Writings for Brear

The children, asleep in the back after a 4 am start, aren’t missing much. Dawn is cloud-cover filling slowly and greyly with light. Driving west across Cornwall, the A30 grows each year a little straighter here, wider there. The ferry this time batters and bludgeons its way through a heavier sea than normal. Passengers bend double, recklessly, voluptuously abandon themselves to being ill. I disappear into my binoculars, see no dolphins, am stoical. Waves foam and pitch, cross-hatched with the annual flickering of shearwaters.

Every August we do some (generally more pleasurable) version of this. The ship between Penzance and the Isles of Scilly is still the same one I first boarded about the age my son is now. I liked one island straight away. To describe Bryher as England’s westernmost settlement makes it sound too bleak. Tresco, to its east, lies across a sheltered strait, more or less a sandy lagoon. The sea to its north and west, by contrast, is indeed jagged with rocks all the way to the horizon. The rest of the island group is to the south.

The Godolphin Report of 1579 takes up the story: ‘The Isle of Treskawe with som others… did belong unto the Abby of Tavistocke, it is said that Mr Christopher Coplestone canne show writings for the isle called Brear… The auncient rents I know not but if any were paid they were but puffyns or like small value.’ Puffins still pay the rent, after a fashion, or are a chief attraction of the ‘wildlife tours’ which carry visitors, weather permitting, in brightly ...