HISTORY IN FOCUS ST KITTS

From the restored ruins of the island’s first rum distillery and a reimagined narrow-gauge sugarcane railway to the fascinating fortress/museum crowning Brimstone Hill National Park, a trip to St Kitts offers a poignant insight into the Caribbean’s turbul

Fancy having a UNESCO World Heritage

Site all to yourself? That’s how it can feel on a visit to Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park, a colossal, British-designed military citadel dating from 1690 that crowns the west coast of St Kitts, offering expansive views to the neighbouring Dutch island of St Eustatius. Dubbed the ‘Gibraltar of the West Indies’ and once home to over 1,000 soldiers and their families, it’s filled with memories of the enslaved and the enlisted and includes an extensive museum.

St Kitts is considered the ‘mother colony’ of the Leeward Islands; English and French settlers arrived here as early as the 1620s and then spread to neighbouring islands. These formative years are recalled at the cemetery of the Anglican church at Middle Island, where the tombstone of Sir Thomas Warner, the first English governor of the West Indies, survives. At the Wingfield Estate in Old

Road Town, an indefatigable Yorkshireman, Maurice Widdowson, has spent years excavating and restoring the ruins of the first working rum estate and distillery in the Caribbean. A self-guided trail tells its story from the early days of tobacco and indigo to the rise of sugarcane.

History-lovers will find more to unpick in St Kitts & Nevis’s capital. It’s home to Basseterre, with time-battered churches, Georgian buildings, the modest National Museum of Saint Kitts and leafy Independence Square, where schoolchildren now grab lunch from brightly painted food trucks. Around the island, chimneys and mills stand testament to a sugar industry that limped on until 2005. A legacy of this is the splendid St Kitts Scenic Railway, a narrow-gauge line originally built to transport cane that’s been reborn as a ride that trundles around the north to the accompaniment of live a cappella singers.

The journey reveals how St Kitts remains a wonderfully green island where the rainforest is actually expanding due to the demise of sugar. For a taste of its dense and mountainous interior, take on the strenuous guided hike to its highest point, the 3,792ft summit of Mount Liamuiga. Your reward is to look down into a huge, forested volcanic crater, before heading back to relax at one of the island’s many golden-sand beaches. Centrally placed South Frigate Bay Beach has a strip of bars and affordable accommodation at Timothy Beach Resort, while Cockleshell Bay Beach, at the tip of the island’s southeastern peninsula, is the largest and liveliest, a fine place to kick back with a Carib beer and a swim after a satisfying day’s sightseeing.

HOW TO DO IT: British Airways Holidays offers a seven-night trip from £749 per person (based on two sharing), including flights and accommodation at Timothy Beach Resort, room only. ba.com

MORE INFO: brimstonehillfortress.org caribellebatikstkitts.com/wingfield-estate stkittstourism.kn