Treasure islands

Tanya Gold escapes the tourists and heads underground – to find the Bronze Age graves of Scilly Isles natives

The boat is called the Surprise. It is long, low and open to the sky: a bourgeois, Vikingstyle longship, filled with people wearing very clean walking clothes and very clean masks. We are outdoors and on the Atlantic Ocean but you can’t be too careful.

The Surprise stops a few feet from Teän, a tiny island between Tresco and St Martin’s. We were to jump into the water here and walk to the beach. But, on embarkation, the captain sees the average age of the passengers – is it 60? – and wonders aloud if we will break our ankles.

So he asks his mate to bring a black, inflatable dinghy from St Mary’s Harbour – the harbour where Wally the walrus destroyed boats for sport this summer before floating away.

‘I saw him ten times a day,’ says another boatman when I ask him about Wally. ‘I saw him too much.’

But this is a resort for sea life; a humpback whale was spotted off the Scilly Isles in September. So we leave the Surprise for the dinghy. The mate hauls it up the beach and the Surprise waits offshore.

The Isles of Scilly are 28 miles from my home in Newlyn, west Cornwall: smudges on the horizon. The isles are lovely – no water looks so clear from the mainland and no sand so bright – but in Scilly I prefer the dead to the living. They seem more vivid; happier, even.

Scilly was colonised by the white upper-middle classes long ago – at least in summer. Winter is another thing entirely. If you seek the real isles, go in winter, if you can tolerate the wind.

The colonisers spend May to September traipsing between the five inhabited islands, saying things like ‘Do they have granola?’ and providing 85 per cent of the islands’ income while, in leasing holiday cottages, depriving the natives of homes to live in. If winter is brutal here, summer is merely an uneasy peace.

St Mary’s – the biggest island of the archipelago – sells resort wear to amateur sailors who anchor off Tresco, a land of golf buggies, passive-aggressive, dog-related signage and a museum called Valhalla, dedicated to the figureheads of wrecked ships.

But I am on a boat entirely open to the Atlantic with 30 masked people. So, like Charon, I seek the dead. The resident population of Scilly is just over 2,000. Underground, there are many more.

We are on Teän for an archaeological tour with Katharine Sawyer, a local expert and stalwart of the Community Archaeology Group. The day after I leave, she searched Gugh (pronounced ‘Goo’) for a lost kelp-pit. Here people do things for themselves. They have no choice. The supply boat, the Gry Maritha, can be delayed for weeks.

Teän is small and madly shaped – the map looks like a headdress. Here, at the top of a small hill surrounded by bracken, I find I am standing on a Bronze Age entrance grave. This isn’t unusual for the isles. Scilly is all hilltop – you used to be able to walk from St Mary’s to Land’s End – and Bronze Age people built graves on high ground.

We hum with curiosity at the grave,

Scilly’s resident population is 2,000. Underground, there are many more

Teän: now uninhabited, it has entrance graves dating from the Bronze Age

once we know what it is – it is another surprise. A man in a straw hat asks a question about the rising waves, and is shushed for pressing the point.

We tramp downhill to examine a 17th-century ruined house attached to an eighth-century Christian chapel and Roman midden, in which Sawyer once found an animal jawbone.

Some of the corpses, we are told, had leprosy, which was not then a British disease – evidence of international life! The ruins are attacked by bracken and grass. They are beautiful.

I love uninhabited islands. I wish I could visit Samson, the twin-humped island that looks like a bra, but there is no boat today. Samson was abandoned in 1855 as there was no drinking water and the population – two families – survived on potatoes and limpets.

I stay on St Agnes because it is the doughtiest and least-developed island, home to 80 people and owned, as almost all the isles are, by the Duke of Cornwall. He is a kindly landlord if you value aesthetics over life. There aren’t any of the ugly houses you find on St Mary’s that remind me so much of Bournemouth.

I stay on a farm campsite with views over the Dogs of Scilly – blackish rocks, which, in 1707, scuppered the HMS Association and killed 1,500 men in one night. The Bishop’s Rock lighthouse (1858) rises among them; it looks like a spacecraft.

With my binoculars, I search for Rosevear, another blackish rock, for the ruined houses of the men who built the lighthouse. I cannot see the houses – but my husband would like to live there.

I read a series of novels where murders are committed on the isles. They are formulaic – there is one killer per island and there is always a lockdown while the case is solved – and insulting: the perpetrators over four books are three natives to one incomer. I don’t think they’re for locals, who are peevish rather than murderous, but they’re sold everywhere.

If I walk 200 yards from my tent, I find I am standing on a prehistoric field system. I know this because, at some point, someone arranged the granite blocks in a row. Here is a tiny maze in granite stones, made by a lighthousekeeper in 1729. The birds are extraordinarily tame because they fear no predator and accept pieces of ice-cream cone from my hand.

St Agnes is proud to be rat-free. There are signs inviting the visitor to share if they see a rat. ‘Rat on a rat,’ it says, as if being a rat was some kind of moral choice which the rat unconscionably made.

There is a good pub – the Turk’s Head (they probably meant the Spaniard’s head) – another lighthouse (1680), now transformed into a house, and a post office. Beyond that, there is only the sea, which is the whole point of Scilly: the beauty and the pain.

It is an eerie place: a combination of savagery and tourist culture, which spreads itself on granite like jam. Without us, the islanders would be subsistence farmers.

They sometimes pretend, from behind the tills in the shops selling Scilly soap and driftwood sculpture, they would prefer it that way.

Skybus flies to the Scilly Isles. The Scillonian III ferry sails from Penzance to St Mary’s. islesofscilly-travel.co.uk