A team of volunteers is preparing to travel roughly 9,000 miles to Antarctica, where they will spend five months helping protect one of Britain’s most remote historic sites.
The group will be based on Goudier Island, a tiny island about the size of a football pitch and home to Port Lockroy, which includes the world’s most remote post office.
Alongside running the post office, museum and gift shop, the eight-person team will carry out major repairs to the more than 80-year-old base.
Royal Air Force veteran Carole McCullough, who is leading the group, said the extraordinary setting made the opportunity impossible to resist.
“I will just open the door and look at the beautiful surroundings and our local neighbours are a massive penguin colony, so that will be fantastic,” she said.
Port Lockroy in Antarctica, where penguins regularly gather around the historic buildings.
The UK Antarctic Heritage Trust says Port Lockroy needs significant repairs because of its age and increasingly challenging environmental conditions, including heavier rainfall, water flow and snow loads.
This will be the second year of a three-year conservation project aimed at protecting the historic base.
The team is due to travel to Antarctica at the end of October.
McCullough, from County Down, said she first became interested after hearing about the unusual job opportunity in the news.
“The more I read, the more I thought this is the most fantastic opportunity,” she said.
She added that preserving the site is about maintaining a connection between the past and present while ensuring future generations can continue to experience its history.
Life on Goudier Island will be far from luxurious.
The crew will share a bunk room and live without running water or flushing toilets. They will also work in sub-zero temperatures and experience almost constant daylight during the Antarctic summer.
To prepare, team members undergo first-aid training, sea-survival courses and lessons about the penguins they will be living alongside.
Small comforts will also matter during the five-month stay, with chocolate, packet soup and watercolor sets among the items expected to help pass the time.
“I love chocolate so I made sure I sent some over,” McCullough said. “We will be there over my birthday and Christmas so I have a few presents also.”
The restoration work will include strengthening the historic structure by installing up to six roof beams and around 30 steel and timber supports beneath the floor.
A Gentoo penguin family near Port Lockroy.
The volunteers will also monitor a colony of more than 1,000 Gentoo penguins living on and around the island.
Port Lockroy was established in 1944 as part of a secret wartime mission to strengthen Britain’s presence in Antarctica. It later became the country’s first permanent scientific base and is now preserved as a heritage site.
The team will also work at nearby Wordie House, another historic Antarctic base that holds one of the region’s longest continuous climate records, dating back to the 1940s.
For the volunteers, the mission combines conservation, history and science in one of the most remote environments on Earth — with a large colony of penguins as their closest neighbors.