Our Island is at the heart of all that we do and know. It’s the inspiration behind our Barra Atlantic Gin and we are so proud of where we come from. It saddens us that our annual visitors, family members and friends cannot roam freely to and from our Island during this time, we understand the disappointment and the sadness that this brings. Therefore, we want to do all that we can to bring or show a little bit of day to day Island Life on Barra, for those of you that are missing out.

Equally, we’re all about showcasing our beautiful home and the unique traditions and jobs that are carried out by it’s hard working locals each and every day.

If you’ve been following us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, you’ll be familiar with the array of ‘Island Life’ posts we’ve shared over the past two months. If you’ve no idea what we’re talking about, then simply click to have a little look on our accounts!

Us Islanders can turn our hands to many things and while it is very common for us to have a full-time job, there are always side jobs to be dealt with during our day to day life. Fishing and farming play a huge part of this and is a main source of income for many on our Island home.

With our local fishermen taking to the surrounding sea of Barra to creel fish or trawl, we enable many to enjoy the luxury of the freshest seafood you can eat including white fish, prawns, scallops. brown crab, velvet crab, lobsters and many more.

While the fishermen fish, the crofters’ croft and take to the hills and machairs on land where you’ll witness livestock of sheep and cows grazing day to day, feeding them up in preparation for the annual sales around Scotland.

We’re also big lovers of good home-grown vegetables, with our most popular being potatoes, of course! Each year we and many others take to the fields and plant potatoes with family and await with anticipation for a taste later in the year. Around August we pick the potatoes and are finally able to enjoy our own homegrown goodness. We’d be lying if we said planting potatoes was solely for eating at home, we have a streak of competitiveness and enter Barra’s Annual Potato Competition which is held at the infamous Castlebay Bar every August. This is a rather big deal on the Island and many entries are placed with our potatoes being judged on taste and ‘best dressed’ – you should have a look on Barra & Vatersay’s Potato Competition Facebook Page to see more -  and last year we’re proud to say that Katie Morrison, part-owner of Isle of Barra Distillers took home first prize!

We will continue to post about Island Life across our social media platform and hope that many of you will enjoy an insight into our beautiful home as well as enjoy a taste of our Barra Atlantic Gin!

We hope you are all safe and well during these times.