Turning Back the Dial: the Isles of Scilly by Richard Waters

They may only be 28 nautical miles from Lands End, but the hidden Isles of Scilly may as well be a few decades away.  For where else can you chat to perfect strangers, find an honesty box at every corner, leave your bike unchained and let your 5 year old son wander off at a village fair without overly worrying?

You can here and once you've tasted the Scillies' rugged simplicity you might never need to go anywhere else. It was two weeks ago we visited, and still I'm thinking about my morning runs around the old garrison on St Marys Island, the perfect blue skies and green water harbours strung with seaweed.
   
We stayed in pretty St Ives for the first night of our holiday. Usually its Cornish maze of granite streets and cobbles would have been the crock of gold at the end of the A30, but it wasn't; for through the mist, invisible and crouching was a place devoid of tattooed tourists, traffic-thronged streets and flash surf shops for weekend athletes. A place I'd heard of since childhood but never actually thought to visit. Who wants to go to a place that sounds like silly? Quite a few people in fact - the Romans spoke of it millennia ago and what about King Arthur who is said to be buried there?

Flying in a Tin Bird

We left St Ives' harbour shrouded in fog, a whiff of salt in the morning air and the promise of storms. "Sorry," explained the Skybus representative at Lands End's diminutive airport, "But you may have to wait a while before we can fly again... maybe tomorrow. Why don't you go for a coffee and we'll give you a call if it clears." So we drove to nearby Sennen Cove and its arc of perfect beach. No sooner than our lips touched a frothy coffee the sky washed itself blue and we were good to go.

Climbing into an 8-seater, twin prop plane is an experience somewhere between boarding a rollercoaster and Robert Redford's bi-plane in 'Out of Africa'. Romantically dinky (the cockpit's almost on your lap), it's a little unnerving when the door shuts with an insubstantial slap like one of those eighties Suzuki jeeps. We steeled ourselves as the tin bird fought for purchase on the wet-grass runway, then a little shudder and we were airborne, every whisper of wind rattling the plane. My 5-year-old son, Finn was looking for Basking sharks out of the window, I was craning to see Wolf Rock lighthouse, while my partner Ali held onto our baby, Aggie. This is the way to fly - low altitude, where you can see everything clearly below. I felt like Biggles!

First Glimpse of Scilly

Within minutes you see the Isles of Scilly glittering under their own weather system (nowhere else receives as much sunshine in Great Britain), vanilla coloured beaches fringed by impossibly turquoise water. Your first stop is St Mary's, the most populated of the islands and the only one with cars - you won't miss them, nor their drivers who seem to think they're in a Cornish Grand Prix. The heart of the island is Hugh Town harbour, bookended by a lifeboat launch on one side and quayside on the other; in between a myriad yachts, skiffs, dinghies and Babel of foreign accents. But what makes this spot even more beguiling is its sense of possibility; staring out over the faded buoys you can see the pastel green smudge of St Martins Island, in the foreground the woody outline of Tresco Island. St Mary's harbour is a launch pad to a host of goodies, with each of the four nearby isles offering a certain something of their own. And should you choose to go nowhere but stay on this island you'll be treated to a cornucopia of sandy coves, artists studios, grassy bluffs, fish and chip shops and tea houses to keep you busy.
   
After we'd indulged in a few delicious pasties and rifled our way through a shop chock with portholes, netted baubles and Jolly Roger flags, it was time to explore. Hopping on a river taxi (£6.50 return, hourly) couldn't be easier; as you walk down the quayside you'll pass fishermen, yachties fresh from foreign waters and perhaps even the local postie who instead of a bike or red van has a little tub of a boat delivering mail from the mainland. For our first island hop we oped for Tresco across the crystal green water, our destination - the sub tropical Abbey Gardens. Ever since I heard about its peculiar museum of things dredged from the bottom of the sea my curiosity had been tickled, for 'Valhalla' is home to a dozen or so 19th century figureheads recovered from ships that foundered off the rocks of Scilly; buxom maidens, soldiers, aquiline beaked lords and golden eagles, all of them dished up from Davy Jones' salty locker.
   
Established by Augustus Smith in 1834 on the site of a 12th century Benedictine abbey, the gardens are alive with things that frankly shouldn't be there, oversized ferns that make you feel as if you've dropped into Lilliput, colours so vibrant, you may have had your drink spiked by the ferryman. A sign explained this luxuriance rather more concisely: "The unique conditions of the Abbey Garden enable plants to be grown from all five Mediterranean floral regions of the world between latitudes 30 degrees and 45 degrees in both hemispheres."

Flora and Fauna

Finn was beginning to tire of statues, Agapanthus, palms, bamboo and cacti glades so we wandered on, following a path that wound through meadows and sun-dappled cedars. There were no cars, just these funky little green buggies that carry people tired of walking to the ferry launch on the western side of the island. There was something slightly surreal about Tresco, almost too perfect - with its clapboard houses, immaculate beaches and stillness, rather like a Crichton film in which Nirvana Park has been created then things begin to go wrong... the buggies start knocking into pensioners, the druid stones near Grimsby Harbour come strangely to life... 
   
St Martin's, the next island, was our second port of call (it's a good idea to spend at least a day or two on each island). Depending on the tide you land at either Higher or Lower Town. I had an appointment with a seal dive outfit in Higher Town and took so long eating my delicious Full breakfast at Tregarthen's hotel, I missed my ferry and ended up on a later launch which landed at Lower Town. Seeing a man jogging through the morning heat with a light sweat on his forehead is something unusual here, for the Scillies are not a place in which one rushes. A half a mile on, past fields of flowers (daffodils and narcissi are grown in abundance and sold on to Covent Garden), Red Admiral butterflies and roadside organic vegetable carts, I was there, squeezing into a double layer of neoprene.  My mission: to snorkel with endangered grey seals. 40% of the world's population are to be found in Cornwall and a high proportion live in the Scillies.
   
Our skipper was a lovely lady called Anna, she fell in love with seals on her first visit in '98, sold up, left her job in Bristol and moved here permanently to aid Scilly Diving's founder, Tim Allsop. From their little beach shack festooned in drying wetsuits and aqualungs, she runs the operation like clockwork. As she guided the orange Zodiac through the blue chop toward the Eastern Isles I listened to my instructions from her colleague, John, "The males are less friendly than the females and their young. They can be big, up to 3 metres... grey with roman noses."
   
The difference with the colony we were about to visit, was unlike the seals on the islands and mainland, they're almost welcoming of human interlopers. As we dropped anchor in a forest of bronze-coloured kelp, a black shag watching us carefully, the first of a dozen narrow snouts poked from the surface and eyed us mischievously. With their exaggerated whiskers they looked like something from a Dr Seuss book. The water was cold on my exposed mitts, achingly so, with visibility at around ten metres. Perfect clarity for seeing a 3metre bull heading straight my way.

Meeting a Bull Seal   

He looked like a journeyman wrestler, his neck thick as a redwood, eyes flat and obsidian. Not my idea of a cuddly friend to frolic with. He disappeared with a scowl into the wavering arms of the kelp. Two layers of neoprene don't make for balletic grace in the water, and any hopes I had of free diving with the seals were soon dashed, instead I bobbed around like a message in a bottle waiting for someone to take an interest in me. From the brown forest she crept toward me, floating effortlessly with a flick of her silky tail; mink white, dappled in brown rings. Her amber eyes shining with interest, her whiskers teased to perfection. I was in luck- for the next ten minutes we made arabesques through clouds of icy bubbles, my new friend bottling (floating vertically) beside me and looking into my eyes from a few inches away as if she had a confession to make. Nobody knows why these seals are so accommodating, but of all my adventures from gibbons to close calls with tigers this was the most intimate and touching. The dive lasts an hour, the memory endures a lot longer.
   
If the prospect of getting turned into human ice cream in the skirts of the Atlantic don't appeal, there's an easier way to see seals up close. Mark and Susie Groves who run Island Sea Safaris were nice enough to take Finn and I on one of their 2 hr excursions to some westerly uninhabited islands.  These seals were much more skittish and nervous of our presence, with milky-white cubs nuzzling their mother's hides and the big males grunting disapprovingly. Hell Bay is particularly fascinating, for true to its moniker it's swallowed countless ships or sent them to their end. Strange to think that below us in that deep navy water, rotted the bones of many a brave mariner who'd taken his last breath, looked at the lighthouse ray reaching out to him, then gone under.
   
Perhaps my favourite island was St Agnes, not because of the homemade ice cream, nor its rakishly nautical Turks Head Pub. I liked it for its absence of cars and Seventies feel; as we beach-combed, ate ham baps and swam in the washed out summer light I felt as if I were free of responsibility and without a care in the world. At low tide you should head for the sugar-fine sandbar between the tiny island of Gugh and St Agnes. It's a perfect spot to sunbathe and read. As the sky was reddening, the butterflies settling, we left St Agnes naming it our favourite island. You'll make your own mind up when you get here, but be warned - once you've visited you'll keep going back again. So went the words of a veteran traveller we met on the ferry back to Hugh Harbour: "I've travelled all over, from Cape Town to Beijing, but nowhere pulls me back like the Isles of Scilly."