Something of the sense of holiness on islands comes, I think,
from this strange, elastic geography. Islands are made larger,
paradoxically, by the scale of the sea that surrounds them.
The element which might reduce them, which might be thought
to besiege them, has the opposite effect. The sea elevates these
few acres into something they would never be if hidden in the
mass of the mainland. The sea makes islands significant.
–   Adam Nicolson, Sea Room