Spending a penny on the popular bird-watching island of Handa, off the north-west coast of Scotland, could not be better, now that the isle-owning Scottish Wildlife Trust has spent a magnificent £50,000 on a new public loo. Although uninhabited, the stunning island is visited by more than 6,000 bird watchers ever year – and that meant that there has been quite some need for a public toilet!

No bother, you might think, but Handa is also a place of very high winds and so the new public loo needed to be able to withstand the stormy weather conditions if it was going to serve the thousands of visitors! Added to this, there is no running water or electricity on Handa so the public toilet needed to look after itself.

And all this costs money! The £50,000 architect-designed loo has steel foundations set at a depth of two metres and also ticks all the necessary environmentally friendly boxes as a compost toilet system.

Going to the toilet in this special public loo, which is located on a hill overlooking a spectacular beach, isn't as simple as you might imagine, either. For users will be required to sprinkle sawdust after a visit. The toilet will then be cleared out every two years. 

A spokesperson for the architects of the new island toilet said: ''It was a challenging project. The winds are so strong on Handa, so the building needed to be made with steel to hold it down.''

Until now, birdwatchers to Handa have been forced to find an appropriate corner in which to do their business but there were fears that this would lead to environmental damage. (Not everyone is so good about taking their waste home with them).

Handa is an island boasting magnificent sea cliffs of Torridonian sandstone, which rise vertically from the Atlantic. In summer, the isle becomes home to 100,000 seabirds that gather to breed, including internationally important numbers of guillemot, razorbill and great skua. Some 250 pairs of puffin also breed on the island.

Talk about spending a penny… or many thousands of pennies!