Isles of Scilly

• 1. Introduction

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  One daffodil a year is the rent for the uninhabited parts of the Isles of Scilly, a small archipelago off the southwestern tip of mainland Cornwall. The Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust holds those islands, islets and rocks on a lease from the Duchy of Cornwall, and the flower is the whole price.

  The 2021 census counted 2,100 residents, a figure rounded to the nearest 100. Most of them live on St Mary's. The rest are scattered across four inhabited off-islands.

  St Agnes, one of those off-islands, lies more than four miles south of Lizard Point, the most southerly spot on the British mainland. Its hamlet of Troy Town is the southernmost inhabited settlement in Cornwall.

  This documentary asks how a place so small came to be so distinct. How did the land take its present scattered shape? Why do its names speak so many languages? Who was sent here in exile, and who arrived uninvited? And how does a community of just over two thousand run itself?

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• 2. Drowned Lands

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  Between 400 and 500 AD, rising seas flooded a central plain and carved the land into the 55 islands and islets that exist today. That count applies a strict test, in which an island must be surrounded by water at high tide and carry land vegetation. Before the flood, the land was probably a single island called Ennor. The name is a contraction of the Old Cornish En Noer, meaning the land or the great island.

  A Roman-era description calls the place "Scillonia insula", using the singular. That wording suggests either one island or one far larger than any of its neighbours.

  On Nornour, today a small rocky skerry, archaeologists found the remains of a prehistoric farm. The rock is far too small to farm now. An Iron Age British community lived there into Roman times. It was probably formed by immigrants from Brittany, most likely the Veneti, who were active in the tin trade that grew out of mining in Cornwall and Devon.

  The Greeks wrote of the Cassiterides, or Tin Isles, which some believe the Phoenicians visited. The islands may match that description. Yet there is no evidence of substantial tin mining on Scilly itself.

  At Samson, ancient field walls can still be seen below the high tideline. At some low tides, people can walk between certain islands. Gugh is reachable from St Agnes at every low tide by way of a sand bar called a tombolo. The tidal range at St Mary's reaches 5.99 metres, which is high for an open sea location.

  These sights probably feed the legend of Lyonesse, a lost land said to lie midway between Land's End and Scilly. Arthurian literature makes Tristan a prince of that country. Similar tales are told of Ys in Brittany and of Cantre'r Gwaelod in Wales. The whole of southern England has been slowly sinking, which also explains drowned river valleys such as the River Fal and the Tamar Estuary.

  The sea has not finished testing the islands. Evidence shows they were inundated by the tsunami that followed the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

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• 3. Names and Tongues

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  The Romans called the islands Sil(l)ina, a Latin version of a Brittonic name that survives as Cornish Sillan. Nobody knows where the name comes from. It has been speculatively linked to the goddess Sulis.

  The English form first appears in 1176, spelled Sully. In the 16th century, a letter c was slipped into the middle. The change kept the islands apart from the word "silly", whose meaning was drifting from "happy" to "foolish".

  French speakers call the archipelago the Sorlingues, from the Old Norse Syllingar. Mercator used that form on his 1564 map of Britain, and through his map it spread into several European languages.

  Cornish was the main language of the islands until the 1700s, and it left a map of meanings behind. Bryher comes from a word for place of hills. Gugh means hedge-banks, and Peninnis means the end of the island. Porth Hellick is the cove of willows, and Tresco is the farm by elder trees.

  Bishop Rock is an English translation of the 14th century Cornish name Men an Epscop, the bishop's stone. St Agnes was recorded in the 12th century as Aganas, from an early Celtic phrase for off-island. St Martin's was once Breghyek, the dappled one, until it took the name of its church's patron saint.

  No one knows when the islanders stopped speaking Cornish. The old Brittonic language seems to have vanished from Scilly before it disappeared from parts of Penwith on the mainland.

  Today, the word "Scillonian" is sometimes used for people or things connected with the archipelago.

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• 4. Exiles and Raiders

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  Around the year 385, a man named Tiberianus from Hispania was condemned to banishment on the islands. The bishop Instantius shared his fate. Both were caught up in the prosecution of the Priscillianists, a Christian movement named for Priscillian.

  In the centuries that followed, the isles belonged to the Brittonic Celtic kingdom of Dumnonia, and later to its offshoot Kernow, or Cornwall. English conquest in the 10th century may have reached them, but the Norman Conquest cut it short. Cornwall, and possibly Scilly, are generally thought to have fallen under the English Crown late in the reign of Æthelstan.

  In 986, the future King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway met a Christian seer on the islands. Olaf had been born around 960 and had raided various European cities. The seer was probably a follower of Priscillian, part of a tiny community exiled from Spain by Emperor Maximus. In Snorri Sturluson's Royal Sagas of Norway, the seer tells him: "Thou wilt become a renowned king, and do celebrated deeds."

  The prophecy carried a sequence of tokens. Mutineers would attack Olaf at his ships, and he would be wounded almost to death. After a week he would recover and be baptised. According to the legend, it all happened as foretold. Olaf stopped raiding Christian cities and lived in England and Ireland.

  In 995 he saw his chance to return to Norway, where Haakon Jarl was facing a revolt. Olaf persuaded the rebels to accept him as their king. Haakon was murdered by his own slave while hiding from the rebels in a pig sty.

  The Norse knew the islands as Syllingar, and they came as raiders too. The Orkneyinga saga says that Sweyn Asleifsson seized a barge belonging to some monks. A longer passage places a great Norse victory at Maríuhöfn on Columba's-mass, the 9th of June. The name means Mary's Harbour, but it is unclear whether it described a harbour on a larger island or a whole island.

  About 20 years after the Norman Conquest came the Domesday survey. The islands would have belonged to the Exeter Domesday circuit, alongside Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire.

  One group of islands was once held by a confederacy of hermits. King Henry I, who reigned from 1100 to 1135, gave the islands to the abbey of Tavistock. The abbey founded a priory on Tresco, and the priory survived until the Reformation abolished it.

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• 5. War and Wreck

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  Around the turn of the 14th century, the Abbot and convent of Tavistock Abbey wrote to the king with an unusual request. They held islands in the sea between Cornwall and Ireland, and ships passed them from France, Normandy, Spain, Bayonne, Gascony, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall. The abbey feared it lacked the power to do justice to these sailors if war broke out. It asked to swap the islands for lands in Devon, keeping the island churches.

  In 1305, William le Poer, coroner of Scilly, also petitioned the king. His worry was the extent of wrecking in the islands. The names in the records show a mixed population. They include Robert and Henry Sage, who were English, and Richard de Tregenestre, who was Cornish. They also include Ace de Veldre, who was French, and Adam le Fuiz Yaldicz, whose name is possibly Spanish.

  The English Civil War brought the biggest changes. Parliamentarians captured the isles, but their garrison mutinied and handed them back to the Royalists. By 1651, the Royalist governor Sir John Grenville was using the islands as a base for privateering raids on Commonwealth and Dutch shipping.

  The Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp arrived on the 30th of May 1651 and demanded compensation. He got no satisfactory reply, so in June he declared war on England. From this episode comes the disputed Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War between the islands and the Netherlands.

  Also in June 1651, Admiral Robert Blake recaptured the isles for Parliament. His first attack on Old Grimsby failed, but later attacks took Tresco and Bryher. A battery he placed on Tresco to fire on St Mary's suffered a disaster when one gun exploded. The crew died and Blake was injured. A second battery worked better, and Grenville and Blake agreed terms that let the Royalists surrender honourably.

  The victors then fortified the islands. They built Cromwell's Castle, a gun platform on the west side of Tresco, from materials scavenged from an earlier platform further up the hill. That older platform dated back to the 1550s and was poorly sited. It is now called King Charles's Castle. During the same war the isles also served as a place of exile, and the Unitarian Jon Biddle was sent there.

  On the night of the 22nd of October 1707, the islands saw one of the worst maritime disasters in British history. A fleet of 21 Royal Navy ships was sailing from Gibraltar to Portsmouth. Six were driven onto the cliffs, and four sank or capsized. At least 1,450 people died, among them the commanding admiral, Sir Cloudesley Shovell.

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• 6. Gardens and Birds

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  On the 12th of January 1987-23 centimetres of snow fell on the islands, the heaviest snowfall on record. Such a fall is a rarity, though the islands lie at the same latitude as Winnipeg in Canada. The North Atlantic Drift of the Gulf Stream keeps winters mild. Average annual temperature is 12.0 degrees Celsius, the warmest in the British Isles. The recorded extremes run from -7.2 to 27.8 degrees, and the temperature has never dropped below freezing between May and November.

  Rainfall averages about 35 inches a year, with October to January the wettest months. May is among the sunniest, with an average of seven hours of sunshine a day. A Trewartha climate classification, which counts months above 10 degrees, labels the islands humid subtropical, the only such place in the British Isles.

  That mildness allows flower farmers to bring crops to market well ahead of those on the mainland. Scented narcissi, commonly called daffodils, are grown from October to April on St Agnes, St Mary's, St Martin's and Bryher. Scented pinks, or Dianthus, take over in full bloom from May to September. Bermuda buttercups spring up in the bulb fields, and foxgloves grow among the hedgerows in early summer.

  Those hedgerows were planted a century ago as windbreaks. On Tresco, the lush Abbey Gardens sit at the sheltered southern end, while the exposed northern end is low heather and bare rock shaped by wind. Beneath it all lies granite of Early Permian age, an exposed part of the Cornubian batholith.

  In autumn, the islands become a magnet for birdwatchers. Scilly is the first European landfall for many American vagrant birds, and rare Siberian species also appear. When an extreme rarity turns up, crowds of enthusiasts follow, a pursuit known as twitching.

  BirdLife International has named the archipelago an Important Bird Area. It supports breeding European storm-petrels, European shags, lesser and great black-backed gulls and common terns. Ruddy turnstones visit in winter. Annet and Samson have large colonies of terns, and seals are common.

  The islands are also the only British home of the lesser white-toothed shrew, which islanders call a teak or a teke. In 1975 the whole archipelago became an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the smallest in the United Kingdom.

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• 7. Governing Few

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  In 1834, Augustus Smith paid the Duchy of Cornwall £20,000 for the lease of the islands and gave himself the title Lord Proprietor. Before him, the islands had been run by a Proprietor who was usually also the Governor. The governor was a military post commissioned by the monarch, in recognition of the islands' strategic position.

  The Governor was non-resident. He handed military duties to a Lieutenant-Governor and civil duties to a Council of twelve residents. Thomas Godolphin was an early governor, and his son Francis received a lease in 1568. Francis Godolphin, 2nd Earl of Godolphin, was commissioned on the 7th of July 1733. The Godolphins and their Osborne relatives held the post until 1831, when the 6th Duke of Leeds surrendered the lease and the islands returned to direct rule by the duchy.

  Smith's lease stayed in his family until it expired for most of the islands in 1920, when ownership went back to the duchy. The Dorrien-Smith family still holds the lease for Tresco.

  The Local Government Act 1888 let the Local Government Board create councils for the islands separate from Cornwall's. In 1890, the Isles of Scilly Rural District Council was formed as a unitary authority outside the administrative county of Cornwall. The Isles of Scilly Order 1930 gave it the powers of a county council. A later act renamed it the Council of the Isles of Scilly.

  The council represents fewer people than many English parish councils, and it is the smallest unitary council in England. It employs 130 people full-time to deliver services such as water supply and air traffic control. Councillors and staff together account for almost 10% of the adult population.

  The council has 16 seats. Twelve are filled by the ward of St Mary's, and each of the four off-island wards of St Martin's, St Agnes, Bryher and Tresco returns one. At the election of the 1st of May 2025, every candidate stood as an independent. Only the St Martin's seat was contested.

  Two flags represent the islands. The Scillonian Cross was chosen by readers of Scilly News in a 2002 vote and then registered with the Flag Institute. An adapted Board of Ordnance flag has also flown, after one was left behind when munitions were removed from the isles.

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• 8. Making a Living

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  Tourism is estimated to supply 85% of the islands' income and about 63% of all employment. Agriculture now accounts for less than 2% of jobs. The economy has depended on trade with the mainland since the mid-18th century, through the rise and fall of kelp harvesting, pilotage, smuggling, fishing, shipbuilding and flower farming.

  In a 1987 study, Neate found many farms struggling with rising costs and overseas competition, and diversifying into tourism. Most tourism businesses employ fewer than four people, and winter brings a sharp slowdown. Birdwatchers extend the season into October.

  Some things came late to the islands. They paid no income tax until 1954 and no motor vehicle excise duty until 1971. St Mary's is the only island with classified roads, which are the A3110, A3111 and A3112. Visitors arrive by Skybus flights from Land's End, Newquay and Exeter, or by the ferry Scillonian III from Penzance.

  Housing is the sharpest problem. In 1949 much of Hugh Town was sold to its inhabitants, but most freehold land still belongs to the duchy. Local incomes run at about 70% of the national average, while homes cost more. Holiday lets and second homes eat into the supply.

  In December 2021, the council bought a property to convert into 3 affordable homes. In January 2022 it declared a housing crisis, warning that essential services such as the hospital and school were at risk. It said 15 households faced homelessness by March.

  Islanders also know how to be active. A Sport England survey in December 2006 found them the most active residents in England, with 32% exercising at least three times a week for 30 minutes or more. The Isles of Scilly Football League is reportedly the smallest in the world.

  The best-known sport is pilot gig racing, in which six-oared boats, and in one case a seven-oared boat, race between the main islands. A popular story links it to the scramble for salvage from wrecks. In fact, the original race was to deliver a pilot to incoming vessels, guiding them through the reefs and shallows. The World Pilot Gig Championships are held each year over the May Day bank holiday weekend, and crews now come from all over the South-West and further afield.

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