Rare job opportunities have come up to live and work on Fair Isle (Image: Ian Andrews )
Rare job openings are attracting the attention of applicants from all over the globe hoping to live and work on the most remote inhabited island in the UK – where you can wake up to puffins outside your bedroom window.
Windswept Fair Isle is 25 miles south of the Shetland Islands in Scotland, and can be cut off from the outside world for weeks at a time because of mountainous seas and wild weather conditions.
Despite the rugged terrain and hard-to-reach location, Fair Isle is famous for its unique knitwear and woolly jumpers, as worn by King Edward VIII and the Royal Family. These are still produced today on the isle, which boasts more sheep than people.
The island also has an astonishing abundance of birdlife, both seabirds and migrating species, which is why the Fair Isle Bird Observatory Trust (FIBOT) are advertising for two new permanent positions – the Head of Ornithology and a Hospitality Manager for the hotel and guesthouse, where visitors and bird lovers from all over the world come to stay.
Both positions, offering between £20 and £24,000 per annum, are five-year fixed term and include food allowance, accommodation and utilities. So far, people from several countries – including Portugal, the United States, France, Ireland and Spain – have shown an interest in the role.
The new £10million observatory and hotel will welcome guests next year (Image: Ian Andrews )
Douglas Barr, Chair of the FIBOT (Image: NC)
Douglas Barr, Chair of the FIBOT, told Express.co.uk: “Since we’ve put the jobs adverts out the applications have just come from throughout the world, it’s probably a minority of applications that have been from the UK.
“It just shows the appeal is worldwide. You’re going to be involved in this observatory, but it’s a hotel too, and running it in such spectacular surroundings and there’s not that many opportunities like this that come up for people.
“It can be challenging at times to say the least, for example at the moment there have been no planes or boats because of the weather. In the summer it’s not so much the wind, or the low cloud and rain, there’s fog… so you get hammered both ends, but that’s not to say it’s always like that.
“You won’t get stuck for transport on Fair Isle for any length of time in the summer, it’s just during the winter but that’s to be expected and it’s part of the charm of a remote island that you are isolated.
“But still have broadband fibre cable, so you’re not cut off entirely from the world and can still watch Netflix.
“You live permanently on the island but we open from roughly May until the end of October, there’s plenty of work to keep them going during the dark winter months, we can’t have them putting their feet up doing nothing can we?”
The new £10million hotel and observatory are due to open in May next year, following a tragedy in 2019 when the old observatory burnt down. The latest site will be the third iteration of an observatory on the island since the original one was made from old Royal Navy huts in 1948.
Fair Isle has more birds and sheep than people living there (Image: Getty )
The deadline for the two permanent positions is December 11, but there are also two seasonal jobs from March to October being advertised for a Ranger and Assistant Warden, which command pay of £356 per week including accommodation, travel and food.
Transport to and from the island is included for all the jobs, as the only way to get to Fair isle is either by boat or plane.
Mr Barr added that despite being the most isolated inhabited island in the UK, with a population of around 55, there are certain perks to taking up a life on Fair Isle.
He continued: “It’s one of the best places in Britain to go bird watching, it’s renowned throughout the world as a bird watching location, both for the populations of sea birds that it has, and for the migrating birds of spring and autumn.
“There’s puffins, you can see puffins from your bedroom window, that’s true, there’s not many places you can say that.
“It’s a lifestyle thing obviously, not only does Fair Isle have the birds, but it also has the textile industry and knitting etc, it’s a world-renowned island and a popular place to come.
“It’s good we can generate applications from around the world because it just shows you the interest in the place.”
Puffins are one of the many abundant bird species on the island (Image: Ian Andrews )
Mr Barr said it had been a long-awaited re-opening for the island after building work finally comes to a close on the brand new observatory and hotel.
He said: “It’s a £10million hotel that’s been built, Fair Isle is 25 miles away from Shetland mainland so that gives you an idea about the logistics of having to build it, not only do you need to go to Shetland, you then need to go to Fair Isle.
“The funding has come from a number of sources, grants, insurance and our own funding, plus the Scottish Government and Highlands and Islands Enterprise.
“This is the third incarnation of the observatory, the first one was in 1948, which was essentially a set of naval huts left over from the Second World War. As time went on we built another one and rebuilt again in 2010, but unfortunately there was a fire in 2019.
“That building was meant to last us for 30 or 40 years, but obviously the rebuild was forced upon us and we took the opportunity to improve on the bits that we had and that’s where we are at now with a new building that opens next year.”
