I thought I'd live in a big city after graduating. Instead, I moved to an island with fewer than 60 people.

I live in Fair Isle, which is known as one of the UK's most remote inhabited islands.

Maebh Howell

​​When I finished university, people would always ask me what I wanted to do. I saw myself eventually moving to London, building a career, and settling down there. A lot of my friends had already done just that, and I thought I'd do the same.I was living with my parents while I tried to work out what I wanted to do with my life. Despite my British hometown's relatively large size, I felt extremely isolated. It felt like there was nothing for me here. I had a job in healthcare administration, but I had no direction.That's when my mom showed me a job opening on Lundy, an approximately 3-mile-long island in the Bristol Channel. I'd gone on a family trip there once before, and loved the landscape, history, and nature.I applied right away and, within a month, I had quit my job, packed up my belongings, and hopped on a ferry toward Lundy, my life on the mainland behind me.While on Lundy, I met my partner, who was volunteering there. He had lived on other remote islands — Skokholm and Fair Isle — and told me all about them.There was a whole world out there of remote islands, and now I wanted to experience them all, these far-flung reaches of the UK now within my grasp. When he left Lundy to take a job in Fair Isle, I decided to follow him, applying for a job as a housekeeper at the island's Bird Observatory.So, a year and a half after graduating, I moved to the most remote inhabited island in the UK.