Jenny Walters
Forget long-haul to the Maldives; make it your mission this year to walk round one of Britain’s 7092 islands.
Features editor Jenny has been island-hopping for our Mission: 2020 edition – and like everything she writes about, it becomes a must-do.
ISLOMANIA: ‘A RARE but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people... who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are in a little world surrounded by sea fills them with an indescribable intoxication.’ Writer Lawrence Durrell wasn’t alone in his obsession with islands, though: think Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Castaway and Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs which asks guests to imagine themselves marooned (many of them listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No 9, the castaways’ most picked tune). Darwin was fascinated by the Galapagos; Moomin-author Tove Jansson summered every year on the tiny rock of Klovharu in the Gulf of Finland; St Columba spread the Christian word across Britain from the Scottish isle of Iona. Islands have a long and varied history of enchantment.
And this is a good part of the globe to nurture islomania. The Great British mainland and the island of Ireland are just the two largest lumps in an archipelago that contains thousands of isles, eyots and skerries. 8% of the British Isles – 9265 square miles – pops up in these smaller chunks. Some stretch tens of miles long like the Isle of Skye; others are mere crumbs of rock above the waves. In more detail, the Ordnance Survey calculates that Great Britain has 6289 islands, 803 of which are large enough to have their coastlines mapped. Northern Ireland has 160 (57 offshore, 103 on inland lakes); the Republic of Ireland has 279 offshore and 78 inland; and then there’s the Isle of Man and the Balliwicks of Guernsey and Jersey. All told, it tots up to at least 7092 islands.
So where to start? How about somewhere fringed by white sand and tickled by turquoise sea? A place that has the nation’s warmest climes? An archipelago that goes by the nickname of the Fortunate Isles?
The Isles of Scilly lie 28 miles off Land’s End, as if Cornwall has flicked some prize chunks out into the Atlantic. Five of them are inhabited and another 140 scatter across the seas, or 140-ish: deciding when a large rock qualifies as an island is an indeterminate process and that number varies. Put together, they make 6.32 square miles of solid ground and form the smallest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Britain.
St Mary’s is the largest isle and it’s where the ferry from Penzance docks after three hours on the high seas, during which the mainland shrinks to a dot and the feeling of escaping to paradise grows. I’m heading to the off-island of Tresco and a short hop on a small boat later, I step onto the quay at New Grimsby.
At just over two miles long and one mile wide, Tresco is the perfect size to walk around – to fulfill my two-boot island-hopping mission – but first, and counterintuitively, I set off inland. I want to see the Great Pool. It is the largest body of freshwater in the entire archipelago and almost scythes Tresco in two. Dunlins, ducks and plovers can be seen here and as I walk along its northern shore, I pop into a couple of hides for a better look. It’s a migration hotspot too. For many birds these islands are the first landfall for thousands of miles and the place heaves like a bank holiday at Heathrow.
And soon I hit the beach at Pentle Bay. There’s no describing it without cliché. It’s like a brochure for some far-flung destination. The sand is bright white. The great grey rollers of the wild Atlantic have relaxed to a clear Caribbean ripple. The sky is deepest blue, the sun is shining, and there’s nobody here other than two pin-small people in the distance.
I bimble along the tideline – there’s no rushing a beach like this – and look out on an intricate seascape. The water doesn’t roll in smoothly from a flatline of horizon; instead it bumps around lots of little islands and outcrops. The weathered shapes have endearing names like Little Cheese Rock and Tea Ledge, but these sharp stacks, and more hidden underwater, are deadly. Almost 1000 ships have foundered around the Isles of Scilly, including a naval squadron led by Sir Cloudesley Shovell in 1707. Four of its 21 ships ran aground in an October storm and 2000 lives were lost.
Tresco’s idyllic white sands, formed from granite pulverised to pale dust, continue for a mile up the east coast to Old Grimsby Harbour. Boots off and I’m paddling barefoot along the beach, sometimes in the water, sometimes out, but at high tide you’ll
be pushed off the sand and onto a coastal path which runs past a ruined fort called the Old Blockhouse. Built in the 16th century to defend the harbour against French attack, it didn’t see any action until England’s Civil War – but more on that battle later.
One more curve of bay lies beyond and then the land turns to moor. Tresco is a tiny island with huge variety. As I climb up the hill I could be walking through the heather and mustard-budded gorse of the wild uplands of the mainland’s West Country. There’s a reason for that. The Isles of Scilly are part of the same run of granite, known as the Cornurbian Batholith. Devon’s Dartmoor is its first show in the east, then Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor, Land’s End, and these islands are the last time it breaks the waves in the west. The rock is 290 million years old and has a crystalline, granular texture due to slow cooling over thousands of years. Covered by ocean in the Devonian and Carboniferous, it was then pushed skywards, to be shaped again by fluctuating sealevels over recent millennia.
For a long time it was a single super-island: the Romans wrote of one isle called Ennor in the 4th century. Then rising seas pushed brine into the lowlands and fractured the land into the numerous isles you see now. The inundation wasn’t entirely decisive though: you can still walk across the narrow strait between Tresco and Bryher on low, low tides, or play a game of cricket like the locals.
You might also glimpse prehistoric field boundaries beneath the Scillonian waves, and the flooded remnants of long-ago farms. The islands have one of the densest concentrations of ancient tombs and archaeological sites in Britain, with 239 scheduled monuments. Deeper underwater, so legend tells, lies Britain’s Atlantis. Between these islands and the mainland is the sunken land of Lyonesse. Some stories connect it with Arthurian myth, suggesting the wounded king was laid to rest here after his final battle at Camlann. Others talk of a terrible storm that drowned the land one night, leaving a single survivor galloping ahead of an immense wave to reach what is now Land’s End. And some say you can still hear the bells of the Lyonesse churches ringing underwater.
Bryher comes into view as I crest the hill and turn south for King Charles’ Castle, a fort built over 120 feet up on a cliff on the west side of the island to guard New Grimsby. The views are glorious but it was poorly sited for warfare. The steep angle of fire down into the narrow channel meant the balls rolled out of the cannon before they could be blasted. Constructed in the mid 16th century it was garrisoned by Royalists in the Civil War 100 years later, but the Parliamentarian enemy stormed Tresco from the other side in 1651, at the Old Blockhouse. Stonework from Kings Charles’ Castle ended up being used to build Cromwell’s Castle on a rocky outcrop below.
I drop down to its sturdy tower and pick up a path along the shoreline to New Grimsby that is fringed with wildflowers. These islands are a curious mix of lush and barren. Only a third of the isles and islets have any form of plant life and that can just be a lonely lichen, but where things do grow they do so with vim. The North Atlantic Current keeps the islands warm – the average annual temperature of 11.8°C makes this the balmiest place in the United Kingdom – and with well above average sunshine they can see spring blooms as early as February. Daffodils and narcissi have long been a valuable crop on the islands, growing in small fields with hedges, which locals call walls, to protect against the elements. Each year the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust pays a single daffodil in rent to the Duchy of Cornwall, which owns much of the archipelago.
The subtropical climes mean exotic flora flourishes too. The islands are the only UK location for many Mediterranean species, including dwarf pansy and adder’s tongue fern, and south of New Grimsby I brush past the famous gardens of Tresco Abbey. Here beneath the palm trees you’ll find 20,000 plants from 80 countries including Brazil, Burma and South Africa. Even in midwinter, 300 species of plant can be in bloom.
I’m keeping an eye out for a critter, though: the red squirrel. In 2013 a small group was flown in by helicopter, away from the pox-carrying grey squirrels which threaten populations on the mainland. That group is now flourishing and islands afford protection for many species: this is the only place in Britain to see the lesser whitetoothed shrew, or teke as it’s known locally. Islands are also places where curious endemic species
“In in love short, I’m with the place. When I’m there, when I’m with her, she simply takes me over, consumes me. When I’m not there I write about her or I dream about her.” MICHAEL MORPURGO ON THE ISLES OF SCILLY
evolve independent of other influences: just think of the unique fauna of the Galapagos that fascinated Charles Darwin.
The sands of Appletree Bay lead down to the southern end of the island, and I share them only with some tangerine-billed oystercatchers. I look for some of the island’s resident seals as I approach Tresco’s tip, but I can’t spot any among the fractured stacks that puncture the waves out to St Mary’s. I’m almost back to the east of the island now, returning to Pentle Bay where the grains of sand glint like pale golden caster sugar in the afternoon sun. I walk up the beach to where I joined it this morning and triumphantly complete my mission to circumnavigate Tresco. It’s taken me all day to cover seven miles; I’m obviously easing into the relaxed rhythm of island-time.
And Durrell was right; there is something intoxicating about these little worlds surrounded by sea. Fortunately there are at least four more to walk right on the doorstep, and hundreds more around Britain. More than enough to keep any ‘islomane’ happy all year.