Where to stay

Chapel House En route to the Isles of Scilly, this spacious B&B ina historic Georgian house overlooking Penzance Harbour and Mount’s Bay is a few minutes drive from Penzance station and 25 minutes from Land’s End airport. The generous breakfast includes Cornish smoked haddock with scrambled egg and good locally made bread. Doubles from £150, with breakfast. Chapel Street, Penzance, TR18 4AQ, 01736 362 024, http://www.chapelhousepz.co.uk

Hell Bay Hotel Stylish and secluded hotel overlooking white sands, rocky coves and beautiful sunsets. A fine private art collection including Barbara Hepworth. Breakfast in England’s westernmost hotel on kippers with lemon butter, scrambled eggs or local sausages and bacon. Doubles from £150, with breakfast. Bryher, TR23 0PR, 01720 422 947, http://www.hellbay.co.uk

Karma St Martin’s Hotel Unobtrusive hotel in an area of great beauty with views across Tean Sound. Many of the spacious rooms have a panoramic sea view, and the large terrace stretches to the shoreline. The well-stocked library is ideal for this peaceful setting. Doubles from £270, with breakfast. Lower Town, St Martin’s, TR25 0QW, 01720 422 368, http://www.karmaresorts.com

The New Inn Well-located B&B. The popular bar and restaurant occasionally hosts live music and ale and cider festivals. Head chef Sarah Skeate’s seasonal menus include Tresco-reared beef and Borough Farm eggs; try the Ploughman’s with Cornish cheese or the delicious treacle tart or Eton mess. Doubles from £60 per person, with breakfast. Meals from £28, sandwiches and a beer from £10. Tresco, TR24 0QQ, 01720 423 006, http://www.tresco.co.uk

Sea Garden Cottages Only a few metres from the beach and Ruin Beach Café (see Where to eat), these spacious and comfortable one to three-bedroom cottages have lovely views across the bay to St Martin’s. Tresco Abbey Garden (see Don’t miss) is a 20-minute walk away. One-bedroom cottage on a self-catering basis from £160 per night. Tresco, TR24 0PW, 01720 422 849, http://www.tresco.co.uk

Star Castle Hotel With a fine view of the harbour and archipelago, this 16th-century fort is now an atmospheric hotel with extensive gardens overlooking Hugh Town. Modern rooms are available and there are two dining rooms, one in a large and light-filled conservatory (see Where to eat). Doubles from £278, with breakfast. St Mary’s, TR21 OJA, 01720 422 317, http://www.star-castle.co.uk

Travel Information

Some 45km west of the mainland, the Isles of Scilly’s closest connection by air is Land’s End. Currency is sterling and the time zone is GMT.

GETTING THERE
Great Western Railway Savour the journey to Cornwall with this magnificent feat of Victorian engineering. Pass through the Somerset Levels and the South Devon coastline while enjoying award-winning chef Mitch Tonks’ lunch or dinner menu in the Pullman, the country’s only fine-dining rail service. 0345 7000 125, http://www.firstgreatwestern.c...
Skybus shuttle Flights to St Mary’s from Land’s End (15 minutes) and Newquay (30 minutes) year-round and from Exeter (60 minutes) March to October. Prices from Land’s End to St Mary’s start from £140 per person. 01736 334 220, http://www.islesofscilly-trave...

RESOURCES
Isles of Scilly Travel For information on travel to Scilly and around the islands. 01736 334 220, http://www.islesofscilly-trave...
Visit Isles of Scilly Comprehensive information on travel to and around Scilly, accommodation, local events, things to do, places to go, and festivals. Steamship House, Hugh Street, Hugh Town, St Mary’s, TR18 4BZ, 01720 424 031, http://www.visitislesofscilly....

GETTING AROUND THE ISLANDS
St Mary’s Boatman’s Association For travel between the five inhabited islands. Boat departure times are weather-dependent and can change at the last minute, so it’s always best to check. Information is displayed on island notice boards as well as on quay timetables. 01720 423 999, http://www.scillyboating.co.uk
FURTHER READING
The Island Ingredient by Toby Tobin-Dougan and Paul Websdale is a coffee table book with more than 115 pages of island stories, seasonal food and recipes. (Grey Mullet Publishing, £20).

Where to eat

Prices are per person for three courses and half a bottle of wine, unless otherwise stated.

Cloudesley Shovell Restaurant Go for the St Martin’s fish chowder, crab linguine or lobster salad with bread from Island Bakery and a sparkling English wine or a local wine from St Martin’s Vineyard. From £34 for lunch, £45 for dinner. Karma St Martin’s Hotel, Lower Town, St Martin’s, TR25 0QW, 01720 422 368, hhtp://www.karmaresorts.com

Crab Shack Pop-up crab shack in a former barn a short walk from Hell Bay Hotel. Bryher crab, mussels and scallops are all straight from fisherman Mark Pender’s boat and cooked in a choice of butters. Accompaniments are simple and a cheese board or Eton mess follows. From £45. Bryher, TR23 0PR, 01720 422 947, http://www.hellbay.co.uk

The Flying Boat Casual and friendly restaurant serving breakfast, sandwiches, lunch, afternoon tea and cocktails. All using local produce. Tresco, TR24 0QQ, 01720 424 068, hhtp://www.tresco.co.uk

Hell Bay Hotel Head chef Richard Kearsley makes full use of the superb local produce. Order grilled mackerel, lemon sole with saffron potatoes, Hell Bay bouillabaisse, potted crab, Tresco beef steaks and a lemon tart or raspberry sorbet. From £8 for a light lunch, without drinks, £45 for dinner, without wine. Bryher, TR23 0PR, 01720 422 947, http://www.hellbay.co.uk

Juliet’s Garden Owner Juliet May’s large, award-winning café and terrace is the perfect place for a strawberry Pimm’s with homemade cake. Try chef Andrew O’Connor’s local sea bass, hot-smoked duck, lamb or crab. From £10 for lunch, without drinks, £30 for dinner. Porthlow, St Mary’s, TR21 0NF, 01720 422 228, http://www.julietsgardenrestau...

Ruin Beach Café Enjoy a fine view from the large wooden terrace overlooking Old Grimsby beach while you sample a tasty pizza or roast Tresco beef from the wood-fired oven. There’s a variety of locally sourced produce, including excellent asparagus from nearby Borough Farm when in season, and the herb required for a rosemary martini. From £32. Tresco, TR24 0PU, 01720 424 849, http://www.tresco.co.uk

St Mary’s Hall Hotel Both the dining room or charming garden, are a lovely backdrop to confit of Salakee Farm duck leg and Cornish pigeon with red onion marmalade, house-smoked Scilly peppered mackerel or Cornish pork loin. Cream tea with clotted cream also superb. It’s the very best of the islands’ produce. From £25 for lunch, £35 for dinner. Church Street, St Mary’s, TR21 0JR, 01720 422 316, http://www.stmaryshallhotel.co...

Seven Stones Inn A free house with views across the bay from the large terrace. Try fish pie or pâté with in-house smoked fish or freshly caught fish and chips. Drinks include local Ales of Scilly and beers from Cornwall. Live music, comedy and theatre, too. From £20 for two courses and a pint of beer. Lower Town, TR25 0QW, 01720 423 777

Star Castle Conservatory restaurant With a winery, market garden and fishing boat, good use is made of them all. Opt for the local brill with samphire, duck with cabbage or John Dory with asparagus. Don’t miss the chocolate mousse with homemade honeycomb and clotted cream. From £25 for a light lunch, £50 for dinner. Star Castle Hotel, St Mary’s, TR21 OJA, 01720 422 317, http://www.star-castle.co.uk

Turk’s Head Pub Enjoy good local beers and pub food while you wait for the boat from St Mary’s to arrive. From £16 for fish and chips and a pint of beer. St Agnes, TR22 0PL, 01720 422 434

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

We’re a very small island. We have no choice but to work out how we can survive when the weather turns against us and the boats can’t go out,’ Dom Crees tells me as I admire the view westwards across the Tean Sound from the terrace of his Seven Stones Inn.

Dom and his wife Emily fell in love with St Martin’s – one of the five inhabited Isles of Scilly – on their first trip here many years ago. Like everyone here on the islands, they’re highly adaptable. ‘We grow some foods and source everything else as locally as we can. A fisherman friend brings us plaice, cod, John Dory, crab and mullet and we smoke mackerel and chicken, which is an old island method of preserving food.’

Further east, in the island’s largest settlement of Higher Town, baker and café proprietor Barney McLachlan fits his working life around the small ferries that link St Martin’s (less than 2.5sq km) with the other islands. ‘When they dock or leave in the morning, my pasties disappear or, if it’s an afternoon boat, it’s my cakes and scones that go,’ he says as he stacks the crusty bread he’s about to deliver to Seven Stones. Nearby, Jason Poat, owner of Polreath Tearoom, says: ‘Families are forced to cook here – you can’t go along to the supermarket. But our weather is kind to us, and people come back year after year and ask me what I’m growing now and what I’m cooking with the good things in my garden. It’s a simpler way of living and you know your food is going to be good.’ His pies are proof of that.

To reach St Martin’s from the mainland means either flying or taking a ferry from Penzance in Cornwall to St Mary’s, then taking a small boat. St Mary’s is the largest of Scilly’s islands and home to three-quarters of the 2,200-strong population but you can still walk around its coast in one day. Its main town, Hugh Town, is a hub for travel and island life, and is dominated by a dramatic civil war-era garrison. Narrow country lanes lined with high hedges take you between small fields to innovative new producers. Kylie Carter and Dave Mumford rear handsome and delightful ducks on their fertile land at Salakee Farm and, much to the local chefs’ delight, supply many of the islands’ restaurants.

Further north, Robert Francis has planted four hectares with pinot noir, pinot gris and chardonnay grapes at his Holy Vale vineyard. ‘My family love it,’ Robert explains to me as I admire his strong, healthy vines, ‘but last year our weather misbehaved at the wrong moment, and my son has renamed it “Dad’s folly”. But this year I hope to change that.’

The Isles of Scilly lay 45km south-west of the Cornish peninsula. Once joined to each other, and perhaps to the mainland, there is much evidence of ancient burial grounds and subsistence farming. Romans, Norsemen and the Spanish Armada passed through, and their position on medieval trade routes from Europe to the New World meant the islands were of great importance for the Tudors and Cromwell. Today, the forts they left behind are the perfect places to witness dazzling displays of stars in the clear skies, glorious sunsets over the Atlantic and to follow birds – Arctic terns, cuckoos, puffins, storm petrels – on their migratory paths. The 145-plus islands, mostly owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, lie in the Gulf Stream that sweeps across the ocean from the Caribbean.

Scilly’s mild climate is especially pronounced on Tresco, the second-largest island in the archipelago. Its granite rock quarry used to provide stone with which to build the island’s houses. Now it’s home to a magnificent garden of more than 4,000 plants gathered from five continents. Tresco Abbey Garden was started by Augustus Smith (1804-1872), the first ‘lord of the islands’ to live here. Laid out according to the plants’ native lands, you and your imagination can wander from South Africa to New Zealand to California past palms, agapanthus, giant ferns, flame trees and cacti.

I find gardener Emma Lainchbury in the kitchen garden. ‘Its main purpose is to supply the house with the produce its residents need, but the soil is so fertile and the climate so good that there is always a surplus,’ she tells me as we walk alongside well-tended beds of shallots, artichokes, beetroot, spring onions, lettuces, broad beans and spinach. ‘Chefs are very keen to have anything that’s spare and I now grow more unusual herbs for them, such as angelica.’ We pass fruit bushes – loganberry, raspberry, blackcurrants – and bantams and partridges wandering at will on our way to the garden’s nine beehives. ‘The bees are swarming at the moment, so we have to be careful,’ warns Emma. ‘They’re disease-free but bee swarms can travel up to 5km. We have flowers all year round here, so we’re a popular destination.’

Tresco’s car-free peace and tranquillity seems to affect birdlife too, with song thrushes, robins, sparrows and blackbirds joining you as you sit down to eat. ‘I love partridge most of all,’ grins New Inn chef Paul Brown; I fear for the partridges happily pecking nearby. Tresco supports two farms – one beef, the other mixed arable – and their delicious produce is on the menus of many Scilly restaurants. Banks of flowers – bluebells, sea pinks, red campion, flag iris – line the paths that criss-cross this island, taking you through woodland and along secluded sandy beaches with breathtakingly beautiful views of low-lying islets just offshore. It’s certainly an enviable round for the postmistress; the only one in Britain still allowed to ride a bike.

On neighbouring Bryher island, I meet Richard Kearsley, head chef of the Hell Bay Hotel. He’s just received a text from Emma at Abbey Garden, asking if he’d like some of her first asparagus. ‘She’ll take it to the school for my young daughter to bring back on the school boat this afternoon.’ Just 20 pupils attend Tresco’s primary school, including three from Bryher. Later, on my way to meet fisherman Mark Pender, I pass Richard, his daughter and their large bag of asparagus. ‘It’s a bit lumpy out there,’ sighs Mark as he ties his small boat to the harbour wall. He has a good catch – two large baskets full of lobsters, dozens of fine crabs, scallops and fish – but it’s been a long and tiring day. ‘My family have been fishermen here for as long as anyone knows,’ he says. ‘My dad, who’s 72, still does 100 pots a day. My sister Amanda prepares the shellfish to sell to visitors and restaurants, and my mum keeps it all going. She also makes great marmalade.’

Amanda is also an early riser. Every day at 6am she gives Mark a list of what she needs to fill the orders or she texts him later. ‘It’s better than what my mother had to do,’ she says. ‘If she received an order after Dad had left in the morning, she’d go to a clifftop and wave to him out in his boat. He’d have to come back to pick up the list.’ Amanda makes superb potted crab and crab sandwiches which she sells in the tiny shop attached to her house. ‘My grandmother sold small goods to raise money for the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) here so our two-up, two-down has always been a shop really. I love the business. Until we took control of this supply line, restaurants had to buy fish from the mainland – even when it was caught here – and it was often frozen.’

Bryher (just 2.5km long and 800m wide) is the westernmost of Scilly’s inhabited islands, 15 minutes by ferry from Tresco or, if the tide is very low, a walk across the sands. Rich in historic cairns and birdlife – swans, oystercatchers, gulls, gannets, cormorants – its sandy grassland flora make it a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Like the other islands, Bryher was once home to early season flower farming. Today, this market has gone and many farms have disappeared. Those who remain are finding new ways to support themselves. Fudge-maker Kris Taylor has lived on Bryher for almost 40 years. ‘My 11-year-old daughter wanted dance lessons so she started making fudge to pay for them. I took over when she went to university.’ Like many other smallholdings in Scilly – selling vegetables, strawberries, eggs, honey and sea salt – Kris leaves her fudge on a stall outside her house with an ‘honesty box’ for payments. ‘My favourite flavour is “thunder and lightening”. It’s the name of the snack – treacle and clotted cream on bread – a farmer’s wife would take out to her husband at teatime while he was working in the fields.’

The clotted cream Kris uses to make her fudge comes from St Agnes, the southernmost of Scilly’s inhabited islands. Sam Hicks, born and schooled here, keeps a small herd of beef and dairy cattle and some very happy whey-drinking pigs on his farm, which stretches across green fields towards the windswept Atlantic shores. ‘I sell clotted cream and ice cream to all the islands, as much as we can make,’ he says, ‘but it’s not easy as a delayed boat can mean disaster for a chef’s plans, as well as myself.’ Indeed, you have to be relaxed here. And be prepared not to leave an island when you’ve planned to or even go for a walk once the westerlies start blowing. Over the centuries, hundreds of ships – and thousands of lives – have been lost on the rocks nearby and Scillonians have shown immeasurable courage taking their gigs (rowboats) out to rescue people.

For a different kind of introduction to the Scillonians, stroll around the islands’ graveyards and you’ll find the same names appearing on many headstones – Pender (on Bryher), Hicks (St Agnes), Jenkins and Griffin (every island). On St Martin’s you will find the name Gibson. Val Thomas (née Gibson) can trace her family back to the 17th century. She and her husband Graham have transformed her family’s farm from flowers to a vineyard, mostly for white grape varietals – siegerrebe, reichensteiner, madeleine angevine. ‘Grapes are not new here but wine is,’ says Graham. They also make apple juice from the islands’ native Scilly Pearl variety. ‘Because bulbs have been grown here for generations, there’s an unusual flora in our old arable fields,’ Graham explains as we walk past the lovely wildflowers amongst the vines. Residents have an unusual way with words. ‘Fences came to our island in the 1950s for windbreaks and we need to cut them frequently, whereas our hedges have been here for centuries and just need rebuilding every now and then,’ says Graham, before explaining that here, on these lovely islands which have captivated so many with their wild beauty, charm and very good food, fences are hedges and hedges are stone walls.