Taking a Walk

Farther from the British mainland than Calais, England’s only archipelago steps into spring long before we do.

Everything seemed to be flowering at once when I walked the length of St Martin’s, perhaps the least celebrated of the inhabited Isles of Scilly. An islander told me there was always an agapanthus in bloom somewhere on St Martin’s. Its daffodils have gone feral, too. They poked up everywhere – hedges, bracken-covered moorland, beside coves of white sand and even out of the rubbish dump. This was definitely the most picturesque tip I’ve ever witnessed, replete with bluebells, ixias and narcissi whose names spoke of a golden age: Scilly White, Golden Spur, Golden Mary, Magnificence and Soleil d’or.

For the latter half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, spring flowers were heavy industry on the light soils of St Martin’s. Islanders cultivated bulbs for the Christmas market, burning straw over dormant bulbs in summer or ‘forcing’ them in glasshouses. Flowers were shipped on the Scillonian ferry, then propelled from Penzance to Covent Garden on the fast train.

Now the tiny fields are still divided by tall, slender hedges of evergreen pittosporum. They were to shelter bulbs from the wind, and they were called ‘fences’. They were planted against old stone walls, which were called ‘hedges’.

Beyond the fence-hedge-walls, I saw an old man in yellow oilskins bent over a row of daffodils, an image that could have come from a century earlier. The fences may have halted the wind but they couldn’t stop the gale of globalisation that saw this industry collapse. Just one farmer on St Martin’s today sells small bunches of flowers to mainland markets.

St Martin’s in the spring is as beautiful as it is disorientating. Like many tiny islands, it plays tricks with space and time. At first it seemed large, perhaps because we arrived at the edge, and the edge – its coast – is enormous. It was a dauntingly steep haul up a corrugated concrete track from the stone jetty to Higher Town. Here began the intimate middle of the island, which seemed to hug its inhabitants close with its shelter, busyness and bucolic detail.

Stone cottages opened their doors onto the road. Verges were adorned with three-cornered leek and an abundance of sparrows and thrushes, unseen since distant childhood. There were garden tea rooms, a splendid wooden post office and shop that sold everything, and a shed doubling as coastguard and fire station, with an ambulance station to the side.

The island’s road, its only artery, was surprisingly busy, although most vehicles were quad bikes or ancient tractors. It felt like a decent walk to Middle Town, with fine views west into the sheltered turquoise waters at the centre of the archipelago. There was no sense of the Atlantic to my east. But it was only a short trot up the sandy track through the Monterey pines to the oceanic side of St Martin’s; here, the glorious white-sand beaches of Little Bay and Great Bay suddenly revealed themselves below rugged Cornish moors in miniature.

Past the scenic beer terrace of Seven Stones Inn, and the cottages of Lower Town, and there was still no sense of an imminent end to this surprisingly complicated, small place. Then, the lane curved up to the left and, abruptly, I reached the island’s end, marked by another stone jetty and more siren waters – lethal currents in beguiling aquamarine. The sea, like the past, was always at your shoulder on St Martin’s, even when you thought you had given it the slip.

St Martin’s is perfect terrain for a halfday meander from Higher Town quay to Lower Town quay, punctuated by a pub lunch or tea-room tea. Or both. If you travel to Scilly on the Scillonian III, you can transfer directly to the connecting boat to St Martin’s (www.islesofscillytravel.co.uk). Self-catering and hotel accommodation available on St Martin’s. OS Explorer Map 101: Isles of Scilly