Collins New Naturalist Library

103

The Isles of Scilly
Rosemary Parslow

Editors

SARAH A. CORBET, ScD

PROF. RICHARD WEST, ScD, FRS, FGS

DAVID STREETER, MBE, FIBIOL

JIM FLEGG, OBE, FIHORT

PROF. JONATHAN SILVERTOWN

The aim of this series is to interest the general reader in the wildlife of Britain by recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists. The editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native flora and fauna, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Editors

Map

Editors’ Preface

Author’s Foreword and Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1 An Introduction

CHAPTER 2 Geology and Early History

CHAPTER 3 Later History - People and Their Influence on the Islands

CHAPTER 4 Naturalists and Natural History

CHAPTER 5 St Mary’s

CHAPTER 6 The Off-Islands

CHAPTER 7 The Uninhabited Islands

CHAPTER 8 The Sea and the Marine Environment

CHAPTER 9 The Coast

CHAPTER 10 Grassland and Heathland

CHAPTER 11 Woodland and Wetland

CHAPTER 12 Cultivated Habitats - Bulb Fields and Arable Plants

CHAPTER 13 Gardens

CHAPTER 14 Insects and Other Terrestrial Invertebrates

CHAPTER 15 Mammals, Reptiles and Amphibians

CHAPTER 16 Birds

CHAPTER 17 The Future

APPENDIX Vegetation Communities

References and Further Reading

Species Index

General Index

The New Naturalist Library

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

Editors’ Preface

EARLIER VOLUMES OF the New Naturalist library have concerned the natural history of the islands of northern Britain – the Highlands and Islands (1964), Shetland (1980), Orkney (1985) and the Hebrides (1990). Here, in the Isles of Scilly, a group of islands at the extreme southwest of Britain presents a totally different aspect of island natural history.

Any account of the natural history of the Isles of Scilly has to comprehend an unusually wide variety of life and environments. In this striking archipelago of inhabited and uninhabited islands, southwest of Land’s End and on the fringes of the Atlantic, marine and terrestrial natural history are intimately connected. The oceanic climate, with mild summers and winters and stormy weather, exerts a strong influence, resulting in a flora and fauna unique in Britain. Added to this is the effect of thousands of years of human occupation, governed by changing economic conditions and isolation from the mainland, a history which has produced, for example, an extraordinary mix of native, introduced and cultivated plants.

The author, Rosemary Parslow, has an unrivalled knowledge of the natural history of the Isles of Scilly, gained over nearly fifty years of active involvement in observation and survey. Her studies have included the marine life and the life of terrestrial environments, including both fauna and flora. With such a range of practical experience, she is in an excellent position to give a synthesis which covers the variety of natural history of the islands, as well as issues of conservation and future development. Such a synthesis will be welcomed by Scillonians and by the many visitors to the islands, as well as by those with wider interests in the British fauna and flora.

Author’s Foreword and Acknowledgements

HOWEVER OFTEN YOU go to Scilly it is still a magical experience as the islands slowly emerge out of the line of clouds on the horizon, to resolve into a mass of shapes and colours against the sea and sky. Whether you go there by boat, stealing up gradually on the islands, or by air, flying in low over the coastline of St Mary’s to land with a rush on the small airfield – like one of the plovers that feed there on the short turf – it brings a thrill of excitement every time.

I first went to Scilly in 1958, to stay at the St Agnes Bird Observatory that had started up the previous year. It was an ‘un-manned’ observatory, run by a committee of enthusiastics, organising self-catering holidays for groups of bird-ringers to operate it as a ringing station over the spring and autumn migrations. The first year had been based in tents at Lower Town Farm, but by the time of my visit they were renting the empty farmhouse. Like many similar establishments they ran on a small budget and lots of commitment; the living conditions were very basic, but the surroundings idyllic. That first visit was the start of a lifetime love affair with Scilly, which has influenced my whole adult life and has led to writing this account of the natural history of the islands.

Those early visits were made when I was working as a very junior scientific assistant at the British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington. At that time collecting specimens was still an important element of the work, in order to build up the Museum’s taxonomic collections. So staff holidays often became unpaid collecting trips, and mine were frequently timed to go to Scilly at the best times for ‘shore collecting’, to collect marine invertebrates. These were when the equinoctial spring tides occur, around Easter and again in autumn, when the most extensive areas of shore are exposed. This was in the days before cheap wet suits and underwater photography meant that marine biologists were no longer constrained by tides. At that time it was boulder-turning and wading and following the tide down to the lowest level accessible, laden with heavy collecting gear. Most of the collecting I did was to order: specific groups of animals were targeted because these were ones where information on their distribution and status was needed, as well as adding representative specimens to the Museum collections. This resulted in a series of Isles of Scilly collections in the 1960s and ’70s, mostly shore fishes, sponges, worms, and other invertebrates, especially echinoderms, my specialist group.

Even after I had left the Museum, a colleague would send a small milk churn packed with collecting paraphernalia to the island of St Agnes to await my arrival for the family holiday, and then we would return it with the carefully preserved and labelled specimens packed inside. This system usually worked very well, but in the early days there were some hiccups – like the time the churn was nearly dispatched to Sicily due to a misunderstanding with the carriers, or the year it was put back on the launch by a puzzled islander because he did not know anyone who used milk churns on the island!

This first-hand experience – firstly the shore collecting, then the species records when collecting specimens became unfashionable, my involvement with the bird observatory, and then starting listing plants – was fortuitous in that it gave me a unique opportunity to study, photograph and get to appreciate the wildlife, scenery and history of these enchanting islands. I have been fortunate in that I was also to spend many weeks over the succeeding years on Scilly, usually based on St Agnes, and later St Mary’s.

Since those early days I have visited the islands at least once every year (except for a break of a couple of years in the late 1960s), have had several prolonged stays, and have been there in every month of the year and probably most kinds of weather. This has probably been the best way of getting to know as much as possible about the islands without being resident there. At various times I have been employed to survey and produce reports on a number of subjects from bats to plants. In 2002 I was commissioned to write a Management Plan for the land leased by the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust. This gave me a further opportunity to spend a longer time on the islands, getting to know them, their habitats and the people whose job it is to manage those habitats (Parslow, 2002).

Due to the climate and the geographical position of the islands there are some species, particularly plants, which are not usually easy for the holiday visitor to see. Certainly if you want to see some of the plants which flower in the middle of winter, such as some of the introduced aliens, German ivy Delairea odorata and some of the Aeoniums, then a visit at Christmas or New Year is essential. This is also a good time to find the tiny least adder’s-tongue fern Ophioglossum lusitanicum, a great rarity found in Britain only on the Channel Isles and on St Agnes in Scilly. Every month has its specialities, so there is always something to look out for at any time of the year. If your interests are more ornithological then everyone will recommend the spring and autumn migrations for the ‘falls’ of unusual migrants. In summer there are breeding seabirds, and a boat trip can take you out to see puffins, shags, guillemots, fulmars and other seabirds among the uninhabited islands – and there are also grey seals hauled out among the distant rocks. Even in winter there are peregrine and raven to look out for, and sometimes in cold weather large numbers of woodcock seem to fall out of the sky. For the other natural history groups, lichens, insects, fish or seaweeds, there are nearly always things to do and things to see!

It is not possible to write about the flora and fauna of the Isles of Scilly without considering all the other aspects that go to make them so unique. Their geography, geology and climate are intimately bound up with the history of the people of the islands, the way they have used the land, and present-day management. Over the next few chapters we will consider many of these aspects of the islands, as well as the major habitats found in Scilly – the heathlands, coastland, cultivated fields and wetlands. Each of the islands has its own unique character and special plants and animals – from St Mary’s and the inhabited smaller ‘off-islands’ to those uninhabited islands and rocks which are home to the rest of the islands’ wildlife. Then there are those people who have been important in the study of the island flora and fauna, the story of the rise in popularity of the islands for birdwatchers, the effect climate has had in shaping the flora and the escapes from cultivation which have now become established as part of the landscape. The sum of all these is what makes up the fabric of these unique and beautiful islands, the Isles of Scilly.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Compiling this book has taken a long time; it represents several decades of involvement with the Isles of Scilly, and it would never have been written without the help and encouragement of many people. There are too many individuals to mention everyone, but I hope that they will understand that I am hugely grateful to them all. The real generosity of those naturalists who allowed me free access to their work and who commented on sections of the text has made it possible for me to include many aspects of flora and fauna about which I know very little.

The artwork in this book has been selected from a huge volume of material I have been offered; unfortunately I could only use a small selection. Many of the photographers and artists also helped in other ways, with information and comments. For permission to use their material I would like to acknowledge Andrew Cooper, Paul Gainey, Sandra Gibson & Frank Gibson (Gibson Collection), Martin Goodey, Richard Green, Mark Groves, Alma Hathway, Ren Hathway, David Holyoak, Chris Hopkin, David Mawer, Paul Sterry, Bryan Thomas, Ian Wallace, the Isles of Scilly Museum (for Hilda Quick woodcuts) and the Cornwall Archaeological Unit and Jeanette Ratcliffe. I consulted libraries at the Cornish Studies Library, Redruth, the Natural History Museum, London, and English Nature (now Natural England), Truro.

I am very grateful to the many people in the Isles of Scilly who have helped in so many ways, although space does not allow me to mention them all. In particular I thank Martin Goodey, Anne and Mike Gurr, Ren Hathway and Jo Wrigley, Wendy Hick, Francis and Carol Hicks, Johann Hicks, Lesley and David Knight, Jim Liddon, Julie Love, Amanda Martin (IOS Museum), Cyril Nicholas, Steve and Julia Ottery (and the Museum Flower Ladies), Adrian and Mandy Pearce, Penny Rodgers.

Specific help and comments on individual chapters and topics were generously given by Jon Akeroyd, J. F. Archibald, Ian Bennallick, Sarnia Butcher, Adrian Colston, Bryan Edwards, Bob Emmett, Chris Haes, Steve Hopkin, Julia MacKenzie, Rosalind Murphy, John Ounstead, Helen Parslow, John Parslow, Mark Phillips, Peter Robinson, Katherine Sawyer, Sylva Swaby, Andrew Tompsett, Stella Turk, Steve Westcott and Will Wagstaff Keith Hyatt not only read all the first draft text but found lots of useful snippets of information as only he can; Ian Beavis freely allowed use of all his material on Aculeate Hymenoptera and other groups; Jeremy Clitherow and Alison Forrester (English Nature) gave me access to many unpublished reports and other scientific information; David Mawer (IOSWT) has been a constant source of information on all aspects of natural history in the islands. The Isles of Scilly Bird & Natural History Review published by the ISBG has also been a rich source of recent information.

I must also acknowledge the team at HarperCollins, especially Richard West, who read the first draft, Helen Brocklehurst and Julia Koppitz, and above all Hugh Brazier, for many improvements to the text.

To my son Jonathan (Martin) Parslow and daughters Annette and Helen, who shared the early visits to Scilly and still love Scilly as much as I do, I dedicate this book.

CHAPTER 1 An Introduction

It’s a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries; I never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes.

For it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills, And April’s in the west wind, and daffodils.

John Masefield, The West Wind

ALTHOUGH MASEFIELD probably did not have the Isles of Scilly in mind when he wrote those lines, they often remind me of the islands. In the early days of the year the low hills are brown with dead bracken stems and heather and there are daffodils and narcissus everywhere (Fig. 1). Seabirds wheel and call and often the climate is quite mild and balmy.

The rocks and islands that form the Isles of Scilly are located about 45 kilometres (28 miles) southwest of Land’s End. Mysterious, romantic and beautiful, they have long exercised the imagination of storytellers and historians, and legends abound that the Isles were once the lost islands of Lyonnesse or the undersea land of Atlantis. Or they may have been the islands known to the Greeks and Romans as the Cassiterides, the Tin islands, although there is little evidence of there having ever been any significant tin-mining on the islands.

The hills in Scilly are not high: most are under 45 metres, and the highest point is near Telegraph on St Mary’s, 49 metres above chart datum. The Isles of Scilly archipelago forms a roughly oval-shaped ring of islands in shallow seas of fewer than 13 metres in depth, except for the deep channels of St Mary’s Sound between St Agnes and St Mary’s, Smith Sound between St Agnes and Annet, and the deep waters towards the Western Rocks. Among the main group of islands are extensive sand flats the sea barely covers, with less than three

FIG 1. February on St Agnes, with daffodils flowering among the dead bracken. (Rosemary Parslow)

metres depth of water over much of the area at high tide, and with wide sand spits and shallows. At low water St Martin’s may be inaccessible by launch.

When you fly into the islands you first see the low-lying islands of the Eastern Isles looking green and brown with vegetated patches and rock (Fig. 2). Often the sand spits in the turquoise sea over the sand flats are revealed before you descend over the neat fields and cultivated land of St Mary’s to land on the airfield (Fig. 3). From the air the huge number of tiny islands and the many reefs and rocks under the water show how easily so many hundreds of ships have been wrecked in Scilly over the centuries (over 621 known wrecks have been recorded) (Larn & Larn, 1995). Even today, with depth gauges, GPS and radar, as well as more accurate charts, ships and other craft still get into trouble among the islands every year.

The inscription on an eighteenth-century map based on Captain Greenville Collins’ Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot survey (Fig. 4) refers to one of the most notorious Scilly shipwrecks, in addition to several other features of the islands:

The Ifands of Scilly are very fruitfull abounding in Corn & Pasture, here are plenty of Conies, Crains, Swans, Herons, Ducks, & other Wild Fowl, thefe Islands were Conquer’d by Athelstana Saxon King, & have ever since been Counted part of

FIG 2. The Eastern Isles: the view from Great Arthur towards Little Ganilly and St Martin’s. (Rosemary Parslow)

FIG 3. A patchwork of bulb fields, St Mary’s, February 2004. (Rosemary Parslow)

FIG 4. Eighteenth-century map of the Isles of Scilly, probably based on the Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot survey by Captain Greenville Collins, first published in 1693.

Cornwall: they are about 60 miles from the Lands End in Cornwall & are reckoned to be 145 in number; one of them called Scilly which gave name to the rest was counted ye chief, but St Mary’s has now got the preeminence; they are dangerous to be approach’d by strangers on account of the hidden Rocks & have been fatal to many Ships of our own Nation, & particularly to Sr. Cloudsley Shovel with 3 other Men of War who where all lost here on the 22. of Oct. 1707 at night, on their return home from the Siege of Toulon. There is however a safe passage from these Islands, where Ships are furnish’d with Pilots from the Place; and there are secure Harbours in them large enough to receive the Royal Navy: & particularly at St Mary’s, where there is a commodious Harbour & a Castle built by Queen Elizabeth.

Although there is an island called Scilly Rock off the west coast of Bryher that is reputed to have given its name to the group, this is probably not so. In the Middle Ages the name for all the islands was variously Sullia or Sullya, becoming Silli later. The current spelling as ‘Scilly’ is a more recent form to prevent confusion with the word ‘silly’ (Thomas, 1985). The islands are usually referred to as the Isles of Scilly or Scilly, never the Scilly Isles!

There are five islands that are now inhabited, plus some forty or so uninhabited (by people, that is – rather arrogantly we ignore the other inhabitants) and large enough to have vegetation on them, and then a further 150 or so rocks and islets. The figure cannot be definite as every stage of the tide changes one’s perspective as land is alternately exposed and hidden by the sea. From the isolated Bishop Rock with its tall lighthouse in the southwest of the group (Fig. 5) to Hanjague, east of the Eastern Isles, is 17.5 kilometres, and the archipelago

FIG 5. The Western Rocks and the Bishop Rock, the westernmost point of the Isles of Scilly, with resident grey seals. (David Mawer)

extends some 13km from north to south. The islands have a total land area of about 1,641 hectares or 16km², more of course at low tide when more land is uncovered (Table 1). Situated on latitude 49° 56’ N and longitude 6° 18’ W, the islands are on the same latitude as Newfoundland, but the climate under the warming influence of the Gulf Stream is very different. Although the islands are part of Watsonian vice-county 1 (West Cornwall) for recording purposes, they are often treated as vice-county 1b for convenience. All the islands fall within four 10km grid squares, with most of the land being contained within just three, the fourth square being mostly water.

TABLE 1. The Isles of Scilly: areas of the principal islands. Areas are all in hectares at MHWS. (Figures from Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust)

Isles of Scilly total area at MHWS = 1,641ha

Total area at LAT (lowest astronomical tide) = 3,065ha

Number of islands (includes rocks and stacks) of any size at MHWS = 818

Number of islands at MLWS = 3,825

Number > 0.03 ha at MHWS = 203

Number > 0.09ha (so possibly with some vegetation) = 101

CLIMATE

The climate of the Isles of Scilly is characterised as oceanic, with mild wet winters, mild sunny summers, frequent strong winds and gales, and also sea fogs. A major influence on the climate is the North Atlantic Drift, an arm of the Gulf Stream. Compared with the Cornish mainland Scilly has milder winters (February mean 7.3°C) and cooler summers. The average monthly mean temperature is 11.7°C (National Meteorological Library). With most days in the year having a temperature usually above 5°C, many plants can grow in Scilly that cannot survive on the mainland. This also includes winter annuals that grow throughout winter and flower very early in spring. As many plants on the islands are frost-sensitive the occasional bad winter can cause a considerable amount of damage. Fortunately snow and frost are much less frequent than on the adjacent mainland. Snowfalls are relatively infrequent; frosts are occasional and usually neither very hard nor long-lasting.

The rare occasions when there have been more severe frosts have had a devastating effect on the vegetation, especially the ‘exotic’ plants. Winter 1987/8 was one such occasion, with almost all the evergreen Pittosporum hedges being either killed outright or cut to the ground. Hottentot fig Carpobrotus edulis is one species that can be susceptible to both frost and salt water, but as the stands are usually dense there is nearly always a piece of the plant protected enough to survive and grow again. Rainfall is low compared with Cornwall, 825mm per year on average; some of the rain clouds appear to pass over the low islands without precipitation. The islands are prone to sea fogs and this increases the general humidity, which is reflected in the rich lichen flora – also an indicator of the clean air and lack of industrial pollutants.

As the former Duchy Land Steward wrote, ‘the weather in Scilly is characteristically unpredictable’ (Pontin, 1999). Gales and strong winds over force 8 are a frequent feature, and not just in winter: gales can happen throughout the year. Visitors can sometimes find themselves marooned on the island they are staying on for several days when the boats stop plying due to rough seas. Some of us have considered this a bonus at times!

THE SCILLONIANS

The Isles of Scilly have had almost 4,000 years of continuous occupation since the arrival of Bronze Age farmers (Thomas, 1985), but for centuries before that nomadic people who left little sign of their presence other than a few flints had visited the islands. The population has fluctuated and there have been many incomers over the centuries. Not many of the current families can trace their ancestors back more than a few hundred years, usually to the 1640s or 1650s (court records show the Trezise family was in the islands in the thirteenth century). Some are probably descendants of soldiers who came to man the Garrison and married local women. The inhabitants of St Agnes used to be known as Turks as they tended to be short and swarthy and were reputed to have had an exotic ancestry. As on other British islands such as Orkney (Berry, 1985) there has been a continuous stream of people, including Neolithic visitors, Bronze Age and Iron Age inhabitants, pirates, smugglers, Cromwellian soldiers, Royalists, French traders, British servicemen in both World Wars, land-girls, and men and women who came to staff hotels and other establishments. Many of these peoples stayed, married locals, and their descendants have added to the rich mix of heritage in the population.

Population

The resident population of the islands has stayed at around 2,000 for many years. Of these about 1,600 live on St Mary’s, with about 160 on Tresco and 100 on each of the other inhabited islands (St Martin’s, Bryher and St Agnes). During the summer holiday season visitors approximately double the population.

The Duchy of Cornwall

The Isles of Scilly became part of the original Duchy of Cornwall in 1337 when Edward, the Black Prince, became the first Duke of Cornwall. Today the islands are still owned by the Duchy, administered by a resident Land Steward. The Duchy is governed by a Council, of which His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall is Chairman. Much of the land on the inhabited islands is in agricultural tenancies, with the exception of the island of Tresco, which is leased to the Dorrien-Smith family, and Hugh Town, which became freehold in 1949 (Mumford, 1987). In 1999 there were some sixty farm-holdings, covering 557 hectares, of which 182 are in horticultural use, mostly bulbs. The average farm on the smaller islands of Bryher, St Agnes and St Martin’s is very small, sometimes less than 10 ha, although those on St Mary’s and Tresco are proportionately larger. Many fields are equally small, some less than 0.1ha (Pontin, 1999). Some 1,845 hectares of the unfarmed land are now leased to the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust, mostly heath, wetland and coast on the inhabited islands and including all the uninhabited rocks and islands.

The Council of the Isles of Scilly

The Council of the Isles of Scilly is a unitary authority (Local Government Act 1972, as applied by the Isles of Scilly Order 1978). This means the Council has unusual powers in that it has all the functions of county, district and parish councils as well as replacing the Environment Agency and the airport authorities in the islands. The islands are not automatically included in all national legislation. There are sometimes specific references or amendments to ensure that legislation also refers to the islands.

TRAVELLING TO THE ISLES OF SCILLY

These days getting to Scilly is no longer the difficult and chancy business it was in the past, and we can easily forget that for earlier visitors the journey was frequently an ordeal. Passengers could arrange to go by sailing ship to the islands, but it was not until the start of the regular mail boat after 1827 that there was an organised service from Penzance to St Mary’s. Even so the passage usually took eight to nine hours and at times as much as two days. Things picked up when a steamer service started about 1858, and a year later the railway was extended to Penzance. Then in 1937 the air service started linking Scilly with the mainland, offering an alternative and much quicker route for those reluctant to brave the sea crossing.

The RMV Scillonian (Fig. 6) is the third of that name to have carried freight and passengers between Scilly and the Cornish mainland. She sails most days (except Sunday) between spring and autumn, the crossing taking about two and a half hours according to conditions. The Scillonian is notorious for her rolling motion, which is due to her shallow draft, designed to enable her to enter the shallow waters around the islands; but the possibility of seeing unusual seabirds, cetaceans and other excitements during the passage makes her popular with many visitors. The alternative routes to Scilly are by air, either fixed-wing plane or helicopter, both of which take about twenty minutes; but neither flies if there is fog. Flying is the only route in winter when the Scillonian is laid up. A second ship, the MV Gry Maritha, now transports most freight to the islands. Inter-island launches meet the ships in St Mary’s and transfer goods of all kinds to the ‘off-islands’, as the other four inhabited islands are known locally.

FIG 6. The RMV Scillonian in harbour after her two-and-a-half-hour sail from Penzance. July 2006. (Rosemary Parslow)

Tourism

It was not until after World War II that Scilly became really popular as a holiday destination, with hotels and guesthouses opening up to accommodate many more visitors, including many naturalists. In 2003 Scilly attracted 122,000 visitors (Isles of Scilly Tourist Information). Tourism now accounts for some 85 per cent of the island economy, although apparently a significant amount of the profits goes off the islands to the mainland-based owners of holiday property and hotels. Most visitors stay in holiday accommodation on the islands, including hotels, guesthouses, cottages and camp sites. Others arrive and stay on their yachts and motor cruisers.

THE UNIQUENESS OF THE SCILLONIAN FAUNA AND FLORA

We will see in later chapters that the Isles of Scilly aptly demonstrate the phenomenon of island biogeography. In all groups of flora and fauna there is a paucity of species compared with Cornwall, and this is a theme to which we will return. This paucity is readily attributed to the distance from the mainland, the much smaller land area and the limited range of habitats compared with those in Cornwall, with no rivers, only a few tiny streams, no acidic mires (bogs) and only granitic bedrock, with none of the slates, serpentinite and other rock types of the mainland. Widespread exposure of habitats on the Isles of Scilly may also account for the absence of some species that are susceptible to wind-blown salt spray. For example there are currently about 217 bryophyte species (57 liverworts, 3 hornworts, 157 mosses). Of these, six liverworts and five mosses are species introduced in Britain. Compared with Cornwall the total bryophyte flora is much poorer, with only about 36 per cent of the overall Cornish total of 167 liverworts (including hornworts) and 37 per cent of the total of 430 mosses. Scarcity of basic soils on the Isles of Scilly may also account for the absence of some other species common in Cornwall.

The number of species of land birds in Scilly is also small. Visitors to the islands are usually surprised to find many common passerines, let alone owls and woodpeckers, missing or in very low numbers. Equally the very confiding nature of blackbirds Turdus merula and song thrushes T. philomelos will soon be remarked on. The Isles of Scilly have hardly any land mammals, and no predators such as foxes Vulpes vulpes or stoats Mustela erminea. There are no snakes and very few resident species of butterflies or dragonflies; this is common for all groups. But on the other hand there are species that are only found in Scilly, such as the Scilly shrew Crocidura suaveolens cassiteridum, several rare lichens and many other examples of interesting and uncommon species.

Lusitanian and Mediterranean influences

References will be made in the following chapters to Lusitanian influences. The geographical position of the Isles of Scilly has led to a number of unique aspects of the flora and fauna. Many species are at their northern limit in Scilly and southwestern Britain. These are species from the Atlantic coastal regions of southern Europe, based on the former Roman province of Lusitania, and into the Mediterranean. A visit to parts of Spain or Portugal will reveal many species of plants that are commonly seen in Scilly, but that are rare of absent from the rest of Britain. There are also lichens, invertebrates and other groups with Lusitanian species that reflect the same distribution, and in the marine environment many species found in southern or Mediterranean waters that also occur in the Isles of Scilly and the Channel Islands. In the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora (Preston et al., 2002) the floristic elements of the flora are described: the Mediterranean-Atlantic and Submediterranean-Subatlantic are plants that are associated with these biogeographical regions.

NATURE CONSERVATION DESIGNATIONS

Currently the Isles of Scilly are covered by a plethora of designations relating in some way to nature conservation.

 The whole coastline of the Isles of Scilly was designated a Heritage Coast in 1974.

 Scilly is a candidate Special Area of Conservation (cSAC) under the European Habitats Directive.

 A Special Protection Area (SPA) (for birds) covers 4.09km2.

 Scilly is a Ramsar site, an international important-wetland designation.

 Scilly was designated a Conservation Area in 1975.

 Twenty-six sites have been designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) by English Nature. Of these five are geological sites.

 The Isles of Scilly has been a Voluntary Marine Park since 1987 – this includes the whole area within the 50m depth contour line.

 Scilly was designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in 1975 – it includes ‘all the islands and islets above mean low water that together form the Isles of Scilly’. The total area covered is 16km2. Scilly is the smallest AONB in the country; also the only one under a single local authority. The Management Plan for the AONB was published in 2004.

STUDYING THE FLORA AND FAUNA OF THE ISLES OF SCILLY

Although many of the visitors to the Isles of Scilly over the centuries have commented on the natural history of the islands, most of what has been written has concentrated on the most obvious groups. Authoritive books have covered plants, birdlife, butterflies and moths, but many of the marine species, insects and more difficult groups are the subject of papers in scientific journals or rather inaccessible unpublished reports held by English Nature and other bodies. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in these other groups, especially invertebrates and marine life, which had otherwise been left to a small number of specialists.

For many years botanists have been well served by a Flora (Lousley, 1971), but it is now due for an update as there is a great deal of new botanical information available. Some plant hunters whose aim is to record rare plants, and especially alien species, are regular visitors to the islands.

Birds have tended to attract the lion’s share of attention since the late 1950s, when the St Agnes Bird Observatory became a focus for birdwatchers hoping to see rare and unusual migrant and vagrant species. October is still the most popular month for birdwatchers to visit Scilly. This is an extraordinary phenomenon; it has to be seen to be believed. Hundreds of enthusiasts, bristling with telescopes, pagers and binoculars, arrive in Scilly intent on seeing rare migrant birds. These birders mostly have well-defined patterns of behaviour, usually travelling en masse to wherever there is news of some exciting bird. So it is not unusual to see them all gathered in one place, behind lines of telescopes waiting patiently for a glimpse of their quarry. In the evenings many will attend the ‘count’, when the tally of the day’s finds are recorded.

The marine habitat might seem to be rather neglected. Although there are organised field trips to Scilly to study marine ecology, most of the information stays in student dissertations. But for every child visiting the islands half the fun is exploring rock pools. Now, with plenty of opportunities to dive or snorkel, the underwater life is becoming much better known. Underwater safaris, glass-bottomed boats and swimming with seals and seabirds are making this fascinating medium much more accessible to the general public.

Some of these visitors to Scilly are going to take more than a casual interest in what they see. Hopefully they will contribute records and notes that will lead to further expansion of our knowledge of the natural history of the islands. Since its inception the Isles of Scilly Bird Group has produced a report that also includes notes, short papers and reports on natural history subjects other than birds – the Isles of Scilly Bird & Natural History Review. Perhaps this book too will encourage an interest in the fascinating natural history of the Isles of Scilly.

The chapters that follow are arranged to give an overview of the geology, something of the history, the people who contributed to our knowledge of the natural history of the islands, the individual islands, the main habitats, and the major groups of flora and fauna. Descriptions of some of the plant communities are included as an appendix.

CHAPTER 2 Geology and Early History

There are signs of Bronze Age man on every island in Scilly.

Charles Thomas (1985)

GEOLOGY

AT FIRST GLANCE the Ordnance Survey’s geological map of the Isles of Scilly appears to be something of a disappointment: almost the whole of the land shown on the map is coloured in the same shade of red-brown, representing granite. A granite batholith, the Cornubian batholith, extends as a series of cupolas or bosses along the Southwest Peninsula from Dartmoor to Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, ending at the undersea mass of Haig Fras 95km further on and slightly out of line, presumably due to faulting (Edmonds et al., 1975; Selwood et al., 1998). Originally the rocks were a softer, slatey rock called killas; this was altered by pressure from the granite boss as it was extruded and pushed up into the killas, which was later eroded and now only exists as rock called tourmalised schist, found as a narrow dyke-like patch on the northwest of St Martin’s (Anon., Short Guide to the Geology of the Isles of Scilly).

The Scilly granite is very similar to that found in Cornwall, and was classified by Barrow (1906) into different types, the main ones being the older, coarse-grained G1, which is found mainly around outer the rim of the islands, and G2, which is finer-grained and is mostly in the central part of the islands and has often been intruded into G1. The two types of granite merge into each other without any obvious line of demarcation. Characteristically the granites are made up of quartz and crystals of feldspar, muscovite mica, biotite mica and other

FIG 7. Loaded Camel Rock at Porth Hellick, St Mary’s, May 2006. (Richard Green)

minerals. Much of the rock is beautifully striped through with veins and dykes, mostly narrow and usually white or black according to the infilling; white quartz or black tourmaline crystals can be found in these dykes, and rarely larger crystals of amethyst quartz. A vein of beautiful amethyst quartz that runs through some of the rocks to the north of St Agnes at one time had large, visible crystals, but most have since been taken by collectors. It is still possible to find smaller veins of crystals, and some beach pebbles have small layers of crystals running through them.

Another characteristic of the granite is the weathering along the veins and softer areas in the rock. The cooling and pressures have already formed these into very distinctive vertical and horizontal cracks, and erosion by weather and the sea then combine to produce the most extraordinary natural sculptures. Some of the most impressive examples can be seen on Peninnis Head and along the east coast of St Mary’s, but all the islands have examples. Some of these rocks have been given fanciful names: Pulpit Rock, Monk’s Cowl, Tooth Rock, Loaded Camel (Fig. 7). A curious type of formation seen frequently in Scilly is a rock basin in the top of a granite boulder where rainwater has weakened feldspar and released quartz crystals, which apparently have blown round and round to form a natural bowl.

Surface geology

When the granite weathers it eventually becomes reduced to sand. Blown sand is an important constituent of the soils of all the islands as well as forming the beautiful white beaches and the sand bars that link many of the higher parts of the islands. Ram (also known as head or rab) is a cement-like material formed by the breakdown of periglacially frost-shattered granite fragments that forms deposits around the bases of granite carns, in valleys and especially in the cliffs (Fig. 8). It is often excavated from ‘ram pits’ to be used by the islanders as a mortar in building work and sometimes as a road surface. Alluvium is found under the Porthloo fields, and at Lower and Higher Moors. Small patches of gravel found near the daymark on St Martin’s and at a few other places are probably of glacial origin – see below.

FIG 8. Ram shelf at the base of the cliff on Samson. (Rosemary Parslow)

FIG 9. An example of a raised beach at Porth Killier, St Agnes, where former beach levels can be seen above the present beach. May 2003. (Rosemary Parslow)

Raised beaches

Raised beaches are especially common throughout the southwest of Britain, and the Isles of Scilly have many examples. The raised beach at Watermill is a classic site with a conglomerate of clast-supported rounded cobbles and boulders, overlain by well-sorted medium sand (Selwood et al., 1998). There are many places all around the coasts in Scilly where former shore levels with beach deposits are exposed in the cliffs above the present beaches. There are raised beaches at Hell Bay, Bryher; Porth Killier, St Agnes (Fig. 9); Piper’s Hole, Tresco; Shipman Head, Bryher and many other places.

Glaciation

Although it was long thought that glaciation had missed Scilly, there is evidence that a tongue of ice from the southern edge of the Late Devensian ice sheet, the Irish Sea Ice Stream, probably reached the northern islands of Scilly 18,000 years BP (before present), eventually leaving deposits on White Island off St Martin’s, and on Northwethel (Scourse et al., 1990). The evidence for this lies in a great variety of rocks exotic to Scilly such as flint, sandstone and associated ‘erratics’. The best example of glacial till in the islands is within the Bread and Cheese

FIG 10. The bar to White Island is a former glacial feature, probably a glacial moraine. June 2002. (Rosemary Parslow)

formation at Bread and Cheese Cove SSSI on the north coast of St Martin’s: the overlying gravels, the Tregarthen and the Hell Bay gravels, are interpreted as glaciofluvial and solifluction deposits respectively. There are erratic assemblages with both deposits (Selwood et al., 1998). Recent work suggests that some of these deposits, such as that at Bread and Cheese Cove, may not be in their original positions (Hiemstra et al., 2005). Other sites with glacial links occur in the bars in the north of the islands, such as the ones at Pernagie, the one connecting White Island to St Martin’s (Fig. 10), and Golden Bar, St Helen’s: these are probably glacial moraines, not marine features (Scourse, 2005).

EARLY HISTORY – THE SUBMERGENCE

Twenty thousand years ago most of Britain was under the last glaciation, extending as far south as the Wash and south Wales. At this time sea level would have been as much as 120m below Ordnance Datum. Then the climate ameliorated and by 13,000 BP the Devensian ice had almost disappeared (Selwood et al., 1998).

Four thousand years ago, before the sea inundated the land, Scilly would have had a very different landscape, with low hills and sand dunes surrounding a shallow plain (Fig. 11). Based on the present-day undersea contour lines, there would at that time have been three main islands: the principal one would have included the present-day St Mary’s, Tresco, Bryher and St Martin’s, the Norrard Rocks, the Eastern Isles and the St Helen’s group; Annet and St Agnes would have made up a smaller second island group; and the Western Rocks would have been the third. Later the islands became parted as the sea rose still further. The long isolation of St Agnes from St Mary’s and the rest of Scilly may possibly explain the differences in the flora – for example why the least adder’s-tongue fern Ophioglossum lusitanicum is restricted to St Agnes.

Most accounts of the submergence of the Isles of Scilly are based on the model proposed by Thomas in Exploration of a Drowned Landscape (1985). Thomas suggests that sea level rose rapidly and reached to within a few metres of present-day levels by 6000 BP, although final submergence of the island of Scilly to

FIG 11. A map showing how the main islands may have appeared prior to the submergence. (After Thomas, 1985)

create the present archipelago may not have been effected until post-Roman times. Archaeological and historical evidence show that although sea was rising on a unitary island about 2000 BC, ‘submergence began in earnest during Norman times and was effectively completed by the early Tudor period’ (Thomas, 1985; Selwood et al., 1998). However, Thomas recognised that although his model assumes a gradual process of submergence, there is an alternative picture with a series of dramatic events such as tidal surges. According to Ratcliffe and Straker (1997), submergence may have been even more gradual than Thomas proposes. The most controversial aspect of Thomas’s model is his suggestion that separation of the islands did not occur until early Tudor times. Although the exact details of when and how the marine inundation took place are unclear, remains of huts, walls and graves on areas now covered by the sea are irrefutable evidence that it took place.

THE EARLY LANDSCAPE

During glaciation, land south of the ice sheet would have been bare tundra, cold, with sparse vegetation and probably few animals (Yalden, 1999), and certainly few that are still found in Britain today. It is difficult to imagine what Scilly was like at the time of the earliest human visitors, who were probably Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who left only a few flints as evidence of their passing. We have already seen that the islands would have been a considerably larger landmass than the present-day scatter of islands. Much of the land was covered in birch woodland, sparse grassland and marshy land with sedges. These conditions of the Mesolithic period persisted across southern Britain, then part of Continental Europe, and most of the steppe species that were present then have either died out or retreated to more northerly areas. During the Neolithic period people may have started to settle in Scilly and begun clearing the land, but pollen evidence shows some forest clearance was followed by woodland regeneration and agricultural decline. There are a few artefacts from this time, but it is likely these were only temporary occupations (Ratcliffe & Johns, 2003).

EARLY MAMMALS AND OTHER FAUNA

Very few remains of the early fauna of the islands have been found, but one small rodent, the root or Pallas’s vole Microtus oeconomus (very similar to our field vole M. agrestis) was present, as was the red deer Cervus elaphus, and both were still present in Scilly in the Bronze Age.

Modern Scilly is poor in mammal species, and the written records are sparse. Bones found in the Iron Age sections of the excavations on Nornour included Scilly shrew, wood mouse or long-tailed field mouse Apodemus sylvaticus and root vole. The first two are still extant in Scilly, but the root vole is believed to have become extinct at some later period, no remains having been found after Romano-British times (Turk, 1984; Ratcliffe & Straker, 1996). Root voles are no longer found in Britain although there are isolated (relict) populations still in the Netherlands, Scandinavia and eastern Europe (Mitchell-Jones et al., 1999). In late summer 1978 my daughter and I found a vole mandible and two molars in storm debris on the boulder beach below the Porth Killier Bronze Age midden, along with scraps of bone and shards of coarse pottery. These were sent to the Natural History Museum, where the vole remains were identified as root vole (Gordon Corbet, in litt.). Later, in 1982, I had the opportunity to go to Hungary and was able to visit root vole habitat near Lake Kolon, in Kiskunsági National Park. This is an area of rough grassland and Phragmites swamp, which would seem to be typical habitat of the vole. An interesting note by Mitchell-Jones et al. (1999) is that root voles migrate from wetland to dunes or drier habitats in winter, and even into houses.

Other animal remains that have been found from archaeological sites include seals, various cetaceans, red deer, toad Bufo bufo (an amphibian no longer native in Scilly), as well as numerous fish and bird species and domestic horse, ox and sheep, all from Bronze Age sites. Roe deer Capreolus capreolus, seals, cetaceans and domestic animals have been recorded from Iron Age/Romano-British sites. At coastal sites seals, small cetaceans and fish were clearly an important part of the diet of the human inhabitants. Although not listed among the remains of fish and molluscs that have been recorded, the boulder beaches and rock pools can support several species of easily caught edible fish, for example rocklings, the larger gobies and grey mullet Chelon sp. Today the large freshwater pools on the islands also contain very large eels Anguilla anguilla, and these may also have been present in the past.

Further discussion on the early mammal fauna is included in Chapter 15, and prehistoric and historical records of birds are discussed in Chapter 16.

THE EARLY HABITATS

Of particular interest is Thomas’s (1985) description of the reconstructed palaeoenvironment of the early Scillonian landscape and the mapping of four main types of habitat. Some of the evidence for this he based on the pollen records, which unfortunately were limited to the few peat deposits and archaeological digs, and also on the distribution of some significant plants in Lousley’s Flora (1971). The four habitat types he described were stream-drained marsh, woodland, sand dune and open ground (including heath).

There are still marshlands in Scilly today, although they are nowhere near their former extent. Some of the land now under the sand flats between the islands could have been low-lying and boggy, but all that remains now are small wetlands at Higher Moors, Holy Vale and Lower Moors on St Mary’s, now much contracted in area. Even as recently as the 1960s there were wet fields from near Porthloo Pool and Rose Hill through to Lower Moors with yellow iris Iris pseudacorus, lesser water plantain Baldellia ranunculoides and hemlock water-dropwort Oenanthe crocata. Although these areas are still there they are now much drier and less species-rich. Another similar wetland area is now flooded and forms the Great Pool on Tresco. All the other streams and marshy areas are now lost under the sea, but some can still be traced from the geological record. Between Teän and St Martin’s is the deep channel of Teän Sound, which probably marks the route of a prehistoric stream.

One of the most interesting theories propounded by Thomas is his mapping of the ancient woodland cover on the islands by looking at the distribution of woodland species in Lousley’s Flora. From the pollen samples analysed by Dimbleby (1977) from Innisidgen and by Scaife (1984) from Higher and Lower Moors it would seem that Scilly was once covered in woodland. This woodland consisted of oak Quercus robur and birch Betula spp. with an understorey of hazel Corylus avellana and alder Alnus glutinosa (probably where there were wetter areas). Pollen evidence also included some ash Fraxinus excelsior and traces of yew Taxus baccata, and later hornbeam Carpinus betulus and elm Ulmus sp. Virtually nothing of this woodland is evident today, but support for the pollen evidence and what it tells us about former woodland distribution can be extrapolated from the present-day distribution of plants (known as ancient woodland indicators) that have strong ancient woodland associations, for example wood spurge Euphorbia amygdaloides and wood dock Rumex sanguineus (Kirby, 2004). In his Flora of the Isles of Scilly Lousley (1971) comments on a number of these woodland plants that were growing in non-woodland habitats. These fall in very neatly with the pattern of woodland 2000 years ago, as demonstrated by Thomas (Fig. 12).

Since 1971 additional plant records have reinforced the pattern. So it is possible to visualise the kind of woodland that may have grown on the islands at the time, possibly similar to the present-day Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor, with stunted, twisted trees, wind-pruned into shape and only able to reach any reasonable height where they are sheltered in the hollows between the hills – as happens with the elms in Holy Vale today. The ground cover may have been open, with many of the species that still exist in Scilly. The trees and exposed rocks would also have supported luxuriant ferns and bryophytes. Other evidence of the ancient woodlands that existed on Scilly are the numbers of buried tree trunks that have been found on Tresco in the past, and the few oak Quercus sp. trees and woodland plants in the area still known as Tresco Wood. There are also records of submerged tree trunks on St Mary’s and, more reliably, St Martin’s.

FIG 12. The present distribution of AWI (ancient woodland indicator) plants may indicate where woodland existed before the submergence. (Updated since Thomas, 1985)

The work carried out between 1989 and 1993 by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit (Ratcliffe & Straker, 1996) on a number of cliff-face and intertidal deposits also provided exciting additional evidence for the deciduous Mesolithic/Neolithic forests. In addition, the CAU found further evidence that these forests were being replaced by heathland, grassland and cultivated plants by the Late Iron Age, as people began to have an impact on the land.

The other main habitats, sand dunes and heathlands, are still present. Many of the dunes have been flattened and have become vegetated with grassland and scrub, or are now cultivated fields. Heathlands and grasslands have resulted from the management of the open habitats over centuries. The land would have been utilised in many ways, from grazing for animals to the stripping of turf from the heath to use as fuel – once the inhabitants had cleared most of the woodland.

Pollen analysis

Pollen analysis of samples from Higher and Lower Moors (Scaife, 1984) shows the distribution of pollen and spores in four levels of the peat below the two mires on St Mary’s. Later work investigated more areas of peat (strictly not really peat but humic silts) at Porth Mellon, St Mary’s, and Par Beach, St Martin’s (Ratcliffe & Straker, 1996). The earliest levels are mostly tree and shrub pollens, oak, birch, hazel, some ash, elm and willow Salix sp., also some grass species, sedges, bracken Pteridium aquilinum, other ferns and some aquatic plants. These all point to a landscape with woodland, mire and open-water habitats. The record for Lower Moors has less tree pollen and may fit the theory that the ancient woodland was distributed mainly on the north and east of the island (Thomas, 1985). Pollen samples also show there was some further clearance of the secondary woodland that regenerated after the earlier clearances. This coincided with the more open landscape and evidence of arable, heathland, mire and coastal habitats associated with the Iron Age and Romano-British communities then inhabiting the islands. John Evans (1984), excavating an Iron Age field system at Bar Point, found the kind of plant remains that would be expected to follow after most of the woodland had been cleared. These charred fragments were mostly plants of heathland or acid grassland: grasses, ribwort plantain Plantago lanceolata, vetch Vicia sp., Galium, Medicago, broom Cytisus scoparius, elder Sambucus nigra, gorse Ulex sp., false oatgrass Arrhenatherum elatius, as well as oak.

EARLY AGRICULTURE

It was not until about 2000 BC that the first settlements may have started on Scilly (Ashbee, 1974; Thomas, 1985). The evidence from pollen deposits, and from sources such as middens and other archaeological deposits, shows changes in the palaeoenvironment after the clearing of the forest, resulting in more open landscapes with grass and heathland species (Ratcliffe & Straker, 1996). These clearances coincided with the early settlement of Scilly, when it is presumed the woodland was cleared for timber and firewood, as well as to open up areas for cultivation. The growing of cereals (and possibly other plants that produce edible seeds) and the use of the plough must have happened quite early after the arrival of the first settlers. The excavation of the Iron Age site at Bar Point graphically illustrates the agricultural practice at that time (Evans, 1984), with evidence of stone banks to produce individual fields – not apparently for keeping stock in, but to demarcate ownerships. Cultivation marks left by the rip-ard (a primitive plough) and mattock as well as burnt charcoal from gorse were found, and also hoof prints of domestic animals – horses, cattle, and sheep or goats. Pollen analysis indicated open land without trees or shrubs (although a small amount of oak, alder and hazel pollen was found in one location), and the presence of cereal pollen points to cereal cultivation. Ribwort plantain was ‘in consistent but low abundance’, which suggests cultivation and grazed land. The evidence for deforestation is based on the association of ribwort plantain with pasture and cultivation and its intolerance of competition with woody plants (Godwin, 1975).

Once the islands had been successfully settled one presumes a period of stability and expansion of the human population followed. This is when the great changes in the landscape, the vegetation and animal life in Scilly would have really begun. As the woodland was cleared, perhaps leaving only small areas, more and more land would have been broken up and cultivated to meet the demands of the increasing human population. Farm stock would have been grazed on the open land, cliffs, dune grasslands, coastlands or around the marshy areas. Bell heather Erica cinerea, ling Calluna vulgaris, reed Phragmites australis and bracken would have been cut for bedding and thatching. Beaches would have been scoured to search for edible seaweed, molluscs and fish. Widespread cultivation and grazing became prominent during the second millennium BC, with many evidences of farming in the pollen and charcoal plant remains, querns for grinding grain, bones of farm animals and so on

FIG 13. The remains of an Iron Age and Romano-British settlement are still visible on Halangy Down, St Mary’s. March 2006. (Rosemary Parslow)

(S. Butcher, in litt.). Also the field walls, settlements and lynchets across some fields indicate the impact on the landscape. Cultivation of the islands must have continued over many centuries, as is demonstrated near the Romano-British settlement at Halangy Down (Fig. 13), where Charles Thomas and Peter Fowler found traces of earlier fields with ones on a different alignment underneath.

There are numerous field walls that are now only seen at low water spring tides in the sea off Samson, Teän and some other islands (Fig. 14). These all point to there having been much more land available for grazing or cultivation before it was lost to the sea with sea-level rise. Their presence also suggests that not all the low-lying land was marsh; but only reasonably accessible land would have been divided into fields.

FIG 14. At low tide the lines of ancient field walls are visible in the sand flats off Samson. June 2002. (Rosemary Parslow)

Arable cultivation

Early cereal crops on Scilly included six-rowed (and possibly two-rowed) barley Hordeum vulgare in both the hulled and naked varieties, which have been identified from several archaeological sites. Other crops that have been recorded are emmer wheat Triticum dicoccum, Celtic bean Vicia faba var. minor and oats Avena sp. The origins of domestication have been identified in the area of the Near East some 9,000-10,000 years ago, and barley and other crop species must have gradually made their way to Europe with the early inhabitants and through trade (Smith, 1995).

There is evidence of arable cultivation in the Isles of Scilly at least as far back as the Bronze Age. On Samson archaeologists found a cache that consisted of a cleaned crop of naked barley, probably six-rowed barley, confirming this was grown in the Early Bronze Age. Six-rowed barley (and possibly also two-rowed barley) was clearly an important crop in Bronze and Iron Age Scilly both in the hulled and naked forms – although most of what has been found is the naked variety. Hulled barley has been found at Middle and Late Bronze Age sites. Barley has also been identified from post-medieval deposits at Steval Point, St Mary’s. Emmer wheat and Celtic bean were found with both kinds of barley at sites at Porth Cressa, St Mary’s, and Porth Killier, St Agnes. At Halangy Down, besides the older lynchets beneath those of the Romano-British settlement, a pot was found nearby with impressions of grain in the clay. One intriguing find was of a large number of seeds in the post-occupation layers of a hut at West Porth: these were dated to Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age and are of great interest as they were of common arable weeds (Ratcliffe & Straker, 1996). Unfortunately there are very few records or remains of plants to give more than a hint of the wild flora of arable fields.

Arable weeds identified from Bronze Age sites in Scilly include vetches, knotgrass Polygonum sp., chickweed Stellaria sp., black bindweed Fallopia convulvulus, small nettle Urtica urens, corn spurrey Spergula arvensis and red goosefoot Chenopodium rubrum. A curious occurrence was ploughman’s spikenard Inula conyza, a plant more usually growing on calcareous soils. It is possible that some plant seeds (for example corn spurrey and knotgrass) were eaten in a kind of porridge. Certainly weed seeds continued to be found from archaeological sites after the Bronze Age, as did emmer and barley. Unfortunately there is not a great deal of evidence of Iron Age cultivation. Only two sites are recorded, Shipman Head, Bryher, and Halangy Porth, St Mary’s (Ratcliffe & Straker, 1996).

There is little information on arable plants from the Late Roman and Early Medieval periods, although there are unspecific barley and oat records from the seventh/eighth-century layer and wheat and barley from the tenth to thirteenth centuries. Weed seeds, most of which could be arable weeds, were also recorded. Some of the plants that are still found in Scilly are believed to have been early introductions as contaminants of seeds or goods brought in from the Continent, even from as far away as the Mediterranean.

LIMPET MIDDENS

There are shell middens in many places on the Isles of Scilly, refuse heaps that in some cases date back to the Bronze Age. They contain bones and other rubbish thrown out by the inhabitants, especially common limpet Patella vulgata shells. There seems to be a correlation between the size of the limpet shells and the living conditions of the people at that time: the smaller the shell apparently the tougher life had become for the people, as the shells were being harvested before they had reached full size. It is reported that they are very chewy and uninteresting, but presumably they were at least an easily accessible food and protein source. However, the University of Bristol Expedition in 1978 declared limpets were delicious in a risotto!

Limpet shell middens have been found at many archaeological sites on Scilly, on any islands that have been inhabited at any time. Middens were often in use up to the nineteenth century, and frequently can be dated by pottery shards and other remains layered in with the shells and other rubbish. When the inhabitants of Samson were evacuated from the island in 1839 they left behind a huge pile of limpet shells. Some of the beach pebbles used to knock limpets off the rocks were also found. There is evidence that some limpets were collected for fishing bait, but it is also very probable they were eaten even in quite recent times (Ratcliffe & Straker, 1996). Although limpets were the main species taken, remains of other edible molluscs have also been identified from the middens. These are mostly the species that would be expected: cockles, scallops and topshells, all of which are still common around the islands.

CHAPTER 3 Later History – People and Their Influence on the Islands

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonesse – A land of old upheaven from the abyss By fire, to sink into the abyss again; Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt, And the long mountains ended in a coast Of ever-shifting sand, and far away The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

Tennyson, The passing of Arthur

THE HISTORY OF England and how it was reflected in the Isles of Scilly is perhaps peripheral to our story of the natural history. But throughout the centuries there has been commerce with the mainland of Britain, as well as short-lived invasions, and a variety of traffic between Scilly and the Continent, at least as far as the Mediterranean. People bring all manner of goods with them when they travel – but it is often the unrecorded or accidental materials they may have carried that are of greatest interest to us.

MEDIEVAL SCILLY

The early history of Scilly is shrouded in the mists of time. An archipelago of small islands just visible on a clear day off the coast of Cornwall was bound to seem mysterious and attractive. There are many tales and legends associated with the islands, many of them bound up with tales of giants, Vikings and especially King Arthur. In the absence of written records, however, real history can only be deduced from the artefacts and remains left by the early occupants on Scilly.

There is little material evidence of trade from abroad prior to Roman times, although some finds suggest that the islands were not totally isolated. By Roman times finds of Samian and other wheel-made pottery, pipe-clay figurines on Nornour and Roman coins indicate links with France, elsewhere on the Continent and the Mediterranean (Ashbee, 1974). These contacts were very likely to have been instrumental in the importation of plants – both deliberately for food and accidentally as weed seeds, among seed corn or caught up in goods and packaging – that may have been some of the early colonists of cultivated fields.

Later, during the early Middle Ages, long-distance trade increased between western Britain, Ireland, France and the Mediterranean. Scilly was in an excellent position to benefit from ships calling in for fresh water and supplies, and in return to acquire goods such as amphorae of wine and olive oil from the eastern Mediterranean and wine and pottery from Gaul. A site on Teän was possibly a small trading post at the time (Ratcliffe & Johns, 2003).

During the twelfth century Tavistock Abbey administered the northern part of the Isles of Scilly. At this time a Benedictine Priory was established on Tresco, with small churches on the other islands. This would have been significant in the botanical history of the islands, for the monks were much involved in long-distance trade all around Britain and the Continent and would, deliberately or accidentally, have been another vehicle for the introduction of plants. Scilly produced dried seabirds and fish, which were exchanged for goods from further afield (Ratcliffe, 1992). The monks are credited with the introduction of various herbs, some of which still occur in Scilly, such as soapwort Saponaria officinalis and tansy Chrysanthemum vulgare. They may also have reintroduced elder, and they are said to have brought the first narcissi to Scilly, as they had done already on St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. Whether or not this is true, it is from those original narcissi growing semi-wild around the former priory that eventually grew some of the flowers that centuries later became the foundation of the bulb industry.

In the early fourteenth century Ennor Castle, on the hill above Old Town, St Mary’s, was held by Ranulph de Blanchminster, who was charged with keeping the peace and who was expected to pay the king an annual tribute of 300 puffins Fratercula arctica or 6s 8d. Apparently puffins counted as fish and so could be eaten in Lent; their feathers were also valuable. What is not clear is whether the ‘puffins’ were actually puffins or Manx shearwaters Puffinus puffinus, which at one time were known as ‘puffins’ (as is suggested by their scientific name). There is a record that during Ranulph’s occupation he imprisoned the king’s coroner for taking away a whale that had been beached on his land and only released him on payment of 100 shillings. In 1337 Scilly became part of the original Duchy of Cornwall when Edward the Black Prince became the first Duke of Cornwall.

ELIZABETHAN SCILLY

It was Queen Elizabeth I who in 1570 leased Scilly to Francis Godolphin, initially for 38 years at £20 per annum. This link with the Godolphins was to continue, more or less, until the heir to the Godolphins, the then Duke of Leeds, gave up the lease in 1831 and the Duchy of Cornwall resumed control. The next period in Scilly’s history seems to have been a nervous time, with the threat of invasion ever in the offing. Despite this nothing much was done to prepare to repel possible attack during the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, despite, one would have thought, there being a very real threat of invasion by the Spanish Armada. Then, near the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Star Castle was built, followed by the first defences on what is now the Garrison.

THE CIVIL WAR IN SCILLY

During the Civil War the Garrison defences were improved and King Charles’s Castle was built on Tresco to defend the harbour at New Grimsby. The islands passed from Royalist to Parliamentary hands and back again. Unfortunately the Royalist command by Sir Richard Grenville led to the islands becoming a base for piracy, which annoyed not only Parliament but also the Dutch. It was not long before both the English fleet and the Dutch set sail to capture the Isles of Scilly. Eventually the Royalists surrendered to Admiral Blake after the Garrison had come under relentless fire from his ships and from Oliver’s Battery, which had been built on Tresco, and the Dutch backed off. Later, another fortification known as Cromwell’s Castle was built in a better position overlooking the harbour of New Grimsby (Fig. 15), to ward off further attack by the Dutch (the fortifications at Charles’s Castle on the hill overlooking Tresco Channel being so badly placed as to be useless for defence).

In 1660 the monarchy was restored, and the Godolphins returned to Scilly. But it does not seem to have been quiet for long. Spain became a threat again, and in the second half of the century there was a massive programme of building on the promontory of the Garrison and elsewhere to strengthen the defences.

Turk (1967) refers to a comment by Richard Ligon in the True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1673), where he mentions puffins ‘which we have

FIG 15. Cromwell’s Castle and the ruins of King Charles’s Castle, Tresco. Photographed from near Hangman’s Island, Bryher, March 2005. (Rosemary Parslow)

from the Isles of Scilly…this kind of food is only fit for servants’. So clearly puffins (or shearwaters, which were considered a delicacy) were being exported from Scilly at the time.

NAPOLEONIC WARS

For the next century life in the Isles of Scilly remained quiet once again, and very little of note happened. During the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) Scilly again seemed vulnerable and some additional defences were built. Life in Scilly was very hard at this time. Attempts to relieve the poverty and distress of the islanders by establishing a pilchard and mackerel fishery were not very successful, and famine conditions continued for some years, especially on the off-islands (Bowley, 1990). In 1834, just three years after taking over the lease from the Godolphins, the Duchy of Cornwall leased the Isles of Scilly to Augustus Smith in an effort to get rid of what had become an acute embarrassment to them. The arrival of Augustus Smith was to have a profound effect on Scilly and the Scillonians, as well as on the flora of the islands (see Chapter 13). In 1863 the Garrison defence force was eventually disbanded.

WORLD WAR I AND WORLD WAR II

During the two World Wars Scilly was host to large numbers of servicemen, and the islands were considered very vulnerable to attack or invasion. In World War I a naval seaplane base was established, first on St Mary’s but later transferred to Tresco, and almost a thousand men were based on the Garrison on St Mary’s. During World War II Scilly became important as a lookout post for German submarines, and additional fortifications were built on St Mary’s, with fighter planes and air-sea rescue launches stationed there. Even so a number of air raids occurred and there was some bomb damage on the islands. It was just prior to World War II that the population of Scilly reached 2,618, the highest yet (excluding temporary summer populations now). This was also the time when the greatest amount of arable land was under cultivation (Lousley, 1971).

THE KELP INDUSTRY

For some hundred and fifty years from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century the burning of kelp was an important local industry that involved almost every family on Scilly (Fig. 16). When kelp burning was in progress, ‘wreaths of smoke rising amidst the dun verdure and hoary carns of these pretty isles’ apparently made them look all the more ‘pleasing and picturesque’ (Woodley, 1822). This might have seemed picturesque from a safe distance, but it is known that the clouds of acrid smoke polluted the air and stank out the houses and the washing lines for weeks on end. James Nance introduced kelp burning to Scilly in 1684, at a time when their more ‘usual’ means of livelihood, smuggling and wrecking, had been curtailed by the introduction of lighthouses and a customs house (Over, 1987). Activities such as collecting the seaweed, stacking it to dry and processing it would have involved the whole family. When it was burned it produced soda ash, which at the time was essential for the making of glass. Although the seaweeds collected were generally called ‘kelp’, they were mostly different species of the large wracks. The species mostly involved were the following:

 knotted wrack Ascophyllum nodosum

 bladder wrack Fucus vesciculosus

 serrated wrack Fucus serratus

 driftweed Laminaria cloustini

 sugar wrack Laminaria saccharina

 driftweed Laminaria digitata

According to Over (1987) only the fucoid seaweeds would have been a significant part of the harvest in Scilly because of the difficulty of collecting the big Laminaria seaweeds that grow in deeper water. However, storms frequently drive masses of seaweed onto the shore where it can be collected, and use of a boat could also have made it possible to access the Laminaria beds at low water springs.

Starting in March, families would collect the seaweed and carry it to places where it could be heaped up and dried. Deep stone-lined pits just above the shore were used to burn the seaweed, and these were kept going continually until the mass of weed began to liquefy, when it was stirred in a particular way and left to solidify. This lump of ‘kelp ash’ was eventually shipped off to Bristol or Gloucester to be processed for use in glass making, as well as for the manufacture of soap and alum.

It was necessary to haul huge amounts of the algae up the shore (it took

FIG 16. Burning kelp in pits by the shore to produce soda ash was a stinking and unpleasant task. The industry lasted for some 150 years until about 1835. (Gibson collection)

some 3-4 tonnes of weed to produce 127-152kg of crude ash before refinement), which could mean a family was collecting something in the order 268 tonnes of wet seaweed in a year. This would have had a considerable denuding effect on the shore and must have been quite devastating to those species associated with the algae. In some years it seems the crop of algae was not enough to go round. There is some indirect evidence of this in the court cases recorded at the time that refer to islanders infringing the rights of others by taking kelp they did not own. By law, ‘no person was to cut…off an inhabited island where a horse could go among the rocks at low tide’, presumably as these stands of kelp were already allotted. One would imagine that when the kelp was not so abundant and families became hard-pressed to find enough to fulfil their requirements, life must have been increasingly hard (Over, 1987). Kelp collecting was not confined to the inhabited islands: for example, some islanders spent the summers on Great Ganilly collecting seaweed.

The kelp industry spread all around the coasts of Britain, although it was not initially popular everywhere; in Orkney, the islanders of Stronsay rioted in 1762. But soon the high prices paid for the soda ash ensured that the practice became the main means of livelihood for many coastal and island communities (Berry, 1985). This was helped by wars and protective tariffs that blocked off the usual foreign sources of alkali, particularly ‘barilla’ glasswort Salicornia sp. from Spain. Eventually the industry fell into decline after the Napoleonic Wars, and it never recovered once it was found easier to manufacture soda chemically. Presumably the shores soon recovered and the algae soon grew again unchecked.

There are few signs now of this extraordinary industry, just a few abandoned kelp pits above the shoreline and the remains of a handful of quays from which the kelp was exported. There is a good example of a kelp pit below Kittern Hill on Gugh, with others on White Island, St Martin’s, on St Martin’s itself and on St Mary’s – and there are several on Toll’s Island, St Mary’s. These are now just shallow stone-lined basins in the turf, not as deep as they would have been when in use. There are ruined quays at Pendrathen and on Teän, as well as on White Island, on Toll’s Island, and at Watermill (Bowley, 1990).

Seaweed was also used to manure the fields, a practice which was in use until quite recently in the 1960s and 1970s. In the past both sheep and cattle would also graze on ‘oar weed’ (Borlase, 1756). A few farmers and householders still take seaweed to use on their crops, usually composting it until it has rotted down and the rain has washed out some of the salt.

PIRACY AND SMUGGLING

Scilly had been a base for pirates during the early twelfth century, at which time it was left to the resident monks to attempt to control the practice. Later, Lord Admiral Seymour (the widower of Catherine Parr, the surviving queen of King Henry VIII) was hanged in 1549 for piracy and treason after spending only two years on Scilly. Smuggling has long been associated with the southwestern counties of England, and Scilly is uniquely suited to it, with plenty of hidden places around the islands and fleets of gigs capable of sailing to the coast of France. At one time smuggling was one of the main occupations of the islanders, alongside the legitimate occupations such as piloting.

WRECKS

Over the centuries there have been hundreds of wrecks in the Isles of Scilly. Besides the accidental passengers they may have carried, such as rats, their spilled cargoes frequently washed ashore and may have introduced some plants and animals to the islands. From the published lists of cargoes we know the

FIG 17. The SS Castleford ran aground on the Crebawethans in fog in June 1887. Most of the cattle from the ship were later taken to Annet. (Gibson collection)

ships were frequently carrying hides, corn and seeds. When cattle were rescued from wrecks we know that the survivors were landed on uninhabited islands, Samson in one case and Annet in another (Fig. 17). One supposes the islanders would also have taken supplementary feed to the cattle during their enforced marooning. This may have resulted in grasses germinating from fallen seed from the hay.

One animal that may have reached Scilly as a stowaway is the wood mouse, now resident on St Mary’s and Tresco. The black rat Rattus rattus may also have arrived by boat. At one time they had colonised Samson and would have been on many of the islands; later the brown rat R. norvegicus also presumably arrived on ships.

FARMING

The observations of the many people who visited the Isles of Scilly over the centuries give only the most tantalisingly incomplete account of the life of the people at the time, and very little detail about the farming. Maddeningly, most authors have not confined themselves to their own first-hand experiences but have quoted liberally, repeating, frequently without acknowledgement, the observations of their predecessors. One gentleman who visited the islands, the Reverend George Woodley (1822), was also very scathing about his predecessors, Robert Heath, who spent a year on the islands, and John Troutbeck, who was the chaplain of the islands. Troutbeck published his account in 1794, but his information in turn appears to be based on the reports of Robert Heath (1750). From all the accounts it seems that one of the most important crops at the time was potatoes in great quantity, and in good years the islanders might get two crops a year. The islands were not very good for growing wheat, but barley, rye, oats, pillas (an oat-like grain eaten as a porridge, which even up to quite recent times was being grown alongside corn and root crops), peas, beans and roots all did well. Salads, gooseberries, currants, raspberries, strawberries – anything that can be sheltered below walls could be grown. Garlic, both cultivated and wild, samphire for distilling and pickling, all grew locally. Rock samphire Crithmum maritimum still grows around all rocky shores (Fig. 18), but it is no longer pickled and exported in small casks (Heath, 1750; Woodley, 1822).

According to Woodley (1822) the local horses were small and had to survive on poor fare that included gorse, which they bruised with their hooves before eating, the sheep were small, long-legged animals similar to those on the Scottish islands, and both the sheep and the small black cattle subsisted on seaweed when

FIG 18. Rock samphire collected from the shore was once used for pickling and distilling. (Rosemary Parslow)

there was no hay for them. The local hogs would also have to be fed on seaweed and even limpets at times, causing their flesh to be reddish in colour and giving them an unpleasant fishy taste.

Several of the uninhabited islands were used as summer grazing, as well as places where there were colonies of rabbits Oryctolagus cuniculus and seabirds that could be utilised to provide rabbit meat and gulls’ eggs. Sheep and deer were grazing on the Garrison, St Mary’s, when Walter White (1855) was there in the mid nineteenth century. He also describes hayfields, arable fields of grain, root crops and potatoes (the latter were sent to market at Covent Garden).

Sheep were kept on the islands until the beginning of the twentieth century, and although there are now very few they have never completely died out. There are sheep pictured beside the Punchbowl Rock on Wingletang, St Agnes (Mothersole, 1919), and the last time sheep were on the island was in 1926 at Troy Town. Goats were kept throughout the centuries and are still present on several holdings on the islands. Donkeys were very common at one time and were used to carry baskets of kelp up from the beach. The Gugh donkey Cuckoo became famous when Leslie Thomas wrote about him in Some Lovely Islands (1968). Until the mid-1950s horses were still used on some farms, but the only horses now on the islands are for riding, other than the Shetland ponies that are being used for conservation grazing on some of the important nature conservation sites.

One curious industry between about 1840 and 1880 was straw-plaiting for making hats (Matthews, 1960). Besides using wheat and rye straw various hollow-stemmed grasses were also utilised, including crested dog’s-tail Cynosurus cristatus and yellow oatgrass Trisetum flavescens. Crested dog’s-tail is still a common grass in the islands and yellow oatgrass was found on Teän as a relict of farming but has now disappeared.

THE EVACUATION OF SAMSON

Sir Walter Besant’s romantic tale of Armorel of Lyonesse (1890) has coloured the island with a totally unrealistic, fictitious past; there is even a ruined cottage on the island reputed to be Armorel’s cottage. Sadly the reality is quite different: although the island was inhabited for many years, life for the islanders was hard and eventually Samson was abandoned in 1853-5 during the ‘reign’ of Augustus Smith.

Samson has many archaeological sites from the Bronze Age, mostly burial monuments but also a field system and hut circles on the south side of South Hill and another field system on North Hill. At some time the island became deserted and may have then been uninhabited for centuries. Finds of pottery from below dunes in East Porth may point to a lone cleric or other person living there in the thirteenth century (Thomas, 1985). In 1669 five people were living on Samson, possibly in a single dwelling, when Cosmo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, made his short visit to Scilly. At some time after this the population rose to some thirty or forty people; between about 1755 and 1780 was probably their most settled time.

The main difficulty with living on Samson was the very poor water supply. The wells were slow or silted up, and the water was bad. At times water had to be fetched in barrels from Bryher or Tresco. It must have been a hard existence, based on fishing, which was the islanders’ major occupation, growing a few basic crops, corn and potatoes, and keeping stock. From the limpet shell middens they left behind there clearly were difficult times, when shellfish became a major part of their diet. Other sources of income, piloting and kelp burning, were important but never enough to sustain the population.

At the time of the greatest population, in 1829, there were nine cottages and thirty-seven people. The islanders grew their crops in small strip fields or lynchets. Even their tiny fields were subdivided into even tinier plots, in keeping with the custom of the time that when a man died his holding would be divided between his sons and sometimes also widowed daughters and daughters-in-law. The boundaries of these divisions were often based on earlier lynchets or were laid out strip-fashion. There were no trees for fuel so turf would have been cut from the tops of the hills (the top of North Hill is still very bare to this day, possibly from turf cutting or later fires). It was reported by Captain Robert Welbank, a Trinity House visitor in 1841, that both bracken and dried seaweed were used for fuel, and any driftwood would also be precious (Thomas, 1985). At that time there were twenty-nine people living on Samson, seven being children. There were only seven households: four farmers, one farmer’s widow, two fishermen. By this time Augustus Smith was introducing his reforms and imposing them on the other islanders in Scilly, and he soon prevailed on the tenants on Samson to relocate to St Mary’s or other islands, with the benefits of education for their children and better occupation for themselves. The last inhabitant is said to have left in 1855. After that the houses would have been stripped; they soon began to collapse and are now all ruins (Fig. 19). Shortly after the evacuation Augustus Smith built a large stone-walled enclosure around the top of South Hill in which he attempted to keep a herd of fallow deer Dama dama. The deer, however, soon escaped and tried to get to Tresco. Some accounts say they drowned, but the distance is not very great and at low tide they might have walked across. A herd of cattle was also grazed on the island.

FIG 19. Ruined cottages on Samson, photographed during a visit to the island by a party of geology students in the 1890s. (Gibson collection)

FIG 20. On Samson primroses still grow near the ruins of the cottages. (Rosemary Parslow)

Besides their ruined dwellings, kitchen middens and other artefacts, the inhabitants of Samson left other mementos. They left behind several trees, tamarisk Tamarix gallica, elder, privet Ligustrum ovalifolium hedges (the latter now apparently lost, as only wild privet L. vulgare is found on the island today), burdock Arctium minus and primroses Primula vulgaris, which are still found not far from the ruins (Fig. 20). They also left the stone hedges that marked the boundaries of some of their tiny fields. Despite the history of Samson, Kay (1956) was of the opinion that it was the sort of place where a couple of enterprising young men could earn a healthy living with a flower farm and a few cattle. He had earlier heard of a Scillonian who had been offered a deal on the island, £10 per year rent for twenty years, then £250 per year afterwards. His friend did not take up the offer, his new wife not fancying a life on an uninhabited island – and it is probably fortunate for Samson that it has remained uninhabited by humans.

CHAPTER 4 Naturalists and Natural History

A singular circumstance has been remarked with respect of these birds [woodcock], which, during the prevalence of strong gales in a direction varying from East to North, are generally found here before they are discovered in England, and are first seen about the Eastern Islands and the neighbouring cliffs. May not this circumstance tend to elucidate the enquiries of the naturalist relative to their migration?

George Woodley (1822)

SOME OF THE early visitors to Scilly played their part in contributing to our knowledge of the flora and fauna of the islands, and some of them will be mentioned in these pages. Today, Scilly is a popular holiday destination, and many naturalists visit the islands. Universities and other groups also make field trips to Scilly to study various aspects of the ecology, especially the marine biology. Another large group that has contributed greatly to scientific information about Scilly is the diverse body of professional biologists who continue to carry out surveys and all manner of research projects on the flora and fauna, often on behalf of statutory agencies such as English Nature. Clearly there are now too many people to do more than acknowledge the contribution of a few of their number. The selection is necessarily subjective, covering mainly the earlier naturalists, but also people I know, and those whose work I have drawn upon. It is becoming increasingly difficult to acknowledge everyone who has added to our knowledge of the natural history of Scilly – especially when it comes to birds and plants. So I hope those mentioned here will stand as representative of the rest.

Prior to the early 1900s the only notes on the natural history of the Isles of Scilly were occasional comments in reports of broader interest such as that by Robert Heath (1750), after he had spent about a year in Scilly. When J. E. (‘Ted’) Lousley published his Flora in 1971 he gave a comprehensive account of botanists who had contributed to the discovery of the flora of the islands. In this he commented on the paucity of botanical records from Scilly before the early twentieth century, which he put down to the inaccessibility of the islands. So when Sir William Hooker, the first Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, spent ten days in Scilly in spring 1813, visiting all the larger islands and making only the most miserable of comments on a few species he had observed, Lousley is scathing in his assessment of the great opportunity lost.

Fortunately things picked up a little from then on. In 1821 a Warwickshire botanist, the Reverend William Thomas Bree, visited Scilly and listed a few plants, including the first record of balm-leaved figwort Scrophularia scorodonia. Other botanists also visited the islands: Francis King Eagle collected white mignonette Reseda alba in 1826, and Matilda White discovered orange bird’s-foot Ornithopus pinnatus in 1838 (Fig. 21). Fifteen species of Scilly ferns identified by Edward William Cooke were published by North (1850). The year 1852 was apparently a good one, with four excellent botanists visiting the islands in the shape of Joseph Woods, John Ralfs and the two Misses Millett. These ladies spent five weeks on Scilly in June and July and listed 150 flowering plants and ferns. Lousley is full of praise for the competence of the sisters and only regrets they did not include localities for their finds. Another botanist who paid a short visit to Scilly was Frederick Townsend, who stayed at Tregarthen’s Hotel on

FIG 21. Miss Matilda White discovered orange bird’s-foot on a visit to Tresco in 1838. (Drawing by Alma Hathway)

St Mary’s (the hotel is still there). Although he only spent ten days in the islands, he recorded 348 species and published his list in 1864. Unfortunately Lousley found 21 records on the list were probably mistakes, some of which were later corrected by Townsend himself in his own copy of the report (Lousley, 1971). As botanists at the time did not have the competent floras and identification aids we have now, I have nothing but admiration for their achievements. As more and more botanists managed to get to Scilly, some of them made a greater contribution than others to the flora; their records are acknowledged by Lousley (1971).

It was fortunate that Ted Lousley, a well-known and respected amateur botanist, visited the Isles of Scilly in September 1936, when he personally added western ramping-fumitory Fumaria occidentalis to the flora. He was so taken with the islands that he continued his visits, recording many additional species and experiencing every month from March to September during the next four years. The first manuscript version of the Flora was completed in 1941 and then hidden away during the war years to be finally completed and published in 1971. The last visit Lousley paid to Scilly was in May 1975 when he stayed at Star Castle Hotel on St Mary’s, conducting a group of botanists around the islands and showing them dwarf pansy Viola kitaibeliana. Lousley, by profession a bank manager, was at some time Honorary Curator of the South London Botanical Institute. As it happened this was where many of the specimens, correspondence and manuscripts from botanists who had visited Scilly had been deposited. Among those whose material he had access to were Hambrough (visited Scilly 1845), Woods (visited 1852), Beeby (visited 1873) and Townsend (visited 1862).

Lousley’s own herbarium specimens are now at Reading University. Some of his notebooks, letters, photographs and papers, as well as the manuscript of the Flora, are held in the archives of the Isles of Scilly Museum on St Mary’s. He also wrote a number of reports on the flora for the Nature Conservancy Council during 1946, 1954, 1957 and 1967, of which the latter three have been consulted in preparing this book, the earliest report having apparently been lost.

It was an early visit by Cambridgeshire classics don and well-known amateur naturalist John Raven to St Agnes in March 1950 that added the least adder’s-tongue fern and early meadow-grass Poa infirma to the flora (Raven, 1950). Raven spent ten days in March and April in Scilly accompanied by his father and Dr R. C. L. Burges. He found early meadow-grass was abundant and widely distributed on St Mary’s, Tresco and St Martin’s but not on St Agnes (he did not get to Bryher). While having a picnic on Wingletang Down, St Agnes, Raven found the least adder’s-tongue fern. He had seen dead fronds on a previous visit but it was too late to identify them. Another plant that he discovered was dwarf

FIG 22. In 1950 naturalist John Raven found several new plants on Scilly, including dwarf pansy on Tresco and St Martin’s. (David Holyoak)

pansy: two colonies on Tresco and also some plants on newly dug fields on St Martin’s (Fig. 22). John Raven wrote a number of books and papers on plants, including Mountain Flowers in the New Naturalist series.

Besides acknowledging the many botanists who had contributed the records that formed the basis of his Flora, Lousley also refers to the first attempt to classify the common plant communities in Scilly by Oleg Polunin in 1953. At that time Polunin was the much-respected biology teacher at Charterhouse School, Godalming. He produced short descriptions of the plant communities in Some Plant Communities of the Scilly Isles (1953) as a handout for the boys he took on field trips to Scilly. Later in the 1950s he was Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) recorder for West Cornwall, when he also found time to visit Scilly.

Polunin is probably now better known as the author of a number of photograph-based field guides to European plants.

Not everyone who recorded plants in Scilly was a botanist. W. S. Bristowe was an arachnologist who visited Scilly twice and wrote two seminal papers on the spiders (Bristowe, 1929, 1935). What is particularly remarkable is that he managed to land on so many of the small islets during his visit and not only collect spiders but also record the vegetation. In some cases until recently his were virtually the only records we have for some of the least accessible islands. Apparently he had a period of unprecedented calm weather for his stay that allowed him to make so many landings.

Someone else who seemed to manage to get onto many of the small rocky islands was a local photographer and keen naturalist. C. J. King lived on St Mary’s and owned a photographic business, sold postcards and gave lectures on natural history. He published an account of the birds and other wildlife as Some Notes on Wild Nature in Scillonia (1924). This is a small volume but full of his own very personal and interesting observations. He seems to have made many expeditions to uninhabited islands and scrambled among rocks to get close to the birds or seals he wanted to photograph, even spending the night there on occasion.

The association of the Dorrien-Smith family with Scilly, especially Tresco, has been of considerable significance to the natural history of the islands ever since Augustus Smith first leased the islands from the Duchy in 1834. During his stewardship Augustus Smith was responsible for many introductions, besides plants. Some of these introductions were quite eccentric: different coloured rabbits, deer, and even ‘ostriches’ – although from the photographs in Cowan (2001) and Llewellyn (2005) and the probable source of the birds (Augustus Smith apparently having ‘kidnapped’ the first one from a ship that had come from Rio) it would seem these were in fact South American rheas Rhea americana.

Augustus Smith also had an interest in birds, and many shot on the islands ended up in the Abbey collection. He also regularly had shooting parties, especially on Tresco, that sometimes resulted in flushing unusual species – which were shot. After the death of Augustus Smith, his nephew, Mr Thomas Algernon Smith-Dorrien (who in keeping with his uncle’s wishes changed his name to Smith-Dorrien-Smith, later shortened to Dorrien-Smith), took a leading interest in the new flower-growing industry (Vyvyan, 1953). The Dorrien-Smith family inherited the lease of all the islands, but when Major Arthur A. Dorrien-Smith (‘the Major’) succeeded his father Thomas Algernon he returned the lease to the Duchy, retaining only Tresco and the uninhabited isles. Although the Dorrien-Smiths have been mainly interested in plant acquisition for the Gardens, they also continued to add to their large collection of stuffed birds, mostly taken in the islands (generally only one of each species was collected). Between 1922 and 1940 the Misses Dorrien-Smith (Gwen and her niece Ann) made a collection of Scilly wild flowers. What Lousley describes as an ‘unreliable’ list of these, without localities, appears in Vyvyan (1953). But I think Lousley was a little harsh, as most of the 260 species are plants that are still on the Scilly list.

The Major took a particular interest in natural history, especially birds. He contributed regularly to British Birds and the reports of the Cornwall Birdwatching and Preservation Society. Commander Thomas Dorrien-Smith, the only son of the Major to survive World War II, was the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) honorary warden until the 1960s and also held a unique licence under the 1954 Protection of Birds Act from NCC to take bird specimens to add to the family’s private Abbey collection. ‘The Commander’, as he was known, was very disappointed when he was not told about the 1958 northern waterthrush Seiurus noveboracensis (the first for Britain), as he would have liked to add it to the collection! He was persuaded that rare birds should be left alive for others to enjoy and this was apparently why he stopped collecting (J. Parslow, in litt.). The last specimen shot for the Abbey collection was taken by Fred Wardle, the estate gamekeeper, about 1956. Later Peter MacKenzie persuaded the Commander to allow the bird collection to be moved from the Abbey to the basement of the recently opened museum on St Mary’s. While the collection was in the Abbey it was housed in a dark corridor; unfortunately when moved to the museum the specimens were exposed to strong light, eventually resulting in loss of colour and some deterioration. The Commander leased Tresco from 1955 until his death in 1973; his son Robert Dorrien-Smith succeeded him. Over the years the Abbey Gardens have been the source of most of the alien plants and animals now established in Scilly.

Collecting bird specimens as mounted skins was a perfectly respectable hobby among gentlemen in the nineteenth century. One collector, Edward Hearle Rodd, was author of The Birds of Cornwall and The Scilly Isles (1880), although he died while the book was in production and the final editing had to be carried out by his friend James Edmund Harting. Although there are references to Scilly throughout the text, the main section on Scilly consists of the collected letters from his nephew Francis Rashleigh Rodd, written to his uncle when staying on Tresco between 1864 and 1871. Rodd was a well-known collector of bird skins, and many specimens from Scilly ended up in his collection, eventually passing to his nephew on his death. F. R. Rodd was also a sportsman and collector, and shot many birds both for the pot and to add to his collection of stuffed birds. He also had dead birds sent to him from Scilly. One of his trophies that clearly delighted him was a bittern Botaurus stellaris that he ‘knocked down’ on Christmas Day 1864. He decided to have it mounted with the neck feathers ‘rampant’ rather than ‘couchant’. One interesting letter comments on how the gentlemen of the county were giving up their hobby of falconry and were now shooting birds instead. Collections of birds’ eggs and stuffed birds became very popular at the time. When his uncle died Rodd inherited his bird collection and housed it at Trebartha Hall in Cornwall with his own specimens. Everything was lost when the Hall was burned down in 1949 (Penhallurick, 1978).

Leslie and Clare Harvey moved to Scilly soon after Leslie retired as Professor of Zoology at Exeter University. Clare Harvey had also been a lecturer at the university and had specialised for many years in the study of seaweeds. They lived in a bungalow on the Garrison that was approached through a sally port (one of the stairways through the granite walls connecting one level with another). Ducking your head to descend the precipitous stairs to the garden, you were aware of all manner of plants, wild and cultivated, that ran riot on the walls and in the narrow garden. Clare was a great collector, and it is perhaps fortunate for future botanists that the high walls of the Garrison imprisoned most of the plants within the garden. During their sojourn on the islands the Harveys were the focus of all that was botanical, and in 1970 they started a wild-flower table in the museum, exhibiting live specimens during the summer months, replenished weekly by a group of local enthusiasts known affectionately as the museum ‘Flower Ladies’. Clare was BSBI recorder for Scilly until the 1980s, but sadly, despite an unrivalled knowledge of the wild flowers, she kept no records, wrote very little and rather lost heart without Leslie’s company after he died in 1986. Despite increasing frailty and failing sight, Clare still took an interest in the plants and continued to write to me and send specimens until just before her death in 1996 when she was in her nineties. The ‘Flower Ladies’ continued to put out their weekly display of local wild flowers until 2004, when the last team retired. But Julia Ottery (who produced a book of her wild-flower paintings in 1966), Celia Sisam, Elizabeth Legg, Lesley Knight and others were responsible for adding many plant records to the flora. Another resident who contributed to what we know about the flora was Peter Clough, who was head gardener at Tresco Abbey from 1973 until 1984. Besides being a notable horticulturalist, Peter was also a keen botanist and took a great interest in the wild flowers on Tresco. He maintained a card-index of plant records during his time on Tresco which he allowed me to copy into the database of the Isles of Scilly plants.

The Isles of Scilly Museum was opened in 1967 by the Isles of Scilly Museum Association with the aim of providing a permanent home for the finds from the archaeological site on Nornour. The present purpose-built building was built by the Council of the Isles of Scilly, financed by subscriptions, donations from the Duchy of Cornwall, various trusts and generous well-wishers, including a handsome interest-free loan from the late Mr K. M. Leach, a benefactor with a great interest in Scilly and especially the wildlife. Many natural history collections are held in the museum, including the Tresco Abbey bird collection, seashells, lichens and many other specimens. The museum also houses a small library of books on Scilly and many photographs, maps and artefacts. As honorary curator, Steve Ottery ran the museum for many years, assisted by a team of devoted and knowledgeable volunteers. Recently, Amanda Martin was appointed as part-time curator, although she too relies on a rota of volunteers to help deal with around 12,000 visitors annually and enquiries from all over the world. Another well-known resident of Hugh Town is the potter Humphrey Wakefield. Humphrey has contributed to many aspects of the work of the museum, both archaeological and natural history, as well as being the first chairman of the Environmental Trust.

A former senior curator of another museum, the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, the late Roger D. Penhallurick wrote a number of books and papers on the natural history of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, including Birds of the Cornish Coast (1969), The Birds of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (1978) and The Butterflies of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (1996).

The MacKenzie family on St Mary’s had been very much involved in the setting up of the local museum. Peter Z. MacKenzie was the veterinary surgeon on the islands and also an enthusiastic naturalist and amateur archaeologist who contributed much to what was known at the time, especially on birds and plants. In 1971 he was appointed part-time honorary NCC warden. Until David Hunt arrived, Peter and his great friend Ron Symons, plus Hilda Quick and the young Francis Hicks on St Agnes, were the only resident birdwatchers on the islands. As honorary warden, Peter was responsible, among other things, for setting up the first nature trail at Lower Moors. Also at this time the NCC were bought a boat, the Marius Neilson, by Mr Leach (who had helped with the loan to set up the museum), and this enabled Peter to warden the uninhabited islands and count seals. Until Peter’s untimely death in 1977 his boatman was a young islander, Cyril Nicholas. In 1979 Cyril was taken on as the NCC’S and later English Nature’s boatman/estate worker, running the Marius Neilson and then her later replacement Melza. Over the years Cyril has taken many survey teams around the islands and has been particularly adept at tricky landings on the smaller uninhabited islands. He has also contributed a great deal to the knowledge of the natural history of Scilly.

Someone who made a huge contribution to the understanding of the early Scilly environment was Frank Turk, who had lived in Cornwall from 1939 with a collection of 14,000 books and a private museum of specimens. Dr Turk was a polymath whose interests ranged from Chinese and Japanese culture to poetry, Siamese cats, art and music, and the natural sciences. He wrote papers on many natural history subjects; he was an expert on mites, myriapods, false scorpions, mammals and animal bones from archaeological sites. His studies of animal bones found on archaeological sites in Scilly have given us a detailed picture of the species of birds and animals that formerly inhabited the islands. His wife Stella Turk worked in tandem with her husband for many years, supporting his work. Stella Turk was born in Scilly, on St Mary’s, but emigrated with her family to New Zealand when she was two, returning to Cornwall when she was seven. Stella is perhaps best known for her work on land and marine molluscs and other invertebrates, as well as her book Sea-shore Life in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (1971). Stella retired from her work at the Cornwall Biological Records Unit in 1993, since when she has continued to give her time voluntarily, entering thousands of records on the ‘Erica’ database of Cornish records. In January 2003 Stella’s contribution to Cornish natural history was recognised when she was awarded the MBE in the New Year’s Honours.

It was when I first visited Scilly and stayed at the St Agnes Bird Observatory at Lower Town Farm that I met Hilda Quick, the resident birdwatcher and a force to be reckoned with. Miss Quick, as she was always called, moved to her cottage just a few metres from Periglis beach, St Agnes, in 1951. When the bird observatory first started up in 1957 she was at first greatly opposed to the use of mist-nets and would cut birds out of the nets if she found them.

FIG 23. ‘Birdwatching from a boat’. A woodcut by Hilda Quick of herself, from her book Birds of the Scilly Isles (1964).

FIG 24. ‘Seabirds’. Another of Hilda Quick’s woodcuts, produced in her tiny cottage by Periglis beach, St Agnes.

Fortunately she was eventually won over and although she probably merely tolerated ringing, she nevertheless became a stalwart friend and supporter of the bird observatory. She wrote Birds of the Scilly Isles (1964), a small volume illustrated with her own woodcuts (Figs 23 & 24), and also edited the Scilly records for the Cornwall Bird Report for many years. Her hand-printed and very original Christmas cards were a delight to receive. If especially favoured, you might be invited in for a glass of wine made from local wild flowers. In this she was quite an expert and enjoyed demonstrating the difference between wine made from ling flowers and that made from bell heather. Miss Quick kept her elephant-size copy of Audubon’s Birds of America propped open for visitors to admire in her cottage.

The St Agnes Bird Observatory was started by a group of enthusiastic London birdwatchers and ringers. The first year they camped, but in 1958 they moved into Lower Town Farm. The founder and organiser was John Parslow, then working at the British Trust for Ornithology’s Ringing Office, based in the Bird Room at the Natural History Museum. John later went to join David Lack’s team at the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology in Oxford, working on bird migration. The unoccupied farmhouse building was rented from Lewis and Alice Hicks of the Lighthouse Farm, who took a great interest in the doings of the birdwatchers. It was in Lewis Hicks’ boat Undaunted that many of the ringing expeditions to the bird sanctuary island of Annet were made. Perhaps part of their interest was due to their youngest son Francis, who was a small boy at the time and an avid birdwatcher. Before he went away to school on the mainland Francis had an extraordinary bird list, with many great rarities, but no woodpeckers, owls or other common birds! Francis now runs the farm, still finding rare birds; he always wears a pair of binoculars, even when working on his tractor.

Two other enthusiastic birdwatchers at the time were Ruth and Gordon George. Gordon was a farm labourer who worked for Lewis Hicks, and he and his wife Ruth lived in a cottage (now the Turk’s Head pub) by the quay at Porth Conger. They not only kept a lookout for any new birds that had arrived, but encouraged the birdwatchers to stop off at their cottage for a ‘second breakfast’ after the morning circuit of the island. This usually ensured a coffee and a generous wedge of the fruit cake Ruth baked specially for the birdwatchers.

The early days of running an observatory on a small, inhabited island had their problems, such as when the young daughter of the island’s postmaster and her pony rode into a mist-net. Even in its short life, the observatory carried out very valuable work as part of a network of bird observatories around the country. Unlike the big, manned observatories with resident staff, places like St Agnes were run on a shoestring, with a committee who organised the finance and bookings as well as the teams of volunteer ringers and observers. During the life of the observatory it attracted many of the well-known ‘names’ of the ornithological world. Some stayed in the hostel-type accommodation at the observatory and others brought their families and stayed at guesthouses on the island. Many of these have remained loyal to the islands and have returned many times since.

Over the eleven years of its existence the Observatory Committee recorded breeding success, migrants and ringing in an annual report. Although it officially closed in 1967 when the farmhouse became uninhabitable, the logs were maintained for another two years (the logs are now lodged in the Alexander Library, Oxford). Sadly, once the observatory closed the main focus of ornithological work in Scilly was lost for a time. More recently there have been ringers on a regular basis, as well as individuals carrying out scientific work, seabird surveys for example. Most of this work is now coordinated by the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust. Perhaps the best-known spin-off from the observatory days was the upsurge of the ‘twitching’ phenomenon, which started with a group of London birdwatchers some of whom were regular visitors to the observatory. They had found that the cyclonic conditions in the Atlantic in autumn could lead to the arrival of North American birds on Scilly, as well as the European migrants that arrived with easterlies. Now autumn in Scilly is a phenomenon in itself, with the arrival of hundreds of birdwatchers every October.

Frank Gibson is the fourth generation of the Gibson family to be a professional photographer in Scilly. Many of Frank’s superb photographs of landscape, seas and wildlife have been reproduced in numerous books and publications about Scilly, including several on plants and other natural history subjects. Several photographs from the Gibson collection (which includes photographs by earlier members of the Gibson family) are reproduced in these pages. One of Frank’s collaborators on several books and booklets about the natural history of Scilly was David Hunt, who came to Scilly in the early 1960s, initially as gardener at the Island Hotel on Tresco. Later he moved to St Mary’s, where over the years he carved a niche for himself as the ‘Scilly Birdman’, despite great difficulties in making a living as an independent guide, lecturer and local bird expert. He was responsible for writing a ‘code of conduct’ for birdwatchers which helped to improve relations between islanders and birdwatchers. David’s autobiography, Confessions of a Scilly Birdman (1985), was published posthumously after his career came to an untimely end in northern India in 1985, when a tiger killed him as he was leading a birdwatching tour. When I saw him shortly before his final trip, he mentioned his need to get a good photo of a tiger; his camera was recovered after the accident and when the film was processed he had indeed secured a good picture of the tiger that killed him.

After David Hunt’s death his friend Will Wagstaff continued the slide shows and guided walks that had become very popular with visitors. Will had, like many other birdwatchers, first come to Scilly on holiday, returning every year from 1975 until he eventually moved to St Mary’s in 1981. For a while Will worked for the Isles of Scilly Environmental Trust (now Wildlife Trust) as field officer until becoming a self-employed tour leader and lecturer. When the Isles of Scilly Bird Group was started in 2000, by a group of resident birdwatchers, Will was the first Honorary President. The ISBG publishes the excellent Isles of Scilly Bird & Natural History Review annually. With a nucleus of resident birders on the islands there has been an increase in observations during the winter months, and indeed throughout the year. This has culminated in the production of another book on the birds of Scilly (Flood et al., in press).

During the twelve years he lived on St Mary’s Peter Robinson carried out ringing and population studies as well as organising surveys on behalf of RSPB, JNCC and English Nature, including ‘Seabird 2000’ and the Breeding Bird Atlas. In 2003 his interest in the islands and their ornithology culminated in the publication of The Birds of the Isles of Scilly. This monumental work reviewed the birds of Scilly from historic references up to the present day.

The Environmental Trust for the Isles of Scilly was set up in 1986. In 2001 the Trust became the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust, the forty-seventh member of the Wildlife Trusts partnership in the UK. Based on a total land area of 3,065 hectares at LAT (lowest astronomical tide), the Trust is responsible for 60 per cent of Scilly, with 1,845 ha leased from the Duchy of Cornwall. A very small trust, with only three members of staff in 2006, they have an unusually challenging operation, working in an island situation where all the tools, machinery and volunteers have to be transported by boat from St Mary’s to other islands for a day’s practical management work. During 2000 the Trust took on the disused 1900 Woolpack gun battery on the Garrison, which has now been refurbished and is used as a custom-built volunteer centre with accommodation for thirteen volunteers, including an underground meeting room.

Many films and TV programmes are made on Scilly. Andrew Cooper first visited Scilly in 1981, and made several films about the natural history of the islands, Isles Apart, Secret Nature and Lost Lands of Scilly. He also wrote Secret Nature of the Channel Shore (1992) and Secret Nature of the Isles of Scilly (2006). While working on the films Andrew spent many months in Scilly, observing and filming the wildlife. He was the first person to photograph caravanning behaviour of Scilly shrews. Andrew is Vice-President of the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust.

In recent years a number of other naturalists, both local and visiting, have made their unique contributions to our understanding of Scilly’s wildlife. Local diver Mark Groves has written and lectured on the marine life of the islands, photographing many underwater subjects. St Agnes farmer Mike Hicks records and writes about moths, and local restaurateur Bryan Thomas’s superb photographs are a regular feature of the Isles of Scilly Bird Report and Natural History Review. Martin Goodey, who runs Trenoweth Research Station, is also an enthusiastic photographer of birds and insects. For many years Stephen Westcott has been studying the Scilly population of grey seals Halichoerus grypus (Fig. 25). He works from a kayak, which enables him to get very close to the animals with minimal disturbance.

FIG 25. Grey seal among tree mallow. (David Mawer)

Lower plants have not been forgotten, and have been studied by Bryan Edwards (lichens), David Holyoak, Jean Paton and Robert Finch (bryophytes). Insects have been getting more attention too, with the papers by Ian Beavis, and a number of other entomologists, including local birdwatchers in Scilly who have now extended their interests into recording bush-crickets, stick insects and other groups. Molluscs, ferns and plants have also had their disciples. The production of the Isles of Scilly Bird Report and Natural History Review has encouraged visiting and local naturalists to publish their records and papers, making information much more readily available. A number of contributors to the Review have been very generous with information and illustrations for this volume and are acknowledged elsewhere.

CHAPTER 5 St Mary’s

Not a tree to be seen, but there are granite piles on the coast such as I never saw before, and furze-covered hills with larks soaring and singing above them.

George Eliot (1857)

ST MARY’S IS THE largest of the Isles of Scilly at 649 hectares (above MHWS) and approximately 4km x 3km from coast to coast. Only on St Mary’s is there enough metalled road to merit any kind of bus service or any traffic as such. There are just over seventeen kilometres of road that link most of the communities on St Mary’s. Besides being busy with local and farm traffic, the sightseeing buses, the hire bikes and the taxi cabs all use the road to provide a service for the holidaymakers who flock to the island in the summer (bringing your own car to Scilly is not advised).

Away from the sea the interior of the island is gently undulating with a slightly more ‘mainland’ feel due to a largely cultivated landscape with small hamlets scattered among the farms. Many of the fields are arable and often have interesting weed floras, usually including some of the arable plants now becoming increasingly rare in Britain. The field boundaries, consisting of pine windbreaks, evergreen and elm ‘fences’ (hedges), and stone ‘hedges’, all have their particular natural history and landscape features. The unfarmed land, comprising grassland, wetlands and heath, is mostly around the coast. Also around the coastal areas are spectacular rocky headlands, cliffs, sandy bays and dunes. The ‘main’ road forms a figure of eight round the middle of the island, with a few other small sections of made-up road linking the hamlets. Farmland away from the road is generally inaccessible to the general public except were served by footpaths. There is a coastal path round the island and a system of footpaths that mostly link the roads with the coast, or access the nature reserves.

THE BUILT-UP AREA

Around the main harbour on the west of St Mary’s is Hugh Town (Fig. 26), the principal town in the islands, the administrative ‘capital’ where most of the main business of the islands takes place, with the Council offices, shops, banks, hotels, museum and the nearby industrial estate at Porth Mellon. The Council of the Isles of Scilly has unusual responsibilities, and although representing a very small population of approximately 1,600 (c.4,000 in summer) it has virtually the same powers as a county council. The offices of the Duchy of Cornwall (the landlord of the Isles of Scilly), the Wildlife Trust and other organisations are also mainly based in Hugh Town. The passenger ship RMV Scillionian sails from St Mary’s harbour, and with the airport forms the main link with the mainland. The present quay is built over an island, Rat Island, and out into St Mary’s Pool. From the harbour the inter-island launches and the ‘tripper’ boats link with the off-islands and run sightseeing trips.

FIG 26. A view of St Mary’s harbour, Hugh Town and the Garrison, May 2003. (Rosemary Parslow)

Much of the town is on the low-lying land that was originally a sand bar joining the promontory of the Hugh to the rest of St Mary’s between the Pool (harbour) and Porth Cressa. From there the town spreads up the slopes of the Garrison and Church Street. The proximity of the harbour and the beach has resulted in many coastal plants having become residents in the town. Portland spurge Euphorbia portlandica grows at the base and on top of some walls, tiny sea spleenwort Asplenium marinum ferns grow in crevices on many walls and four-leaved allseed Polycarpon tetraphyllum and rock sea-spurrey Spergularia rupicola along cracks in pavements. Some plants have become strongly associated with Hugh Town, including sand rocket Diplotaxis muralis, sweet alyssum Lobularia maritima and cineraria Pericallis hybrida. With all the small gardens around the town many garden plants and more exotic plants are able to escape into alleys and byways, so part of the fun for a botanist wandering around the streets is not knowing what discovery might be waiting around the next corner!

During the summer holiday season Hugh Town can be quite a bustling place. Every morning the holiday people stream down the main streets to the harbour, where they join the queue on the quayside for tickets and then embark on one of the launches that will take them to one of the other inhabited islands or, if the weather is good and the seas calm, on a trip around the Eastern Isles or Annet and the Western Rocks. On the calmest days there will perhaps be a boat going as far as the Bishop Rock lighthouse. This can be an exciting trip that guarantees close views of seabirds and seals. There is always a sea running beyond the Western Rocks, even in the calmest weather, giving the passengers something to boast about in the pub later. But sailing out among the Western Rocks, among the savage beauty of jagged islands and myriad splinters of rock just breaking the surface of the waves, is a graphic reminder of the hazards associated with the sea and Scilly. Reaching Bishop Rock means sailing over another long stretch of restless water beyond the Western Rocks towards the long finger of the lighthouse pointing skywards in the distance. As you sail beneath the lighthouse there is little sign of the rock on which it is built, and looking up at the tower above is an utterly awesome experience. The return of the tripper boats results in a reverse flow back up the main street from the quay as everyone returns for the evening. For a little while now the shops are busy. And if you are a birdwatcher it is time to check the blackboard where bird news is chalked up, hoping all the time you have not missed anything exciting.

On the opposite side of the island to Hugh Town is the hamlet of Old Town (Fig. 27). This was the main town and former harbour (the quay can still be seen) on St Mary’s in medieval times, with a castle where the Governor lived, but it was superseded by the better-fortified Hugh Town. There is little left of Ennor Castle

FIG 27. Old Town harbour with its old granite quay and the church, January 2000. (Rosemary Parslow)

now, just the mound on which it stood; presumably it was demolished and the stone used to build Star Castle. Despite improved sea defences and rebuilding of the sea wall and the road in 1996 it is not unusual to see sand-bags propped up against front doors or seaweed in the street in winter; the lower part of Old Town is another area under constant threat from the sea. Overlooking the Bay is Old Town Church, where the surrounding churchyard, with its different levels and terraces, surrounded by trees, provides a haven for many unusual species of plants. It is impossible to overlook the multi-coloured cinerarias that have escaped from cultivation and rampaged over all the walls, paths and old graves. Other plants growing in the churchyard include grassland species, ferns or garden escapes that find refuge among the gravestones and walls. Migrant birds are often located in the churchyard, and the sheltered conditions also attract many insects and even bats on calm evenings. Some of the nearby fields behind the church also have good arable weed floras. Not far from the church along the edge of the bay is a large isolated rock, Carn Leh, which is an important site for rare lichens.

INLAND ST MARY’S

Inland the countryside is slightly undulating farmland served by the ‘main’ road. The island bus service only drives around the main part of the interior, some roads being very narrow. Between the fields, both pasture and flower fields, the boundaries are formed both by stone ‘hedges’ with a rich cover of ferns, grasses and other plants, and by tall, clipped evergreen ‘fences’ (Fig. 28). Many of the roadsides are fringed with elm trees, predominately Dutch elm Ulmus x hollandica. In sheltered areas the elm trees are able to grow tall, those in the valley of Holy Vale and around Maypole being some of the finest. Crossing the island are several conifer shelterbelts (Fig. 29), which in places include the distinctive silhouettes of Monterey pines Pinus radiata, where remnants of earlier plantings still survive.

FIG 28. Inland St Mary’s: evergreen fences near Porth Hellick, August 2006. (Rosemary Parslow)

FIG 29. A pine shelterbelt and an arable field covered in corn spurrey near Watermill Cove, June 2005. (Rosemary Parslow)

CLIFFS AND COASTS

Most of the coastland of St Mary’s consists of cliffs, not very high, but spectacular enough at times when gales drive the waves in onto the rocks. In places a few small bays break the coastline and there are two large promontories, the Garrison in the southwest and Peninnis Head in the south. In many places there are granite carns (tors) eroded into extraordinary, fantastical shapes: Pulpit Rock, Tooth Rock and the Loaded Camel are just a few well-known examples (Fig. 30). Above the cliffs and steep slopes along the west coast are typical maritime-cliff plant communities, dense bracken communities on the deeper soils, heather-dominated heath and short grassland on the shallower soils and over rocks. Among the shrub species growing on the coast are both common gorse Ulex europaeus and western gorse U. gallii and scattered patches of broom. Along the coastal edge the maritime grassland sometimes extends inland as a series of pastures that in summer are bright with the yellow flowers of common cat’s-ear Hypochaeris radicata amid a colourful mixture of grasses and forbs.

At Carn Morval, on the steepest part of the coast, part of the nine-hole golf course is perched on a rocky promontory above the slope. The rest of the

FIG 30. Pulpit Rock on Peninnis Head, St Mary’s, May 2006. (Richard Green)

FIG 31. Bant’s Carn on Halangy Down, St Mary’s, probably the best known of the Bronze Age entrance graves in the Isles of Scilly. March 2006. (Rosemary Parslow)

golf course sits high above at the top of the slope, where its manicured greens frequently attract migrating birds. As with the airfield this can be very frustrating for the excluded birdwatchers! Beyond Carn Morval is another area of coastal heath at Halangy Down, where in a carefully tended area of grass and mown heather is an important archaeological site managed by English Heritage. These are the remains of an Iron Age/Romano-British village settlement of many small buildings, now marked only by low walls, and the ridges denoting earlier field systems on the nearby slopes. At the top of the hill is Bant’s Carn, a large Bronze Age entrance grave, one of the best examples of its type in Scilly (Fig. 31). The whole closely managed and mown site is quite species-rich, and even the walls and banks of the ancient village have an interesting flora that includes western gorse, hairy bird’s-foot-trefoil Lotus subbiflorus, subterranean clover Trifolium subterraneum growing on and among the stones. The turf is also full of chamomile Chamaemelum nobile, deliciously scenting the air as you explore. Ruts on some of the paths nearby have a miniature flora of toad rush Juncus bufonius and sometimes in spring an unusual but very inconspicuous alien called Scilly pigmyweed Crassula decumbens. This is a South African species, probably introduced accidentally with other plants to the nearby Bant’s Carn farm. Only very recently has it apparently started to spread away from the farm, and it can now sometimes be seen on the path leading up the hill towards the golf course.

Just beyond Bant’s Carn Farm the land slopes down to the sand dunes that form the northern tip of the island at Bar Point. The dune system is very disturbed. Part has been quarried and there is also a part used as a dump. Much of the dune system has become colonised by bracken and bramble Rubus agg. communities. There are areas of scattered gorse bushes, where both the rare balm-leaved figwort and Babington’s leek Allium ampeloprasum var. babingtonii can be found. Closer to the quarry and the dump some plants of garden origin have become established so that you can come upon bear’s breech Acanthus mollis, montbretia Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora, fennel Foeniculum vulgare and even the giant rhubarb plant Gunnera tinctori. Somewhere in the dunes near here the fern moonwort Botrychium lunaria used to grow under the bracken. It was last recorded by Lousley in 1940, and may have been lost when the area suffered major disturbance some time after 1954, from various activities including relaying the submarine telegraph cable, winning sand and dumping rubbish. Since then, despite much searching, there has been no further sign of the moonwort.

More areas of bracken communities follow the northern coast of the island all the way round from Bar Point to Innisidgen, Helvear Down, and right down to the narrow inlet at Watermill Cove. On this northern part of the coast there are areas of pine shelterbelts, which extend right round to the eastern side of the island, and large stretches of beautiful heathland near the coast. Patches of tall gorse with an understorey of lower heathland plants grow along the sides of the path as it continues around the coast, also appearing anywhere there are breaks in the bracken cover.

Close to the coast path are two impressive entrance graves, Innisidgen Upper Chamber and Innisidgen Lower Chamber. Around the barrows the vegetation is kept regularly mown, resulting in species-rich lawns of grasses, sedges and typical heathland plants, demonstrating the potential richness of the vegetation if the surrounding overgrown areas could be restored and perhaps maintained by grazing. Beside the path what appears to be a low wall is the remains of the former Civil War breastworks, half-buried in dense vegetation. As the path drops down the hill into Watermill Cove, the Watermill Stream runs into the sea through mats of dense hemlock water-dropwort, fool’s-water-cress Apium nodiflorum and a group of grey sallow Salix cinerea oleifolia trees. Just round the corner there are steep cliff exposures along the section of the inlet at Tregear’s Porth, an important geological site, notified as the Watermill Cove Geological Conservation Review site. From here the path continues along the coast, and another one follows the Watermill Stream inland along the heavily shaded lane lined with ferns.

The mosaic of heathland, gorse, bracken and bramble continues along the coast past Mount Todden. In places there are more sections of Civil War fortifications and much earlier archaeological sites. Below the cliffs at Darity’s Hole is a very important underwater site where many unusual marine species have been recorded. Towards Deep Point there is an area of ‘waved heath’ (see Chapter 10), and elsewhere there are patches of heather still beneath the taller bracken, as well as around rocks and paths. Where there is a freshwater seepage down one of the slopes, the understorey consists of broad buckler fern Dryopteris dilitata, occasional soft shield-fern Polystichum setiferum and marsh pennywort Hydrocotyle vulgaris. Near Deep Point in an area of short coastal turf careful searching may reveal another rare lichen, ciliate strap-lichen Heterodermia leucomela. It was at Deep Point that at one time the islanders disposed of cars and other rubbish over the cliff. Although the practice has been stopped, the remains of vehicles at the bottom of the cliff in deep water apparently now support a rich marine flora and fauna! At Porth Wreck there is a former quarry in the cliff, often the place to find unusual casual plants.

Porth Hellick Down is one of the largest areas of wind-pruned waved heath on St Mary’s. Much of the gorse among the heathers in the area is western gorse, with flowers a deeper golden colour than the yellow of common gorse. Around the Porth Hellick barrow Ancient Monument is a closely mown circle of grass starred with flowers of chamomile, tormentil Potentilla erecta and lousewort Pedicularis sylvestris, as well as stunted bell heather and other typical heathland plants. Similar vegetation covers the burial mound with a dense sward of low grasses and flowers.

South of the deep bay of Porth Hellick lies the open heathland of Salakee Down with the rather eroded outline of Giant’s Castle, an Iron Age hill fort. At Salakee Down is a beautiful stretch of coastal grassland and waved heath, again with common gorse and western gorse, bell heather, ling and other heathland species (Fig. 32). Close to the Giant’s Castle are a number of small damp and seasonally waterlogged pits with wetland plants including lesser spearwort Ranunculus flammula, bulbous Juncus bulbosus and soft rushes J. effusus as well as small adder’s-tongue fern Ophioglossum azoricum and royal fern Osmunda regalis. Further towards Porth Hellick are more areas of waved heath, where the heather is deeply channelled into ridges by the wind. These coastal areas are among the best places to look out for migrating birds, especially wheatears Oenanthe oenanthe, and even migrating butterflies such as clouded yellow Colias croceus. These ‘downs’ are also home to green tiger beetles Cicindela campestris, rose chafers Cetonia aurata and other insects.

Between Giant’s Castle and Blue Carn one of the runways of the airport

FIG 32. An example of ‘waved heath’ can be seen near Giant’s Castle, an Iron Age cliff castle. Salakee Down, June 2002. (Rosemary Parslow)

interposes itself into the cliff edge. Not a place to linger, although the system of traffic lights at the top of the slope on the edge of the cliff warns of the imminent approach or departure of aircraft. The airport is one of largest areas of open grassland on St Mary’s, but access is restricted due to safety considerations. Most galling for the birdwatchers, as the mown grass attracts rare plovers, wheatears and other birds of open habitats. Usually some kind of viewing place is negotiated each autumn so that birdwatchers can see part of the airfield without interfering with the business of flying.

As you round the corner into Old Town Bay you pass the narrow rocky promontory of Tolman Point, between the bay and Porth Minick. Here there are maritime grassland and cliff communities and a small triangular group of planted shrubs including shrubby orache Atriplex halimus. On the Old Town side of the headland Hottentot fig and rosy dewplant Drosanthemum roseum grow over the rocks and grassland, in places completely submerging native species.

The next headland round the coast is Peninnis Head, the southernmost point on St Mary’s (Fig. 33). This rocky promontory is important, with habitats that support rare plants and lichens. The impressive weathering of the granite tors and the lack of glacial features also contribute to the geological significance of the site. In the nineteenth century Peninnis ‘was considered one of the pleasantest places on the island by visitors; it was a large open downs with no hedge on the west side of it until you got halfway to Buzza Hill, and it was covered with long heath and wild flowers of various kinds which made it very pleasant in summer time’ (Maybee, 1883). The headland is still popular with visitors, who enjoy the dramatic scenery of massive granite carns eroded into natural sculptures and, among the rocks and tumbled boulders, the squat little lighthouse on the Head overlooking St Mary’s Sound. This is the place where the islanders have lit ceremonial bonfires in the past, and it was also the site for the Millennium beacon on 1 January 2000. There are the usual stretches of coastal grassland and maritime heath over the granite, with western clover Trifolium occidentale and two species uncommon elsewhere, spring squill Scilla verna and wild thyme Thymus polytrichus at one of its few Scilly locations. The most exposed edge of the headland is noted for its rare lichen flora including Ramelina siliquosa, Roccella fuciformis, R. phycopsis, golden hair-lichen Teloschistes flavicans and ciliate strap-lichen. To reach the Peninnis headland there is either the track around the coast or the central track from Hugh Town, King Edward’s Road, bisecting the cultivated centre of the headland, with arable fields and pastureland either side. The soils here are deep and less sandy than elsewhere

FIG 33. Peninnis Head is a jumble of extraordinary granite tors. May 2005. (Rosemary Parslow)

so a different range of arable weed species is found among the crop: these include some of the goosefoots Chenopodium spp. as well as the ubiquitous corn marigold Chrysanthemum segetum, docks Rumex spp., shepherd’s-purse Capsella bursa-pastoris and sow-thistles Sonchus spp.

Above Hugh Town is the high, rocky promontory of the Hugh, almost completely surrounded by the granite walls of the early fortifications of the Garrison. Here the long history of the Garrison is marked by an array of buildings, defence works and other structures. English Heritage manages most of the historic buildings and walls that form the Ancient Monument. There are some areas of semi-natural vegetation within the fortifications managed by the Wildlife Trust, mainly areas of bracken and bramble thickets, rough heathland and mown grassland. Some of the windbreaks of Monterey pine have died but there are still more pines and other trees on the eastern flank of the promontory. On the slopes of the hill Babington’s leek and balm-leaved figwort both grow among the bracken and bramble. And a few stands of the Nationally Scarce wild leek Allium ampeloprasum can also be found here, probably overlooked because they were assumed to be the commoner Babington’s leek variety. On the exposed southern side of the Garrison there are more maritime habitats from below the walls to the rocky shore (Fig. 34). There is also a row of tiny abandoned gardens perched on the edge of the cliffs. The thin soils on top of the massive granite walls often support a therophyte community (therophyte plants overwinter as seeds and germinate in spring) of dwarfed species of grasses and forbs similar to that seen on natural granite outcrops around the coast. Where they are permitted to flourish, small ferns such as sea spleenwort lodge in the mortar between the granite blocks, as do other plants that are usually found in rock crevices on the cliffs: Danish scurvygrass Cochlearia danica, pearlworts Sagina spp. and thrift Armeria maritima are frequent examples.

Other interesting species of ferns and other plants grow on both sides of the high granite walls. Between the ramparts are mown lawns that in some places are still typical of coastal grasslands with a tight sward of fescues Festuca spp., buck’s-horn plantain Plantago coronopus, sheep’s sorrel Rumex acetosella, small-flowered catchfly Silene gallica, western clover, rough clover Trifolium scabrum and other clovers. Besides the usual resident birds, the coastal area and the shelterbelts are good venues at bird migration times to look out for species such as wheatear, wryneck Jynx torquilla and black redstart Phoenicurus ochrurus. One section of wall near the Woolpack Battery is remarkable for the hundreds of autumn lady’s-tresses orchids Spiranthes spiralis that flourish there just at eye level in late summer.

FIG 34. Exposure to southern gales restricts growth on the seaward side of the Garrison walls to lichens, tiny ferns and a few other plants. November 2002. (Rosemary Parslow)

QUARRIES

There are a number of former quarries on St Mary’s. Most are overgrown or incorporated into fields, and many are unlikely to be noticed. One you cannot miss is on the side of Buzza Hill. Rising up from Porth Cressa beach, the hill is a popular vantage point to look out over the town and beach below. The quarry at the foot of the hill is mainly used as an informal picnic or rest area and has a mixture of scrub and rough vegetation as well as grassland in the base. Among the plants that have colonised the walls of the quarry are Hottontot fig and another South African succulent, lesser sea-fig Erepsia heteropetala. Another unusual alien grass, rough dog’s-tail grass Cynosurus echinatus, also grows all along the sides of the track up the hill, usually with greater quaking-grass Briza maxima and tall stands of yellow and occasionally white sea radish Raphanus raphanistrum maritimus. Further up the hill yet another unusual alien called wireplant Muehlenbeckia complexa scrambles over the walls, covering most of the vegetation and even the ground with dense wirelike growths so it becomes a kind of mad sculpture. Once at the top of the hill you reach Buzza Tower (a former windmill restored to commemorate a visit by King Edward VII), surrounded by scrub, tall grasses and herbs. The shrubs include broom (probably native here) as well as gorse and bramble.

At the top of Buzza Hill you will find you are on the edge of Hugh Town again and there are many houses, some of which are guesthouses. Inland at Carreg Dhu (pronounced, and sometimes written, as Crake Dew) is another former quarry. This has now been developed as a garden open to the public (see Chapter 13). There is also the former quarry on the Garrison, which has now vegetated over and is probably generally passed unobserved. Other small quarries exist all around the island, and may have just been used very locally to produce building stone or ram.

PORTHS AND BAYS

Because part of St Mary’s straddles a sand bar there are two bays with sandy beaches, Porth Cressa on the south and Town Beach on the north within the Pool (harbour). Porth Cressa lies between the two headlands of Peninnis, the long promontory stretching to the south, and the Hugh, the hill surmounted by the Garrison with the town creeping up its flanks. Porth Cressa is one of the most accessible and popular bays with families and visitors staying locally, because of its proximity to the town and local amenities (Fig. 35). Although it is usually a sheltered bay, the area has proved extremely vulnerable when there are storms from the south. In the past the sea has broken through on a number of occasions and threatened to wash away the buildings (which are virtually only perched on the former sand dune) and eventually cut through into the Pool on the other side of the island. In recent years major defence works have been carried out along Porth Cressa beach to reinforce the sea bank and protect the town. There is perhaps little of great interest yet along the beach, due to the landscaping when the bank was restored, although arable weeds are reappearing in the flowerbeds and some of the sand-dune plants such as sea radish and yellow horned-poppy Glaucium flavum are colonising the beach defences. Town Beach has slightly more muddy sand, and is where all the mooring lines from the smaller boats in the harbour are stretched ashore.

There are several bays on the east coast of St Mary’s. Old Town Bay is quite rocky but with clear channels into the harbour, sheltered from all directions except southeast. The harbour is only accessible at high tide. Near the narrow sandy beach are patches of tree-mallow Lavatera arborea, smaller tree-mallow L. cretica, sea radish, white ramping-fumitory Fumaria capreolata and other plants

FIG 35. Porth Cressa, July 2006. (Rosemary Parslow)

that flourish in the disturbed sandy ground. The sea wall was rebuilt in 1996 after severe storms caused a great amount of damage.

Porth Minick is quite a small bay and has also had substantial sea defence works to reinforce the sea bank. One of the best stands of sea-kale Crambe maritima grows at the top of the beach, and I once saw an islander collecting leaves of the plants by the sack-load – whether to use as a vegetable or perhaps more likely to feed tame rabbits was not clear. Among the rocks at one end of the beach are clumps of house holly-fern Cyrtomium falcata growing in deep crevices where it has been established for many years among the boulders. Fortunately the beach works stopped just before reaching the fern.

Porth Hellick is a large inlet at the seaward end of the Higher Moors nature trail. There is a narrow sandy beach and below it a rocky bay with pools and shallows that attract many birds; at times rare waders will turn up to feed at low water. Between the reedbed around Porth Hellick Pool and the bay there is a narrow strip of tall grassland with wild angelica Angelica sylvestris, balm-leaved figwort and bracken. The bank of the Porth is densely planted with clumps of spiky rhodostachys Fascicularia bicolor, replacing the New Zealand flax Phormium sp. that formerly grew there to consolidate the low dune. The seaward side of the bank supports common dune plants, marram Ammophila arenaria, sea sandwort Honckenya peploides, sea-kale, yellow horned-poppy and oraches Atriplex spp. This is also a good place to look for the distinctive little striped nymphs of the lesser cockroach Ectobius panzeri. Greek sea-spurrey Spergularia bocconii used to grow near the small granite monument to Sir Cloudesley Shovell at the top of the beach, although it has not been seen there for many years, possibly due to the changes that have been made to the sea bank (recently Greek sea-spurrey has been re-found at other sites on the east coast of St Mary’s). The monument marks the spot where the ill-fated admiral’s body was first buried (it is now in Westminster Abbey) when it came ashore after his fleet foundered in the islands in 1707. Another very beautiful sandy bay on the east side of the island is at Pelistry, with its sparkling white sands and unsurpassed views towards Toll’s Island and a distant view of the Eastern Isles.

There are also sandy bays on the west coast of St Mary’s. Porth Mellon is on the edge of Hugh Town and popular for sailing and other activities. There is a degraded sand dune at the back of the bay with some typical species among the marram grass. The next small sandy bay is Thomas’s Porth, backed by narrow dunes and dune grassland. A little group of small bulb fields above the bay once

FIG 36. The coastal form of wall rue, with unusually thick and fleshy fronds. St Mary’s, June 2004. (Rosemary Parslow)

grew a crop of the original Sol d’Or narcissus. Among interesting arable species in these fields are fumitories Fumaria spp., small-flowered catchfly and masses of starflowers Tristagma uniflorum. One of the less common Carpobrotus species grows beside the footpath and Babington’s leek grows in the dunes. At Porthloo the grassland behind the dunes is used for boat standing and boat building; occasionally plants such as hairy buttercup Ranunculus sardous and arable weed species can turn up here due to the constant traffic and disturbance. Wall rue Asplenium ruta-muraria grows on a wall near here, the only place the fern is known on St Mary’s (Fig. 36). The fronds are unusually thick and fleshy, probably due to exposure to salt spray. Porthloo is also a geological SSSI, based on the Quaternary sedimentary deposits in the cliffs, the raised beaches, and organic material that includes pollen indicating former arctic tundra conditions in the palaeoclimate of the island.

WETLANDS

On St Mary’s there are two large wetland nature reserves, Higher Moors and Lower Moors. Higher Moors is fed by a stream that arises in Holy Vale and flows down through the Holy Vale nature trail through the tangle of tall elm trees, grey sallow and understorey of wetland plants either side of the raised pathway. The stream continues through an area of rank grassland and yellow iris. In the stream grow tall plants of fool’s-water-cress, water-cress Rorhippa nasturtium-aquaticum and hemlock water-dropwort. Higher Moors nature reserve and SSSI include both the ‘moor’ and Porth Hellick Pool. Access to the reserve is via a path leading from the road to the coast. Within the reserve views can be made from the boardwalk through the reedbed and from two bird hides overlooking the pool. Along the path a line of very large tussock-sedge Carex paniculata plants usually attract attention as they are up to a metre and a half high and have ferns and other plants growing epiphytically on their trunks. It seems quite shocking now to realise that at one time attempts were made to destroy the plants by killing them with herbicide and burning them. Fortunately, in more enlightened times, clearance of vegetation from around the sedges and cutting back the willow carr has encouraged them to spread. There are also some magnificent stands of royal fern as well as the ubiquitous lady fern Athyrium filix-femina throughout the site.

The Lower Moors nature reserve is situated in a low-lying area between Hugh Town and Old Town Bay (Fig. 37). A stream flows through the site to the sea at Old Town. Part of the area is reedbed, part marsh composed of beds of a very lax local variety of sea rush Juncus maritimus (the endemic var. atlanticus, according to

FIG 37. Lower Moors from the air, February 2004. (Rosemary Parslow)

Lousley), and there are areas of grey sallow carr, as well as a small pool and a scrape with bird hides on the bank. The pools and surrounding vegetation attract rare birds in the migration season. There are ditches, wetter areas and more open areas, all of which support a range of typical wetland plants.

There are also a few other small freshwater pools on St Mary’s, although several have generally degenerated into duck ponds. There is a pond beside the road from Porthloo to Rose Hill which, with the two fields on the west and Well Field on the east, is managed by the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust as a nature reserve. These fields are composed of a mixture of wetland plants and open grassland. Very little of nature conservation interest remains in the duck pond these days; it has largely been given over to a collection of exotic ducks and a few half-tame moorhens Gallinula chloropus.

Two small freshwater pools at Newford, the Argy Moor pools, drain into the Watermill Stream. Originally designed as ponds as part of a failed attempt to grow flax (presumably the ponds would have been used to steep the plants), the ponds are now very eutrophic due to the large numbers of semi-domestic ducks that frequent the site. There are a number of introduced plants around the ponds and a few marginal species such as soft rush, but there now (2006) appear to be no aquatic plants, although prior to the invasion of water fern Azolla filiculoides there had been a typical aquatic flora (Lousley, 1971). Whether it was the strenuous attempts to get rid of the water fern using herbicides that also eliminated all the aquatic plants, or whether the conditions of the ponds are no longer suitable, is unclear.

Shooter’s Pool, a small pool on farmland behind Lower Moors, is being developed to provide freshwater habitats for birds by the Isles of Scilly Bird Group (in 2005 the pool attracted a black-winged stilt Himantopus himantopus). This pool at one time had a population of the rare lesser water plantain, but this apparently disappeared some years ago. It will be interesting to see whether the plant reappears in future.

CHAPTER 6 The Off-Islands

We’ll rant and roar, across the salt seas

Soon we’ll strike soundings in the Channel of Old England

From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-four leagues.

Spanish Ladies, traditional sea-shanty

IN ADDITION TO St Mary’s there are four inhabited islands in the Isles of Scilly. These are called the ‘off-islands’ by Scillonians. Three were formerly joined to St Mary’s when Scilly was mainly one large island many centuries ago (see Chapter 2). St Agnes has been separated from the rest far longer by a deep channel, St Mary’s Sound, and as a result always seems to have a different ‘feel’ and some differences in the flora that may reflect this longer isolation. None of the off-islands has a large population. The majority of the inhabitants are farmers with some involvement with the sea, boats or fishing, and most rely to some extent on tourism.

BRYHER

Lying just to the west of Tresco is the island of Bryher. The island is only 129 hectares above MHWS, 2km long by 1km wide. Even so, the topography is very varied. At the far northernmost tip is the domed headland of Shipman Head Down, 42 metres high and divided from the extreme rocky promontory of Shipman Head by a narrow channel through which the sea boils at high tide. The bay to the west of Shipman Head Down, Hell Bay, is famed for its restless, dramatic seas (Fig. 38). Dominating the west coast of the island are Gweal Hill

FIG 38. Restless sea in Hell Bay, Bryher, May 2006. (Richard Green)

and Heathy Hill, with bays between, Great Popplestone Bay, Stinking Porth and Great Porth. These end in Stony Porth and the sandy bay and dunes of Rushy Bay in the south of the island, looking across to the island of Samson. The eastern side of Bryher is more sheltered and sandy, with dunes facing Tresco across the shallow channel. Only beyond the post office in the northeast does the coast become rocky, with a rather sinister small rocky islet topped with a gibbet emerging from the sea: this is Hangman’s Island, where apparently Admiral Blake, who put down the Royalist uprising in 1651, hanged some of his men (Vyvyan, 1950). Watch Hill gives a good vantage point for looking out over the island, as does Samson Hill further to the south.

The centre of Bryher is low-lying, mainly arable fields and pastureland. The gardens and grounds associated with the hotel occupy a large site dominating the lower land in this part of the island. Close beside the hotel is Great Pool, a large brackish pool with a fringe of marshy vegetation. Most people visiting Bryher for the first time will either head south to the beach at Rushy Bay, a ‘must’ for naturalists because of the unusual plants that are found there, or will aim for Shipman Head across the top of Shipman Head Down to see the notorious wild seascapes in Hell Bay.

Bryher has many good things to offer, and you do not have to be a naturalist to appreciate the colour and the beauty of the scenery. The island is small enough to get round in a day, although it repays a longer visit. Although Bryher does not have the wealth of bulb-field annuals of other islands it does have some, for example common fumitory Fumaria officinale, which is very uncommon elsewhere in Scilly. The dune grassland behind Rushy Bay supports a great variety of dune species, usually in a very stunted form. There are miniature plants of sea spurge Euphorbia paralias and Portland spurge, common stork’s-bill Erodium cicutarium, forget-me-nots Myosotis spp. and English stonecrop Sedum anglicum, growing virtually in pure sand. Nothing, however, can quite prepare you for the Lilliputian perfection of the rare dwarf pansy, when you eventually find it, growing in the sandy turf and on bare sand. In May the pansy may be in its thousands, but they are often very difficult to find. In the dunes behind the bay there is a population of grey bush-crickets Platycleis albopunctata that live mostly in among the marram grass. The very observant may also find one of the tiny lesser cockroaches scuttling across the sand behind the dunes.

Perhaps the next attraction for the naturalist is the Great Pool and surrounding marshy vegetation (Fig. 39). The pool lies close to the shore at Great Porth and is unique in now being the only true brackish lagoon in Scilly. A leat links the pool to the sea in Great Porth. At times the pool is temporary home to shoals of land-locked grey mullet Chelon labrosus, trapped until the spring tides can release them again. The pool is very shallow and open and the only aquatic plants are those that can cope with the brackish conditions, usually

FIG 39. Bryher from Gweal Hill, looking towards the saline Pool and Great Popplestone Bay, June 2002. (Rosemary Parslow).

beaked tasselweed Ruppia maritima and fennel-leaved pondweed Potamogeton pectinatus. Saltmarsh rush Juncus gerardii, sea club-rush Bolboschoenus maritimus and at least one species of spike-rush Eleocharis sp. grow all round the edge of the pool. A few birds frequent the pool. Moorhen usually nest and gadwall Anas strepera, mallard A. platyrhynchos and mute swan Cygnus olor are often seen there. But the salty water restricts the number and species that live in the pool, so dragonflies, for example, cannot breed there. A second very small pool nearby at one time would have been covered in brackish water-crowfoot Ranunculus baudotii and one of the starworts Callictriche sp., but for some years it was planted up with water-lily and other pond plants. Now these have been removed it is returning to its former state.

Close to the pool on the brow of Great Popplestone Bay, as well as elsewhere on short turf, grows a lovely red form of white clover, Trifolium repens var. townsendii, often in its most extreme form with purple-red flowers and almost black leaves. And as you walk over the short turf here the unmistakable scent of chamomile rises about you. Spring squill, which is otherwise uncommon in Scilly, is at its best on Bryher. It grows in the short maritime turf along the slopes above Hell Bay, along much of the west side of the island and also below Samson Hill. Even when the flowers are over, the leaves persist for a while, lying curiously twisted on the ground as though they have been poisoned.

On the granite carns where the thin soils become desiccated in summer are areas of typical plant communies (see Appendix) which include plants such as common bird’s-foot Ornithopus perpusillus, bird’s-foot-trefoil Lotus corniculatus, English stonecrop, buck’s-horn plantain, some of the tiny grasses such as silver hair-grass Aira caryophyllea and in a few places the rare orange bird’s-foot. Nearby, heathers, grasses and taller plants grow where there are deeper soils, and in some years the tiny orchid, autumn lady’s-tresses, also appears here. Where moisture is retained over the granite platform there may be one or two discrete patches of small adder’s-tongue fern.

Shipman Head Down in the north of the island is an extensive area of ‘waved heath’, the wind-eroded heath that is one of the most important habitats in the Isles of Scilly. The dominant species are ling, bell heather and western gorse, with common gorse forming dense scrub along the southeast edge and extending down towards the coast. This is where spring squill can be found on top of the plateau, as well as several species of rare lichens. Getting to Shipman Head itself can only be accomplished by a scramble down steep rocks. The promontory is accessible for a short time at low water across the very deep cleft that separates the Head from the main bulk of the island. Colonies of seabirds are able to breed on Shipman Head in relative isolation.

One curious little gem of social history that has revolutionised visiting Bryher was the building of what the islanders humorously call ‘Annekey’ or Anneka’s Quay. This is a pontoon landing on the beach just north of the old stone quay, built during 1990 as part of one of Anneka Rice’s TV programmes, Challenge Anneka. This new landing enables boats to get in to Bryher when the tide is too low to land elsewhere. The only alternative in the past was to run the boat up the beach and land passengers by a plank from the bow.

TRESCO

Tresco and Bryher face each other across the narrow channel that forms the sheltered anchorage of New Grimsby Harbour. Tresco is the second largest and arguably the best known of the Isles of Scilly, on account of the famed Abbey Gardens. The island is just over 3km long and 1.7km wide, and covers approximately 298 hectares. At the north end is one of the most extensive areas of waved heath in the islands, on a plateau some 30 metres high. Across the middle of Tresco, almost dividing the island in two, is the long, water-filled gash that is the Great Pool, with the Abbey Pool slightly to the south. North of Great Pool is a broad band of farmland that stretches to Old Grimsby on the east coast (Fig. 40). South of Great Pool are the Abbey Gardens and woodland around Tresco Abbey. Beyond the Gardens and on the eastern side of the island are extensive sand dunes and stretches of dune heathland. Other than rocky Gimble Porth, and the northern fringes of the island, the coastline of Tresco is mainly composed of dunes and sandy beaches.

General impressions of Tresco tend to be coloured by the presence of the Abbey Gardens and the farm, and especially the very large area of planted woodland that dominates the landscape. The island has a much more managed atmosphere than the other off-islands. This may be partly due to its history, but is mainly because almost the whole island is under one tenancy and has been mostly managed as one estate for a very long time. The present incumbent of Tresco, Robert Dorrien-Smith, took on the estate in 1973.

Even before the visitor reaches the Gardens their influence and that of the tenure of Augustus Smith and the Dorrien-Smith family is evident everywhere on Tresco. Apart from the gardens themselves, this influence is most evident in the sand dunes around Appletree Banks and Pentle Bay, where a hotch-potch of exotic plants have become established among the native dune species. Throughout the dunes are clumps of rhodostachys, the very similar Tresco rhodostachys Ochagavia carnea, bugle lily Watsonia borbonica, Agapanthus praecox

FIG 40. Old Grimsby Harbour, on the east coast of Tresco, June 2002. (Rosemary Parslow)

and red-hot pokers Kniphofia sp. growing among the marram, with balm-leaved figwort, Babington’s leek and sand sedge Carex arenaria. Where the dune has become flattened and consolidated, dune grassland and heathland have formed. Rushy Bank, just beside the road from the landing at Carn Near quay, is particularly interesting, with many unusual plants: orange bird’s-foot (found some years growing all along the edge of the concrete road) and small adder’s-tongue fern can be found here, and on the heathers nearby are rich growths of lichens, including some of the lungworts. Also beside the road at Carn Near there are banks of the extraordinary wireplant moulding itself over the other vegetation in a parody of topiary. Below the dunes, at the back of the beach, is one of the very few places where a few plants of the rare shore dock Rumex rupestris grow among the masses of the coastal form of curled dock Rumex crispus var. littoreus (see Chapter 9). As this section of coast is actively eroding, the future of this shore dock site is probably limited.

Tresco has its own heliport, opened in 1983 (Fig. 41). The island has a hotel, the first to be established on an off-island, and an established time-share business. With the draw of the Gardens, Tresco attracts more visitors than any of the islands other than St Mary’s. The heliport is on a beautiful mown stretch of grassland just beside the Gardens and is well worth looking at (but not when

FIG 41. Tresco, looking north from Oliver’s Battery across coastal dunes, the heliport and plantations, April 2005. (Rosemary Parslow)

helicopters are landing!). Like the airfield on St Mary’s it frequently attracts feeding waders and other birds. In autumn it can be one of the places to look for rare pipits and larks.

Towards the edge of the Abbey Pool (Fig. 42) the grassland is seasonally waterlogged so a band of marsh pennywort, lesser spearwort and other wetland plants extends all round the edge, and similarly around the south side of the Great Pool. When Borlase visited Tresco in 1756 he commented on ‘a most beautiful piece of fresh water edged round with Camomel Turf, on which neither Brier, Thistle, nor Flag appears. I judged it to be half a mile long, and a furlong wide.’ The chamomile turf is still there but no longer so extensive. The fine silt drawdown zone (much enriched by droppings from gulls and waterfowl) around the edge of the Abbey Pool supports a variable array of tiny wetland plants, depending on how much mud is exposed. During periods of drought some of the submerged aquatic plants become visible as the water level drops, and those growing on the mud spread quickly; six-stamened waterwort Elatine hexandra, for example, on these occasions can turn the surface of the mud bright red. Abbey Pool has a resident population of wild and domestic waterfowl, but like anywhere in Scilly it has seen some notable rarities at times.

Great Pool is much more extensive. The lake stretches right across the middle of the island, virtually dividing it in two. Surrounding Great Pool are reedbeds, areas of willow carr and some stretches of muddy foreshore. A painting of the lake and the surroundings by Augustus Smith’s sister Mrs Frances Le Marchant, executed in September 1868, shows the lake to be much more open than now, with the reedbeds only marginal (in King, 1985). The lake attracts many waterbirds, both migrants and the resident species, including gadwall, mallard and moorhen, and is an important feeding area for migrating waders. Among the reeds and in open patches along the foreshore are many common wetland plants, lesser spearwort, royal fern, bulrush (reedmace) Typha latifolia and yellow iris. The rattling songs of reed Acrocephalus scirpaceus and sedge warbler A. schoenobaenus can be heard from the reedbeds around the lake during summer. Good views across the lake can be obtained from the bird hides that are approached by boardwalks from the track north of the pool. One hide was erected in memory of the late David Hunt, the ‘Scilly Birdman’, who was resident on Tresco before moving to St Mary’s (see Chapter 4).

Much of Tresco is under agriculture, with pasture and arable fields (Fig. 43). The Tresco Estate currently runs a large herd of beef cattle. There is more tree cover generally, so that in autumn the island attracts rare migrant birds from

FIG 42. Tresco Abbey and Abbey Pool, April 2005. (Rosemary Parslow)

FIG 43. Arable fields and pine shelterbelt on Tresco. (Rosemary Parslow)

North America and elsewhere to tease the ‘twitchers’ who also flock to the islands.

Across the north end of the island is Castle Down, one of the largest areas of wind-eroded waved heath in the islands. This is a fascinating place, a plateau covered in low heather only about ankle height where the plants form long ridges as they are rolled over by the wind, with large patches of exposed bare ground between the waves. This type of heathland is not particularly species-rich but very atmospheric when the heathers are in flower and the whole place is full of the hum of bees. Besides bell heather and ling, there are several common species of grass, patches of English stonecrop, lousewort and bird’s-foot-trefoil, and lichens and mosses. The tread of many feet on the pathways across the Down, exacerbated by the eroding effect of wind and rain, have caused the braiding of many pathways. On some places on the paths are many shallow temporary pools with a transient wetland flora of starworts and lesser spearwort. Ruins of all that remains of King Charles’s Castle are on one of the high points at the western edge of Castle Down. Besides having a good population of ferns and sea stork’s-bill Erodium maritimum among its stones, the top of the castle makes a good vantage point for looking down into the Tresco Channel between Tresco and Bryher, and over the tower of Cromwell’s Castle on the headland below.

Gimble Porth on the eastern side of the headland is backed with low cliffs where gulls nest, and where some years there is a kittiwake Rissa tridactyla colony. Piper’s Hole is a deep cavern in the north-facing cliffs that can be approached by scrambling down the cliff, but a boat is needed to explore properly. It was very popular with holiday visitors in the past, and there are still postcards on sale showing it lit up with lanterns in the early 1900s. The cave consists of a long boulder-filled passage over 20m long leading to a large underground pool that can be traversed by boat (a punt used to be kept there in the past) to reach the inner chamber, which is over 40m deep. The cave system was investigated in 1993 by Philip and Myrtle Ashmole and specimens of the cavernicolous fauna collected, including a springtail new to Britain, Onychiurus argus, a troglophile species otherwise known from caves in Spain, France and Belgium (Ashmole & Ashmole, 1995).

The plantations and windbreaks originally planted by Augustus Smith and his successors are now coming to the end of their life. Much planting and felling has taken place to remove and replace the fallen timber. The woodlands are a mixture of planted trees and shrubs, escapees from the Gardens, as well as wild plants and ferns – a botanical recorder’s headache. Protected by the plantations are the ‘subtropical’ Abbey Gardens (Fig. 44). These are densely planted with a

FIG 44. Tresco Abbey Gardens, April 2005. (Rosemary Parslow)

great range of plants from countries with a Mediterranean climate, Australasia, the Canary Islands, South Africa and parts of South America (see Chapter 13). Visitors to the Abbey Gardens will also remark on the extraordinarily tame birds. In 2004 the entrance to the Gardens was updated and the tea room moved. If you visit the tea garden, kamikaze robins Erithacus rubecula snatch crumbs from your lips and blackbirds, chaffinches Fringilla coelebs and other birds will help themselves to cake from your plate. At certain times of the year the odd appearance of the house sparrows Passer domesticus, starlings Sturnus vulgaris and blackbirds – with bright yellow caps of pollen from drinking the nectar of Puya chilensis plants – has occasionally led to them being identified as something far more exotic! Another curious phenomenon in the former tea garden was the pecking of holes in the mortar of a wall by dozens of house sparrows, presumably seeking minerals after the manner of some tropical parrots.

Some of the exotic plants that grow around Tresco and the other islands are spread intentionally when people take cuttings or seeds to cultivate for their own gardens or pass around to their friends. Other plants escape from the Gardens by natural means, blown by the wind or otherwise carried accidentally, to end up elsewhere in the islands. Many of these are now established as part of the Scillonian flora. Perhaps the most unusual inhabitants of the Gardens are the two species of New Zealand stick insects that have been part of the fauna for about a century and are now found elsewhere around Tresco. Recently they have also reached St Mary’s. Also from New Zealand but less obvious are the woodland hoppers Arcitalitrus dorrieni, the little back amphipods that now live under every rock and log on the island. These are the most obvious and well-known examples, but there are many other insects and other invertebrate species that originally arrived as stowaways with horticultural material from abroad.

It is not just insects and other animals that have arrived in Scilly with introduced plants. A series of discoveries of rare introduced bryophytes began in 1961 when Miss R. J. Murphy discovered two unexpected liverworts on Tresco, Lophocolea semiteres, new to the northern hemisphere, and a new species of Telaranea that was named T. murphyae after her by Mrs Paton in 1965. Telaranea murphyae may have been introduced to Tresco from the southern hemisphere, as has happened with many other species such as Lophocolea semiteres and L. bispinosa, which are found only on Scilly and in Scotland, pointing to introduction with exotic plants. Besides Lophocolea bispinosa, found by Mrs Paton in 1967, was a moss Calyptrochaeta apiculata, later also found in East Sussex.

Since then, the moss Sematophyllum substrumulosum was first recorded as new to Britain on several of the islands (it has since been discovered to have been found, but not identified, in West Sussex in 1964). It was growing on the bark of Monterey pine in 1995 and again may have arrived with horticultural material (Paton & Holyoak, 2005). Other species recorded have included two mosses rare in Britain (Chenia leptophylla, Didymodon australasiae) and another that has become very widespread and common (Campylopus introflexus). By 2003 some of the alien bryophytes had greatly extended their ranges since the 1960s, with both alien Lophocolea species now widespread throughout the islands, and Telaranea murphyae had spread from Tresco to St Mary’s.

ST MARTIN’S

St Martin’s is a long narrow island with a mainly west-to-east axis. It is just over 3km long by 1.5km wide and covers 238 hectares if you include White Island (15ha). First impressions of St Martin’s are of long, empty white beaches (Fig. 45), intense turquoise sea, little clusters of houses tucked into the hillside and the strangely modern-looking (it actually dates from 1683) conical red and white banded tower of the daymark on high ground on Chapel Down at the eastern end of the island.

FIG 45. The south coast of St Martin’s, looking towards Tresco at low tide with the sand flats exposed. June 2005. (Rosemary Parslow)

As on St Agnes, the individual hamlets are named, rather unoriginally, Lower, Middle and Higher Town. They are strung out along the two-kilometre concrete road from Lower Town quay in the west to Higher Town Bay and New Quay, just over halfway along the length of the island. Beyond the farmland to the east the land rises up to the heathland on Chapel Down. Heathland also extends all along the northern edge of the island; only the insert of the dune grassland of the Plains and in some places wetter areas and a small pool break the continuity. Around the higher and exposed land are rocky promontories and cliffs where seabirds nest. Looking northeast from the cliffs on a clear day you can often see the cliffs of Land’s End, 45km away.

The southern shores of St Martin’s are mainly sandy, with sand dunes and just a few stretches of low cliff. Along the back of the dunes at Higher Town Bay are small bulb fields, frequently inundated by blown sand (Fig. 46). Indeed, much of St Martin’s is composed of blown sand that has been deposited over the whole top of the island in the past. This has led to some of the most impressive arable weed populations in Scilly being found here, including unusual species not found elsewhere in the islands. The sandy soils are also found around Higher Town Bay, where the cricket field is mown maritime grassland dominated by

FIG 46. Bulb fields with rosy garlic Allium roseum, whistling jacks and great brome, St Martin’s, May 2003. (Rosemary Parslow)

chamomile and several species of clover, including both suffocated Trifolium suffocatum and subterranean clover. The cricket field is low-lying and sometimes floods completely – perhaps not ideal for the cricket, but maybe why there is a superb show of chamomile most summers. The sand-dune areas around the quay and along the track ways are also places where some rare clovers are found. Suffocated clover can be difficult to find, as blown sand often drifts over the plants and completely buries them. It also flowers early in the year so has usually dried up and disappeared by early summer. In the corner of the cricket field is a small brackish pool, sometimes covered by the pretty white and yellow buttercup flowers of brackish water-crowfoot.

The dune system along the Higher Town Bay is typical of the NVC (National Vegetation Community) SD7 semi-fixed dune, relatively species-poor but with some interesting herbs such as balm-leaved figwort and Babington’s leek. In places bracken and the evergreen shrub Pittosporum crassifolium are invading the dune. A sub-prostrate form of wild privet occurs along the edge of the track. There are species of unstable foredune habitats such as sea rocket Cakile maritima where there are breaks in the dune. In summer this is one of the best places to see ringlet butterfly Aphantopus hyperantus, a recent arrival in Scilly. At the back of Lawrence’s Bay is a low cliff with a hanging curtain of the succulent Sally-my-handsome Carpobrotus acinaciformis, with its distinctive curved leaves and carmine flowers.

There is a series of rocky headlands with exposed rocks and thin soils along the north side of St Martin’s. Wind-eroded heather and gorse heathland cover the area between Top Rock Hill and the separate group of the Rabbit Rocks. The slopes below the hill are covered with bracken and gorse communities on deeper soils and a fringe of maritime grassland towards the coast. At Round Bowl both small adder’s-tongue fern and orange bird’s-foot have been recorded, but the dune is being invaded by heath and scrub species in this area. Pernagie is a group of small bracken fields below the hill with maritime grassland and a small area of heathland at Pernagie Point. The westernmost headland on St Martin’s is Tinkler’s Hill. The top of the hill has a cover of gorse scrub surrounding a smaller area of heather. At the bottom of the hill is heathland and coastal grassland alongside Porth Seal, where small adder’s-tongue fern may be found. Porth Seal is a geological SSSI on account of the raised beach and important deposits; pollen analysis from the site demonstrated the arctic tundra nature of the Devensian environment. Chaffweed Anagallis minima grows along some wet cart ruts across the heathland, but is easily overlooked. Turfy Hill may have got its name from the practice of cutting turf there formerly. Now the area is dominated by bracken communities, with smaller patches of heather and gorse. Small adder’s-tongue fern also occurs in this area, and one of the large species of New Zealand flax, Phormium colensoi, is well established and spreading.

Burnt Hill is the small promontory of open land on the north of the island between Turfy Hill and Chapel Down. It consists of mainly heather-dominated maritime heath and grassland. Inland from the promontory the heathland becomes dominated by bracken communities and a large area of gorse. Many areas of gorse and bracken are being managed to encourage the re-establishment of heathland plants. Chapel Down, where the land rises up towards the daymark, is dominated by waved heathland with scattered granite boulders and exposed granite platform very prominent towards the east. Many of the rare heathland plants, including small adder’s-tongue fern, orange bird’s-foot and chaffweed, are also found here, and this is also the territory of the St Martin’s ant Formica rufibarbis (see Chapter 14). There are steep cliffs around the edge of the headland with colonies of nesting seabirds during the summer. Above the cliffs are areas of bracken communities and gorse scrub. At Coldwind Pit near the coast there are a number of unusual aquatic plants growing in and around the pool.

On the north side of St Martin’s is an unusual open area called the Plains (Fig. 47). Formerly open grassland and low heath that had developed from dune grassland, it is becoming overgrown by gorse and scrub. Formerly small adder’s-tongue

FIG 47. North coast of St Martin’s, with the Plains and Round Island lighthouse in the distance. (Rosemary Parslow)

FIG 48. Mouse-ear hawkweed is one of the unusual species found in dune grassland on the Plains, St Martin’s. (Alma Hathway)

fern was widely distributed throughout the Plains until it became submerged by taller vegetation. Rare plants such as orange bird’s-foot and a patch of mouse-ear hawkweed Hieracium pilosella at its only known station in Scilly can be found here still (Fig. 48). Above the Plains among the dense thickets of common gorse it is also possible to find the strange pink nets of the parasitic heath dodder Cuscuta epithymum, another plant apparently only found in this one place in Scilly. The headlands and slopes along the northern side of St Martin’s also have spreading, triffid-like, populations of New Zealand flax, although control measures to reduce their numbers started in 2005. It is likely similar measures will be taken against another invasive alien, Myrtus luma, a myrtle-like shrub. Nearer the coast the dune is still active and sea spurge and Portland spurge are among the plants growing on the edge. A sand bar joins St Martin’s to the small, uninhabited White Island (see Chapter 7).

ST AGNES AND GUGH

Officially counted as one island, you could be forgiven for considering them two separate islands if you only saw them at high tide, when the sea covers the sand bar that links them. Most days there is a period when the bar is uncovered and it is possible to cross from Gugh to St Agnes. When the Hick family lived on Gugh in the 1970s, if the bar was covered by the sea, their two sons would sometimes have to row across in their small dingy – the Bar Bus – or miss getting to school on St Agnes if it was too rough to row (W. Hick, in litt.).

St Agnes is 1.5km long by about 1km wide, and Gugh 1km long by about 0.5km across. The land area they cover together is 145 hectares, of which Gugh is 37 hectares. The St Agnes coastline is very convoluted, so walking around the edge can take a suprising amount of time. In the days of the St Agnes Bird Observatory the daily round of the perimeter of the island, to check what birds had arrived overnight, was said to be five miles (8km), presumably including Gugh.

St Agnes

Most of what could be called the ‘middle’ of St Agnes is cultivated, mainly as bulb or arable fields, and it includes the three ‘towns’, Higher, Middle and Lower Town. Inland, St Agnes is a made up of a nucleus of small fields, farms and houses. Many of the fields have a good arable weed flora and between hedges are glimpses of delightful gardens full of exotic plants. Some of the garden walls have some of the best collections of lanceolate spleenwort Asplenium obovatum in the islands.

Wherever you are on St Agnes you are aware of the lighthouse perched on the hill in the middle of the island. The fat white tower dominates the landscape and appears to squeeze into every photograph (Fig. 49). St Agnes lighthouse was built in 1680, making it one of the oldest in Britain. Initially the light was supplied by a cresset, a coal-burning brazier, which stood on a platform in the lantern. This was not very efficient and was replaced by copper oil lamps and revolving reflectors in 1790. The wind vane on top of the lantern is 22.5 metres above the ground, 42 metres above mean high water mark (Bowley, 1990). When the Peninnis Head lighthouse came on line in 1911 the St Agnes light was downgraded to a daymark. The lighthouse keeper’s house is now a farmhouse. Just below the lighthouse hill is the former parsonage in a grove of trees. In migration times a constant stream of birdwatchers patrol the road outside the parsonage in the hope of seeing some really unusual bird that has been attracted to the dense cover in the garden (Fig. 50). Quite often, if they are lucky enough to glimpse a Pallas’s warbler Phylloscopus proregulus or some such rarity, it will flit across the road to disappear out of sight behind the massive wall of the lighthouse garden.

The northern part of the island is flat, low-lying and sandy, with a large meadow and a few former hayfields towards the rocky headland of Browarth. From the hill near the lighthouse you can see the almost perfect circle of Big

FIG 49. St Agnes: cattle grazing beside the lighthouse, May 2005. (Rosemary Parslow)

FIG 50. Pied flycatcher near St Agnes lighthouse. The gardens of the parsonage and the lighthouse attract many passage migrants. (D. I. M. Wallace)

Pool in the meadow (Fig. 51). Both the pools here (there is also a Little Pool nearby) are surrounded by grassland on low-lying land with the sea on two sides. The sea occasionally floods the meadow area, although recent sea defences have reduced the frequency. At other times the pools flood after heavy rain and the leat connecting Big Pool to the sea has to be opened at low tide to release the water. So, although usually freshwater, Big Pool may at times be slightly brackish. Around the pools are successive rings of vegetation: sea club-rush succeeded by saltmarsh rush, marsh pennywort, then creeping bent Agrostis stolonifera. Big Pool contains a few aquatic species, usually fennel-leaved pondweed but on occasion beaked tasselweed. The pool attracts very few breeding waterfowl, but is important at migration times. There are two resident Odonata species, common darter dragonfly Sympetrum striolatum and blue-tailed damselfly Isnura elegans. Frequently there are very large common eels in the pool and occasionally a heron Ardea cinerea will be seen standing in the pool, struggling to swallow one that has wrapped itself around its neck. These drawn-out battles between fish and bird can last for many minutes before the heron manages to swallow the fish or gives up and lets it go.

The meadow is also the local cricket pitch (as well as the tennis court and occasional helipad, especially in winter), with a species list that includes a

FIG 51. Big Pool and the chamomile cricket pitch, St Agnes, February 2004. (Rosemary Parslow)

number of rare and unusual plants including autumn lady’s-tresses, chamomile and several rare clovers. Most of the meadow sward around the cricket pitch is kept short by mowing, or elsewhere by rabbit and cattle grazing. The only site in Scilly for common adder’s-tongue fern Ophioglossum vulgatum is under bracken on the edge of the meadow. Nearby in the cart ruts left by tractors in the sodden turf can be found two species of spike-rush, slender spike-rush Eleocharis uniglumis and many-stalked spike-rush E. multicaulis, as well as another rarity, early meadow-grass, and tufts of the tiny club-rushes Isolepis setacea and I. cernua.

Just west of the meadow is the harbour of Periglis. Here are the former lifeboat house and the remains of the longest lifeboat slip in Scilly, although the shallowness of the incline meant it never functioned properly. Periglis is the main harbour for the islanders’ boats and is very sheltered from most directions. There is a low dune at the back of the bay with typical dune plants including sea-kale, sea bindweed Calystegia soldanella and strandline species where the sandy beach gives way to rocks and boulders towards the north in one direction and towards the quay in the other. Burnt Island is a small island that lies to the northwest of Periglis, joined to St Agnes by a reinforced boulder-filled gabion at Ginamoney Carn. The island is low-lying and rocky, mainly covered in maritime grassland, bracken and thrift. At the furthest extremity of Burnt Island is Tin’s Walbert, a large rock promontory that can only be reached at low tide.

To the east of the meadow is a large and very rocky bay, Porth Killier, and round the next promontory into Porth Conger is the main quay where passengers and freight are landed. South of the bar which links St Agnes to Gugh is the large inlet of the Cove, in which is found the very popular small bay of Covean. Besides attracting sunbathers to its warm, white sands, this can often be the stopping-off place for migrant birds, and sometimes there are willow warblers Phylloscopus trochilus, flycatchers and other birds flitting in and out of the tamarisks and snatching flies from the sand between the sunbathers. Just above the path from Covean to the Bar is a suite of fields with very sandy soils. Most of these have a particularly impressive arable weed flora and are often very colourful with corn marigolds, the ‘whistling jacks’ gladiolus Gladiolus communis byzantinus, fumitories and smaller tree-mallow.

The whole southern part of the island delights in the charming name of Wingletang Down, an extensive stretch of maritime heath with the twin bays of Wingletang Bay on the east and Porth Askin on the west, with the rocky promontory of Horse Point at the southern tip of the island where the land falls into the sea among short maritime grassland and a great chaos of tumbled rocks. Horse Point is almost separated from the rest of the island by the two bays and a narrow sandy neck of land, and it seems highly probable that one day it will eventually be cut through. In the middle of Wingletang Bay is Beady Pool, so named because it is where the small barrel-shaped brown beads from a seventeenth-century wreck have been found. At the back of the bay yellow horned-poppy, sea-kale and sea spurge surmount the low dune bank. Shore dock once appeared in a sand pit here (illicit digging possibly having exposed buried seed), but died out after a few years to reappear in a dune blow-out on the opposite side of the island beside Porth Askin; unfortunately it soon died out there as well. Wingletang Down is very important botanically: rarities such as orange bird’s-foot and small adder’s-tongue fern grow here, but it is also the only locality in Scilly for the very rare least adder’s-tongue fern, known in Britain only from here and the Channel Islands.

St Warna’s Cove is a rocky, south-facing bay on the west of St Agnes. This section of the coast is studded by a number of huge carns that continue right around the west side of the island (Fig. 52). The cove is overlooked by a curiously shaped rock called Nag’s Head on the heathland below the distinctive outline of the coastguard cottages (Fig. 53). And close to the shore is a stone-lined well that is possibly of great antiquity – it is reputed to be close to where the saint is supposed to have landed from Ireland in his coracle. Traditionally pins should be dropped in the well to encourage storms to drive a wreck ashore! Castella

FIG 52. Granite carns at St Warna’s Cove, St Agnes, August 2003. (Rosemary Parslow)

FIG 53. The Nag’s Head and the coastguard cottages, St Agnes, July 2002. (Rosemary Parslow)

Downs, an area of rabbit-grazed coastal grassland and rough heathland further to the west, is where the Troy Town maze, actually a pebble labyrinth, is set in the turf

Gugh

The island of Gugh might be described as the sixth inhabited island, but it is usually included with St Agnes. At low tide you can cross the Bar – a sand bar, strictly a tombolo – from one island to the other. Immediately at the end of the Bar is a small area of dune and dune grassland merging into the maritime grassland fringe around the island. A dense edge of sea-holly Eryngium maritimum marks the dune edge and both sea and Portland spurge are found here with sea bindweed and other coastal plants. The grass bank at the top of the Bar is one of the few places where wild thyme grows; earlier in the year western clover and early meadow-grass are also abundant here. This is another beach where the lesser cockroach has been found. The majority of the island is wind-pruned waved heath or dense gorse and bracken, with maritime grassland around the coastal fringe and on the north and southwest of the island. The summit of Gugh

FIG 54. Named after islander Obadiah Hicks is Obadiah’s Barrow, an entrance grave on Gugh, half hidden among foxgloves and wall pennywort. June 2003. (Rosemary Parslow)

is remarkable for the number of archaeological remains that are still visible: on top of the hills that form the spine of the island are a series of Bronze Age barrows, remnants of walls and a standing stone known as the Old Man of Gugh. Another well-known barrow, Obadiah’s Barrow, lies among dense gorse on the side of the hill (Fig. 54). For a small island there is an extensive list of rare and unusual plants, lichens and invertebrates.

The former Gugh farm occupies the central area just north of the neck across the middle of the island, between the two heathy hills that make up the body of the island. Two houses now stand there; they were built by a Mr Cooper in about 1920 and they have strange curved concrete roofs, like upturned boats, designed to withstand gales (Fig. 55). When Cooper died he was buried on the island. On the east coast of Gugh is a bay with dazzling white sand called Dropnose Porth. This curious name occurs elsewhere in Scilly, so maybe this is a humorous, descriptive reference to a nearby rock. Many of the granite carns and rocks have been eroded into fantastic shapes. There is a rock near Kittern Hill at the north end of Gugh that, seen from the sea, appears to have been sculpted into a likeness of Queen Victoria – though from a slightly different angle it becomes a Red Indian brave!

The sandy neck between the two hills formed from blown sand has an unusual flora. Growing among the bracken beside the path are dog roses Rosa

FIG 55. The tide just covering the Bar (strictly a tombolo) from St Agnes to Gugh, November 2002. (Rosemary Parslow)

canina and an unidentified yellow rose (presumed an escape from cultivation). Balm-leaved figwort is very common here, despite not being found elsewhere on the island. Another plant found in this vicinity is the alien Argentine dock Rumex frutescens. This grows on the edge of the abandoned sand pit, originally dug as a reservoir. In the field below the Gugh houses from about 1933 viper’s-bugloss Echium vulgare, wild mignonette Reseda lutea and common melilot Melilotus officinalis were found, although not all have been seen recently. Their presence in the field has been attributed to the use of shoddy (a high-nitrate manure deriving from the wool industry) before 1933. In the 1960s this neck area was close-cropped grassy sward, a good place to find mushrooms, where thousands of garden tiger Arctia caja caterpillars would swarm and cuckoos Cuculus canorus would arrive to feed on them, and where wheatears would also appear on passage (J. Parslow, in litt.). When myxomatosis reduced the rabbit population, the neck became overgrown with brambles and bracken, and the open turf and the grass tennis court that was there all disappeared from view (W. Hick, personal communication).

Along the top of Gugh, just above Obadiah’s Barrow, there was a heath fire in October 1972 that burned down through the shallow peat soil to the granite. As a result recovery has been slow and even now traces of the fire can still be seen, in blackened stems of gorse and bleached rocks. There have also been changes in the vegetation: yellow bartsia Parentucellia viscosa, for example, became very common in the burnt area and for a time English stonecrop and bird’s-foot-trefoil were dominant plants on the bare ground. Elsewhere heathland extends along the crest of the island, both north and south of the ‘neck’. Sometimes the rare orange bird’s-foot can be found on one of the larger carns in the southern half of the island. Here too are extensive colonies of lesser black-backed gulls Larus fuscus, herring gulls L. argentatus and a few great black-backed gulls L. marinus. It is wise to avoid the gull colonies during the breeding season, as the gulls are likely to ‘dive-bomb’ people who approach too close to their nests, and can be very intimidating.

Small adder’s-tongue fern has been found on at least one place on Gugh in the past, but has now not been seen for about a decade. This is not unusual with this group of ferns, so it could reappear again if conditions are suitable. Other rarities, for example golden hair-lichen, certain invertebrates and migrant birds are found on Gugh, just as they are on St Agnes. Manx shearwater and storm petrel Hydrobates pelagicus no longer breed, but on dark nights the shearwaters may still be heard revisiting their former haunts. For many years there has been a colony of kittiwakes under the cliffs, but recently the colony seems to have moved elsewhere.

Other than rabbits, there are now no grazing animals on Gugh. Cuckoo, the little donkey described by Leslie Thomas (1968), and Demelza the house cow both left in 1974. Cloven-hoofed animals failed to thrive on Gugh due to cobalt deficiencies in the soil, and the animals had to be given supplements (W. Hick, in litt.). Gradually the sandy neck area largely scrubbed over and there is no longer the wide swathe of short grassland that was there in the 1960s. Other farming projects since then have failed, so there are abandoned bulb and asparagus fields which have gone back to dense bracken, but where a flush of daffodils or wisps of asparagus fern still appear in season. Some of the abandoned bulb fields on the farm still have remnant hedges and, where the rabbits have been digging, some of the arable plants, along with both common and orange bird’s-foot, may reappear.

Cuckoo the donkey is a reminder that of all places in Scilly, Gugh often used to have the largest and noisiest population of cuckoos, apparently attracted by the extraordinary numbers of garden tiger and other large caterpillars found there some years. They would fly over the island and the Cove in spring in noisy display, their cuckooing echoing across the water until in the past some islander, driven demented by them, would take the law into his own hands and silence them with a shotgun.

CHAPTER 7 The Uninhabited Islands

Nine leagues from the farthest westerly point of England, there is a space of sea, which, in a circuit of seventy miles, embraces a very great number of small islands and rocks, a great part of which are constantly covered with water, and are the cause of more ship wrecks than happens perhaps in all the other seas of Europe together. These islands, which, by modern geographers are called the Sorlings, are, by English, more commonly known by the name of Scilly.

Cosmo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1669)

WHAT CONSTITUTES AN island in Scilly is subject to considerable difference of opinion. Each writer seems to have had their own idea as to how many islands there are, their views mostly coloured by their particular interest. In 1542 John Leland estimated there were 140 islands ‘that grew grass’; in 1607 William Camden described Scilly as having ‘near 145 islands covered with grass or greenish moss’, but this is rejected by Bowley (1990) on the grounds that many of the smallest islands only had lichen present. Bowley defined an island as being land surrounded by water at high tide, supporting land vegetation at all times and locally accepted as an island. He then lists 54 islands that fit his criterion of having land vegetation. For the purpose of this account the definition of an island has more to do with its natural history, so in this case the designation is essentially pragmatic: it includes any land obviously separate at high water where any kind of wildlife is present. This means all types of islands are included, not just those with higher vegetation growing on them, and it includes bare rocky islets that have colonies of breeding seabirds or are used as hauling-out places by grey seals.

Most of the uninhabited islands can be considered in three main distinct geographical groups, each having their own special character. Of course the name ‘uninhabited’ is something of a misnomer. Rather they are islands not inhabited by humans, as there are plenty of other inhabitants – birds, rabbits and other animals. At the furthermost southwestern extremity of the archipelago, completely exposed to the full force of the sea and the prevailing winds, lies the Bishop Rock, surmounted by the lighthouse (Fig. 56). Included in one group with the Bishop Rock, lying just 2.5km away, is the low mass of jagged rocks,

FIG 56. Bishop Rock Lighthouse towers 49 metres above its rock base. May 2005. (Rosemary Parslow)

reefs and small craggy islands that form the Western Rocks. Continuing the semicircle inwards is the larger island of Annet, low-lying and exposed but large enough to be well vegetated. The Norrard or Northern Rocks also lie to the west of the main group of islands and in the path of the worst storms from the west. Islands in this group are also extremely rocky and bare, like the Western Rocks, just the tips of a more extensive mass of granite reefs hidden below the sea. The harsh contours of the Norrard Rocks and the Western Rocks support very few higher plants, unlike the Eastern Isles and the St Helen’s group (including Round Island and Teän), which seem much softer islands with their gentler contours and vegetation cover. The Eastern Isles are the most sheltered of all the uninhabited islands, protected by the half-circle of the inhabited islands.

The duplication of names of rocks and islands in Scilly can be confusing. For example there are two Green Islands, two Plumb Islands, two White Islands, and so on. With rocks it becomes even more confusing: twelve Round Rocks, four Seal Rocks, five rocks called Biggal and many duplications in the names of bays and other features. Over two hundred islands have some known natural history interest, and the most significant of these are described below.

SAMSON, WITH PUFFIN, WHITE, GREEN AND STONY ISLANDS

Samson is the largest of the uninhabited islands, 36 hectares above MHWS in extent and just over a kilometre in length, consisting of twin hills linked by a sandy neck. Along the eastern side of the island are wide sand flats stretching across the shallow channel to Tresco. At low tide much of the flats is exposed, revealing the remains of ancient walls. The twin granite hills top 30 metres and have archaeological remains on their summits (see Chapter 3 for more about the history of Samson). Many of the lower slopes of the island are covered in deeper soils, now mostly under bracken. Ruins of several abandoned cottages from the time the island was inhabited can be seen, mainly on the north slope of South Hill. The island was finally evacuated in 1855. Some of the field walls are still standing, especially on South Hill, and are seen clearly when the bracken has died down. Other walls may have been robbed to provide stone for the wall of the deer park. Although the 3.5ha enclosure on South Hill was abandoned by 1860 when the deer escaped, the wall is still clearly visible. The few trees found on the island, tamarisk and elder, are associated with the former inhabitants, as are plants such as primroses that probably originated in their gardens. A sand bank at the northeast corner of Samson is the usual landing place for visitors, and very popular for sunbathing and picnicking. Behind the landing is an area of sand dune and low scrub with North Hill rising up behind (Fig. 57). On top of the hill and along the ridge is an area of heathland, much of which has been burned on a number of occasions, exposing the line of archaeological sites along the top. The slopes of the hill and much of the rest of the island are covered in dense stands of bracken. South Hill has vestiges of heathland, but

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