Seventeen years after the events described in her bestselling book "Castaway", Lucy Irvine was travelling again. With her three sons, she went to live for a year on remote Pigeon Island in the farthest corner of the Solomons. The invitation had come from the intrepid eighty-year-old, Diana Hepworth, who, in 1947, set sail from England and embarked on a hazardous journey to find a faraway paradise where she and her husband Tom could raise a family.Pigeon Island, on any but a hand-drawn map, is so minute it's almost impossible to find. It lies on the eastern edge of the Solomons, in a scatter of atolls called Reef Islands, which in turn lie in a strung-out archipelago called Temotu Province, with a total land surface of under a thousand square kilometres in one hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres of sea ... If you're looking for a seriously remote island within islands, within an unimaginable vastness of ocean, this is it.
My own involvement with Pigeon Island.
The hotel operated by the Irvines in Scotland.
A map of the Solomon Islands courtesy of lonely planet.
Go to amazon.com for a look at the book: Faraway
Interested in island-living? Don't miss this book!
Read about my trip to Samoa
We're trying to contact people who were with the Bougainville Copper Project