Teän

Teän lies in the Isles of Scilly, roughly midway between Tresco, 1.5 kilometres to the west, and St Martin’s, just 300 metres to the east, covering some 40 acres of granite tor topped by Great Hill, its highest point at 40 metres.

Beneath the island’s low ground lies glacial till and outwash gravel, physical evidence of the ice sheets that once shaped this corner of the British Isles long before the sea rose to separate Scilly’s many small islands from one another.

Teän has been used by people since at least the Bronze Age, with entrance graves surviving on both Old Man and Great Hill, and it later supported a small farming community: a 1652 parliamentary survey recorded a single resident, and by 1717 the population had grown to around ten people, before falling away again so completely that by 1752 only fields of corn and ruined buildings remained. An early Christian chapel dedicated to Saint Theon, built directly on top of sixteen earlier Christian graves, points to a still older layer of religious history on the island.

Kelp burning for the glass industry sustained a degree of activity on Teän into the 1830s, and grazing continued intermittently long after permanent settlement ended, with cattle recorded on the island as recently as 1945. Today Teän is protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, valued for rare plants including shore dock and dwarf pansy, and for hosting the red barbed ant, considered perhaps the rarest resident animal anywhere on mainland Britain, found here on the island’s heathland alongside more familiar brown rats and house mice.

Wildlife and area

Teän’s declining but still present seabird colonies include Puffin and kittiwakes, alongside Grey Seal and Manx shearwaters recorded in the surrounding waters. The island sits directly between Tresco and St Martin’s, two of Scilly’s larger inhabited islands, a quiet, uninhabited stepping stone between them.