Some basic information on Rockall from a British perspective (who else would call this North Sea outcropping "pudding-shaped"?) can be found here. A more snide, more full, no less British history of Rockall that nonetheless gives more time to Icelandic and other claims to the rock is here.
The islet has been involved in shipwrecks, both of the Helen of Dundee in 1824 and the Norge, which sank after striking Rockall in 1904. It has been important in landhelgisdeilur and thus in the Cod Wars as a point from which to reckon maritime territory.
Flanders and Swann sang a song of Rockall on that account of which this is the first verse:
The fleet set sail for Rockall,
Rockall,
Rockall,
To free the isle of Rockall,
From fear of foreign foe.
We sped across the planet,
To find this lump of granite,
One rather startled Gannet;
In fact, we found Rockall.
I am unsure of the date of the Irish lyric 'Rock on Rockall,' but it seems likely that it is of the same period. Certainly it was penned in response to an English claim on the rock ('the groping hands of Whitehall') of just the sort Flanders and Swann satirized. This verse charmingly claims not only Rockall but Man for Ireland based on Fenian legend:
For this rock is part of Ireland,
'cos it's written in folklore
That Fionn MacCumhaill took a sod of grass
and he threw it to the fore,
Then he tossed a pebble across the sea,
where ever it did fall,
For the sod became the Isle of Man
and the pebble's called Rockall.
A quasi-literary claim to the rock has been made in the realm of humor by the Rockall Times. Alarmingly, the editors seem to have tried periodically to land on the islet itself.
Evidence of other attemped colonizations can be found her and there on the high seas of cyberspace. The largely electronic micronation of Waveland is nominally tied to Rockall, though nowhere near so robustly as the folk of Sealand are to Rough's Tower, and they seem not to have tried to scale the thing. I do not know what the denizens of this Rockall think of the Wavelanders.
3 ummæli:
I hadn't heard of Rockall before. I find this kind of story fascinating.
Have you read about Sealand?
Oh, Sealand is great too, no mistake. Pity neither seems likely to have its own dialect. Have you been out to Utrøst?
I'm afraid I haven't yet stumbled upon Utrøst. It's no surprise, though; I'm neither from nor fremsynt.
Skrifa ummæli