About Cramond Island
Cramond Island is a tidal island off the shore of Cramond village in Edinburgh. It's connected to the mainland by a mile-long causeway and is accessible by foot at low tide. It's a lovely place and popular with the locals for walks and picnics.
It's easy to get stranded on the island if you don't give attention to the crossing times advertised by the RNLI Queensferry coastguard. The tide in this area comes in unbelievably fast. A number of people get stranded every year when they misjudge how quickly the causeway gets cut off by the sea (this video will show you.) The fast tide surprised even Daniel Defoe — the namesake of the Robinson Crusoe author — who got stranded on Cramond together with his wife in 2011. Cramond castaways are rescued by RNLI Queensferry volunteers.
How to keep yourself safe when visiting (via RNLI Queensferry)
Check the forecast and tide times before you go
Tell someone your plan
Take a fully charged phone
In an emergency, dial 999 and ask for the coastguard
About the project
I'm Petra, freelance data visualisation designer and researcher from Edinburgh. I frequently visit Cramond Island — it has the perfect Famous Five atmosphere, which makes me feel like a kid.
The crossing times data on this page was collected from RNLI Queenferry's website. I checked that it matched the official data but in case there are differences, the mistakes are solely my own. You should always check the RNLI Queensferry's calendar for the most accurate times. If you spot an error or have a comment, drop me an line at datagestive [at] gmail [dot] com.
To make the chart and planner, I used ggplot2 and Shiny packages for R. The website uses Hugo HTML5 UP Alpha theme by Nelson/Roberto. The banner photo is by Dan Meyers on Unsplash.
Embedding the chart and planner
You can add the chart and planner to your web page site if it supports iframes. Copy the snippet below and add it to your code.
<iframe
src="http://petram.shinyapps.io/cramond-tides"
width="100%"
min-width="350px"
max-width="750px"
height="850px"
scrolling="no">
</iframe>