The sight of 140 whales jumping, twisting and splashing across a sunny cove was something I’ll never forget.

You could take hundreds of normal whale-watching trips all over the world and never see anything like it.

Yet what should have been a glorious glimpse of a great natural phenomenon became a shocking bloodbath.

For that huge family of Pilot Whales was heading for certain and gruesome death on a small beach in the Faroes.

As a professional travel writer I was visiting the Faroe Islands – a group of tiny specks on the map between Scotland and Iceland – to research articles about holidays there.

On a previous visit I’d found the people friendly, cultured and with a very high standard of living. Their mountainous islands are clean, green and wonderfully scenic. I loved it there. Read the other pieces on this website to catch a feel of visiting the Faroes.

There hasn’t been a murder for 15 years and the Prime Minister works in a painted wooden shed on the

harbourside with grass growing on the roof of his offices.

In the rest of the world, the Faroes are famous for two things – the heroic exploits of their part-time football team and the fact that they eat whales.

Ironically it was five minutes after the final whistle of another brave performance on the football field, a plucky defeat in Scotland, that I spotted something very unusual happening...