New Album – September 18, 2026
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From Exit Chamber:
October, 1981. Within five days of each other, two abandoned parcels of soil are found. The first is left at the perimeter fence of Porton Down, the UK’s main chemical and biological warfare facility. The second at Blackpool Tower, close to where the annual Conservative Party conference is being presided over by Margaret Thatcher. This, however, is no ordinary soil and, according to those who left it there, is infected with anthrax.
This soil was taken from Gruinard, a tiny Scottish island abandoned since the Highland Clearances, but repurposed for biological weapons testing in 1942, during the Second World War. It was twenty years before the UK government would admit that anthrax based weaponry had been tested on the island, and in the intervening period, significant numbers of livestock on the mainland had died in mysterious circumstances, yet still no action was taken to clean up the island.
That was, until the Dark Harvest Commandos intervened. “Where better to send the seeds of death than from whence they came?” said the statement from the group sent to the Glasgow Herald in which they claimed to have collected 300lbs of soil from the island, and threatened to leave samples of it in various places across the United Kingdom. A task force was set up to investigate and pursue the group, but local people would say nothing. Towards the end of the year a further statement was issued, this time stuck to the front door of the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. It said that, as attention had been drawn to the situation, no further action would be taken for the time being, and in 1986 the island was finally decontaminated by a group of UK Government scientists.
The Dark Harvest Commandos have never been caught and likely never will but thanks to them Gruinard is no longer the deadly place it once was. It just goes to show that sometimes direct action is the only option left to us.
