Day 582

Even an island as small as the United Kingdom can still hide ghost towns, ghost kingdoms too.
Their rulers never adhering to current legislation, almost stuck in a distortion of the past.
One such place is called Cairnlochan and lies somewhere between Orkney and the Shetland isles.
Rarely visited by their neighbouring islands, they remained self-sufficient and almost unmodernised.

Sure they had a few modernish advancements but those are mostly medically based.
Their homes are sturdy stone carved from the cliffs and thatched by straw coated from the tar pit.
Even the wildlife seems frozen with horses almost twice the height of an average man.
The streets are dirt coated in a mixture of straw and horse manure.

Nobody lives there now, as was recently discovered by a boat that spotted them by pure chance.
All five villages were utterly abandoned, the farms left to turn back to nature and the crops to rot.
It was hard to say exactly what happened to them until someone thought to test the water.
Few had noticed how many Datura flowers there were about the island, much less by the rivers.

Strange behaviour had been noted in the livestock but it was put down to skittishness.
You see Datura, more commonly known as Angel's Trumpet, is a potent hallucinogen.
Every well tested held toxic amounts of the plant's chemicals, enough to drive an island mad.
With this revelation the United Kingdom's largest manhunt was organised.

The first three months were spent looking for survivors, the next five looking for remains.
Nothing was found, no traces that humans had inhabited the villages, not even hair or skin cells.
Even the surrounding sea held no clues, no remnants of ships or people.
It was almost like the whole island was a museum dedicated to the Celts and in some ways it was.

The search teams that voluntarily camped overnight reported hearing strange splashing sounds.
Some even said they heard laughter on the beaches in voices that sounded like lungs full of water.
Photos emerged of footprints that looked like a duck's, with a human foot for scale beside them.
The prints were almost five times bigger and their source somewhere in the depths of the North Sea.