Home >  Lifestyle >  Travel

Sunday, July 07, 2002

By Catherine Watson, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

ISLES OF SCILLY - You'd think the residents of a place called Scilly would be extra-serious just to make up for the, um, silly name.

True, they do prefer that visitors call their home -- off Lands End, the southwestern tip of England -- "the Isles of Scilly," rather than "the Scilly Isles." But any pretense to somber propriety stops there.

I first noticed this on the short drive from the airport into Hugh Town, the islands' main settlement, when my bus passed a dark blue van with this motto on the hood: "Luke's Taxi -- as reliable as snow in August."

That would be cute anywhere, but in Scilly it's flat-out funny. Although the islands lie at the same latitude as northern Newfoundland, it doesn't snow in Scilly, not even in January. And it virtually never frosts.

This makes Scilly the English equivalent of Southern California, sort of. The warm climate gives the islanders -- who call themselves Scillonians -- a fittingly offbeat winter income.

		If you go... ... Isles of Scilly

From September to March, they grow spring flowers and export them to markets in London and mainland Europe, including flower-proud Holland. When I was there in late October, Scilly's white narcissus were just passing their peak, and rows of yellow narcissus were beginning to nod in the small, rock-walled fields.

"Most things 'ere start by accident -- includin' about 90 percent of the population," said Fred Elms, who runs one of Scilly's few tour buses.

The flower industry was an example he could prove. In 1868, Elms said, the man who was leasing the islands from the Duchy of Cornwall put a bunch of Scilly's off-season blooms in a hatbox and sent them to London for sale at Covent Garden. There's been a market for them ever since.

The rest of the year, Scilly's main crop is tourists, and even in October, there were still big bouquets of them around.

They looked like hunters, and, in a way, they were.

"Twitchers!" said Elms, as he maneuvered his red van around a clot of them. He practically spat out the word.

It's an unflattering nickname for bird-watchers, specifically the ones so dedicated that they plan vacations around the hope of seeing new varieties. And then stand around in muddy fields, squinting hopefully into scopes in the rain.

On Scilly, though, chances are good that they'll see what they came for. These islands -- 49 bits of uninhabited land and six bigger bits with human residents -- lie far enough out in the Atlantic to be a major resting point for birds migrating from the Arctic to Africa.

At dinner one night, a lone twitcher occupied the next table. "What you hope for," he said, with a nod to my accent, "are American birds." Sometimes, he said, one gets blown off course and alights in Scilly.

The museum exhibit I liked best concerned something the islanders used to be notorious for: scavenging shipwrecks. Cargo that washes ashore from wrecks traditionally is up for grabs, and there have been 900-some wrecks on the reefs and rocks around Scilly, as photos of half-submerged masts and bent smokestacks attested.

These frequent disasters even inspired a prayer, which Elms reared back and recited: "'Oh, Lord let there be no shipwrecks. But if there are shipwrecks, let them be in the Scillies, for the benefit of the poor islanders.' Must'a worked, 'cuz they averaged one wreck a month for 100 years."

Some people gravitate to the ends of the earth and stay. In a different life, I might have been one of them. The Falklands, the Faroes, even Easter Island, they're peppered with immigrants who found the place where they should have been born.

The same is true for Scilly. Elms was his own example: "I'm from a little village called London," he said, in a strong East-End accent. "Ya may 'ave 'eard of it." He said he came to Scilly 23 years ago, "an' I'm not goin' back."

I could understand why. These tiny islands are ringed with beaches, where the sand is cream-colored powder, and the water is as clear as anything in the Bahamas.

Except for flowers, tourism and some artists' studios, there's no industry, so the wind-scoured air of Scilly was as clean as any I'd ever breathed.

And it was certainly quiet. In the wake of Sept. 11, that was exactly what I needed. I found myself envying the immigrants who now call Scilly home.

What little action there is is in Hugh Town, on St. Mary's, where 1,600 of the islands' 2,000 people live.

In summer, that many tourists may pass through Scilly in a day, and there's a lot for them to do, including shopping. But by October, many shops and art galleries in Hugh Town, where I stayed, had closed for the season. Those still open were shut tight by 4 or 4:30 p.m., so there was nothing to do until dinner except walk.

Fortunately, St. Mary's is only three miles at its longest and 200 feet at its narrowest, so I could get pretty far.

Slow strolls took me quickly around the star-shaped fortress at the top of Hugh Town, and over to Old Town, where former Prime Minister Harold Wilson is buried and where the remains of a rock pier from the Middle Ages still jut into a miniature crescent-shaped bay.

Winter would be quieter still, the proprietress of my bed-and-breakfast assured me. Despite "very nice" Christmas decorations around town and the famous lack of frost, she said, even the end-of-year holidays don't lure tourists to the Scillies in winter.

So what do residents do? She smiled. "Winter's when we get to know all the new people who've moved to the islands over the summer."

One windy, gray morning, I went down to Hugh Town harbor and boarded an open launch for the boat ride over to Tresco, another island renowned in Britain for its privately owned Abbey Gardens. The other passengers were mostly twitchers, huddled in waterproof jackets against the chill breeze.

A few had brought their dogs (which aren't allowed on St. Mary's beaches in summer). Mild as the Scilly climate usually is, on this morning even the dogs were shivering.

Remarkably, there was also a young British family planning to go snorkeling. The dad wore short-shorts; I could see the gooseflesh on his thighs from the other side of the boat. But he turned out to be the most appropriately dressed of us all.

Scilly's weather is highly changeable, the ex-Dartmoor man had told me: "What England gets, we get first." That day, southwest England's forecast was for sun.

Sure enough, within an hour of our arrival on Tresco, the sky had cleared to brilliant blue, and by the time I'd walked around the coastal path to the Abbey Gardens, it was actually hot.

That explained why the gardens were full of exotic plants from India, South Africa, even Arizona, which in the Scillies qualifies as equally exotic. I wandered for a warm, tranquil hour among thriving cactus, rustling palm trees and the clacking stalks of a bamboo grove. Intriguing as the plants were, however, I liked the tone of this carved stone warning sign better:

Garden visitors, it advised, must "abstain from picking flowers and fruit, scribbling nonsense and committing such-like small nuisances."

It was just whimsical enough to be, um, perfectly Scilly.