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It is said to be Britain’s most remote and expensive public toilet - built on an uninhabited island home to over 200,000 seabirds.

But less than four years after being installed on Handa, three miles off the northwest coast of Sutherland, it seems the £50,000 comfort stop is not completely flushed with success.

The eco toilet is failing to keep up with demand as it tries to cope with a boom in tourists.

More than 6000 plus visitors flock to the isle every summer - and this year numbers are set to soar even more.

Now the Scottish Wildlife Trust, which manage Handa in conjunction with owners Scourie Estate, have sent an official - probably Britain’s remotest loo inspector - to see what can be done.

He has also gone and assessed another compost toilet at Stoer Head Lighthouse in Sutherland to learn lessons from their use of a similar eco-powder room.

“The toilet on Handa is operational but could be composting faster. It is struggling to keep up with the demand and needs tweaking. Our reserves manager took the opportunity to visit Stoer Head while he was in the area to see how their loo works to try to improve the turnover,” said a spokesman for SWT.

“Handa is a beautiful and ecologically important island and it is attracting a lot of visitors.”

The Handa loo is turf-roofed and made of steel.

It took a team of five men, six days to build on an island so difficult to reach it needed two landing craft, making several attempts, to land the specially designed materials on shore.

Positioned on a hill overlooking a beach, the foundations are seven feet deep to stop it being blown into the Atlantic by regular gale-force winds, while the only prying eyes are from the seals and otters who live nearby.

Following completion in 2012, intrepid birdwatchers to one of Scotland’s most spectacular wildlife reserves no longer had to cross their legs until they reached the mainland.

In the summer, more than 200,000 seabirds, including puffins, guillemots and razorbills, gather on the island to breed. But it is the influx of thousands of humans that are the problem.

Although the island has a tiny bothy and toilet with septic tank for volunteers and staff from the SWT, the facilities could not cope with the annual invasion of humans.

Architect David Somerville, who designed the toilet, had been working on the project for five years.

He said when it was launched:”It was a very challenging project. The winds are so strong on Handa that the building needed to be made with steel to hold it down.

“There’s also no electricity and no water so everything had to be thought through very carefully before we even got to the island.”

The structure is rooted seven feet into the sand, with an eco-friendly composting facility in which sawdust is sprinkled after each use, instead of flushing, meaning it need only be cleared out every two to three years. There is also a small lean-to to provide shelter from any driving storms. Funding for the facility came from the Scottish Government, Highland Council and several private sources.

And from the door you can see lots of iconic mountains like Suilven, Foinaven and Ben Mor Coigach as well as seals and otters on the nearby beach.

The red sandstone island and its steep cliffs are now recognised as one of Scotland’s best sanctuaries for a wide range of seabirds.

It is manned in the summer by four long-term volunteers as well as 45 short-term volunteers who come for a week at a time to help maintain the island and carry out bird counts.

However, from September until March the island is completely uninhabited. Every year the SWT advertises for volunteers to spend a week on the island, and is often inundated with applications from all over the world.

On the island’s busiest days it can receive up to 150 visitors and volunteers look after the birdwatchers who arrive to view, among other things, one of Europe’s biggest colonies of guillemots, as well as red grouse, puffin, Arctic skua, Arctic tern, eider duck and various gulls.

In the 19th century, Handa was recorded as having a population of around 65 people. The islanders had a parliament, similar to that of St Kilda, which met daily, and a female-centric society where the oldest widow on the island was considered its ‘Queen.’

But despite a healthy diet of oats, fish and seabirds, the remaining islanders decided to abandon their homes for the mainland in 1848 as a result of the potato famine.