Doing the Scilly thing is sensible in autumn Jeremy Seal dodges the summer crowds on a half-term break Sunday Telegraph, 23/9/2007
Firebrand II slows to a halt a few metres off the boulder-strewn shore of St Agnes, the most southerly inhabited of the Isles of Scilly, and drifts over an unseen wreck by the same name. The man at the wheel, Scillonian boatman and diver Mark Groves, has brought us to the resting place of HMS Firebrand, an 18th-century escort sloop lost on 21st October 1707. Mark had the best of reasons for naming his 12-person rib (rigid inflatable boat) after this particular wreck, one among countless others littering these islands 28 miles west of Land’s End. ‘I was the one who found the wreck on a dive back in 1980,’ he explains with a smile.
An estimated 1500 men died that night when the fleet of the Royal Navy lost its bearings among the Scilly rocks. Four ships, most notably Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s flagship Association, foundered and sank in one of the most notorious disasters in British maritime history. The islands plan to commemorate the tricentenary with all due ceremony. There will be a visit from the Royal Navy. And a lecture is scheduled by author Dava Sobel whose best-selling Longitude tells how the loss of the Association fleet spurred the search for a reliable timepiece which would allow ships’ positions to be accurately plotted.
All of which is a reminder that there’s more to these islands, five main inhabited ones among hundreds of islets and low-tide rock heads, than the blissful scenes they usually conjure; wholesome beach ‘n boating holidays among timewarp landscapes sprinkled with Neolithic remains and springtime fields of scented narcissi. There may be something profoundly domestic about the Scillies, with their countless quirky community notices detailing duck-feeding rules, ping-pong playing hourly levies and local bird sightings, and the ubiquitous benches commemorating those ‘who loved these islands’. But their position at the western approaches to the English Channel, the world’s busiest waterway, also commends them as a world-class shipwreck mecca, and not only to divers.
We’re here to explore this dark and alluring cultural seam, beginning with Mark’s high-speed ‘historic shipwreck and wildlife’ rib tour. He shows us not only wreck sites and relates the history of the islands’ several lighthouses but even has us gasping as a rock aptly called ‘Shark’s fin’ suddenly breaks surface just a few metres from the rib just near the bird sanctuary island of Annet. On other days we’ll take in the famous ‘Valhalla’ or resting place of locally wrecked figureheads on Tresco, the graves of shipwrecked sailors and the beach where glass beads from shipwrecks can still be sifted from the sand. We’ll also drop in on the old lifeboat shed on St Mary’s, all the time keeping a weather eye out for evidence of shipwreck booty from the modern age; the car tyres, computer mouses and Ben Sherman shirts retrieved from the Cita which was wrecked on the main island of St Mary’s in 1997.
I’ve arrived on the islands exactly a year early with my wife and two daughters and, because these Blytonesque islands would seem to demand it, the spaniel. It just so happens that the 299th anniversary of the Association disaster falls during the half-term holiday, which gives us the perfect opportunity to pursue a parallel enquiry to the shipwreck one. We want to know if we might just get away with a family holiday here at the season’s outer limits since an acute accommodation squeeze makes summer on the Scillies something of a closed shop. Late-summer sun? The loss of the Association at precisely this time of year in filthy weather would seem to warn against any such hopes. But the islands’ tourism people tout the delights of the shoulder seasons out here in the Gulf Stream, and the weather proves perfect for Mark Groves’ rib trip. Seals are basking on Annet, the sea-sprayed kids hoot through the ride and the far-flung Western Rocks, rarely visited resting place of the Association herself, show as sunlit jags all along the horizon.
Nor is the weather the only plus. The summer crowds, with a fearsome reputation for stripping the shelves of the islands’ only supermarket at Hugh Town on St Mary’s, are long gone. They have been replaced by the birders who are here for the seasonal migration. They’ve come in sufficient numbers to keep the boats running and the cafes, bike-hire shops and other services open. Which means we’re grateful that the bird action is such a draw, notably the desert wheatear, only the second ever sighted on the Scillies, which is setting this year’s binoculars a-twiddle near Porth Killier on St Agnes.
It’s a twenty-minute walk to the Hugh Town quayside, hub for departures to the so-called ‘off-islands’, from our self-catering cottage at Porthloo on St Mary’s. Our second day promises rather more typical late-October weather; ‘grim; remaining unsettled’, according to the no-bull message on the blackboard outside the tourism office (TIC). Scuds of rain chase us across the water on the fifteen-minute crossing to Tresco. They flail among the bamboos, palms and tree ferns, rockeries and orchards of the world-renowned Abbey Garden which Tresco’s ‘lord proprietor’ Augustus Smith began constructing in the 1830s. A flight of stone steps leads to Neptune, figurehead of a paddle-steamer which was wrecked on the Western Rocks in 1841. Nearby ‘Valhalla’, a real cultural treasure trove, is a collection of some 30 more figureheads from the prows of wrecked steamers, brigs and tea clippers. These restored Ottomans, Highlanders and ladies with extravagant embonpoints, and a single cannon from the wreck of the Association, are moving reminders of the ferocious sea just beyond these verdant gardens.
The next day - ‘a glorious autumn day in a fresh NW breeze, with plenty of sunshine throughout’ according to the TIC blackboard – takes us to St Martin’s. Neat lines of narcissus bulbs shelter behind high hedges of salt-resistant pittosporum. A track leads to Middletown hamlet where a blackboard is chalked with recent bird sightings; redbreasted flycatcher, snow bunting, ring ouzel. The ‘local grown organic veg stall’, fashioned from driftwood, offers parsley and kale, spinach and succulent baby cucumbers. There’s not an honesty box so much as a tray which trusts us in the characteristic Scillonian way not only to pay but also not to trouser the payments of others. We shell out for a handful of cucumbers which we add to our picnic, salting them in the clear brine surf of Great Bay where we share the vast beach with one other family. Children and spaniel paddle among the kelp. The grown-ups doze or search for ancient entrance graves and hut circles above Scilly Point.
A path leads across a heather-clad hillside and emerges on the lane by the church where a notice suggests a cultured island clientele. ‘At present,’ it reads, ‘we are without a regular organist for our Sunday service. Anybody visiting St Martin’s who would like to play please leave a message at the post office.’ We stop at the post office but not to offer our services. We’re after liquorice allsorts from the jar though it surprises us that even here grams have ousted ounces. ‘We began just last year,’ the lady behind the counter tells us. ‘The weights and measures people came from the mainland to check we were changing over.’ We wait for the St Mary’s boat at Par Beach, a white-sand strand of Grenadine loveliness failed only by the modesty of its name. It’s backed by a cricket pitch – ‘You are more than welcome to use the club’s practice gear,’ says the sign on the unlocked pavilion – whose outfield has been invaded by stacked lobster pots, beached dinghies and fishing boats. Back on St Mary’s we stop off at the lifeboat shed to admire the boarded walls which are inscribed with ‘lists of services rendered’ - ‘Took a sick man to Penzance’, ‘Stood by Vessel’, ‘Landed an Injured Man’ – by the local lifeboat since 1880.
We join the St Agnes boat the following morning. It’s packed with birders talking in rapt tones of Kazakhstan and Mongolia, possible provenances for the island’s visiting desert wheatear. We head south from the quayside and walk past flower fields to bracken-covered Wingletang Down where the elements have sculpted the granite outcrops into beguiling shapes. At Beady Pool, cattle trailing red halter ropes wander the sand, grazing on kelp. Blue and white glass beads from a shipwreck, supposedly an 18th-century Dutch slaver bound for West Africa, are regularly found here but we sieve the sand in vain. The children soon lose interest and race along the coastal path which leads past medieval St Warna’s well and a shoreside maze marked out in beach pebbles until they reach Troytown Farm. Mrs Hicks, they have learned, recently began using the farm’s nine-strong milking herd of Jerseys and Ayrshires to make much-admired ice cream.
Our last day sees us fix ourselves up at St Mary’s bike hire shop – ‘Lost Racing Pigeon Rescue; please do not leave birds on the step without phoning to check they will be found quickly’ – and set off to explore the island’s nine miles of road. We clatter down tracks to Bronze Age burial chambers on the downs above the sea. A trackside memorial at Porth Hellick marks where eHeH Hthe body of Sir Cloudesley Shovell came ashore. Legend has it that his corpse, which was buried here before being transferred to Westminster Abbey, was short of its hacked-off ring finger when it was discovered.
Our late-October holiday on the Scillies has been an unqualified success. We like the boat trips and the beaches, the curious signs and honesty trays, and the fact that a quick phone call causes a child’s coat mistakenly left on St Martin’s to find its way back to a peg in the ferry waiting room at Hugh Town. We like the Troytown ice cream and we particularly like it that we can upgrade the return leg at no great cost from ferry (2 hours 45 minutes) to 15-minute flight, with even the dog – a first for him - accommodated in the aircraft cabin by the removal of two seats.
It comes as a shock, then, when the weather closes in Association-style an hour before we are due to fly. All flights cease, and passengers are transferred on to the afternoon sailing of the Scillonian ferry. We experience first-hand the down-side of travelling to the Scillies so late in the year, but at least the transfer from airport to ferry terminal takes the form of a delightful footpath walk through a nature reserve. We pass the time watching reed buntings from a marshland hide.
It’s on the Scillonian that my last ambition is fulfilled. One of our co-passengers is Scilly resident and doyen of British shipwreck history Richard Larn. We get to talking and when I ask him about the Cita cargo and how much of it is still in use, Richard merely winks. It’s then that I notice the Ben Sherman shirt he’s wearing.
Jeremy Seal and family travelled with Isles of Scilly Travel (0845 710 5555; www.ios-travel.co.uk) on their daily ferry service from Penzance (from £70 return adults and £35 child). Flights also available from Land’s End, Newquay, Exeter, Bristol and Southampton.
Isles of Scilly Car Parking, Penzance (01736 332727; www.islesofscillyparking.co.uk).
Accommodation: The Loft House, Porthloo (01720 422845 www.seawaysfarmholidayhomes.co.uk). Other accommodation available at www.simplyscilly.co.uk)
Mark Groves’ Historic Sea Safaris (01720 422732; www.scillyonline.co.uk/seasafaris.html) cost £25 per person for two hours.
The Abbey Garden and ‘Valhalla’, Tresco is open daily, admission £8.50 per adult (01720 424105; www.tresco.co.uk)
Isles of Scilly Tourist Information (01720 422536; www.simplyscilly.co.uk)
An estimated 1500 men died that night when the fleet of the Royal Navy lost its bearings among the Scilly rocks. Four ships, most notably Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s flagship Association, foundered and sank in one of the most notorious disasters in British maritime history. The islands plan to commemorate the tricentenary with all due ceremony. There will be a visit from the Royal Navy. And a lecture is scheduled by author Dava Sobel whose best-selling Longitude tells how the loss of the Association fleet spurred the search for a reliable timepiece which would allow ships’ positions to be accurately plotted.
All of which is a reminder that there’s more to these islands, five main inhabited ones among hundreds of islets and low-tide rock heads, than the blissful scenes they usually conjure; wholesome beach ‘n boating holidays among timewarp landscapes sprinkled with Neolithic remains and springtime fields of scented narcissi. There may be something profoundly domestic about the Scillies, with their countless quirky community notices detailing duck-feeding rules, ping-pong playing hourly levies and local bird sightings, and the ubiquitous benches commemorating those ‘who loved these islands’. But their position at the western approaches to the English Channel, the world’s busiest waterway, also commends them as a world-class shipwreck mecca, and not only to divers.
We’re here to explore this dark and alluring cultural seam, beginning with Mark’s high-speed ‘historic shipwreck and wildlife’ rib tour. He shows us not only wreck sites and relates the history of the islands’ several lighthouses but even has us gasping as a rock aptly called ‘Shark’s fin’ suddenly breaks surface just a few metres from the rib just near the bird sanctuary island of Annet. On other days we’ll take in the famous ‘Valhalla’ or resting place of locally wrecked figureheads on Tresco, the graves of shipwrecked sailors and the beach where glass beads from shipwrecks can still be sifted from the sand. We’ll also drop in on the old lifeboat shed on St Mary’s, all the time keeping a weather eye out for evidence of shipwreck booty from the modern age; the car tyres, computer mouses and Ben Sherman shirts retrieved from the Cita which was wrecked on the main island of St Mary’s in 1997.
I’ve arrived on the islands exactly a year early with my wife and two daughters and, because these Blytonesque islands would seem to demand it, the spaniel. It just so happens that the 299th anniversary of the Association disaster falls during the half-term holiday, which gives us the perfect opportunity to pursue a parallel enquiry to the shipwreck one. We want to know if we might just get away with a family holiday here at the season’s outer limits since an acute accommodation squeeze makes summer on the Scillies something of a closed shop. Late-summer sun? The loss of the Association at precisely this time of year in filthy weather would seem to warn against any such hopes. But the islands’ tourism people tout the delights of the shoulder seasons out here in the Gulf Stream, and the weather proves perfect for Mark Groves’ rib trip. Seals are basking on Annet, the sea-sprayed kids hoot through the ride and the far-flung Western Rocks, rarely visited resting place of the Association herself, show as sunlit jags all along the horizon.
Nor is the weather the only plus. The summer crowds, with a fearsome reputation for stripping the shelves of the islands’ only supermarket at Hugh Town on St Mary’s, are long gone. They have been replaced by the birders who are here for the seasonal migration. They’ve come in sufficient numbers to keep the boats running and the cafes, bike-hire shops and other services open. Which means we’re grateful that the bird action is such a draw, notably the desert wheatear, only the second ever sighted on the Scillies, which is setting this year’s binoculars a-twiddle near Porth Killier on St Agnes.
It’s a twenty-minute walk to the Hugh Town quayside, hub for departures to the so-called ‘off-islands’, from our self-catering cottage at Porthloo on St Mary’s. Our second day promises rather more typical late-October weather; ‘grim; remaining unsettled’, according to the no-bull message on the blackboard outside the tourism office (TIC). Scuds of rain chase us across the water on the fifteen-minute crossing to Tresco. They flail among the bamboos, palms and tree ferns, rockeries and orchards of the world-renowned Abbey Garden which Tresco’s ‘lord proprietor’ Augustus Smith began constructing in the 1830s. A flight of stone steps leads to Neptune, figurehead of a paddle-steamer which was wrecked on the Western Rocks in 1841. Nearby ‘Valhalla’, a real cultural treasure trove, is a collection of some 30 more figureheads from the prows of wrecked steamers, brigs and tea clippers. These restored Ottomans, Highlanders and ladies with extravagant embonpoints, and a single cannon from the wreck of the Association, are moving reminders of the ferocious sea just beyond these verdant gardens.
The next day - ‘a glorious autumn day in a fresh NW breeze, with plenty of sunshine throughout’ according to the TIC blackboard – takes us to St Martin’s. Neat lines of narcissus bulbs shelter behind high hedges of salt-resistant pittosporum. A track leads to Middletown hamlet where a blackboard is chalked with recent bird sightings; redbreasted flycatcher, snow bunting, ring ouzel. The ‘local grown organic veg stall’, fashioned from driftwood, offers parsley and kale, spinach and succulent baby cucumbers. There’s not an honesty box so much as a tray which trusts us in the characteristic Scillonian way not only to pay but also not to trouser the payments of others. We shell out for a handful of cucumbers which we add to our picnic, salting them in the clear brine surf of Great Bay where we share the vast beach with one other family. Children and spaniel paddle among the kelp. The grown-ups doze or search for ancient entrance graves and hut circles above Scilly Point.
A path leads across a heather-clad hillside and emerges on the lane by the church where a notice suggests a cultured island clientele. ‘At present,’ it reads, ‘we are without a regular organist for our Sunday service. Anybody visiting St Martin’s who would like to play please leave a message at the post office.’ We stop at the post office but not to offer our services. We’re after liquorice allsorts from the jar though it surprises us that even here grams have ousted ounces. ‘We began just last year,’ the lady behind the counter tells us. ‘The weights and measures people came from the mainland to check we were changing over.’ We wait for the St Mary’s boat at Par Beach, a white-sand strand of Grenadine loveliness failed only by the modesty of its name. It’s backed by a cricket pitch – ‘You are more than welcome to use the club’s practice gear,’ says the sign on the unlocked pavilion – whose outfield has been invaded by stacked lobster pots, beached dinghies and fishing boats. Back on St Mary’s we stop off at the lifeboat shed to admire the boarded walls which are inscribed with ‘lists of services rendered’ - ‘Took a sick man to Penzance’, ‘Stood by Vessel’, ‘Landed an Injured Man’ – by the local lifeboat since 1880.
We join the St Agnes boat the following morning. It’s packed with birders talking in rapt tones of Kazakhstan and Mongolia, possible provenances for the island’s visiting desert wheatear. We head south from the quayside and walk past flower fields to bracken-covered Wingletang Down where the elements have sculpted the granite outcrops into beguiling shapes. At Beady Pool, cattle trailing red halter ropes wander the sand, grazing on kelp. Blue and white glass beads from a shipwreck, supposedly an 18th-century Dutch slaver bound for West Africa, are regularly found here but we sieve the sand in vain. The children soon lose interest and race along the coastal path which leads past medieval St Warna’s well and a shoreside maze marked out in beach pebbles until they reach Troytown Farm. Mrs Hicks, they have learned, recently began using the farm’s nine-strong milking herd of Jerseys and Ayrshires to make much-admired ice cream.
Our last day sees us fix ourselves up at St Mary’s bike hire shop – ‘Lost Racing Pigeon Rescue; please do not leave birds on the step without phoning to check they will be found quickly’ – and set off to explore the island’s nine miles of road. We clatter down tracks to Bronze Age burial chambers on the downs above the sea. A trackside memorial at Porth Hellick marks where eHeH Hthe body of Sir Cloudesley Shovell came ashore. Legend has it that his corpse, which was buried here before being transferred to Westminster Abbey, was short of its hacked-off ring finger when it was discovered.
Our late-October holiday on the Scillies has been an unqualified success. We like the boat trips and the beaches, the curious signs and honesty trays, and the fact that a quick phone call causes a child’s coat mistakenly left on St Martin’s to find its way back to a peg in the ferry waiting room at Hugh Town. We like the Troytown ice cream and we particularly like it that we can upgrade the return leg at no great cost from ferry (2 hours 45 minutes) to 15-minute flight, with even the dog – a first for him - accommodated in the aircraft cabin by the removal of two seats.
It comes as a shock, then, when the weather closes in Association-style an hour before we are due to fly. All flights cease, and passengers are transferred on to the afternoon sailing of the Scillonian ferry. We experience first-hand the down-side of travelling to the Scillies so late in the year, but at least the transfer from airport to ferry terminal takes the form of a delightful footpath walk through a nature reserve. We pass the time watching reed buntings from a marshland hide.
It’s on the Scillonian that my last ambition is fulfilled. One of our co-passengers is Scilly resident and doyen of British shipwreck history Richard Larn. We get to talking and when I ask him about the Cita cargo and how much of it is still in use, Richard merely winks. It’s then that I notice the Ben Sherman shirt he’s wearing.
Jeremy Seal and family travelled with Isles of Scilly Travel (0845 710 5555; www.ios-travel.co.uk) on their daily ferry service from Penzance (from £70 return adults and £35 child). Flights also available from Land’s End, Newquay, Exeter, Bristol and Southampton.
Isles of Scilly Car Parking, Penzance (01736 332727; www.islesofscillyparking.co.uk).
Accommodation: The Loft House, Porthloo (01720 422845 www.seawaysfarmholidayhomes.co.uk). Other accommodation available at www.simplyscilly.co.uk)
Mark Groves’ Historic Sea Safaris (01720 422732; www.scillyonline.co.uk/seasafaris.html) cost £25 per person for two hours.
The Abbey Garden and ‘Valhalla’, Tresco is open daily, admission £8.50 per adult (01720 424105; www.tresco.co.uk)
Isles of Scilly Tourist Information (01720 422536; www.simplyscilly.co.uk)
