Published in Guardian Travel
June 2024
The last time we came to Lundy was by ship from Ilfracombe. The journey took two hours, and once we rounded Hartland Point the Atlantic waves rolled in and around 50 per cent of the passengers started vomiting. This time the MS Oldenburg is in for annual maintenance, so we are whisked to the island in a tiny helicopter that flies from a working farm on the tip of Devon. The journey takes seven minutes. I don’t miss the vomiting, but I do regret not having the sense of temporal acclimatisation to what has been, for much of its history, a slightly different world.
Lundy Island, three miles long and half a mile wide, stands at the border of the Bristol Channel and the Atlantic. In Welsh mythology it is one of the gateways to Annwn, the otherworldly realm also known as Avalon. Eleven miles off the Devon coast and often obscured by fog, the island has tugged on mainlanders’ imaginations for centuries. Its history can be summed up as a succession of eccentrics trying to build little empires here, ranging from the murderous to the more benign.
The island’s geography – dramatically twisted granite cliffs soaring hundreds of feet high – lends itself to a sense of impregnability. There is just one landing point, near a place called the Devil’s Kitchen. In the 1600s, Moroccan pirates used Lundy as a base from which to raid West Country ports. A century later, a tobacco smuggler and bent MP called Thomas Benson imported convicts here from the mainland to use as his private slaves. In 1836 the island was bought by William Hudson Heaven, with the money he had received as compensation for the emancipation of his own slaves in Jamaica. Ironically, given that history, he declared it a ‘free island’. He built an outsized Anglican church and quarried granite from the cliffs. Lundy was jokingly dubbed the Kingdom of Heaven.
A later owner, Martin Coles Harman, also styled himself a king, and was prosecuted for issuing his own currency, in the form of Half Puffin and One Puffin coins. Finally in 1969, Lundy was donated to the National Trust. The solid granite cottages that comprise its tiny village were restored by the Landmark Trust, which still manages them today, and the island’s ‘permanent’ population – currently 28 – is largely employed in servicing these properties for visitors like us.
You can come to Lundy on a day trip, but we opt for five nights. This might seem a long time to stay on a three-mile rock. But the island is a world in itself, and once our spirits have settled here after the unexpected flight its solitude, wind and wildness feel increasingly hard to leave, and the mainland ever more distant.
There are 25 properties, ranging from the remote, off-grid Tibbets to the former keepers’ quarters in the old lighthouse. There is also a bunkhouse, and a campsite in warmer weather. We stay in Old House South, which used to form part of a manor, and is claimed by the Landmark Trust to be the island’s handsomest building. It is cosy yet elegant, with beautiful rugs, a wood-burning stove and shelves full of well-thumbed books. We cook most of our meals here – the village shop is well supplied – but treat ourselves to a few pub meals in the Marisco Tavern. This serves the kind of hearty fare you need after tramping the cliffs all day, and has the advantage of being mere seconds’ walk from our door.
The tavern – which takes its name from a 13th-century renegade who, like so many others, established his little fiefdom here – is the point around which Lundy’s (human) life revolves. Its walls are hung with lifebelts from the many ships wrecked on its shores: Taxiarchis, Maria Kyriakides, Kaaksburg, Blue Merlin. It is also a community centre and information hub, and several times a week the Head Warden Joe Parker gives a free talk about the island’s ecology. Apart from its wild human history, what makes Lundy extraordinary is its wild nature.
In 2010 Lundy became the UK’s first Marine Conservation Zone, with its eastern seaboard protected from all forms of fishing. It is home to a resident population of 180 Atlantic grey seals – often gathered around the jetty where the Oldenburg gets in – and dolphins, porpoises, basking sharks and even occasional minke whales are visitors to its waters. The seas here mark the northern range of rare cold water corals, including the pink sea fan, which can grow to half a metre tall. And the island’s sheer cliffs are important breeding grounds for up to 40,000 globally endangered seabirds.
In his talk, Joe explains that things have not always been this way. Two decades ago, Lundy was overrun with black and brown rats, voracious eaters of eggs that devastated the seabird population. The island is famous for its puffins – Lund-ey is Old Norse for Puffin Island – but in 2001 only five individuals were recorded here, and the species was at risk of extirpation. Manx shearwaters, which migrate from the tip of South America, were also endangered, as were gannets, kittiwakes, guillemots, razorbills and fulmars. Culling the rats was controversial, but it was either the birds or them. Following an eradication campaign, the island was declared rat-free in 2007.
The seabird population boom has been dramatic. In 2023, puffin numbers were up from five to 1,335, and shearwaters from 297 breeding pairs to over 12,000. Much of the island is protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest – it is also home to pygmy shrews, 860 species of fungi, and the endemic Lundy cabbage which is found nowhere else on Earth – but Joe and others are agitating for Special Protection Area (SPA) status to safeguard the seabirds’ foraging grounds and flyways. This, he says, is essential for their long-term preservation. In the meantime, wardens and rangers regularly patrol the cliffs checking bait stations for signs of rodent recolonisation. Rats who have stowed away on ships can swim for a couple of miles, so Lundy can never let down its guard, but for now the puffins lay their eggs in peace.
They are preparing to do just that when we see them at Jenny’s Cove, through a clifftop telescope set up by a volunteer. At first they look like bright white stones scattered down a grassy slope, but when the lens focuses they leap into sharp relief. This is early April, so these are among the first breeding pairs to have arrived in the British Isles; after July they will be gone, back to the open Atlantic. Awareness of how close they came to vanishing entirely only adds to the pleasure, and privilege, of watching them – so much smaller than we’d imagined, but inexpressibly delightful.
It’s a stormy day, with blasts of wind that almost knock us off our feet. Despite the weather we have ventured north as far as Halfway Wall, one of the three dry stone walls that divide the island. South of Quarter Wall lies the human realm of tavern and church, which already feels a world away. North of Three Quarter Wall are cliffs and crashing waves. Here and there, huddled against the wind, are Highland cows, Lundy ponies, Sika deer and Soay sheep, all of which have been introduced in the past hundred years. They do much less harm than rats, though there are still too many of them: Joe is vegan on the mainland but eats lamb and venison here, ‘organic, totally free range, and no air miles.’ The Soay breed comes from St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides, and is the closest surviving thing to sheep from the Neolithic. Humans arrived on Lundy at least 10,000 years ago, so it is not impossible that those first inhabitants kept hardy flocks similar to the ones that roam today.
The peculiar magic of this island lies in the way it blends sociability with solitude. Conversation is easy in the tavern, and people’s shared isolation gives them a sense of comradeship. No wonder visitors return, and the year-round residents – wardens, housekeepers, bar staff – stay for an average of five years. It takes a certain type. And yet, despite the permanence of the granite cliffs and cottages, everyone leaves in the end, as they always have. Mariscos, Heavens and Harmans stuck it out for decades at a time, but they all vanished too, like extirpated seabirds. Only nature is permanent here, and even that – just ask the puffins – is intensely vulnerable. Lundy’s designation as an SPA might just make the difference.