Brendon Grimshaw and Moyenne Island

In 1962 a British newspaper editor on holiday in the Seychelles bought a small, overgrown island off Mahé for £8,000. He spent the rest of his life turning it into a forest, refused every offer to sell, and lived to see it declared a national park. That editor was Brendon Grimshaw, and the island is Moyenne.

Who Brendon Grimshaw was

Grimshaw was born on 27 July 1925 in Dewsbury, Yorkshire. He trained as a reporter on the Batley News, moved to The Star in Sheffield, and in 1953 went to Kenya as a sub-editor on the East African Standard. He later edited The Tanganyika Standard in Dar es Salaam, until the paper was nationalised in 1969.

He was still a working journalist in East Africa when, on the last day of a holiday in the Seychelles, he agreed to buy an island.

Buying Moyenne for £8,000

The price most sources give is £8,000. That is the figure in BBC Travel and the Seychelles Nation, the national paper. His Yorkshire Post obituary said just under £10,000, and a travelogue from the early 1990s said £10,000, so treat £8,000 as the most common figure.

He did not move in straight away. He kept working in Africa and settled on Moyenne in 1973, according to the Seychelles Nation (one later account says 1972).

What he found was not much. Moyenne had been abandoned from about 1915 into the early 1970s. An earlier owner, an Englishwoman the Tourism Board calls Miss Emma Best, had kept stray dogs and other animals there. One guide names her Mary Best, and her dates are not reliably recorded. By the time Grimshaw arrived, rats were almost the only wildlife and there were no birds at all.

Moyenne Island before and after

Grimshaw did not do the work alone. René Antoine Lafortune, the son of a Seychellois fisherman, was 19 when he started working with him. Together they cleared scrub, cut about 4.8 km of nature paths and planted trees.

The change is easiest to see in numbers:

The mahogany trees now stand 60 to 70 feet tall. The Seychelles Nation reported in 2009 that the pair had introduced 45 endemic plant species, including 40 endemic palms, 13 of them coco de mer. The Nation’s 2012 obituary went further and claimed the island holds more than two-thirds of the country’s endemic plants. We found no survey behind that figure, so treat it as a claim.

The tortoises were Grimshaw’s own project. He numbered their shells and ran a breeding programme, and reports put the number in his care at 110 to 120. BBC Travel counted nearly 50 free-roaming adults in 2022, plus hatchlings in two nurseries. More on the species in our Seychelles giant tortoise guide.

Grimshaw’s father, Raymond, came to live on the island after Brendon’s mother died in 1981. He was 88. He died about five years later and was buried beside a grave Brendon had already dug for himself.

The $50 million he turned down

During the Seychelles tourism boom of the 1980s, Grimshaw was offered up to a reported $50 million for Moyenne. Accounts differ on who made the offer, and he refused all of them. According to the Seychelles Nation, he said he wanted it to be “a national park for everyone to enjoy.”

He had no children, and after Lafortune died in 2007 he set up a perpetual trust with Suketu Patel and others to look after the island when he was gone.

How Moyenne became a national park

The dates get muddled online, so here they are in order. Grimshaw reached an agreement with the environment minister in mid-2008. The final declaration was signed on 22 May 2009, and the public ceremony took place in July 2009. So Moyenne was agreed in 2008 and formally declared a national park in 2009.

Moyenne is often called the world’s smallest national park, including in a 2022 BBC Travel headline. That is a media description rather than an official record. It covers about 9 to 10 hectares.

It sits inside the larger Ste Anne Marine National Park, which the government runs through the Seychelles Parks and Gardens Authority (SPGA). The island itself is a land park run by a private foundation, surrounded by a marine park run by the state.

His death, and who owns Moyenne now

Grimshaw died of natural causes in Victoria in July 2012, aged 87. He is buried on Moyenne next to his father. His headstone says the island “taught him to open his eyes to the beauty around him.”

The island passed to the Moyenne Island Foundation Society, which he had founded. On 28 June 2013 the foundation, chaired by Suketu Patel, signed an agreement with the parks authority: the foundation manages Moyenne and the authority provides technical support. BBC Travel reported in 2022 that the foundation was still carrying out his wishes. Whether Patel still chairs it in 2026 we could not confirm.

This site is not connected to the foundation. We are an independent guide.

A Grain of Sand: the book and the documentary

Grimshaw wrote his own account, A Grain of Sand: The Story of One Man and an Island, published by Camerapix in 1996. He dedicated it to Lafortune.

The documentary of the same name, A Grain of Sand, was made by the Toronto filmmakers Ayelen Liberona and Joseph Johnson Camí and is usually dated 2009 (ExplorersWeb says the crew filmed in 2010). Do not confuse it with Grains of Sand (2025), which is an unrelated film.

Simon Reeve also filmed him shortly before he died, and in 2012 BBC News ran a short video about him as a real-life Robinson Crusoe.

Seeing it for yourself

You can visit. Most people go on a day boat trip from Victoria or Eden Island that combines snorkelling in the marine park with a walk on Moyenne, past the tortoises, the graves and the small museum about Grimshaw. The Saint-Anne Marine Park and Moyenne Island Cruise is run by Creole Travel Services, the company behind the island’s restaurant, and includes a guided walk and the landing fee. Our guide to visiting Moyenne covers fees, timing and what to bring, and the tours page lists the trips that actually land on the island.