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After a few days on the off-islands of the Scillies, each with its mile or so of Land Rover track, its mossy furze-lined paths, its cast of recurring characters, you return to the main island, St Mary's, with something of a bump. Here are shops and banks; here is the bustling quay and its array of freight, the long, long esplanade, the street signs, the strangers, the golf. You feel you've arrived in some perverse vision of the future - whereas a week earlier, ducking out of the helicopter into the shed of a terminal and its attendant thirty-year old buses, it seemed exactly the opposite.

Such scale-warps are part and parcel of island life and nowhere in England (if Cornwall counts as England) can you dip more completely, more rewardingly, into island life than in the Scillies. Its turquoise waters, blonde beaches and scattering of uninhabited islets can on a good day compete with any one of the world's great archipelagos.

All in all, down to the last shrubbed scrap of dry land, there are fifty four Scilly Isles. Together they offer the strangest of seascapes. Rocks and reefs queue up on the horizon, jostling for position on this narrow ocean ledge. Some are low-backed slouches of sand, others defiant outcrops of granite. Even beyond the broken headlands, the Atlantic can still be seen to shatter on lone rocks and you count yourself lucky that you do not have to navigate a ship through these seas - a task so many have failed at in the past.

In 1997 alone, for instance, the Scillies outfoxed two ships of note. In May a cruise liner scraped her hull along the reefs of St Mary's Sound and five hundred Germans found themselves stranded on the islands while their sea-borne hotel limped off for repairs. Just a few weeks before that, the bulk carrier Cita had driven into the rocks, her containers were thrown open and the islanders' houses suddenly filled with car tyres, barbecue sets and plastic key-rings with such epithets as "Lucky Irish Leprechaun" and "May the luck of the Irish find you". Twice a day the tide sucks five metres of water out of this charmed circle of islands, and reveals not only the expanses of flats and shallows but traces of old settlements and field systems. The sea around the Scilly Isles is rising while they themselves are sinking. As recently as the late Bronze Age, when they were first settled, the entire group formed one much larger island. Walking around them now, crossing the causeways that appear at low water, it is more and more obvious that the Scillies are drowning. Their beauty is something transient, and all the more haunting for it.

The five inhabited islands - and the uninhabited too - can all be reached by a short boat trip from each other. Two of them in particular provide the perfect base for exploring - not least because they have two of the Scillies' more comfortable hotels.

Tresco
Tresco is unlike any of the other islands, owned as it is, and as it has been for a century and a half, by one family. The first of them was Augustus Smith, known as the "Emperor of Scilly". It was he who was responsible for establishing on Tresco its most remarkable feature: the Abbey Gardens. When he arrived on the Scillies in 1834, Smith found the entire raft of islands destitute and over-populated. His draconian policies succeeded in revitalising the community while he, unmarried and isolated, allowed himself the sole indulgence of gathering exotic plants. Taking advantage of the frost-free climate and the globetrotting Scillonian sea captains he began the collection which now rivals Kew for its Southern Hemisphere plants - with the difference that whereas Kew grows them in greenhouses, at Tresco they grow outside.

Nothing prepares you for the boulder-block, jungly beauty of the Abbey gardens. Elsewhere the islands are hostages to wind and sea, but here stand clipped ilex hedges tall as churches, and high Phoenix palms, and date palms and echium, while at ground level a host of strange imports - from the monocarpic agaves to bird-of-paradise flowers - send out their blooms in a fabulous array of form and colour.

Where to stay: Tresco's Island Hotel. Views from almost every room take in the never-dull northern rocks and islands - benign and sculptural on quiet days, wild and surf-doused on others. Seafood comes largely from the pots and nets of Scilly's waters and the hotel grounds are full of off-cuts from the Abbey Gardens. Within a few hundred yards of the hotel is the deserted Castle Down and in the other direction the pale beaches of Ravens Porth and Green Porth. There are no cars on Tresco and the hotel picks up guests from the heliport in a kind of tractor and trailer taxi.

St Martin's
One of the remoter, and perhaps the most beguiling of all the islands. Its community of a hundred-odd residents is tight-knit and various. They are receptive and proud of their island and meeting them is one of the more rewarding aspects of staying here.

Viv Jackson is a St Martin's man. Like most he juggles jobs and one of them is RSPB officer. During the season he shares his knowledge and enthusiasm with visitors on regular "bird walks". A pair of golden oriole are nesting on the island and in the last years he has seen more and more ospreys. When I met him - back from cutting rampant ferns on the Plains - he had just heard a rare hawfinch in "Barbara's garden". The Scilly Isles as a whole attract a great deal of unusual birds and crowds of twitchers (themselves as odd a sight as any rare bird) are not uncommon.

To the south of St Martin's is the cluster of deserted islands known as the Eastern Isles. Colonies of sea birds and seals share the rocks and beaches. On the most northerly island, Nornour are the remains of a Bronze Age settlement - shrine, dwelling, cookhouse and midden in such fine condition that it seems only just abandoned. Elsewhere on the Eastern Isles are cairns and chambered tombs which, together with similar sites on other islands, give the Scillies one of the most extensive, and mysterious, groups of burial monuments in Europe.

For those still curious, for whom even this set of terrestrial wonders is not enough, St Martin's has a dive centre. Beginners and experts alike can take advantage of the wrecks scattered all around the Scillies, and of which more are found each year.

Where to stay: St Martin's on the Isle Hotel. The hotel's dining room offers one of the finest views on the islands. Facing west, with a floor-to-ceiling bay window, the room seems all set to make its own Trans-Atlantic bid. The chef is ex-Gavroche and does delicious if over-elaborate things with the local seafood. The hotel boasts a snooker room and indoor swimming pool and a beach so close that white sand drifts against the front door. Few such isolated spots can offer luxury on this scale. Everything (save fish and flowers) has to come in on the small and not always regular freight boat - yet the hotel appears as effortlessly efficient and as sophisticated as any on the mainland.

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