SCILLY SEASON

Lying in the Atlantic some 28 miles off the coast of mainland Cornwall, the rugged outcrops that make up the Isles of Scilly are at the frontier of England, a scattering of isolated but tightknit communities that are British in name if not, with their powdery beaches and tropical plant life, in nature. Most people’s first taste of the Scillies is St Mary’s, which emerges from the ocean as the ferry chugs towards Hugh Town harbour or spreads bucolically out beneath them as their plane swoops in to land at the island’s airport.

The largest and most populated of Scilly’s five inhabited islands