TIDAL ISLANDS I Burgh Island. Bigbury-on-Sea, Devon, England

Negronis and pilchards on a glamorous Devonian island

The Francis Frith Collection

The Coracle isn’t much of a geologist but even so there’s something about tidal islands that gives them a certain mystique. There’s also a certain fear that comes from visiting them and not being quite sure if you’ll get back before the tide nabs you. For those of you that aren’t coastal watchers, a tidal island is an island you can walk to at some point as the sea retreats towards low tide. Often they were natural seats of power like Castle Stalker (Argyll) and St Michael’s Mount (Cornwall) but more commonly they were religious sites like Lindisfarne (Northumberland) and Oronsay (off Colonsay), those monks just loved a bit of escapism.

Burgh Island has a bit more glamour and schizzle than most tidal islands, the monks wouldn’t have been seen dead there. I say that but in fact the monks were there way back when and are possibly buried beneath the fine Art Deco hotel built in the 1920s by the filmmaker Archibald Nettlefold. What a name. There’s a lovely clean white elegance to the building that makes you want to lounge on the terrace and sip a Negroni or a French 75. Many of the great and the good did just that in the 1930s: Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Noel Coward, Josephine Baker. It’s perhaps most famous for being the setting for a couple of Agatha Christie novels but has also featured in several films and even more thrilling, a whole episode of Lovejoy.

The Coracle

It is a little pricey though so equally wonderful is a hoppy pint of St Austell next door at the Pilchard Inn which is one of the oldest pubs in the UK. Pilchards were really the thing round here. On the top of the island there is an old huers’ hut from where fishermen would ‘hue and cry’ on sighting shoals of pilchards. Smuggling was also big business round here but then smuggling and islands is a bit like old pubs and ghosts right?

One unique thing about the island is the method of arrival. Since 1969 you can cross to the island at high tide (you haven’t forgotten this is a tidal island have you?) using the contraption that is the sea tractor. It looks like something Heinz Wolff might have come up with on the 1980s TV programme The Great Egg Race. In fact, and in suitably Burgh Island style, Robert Jackson CBE designed it in return for a case of champagne. It’s a wonderfully anachronistic machine, just make sure you don’t spill your French 75.