Scilly Isles

Palm trees grow between granite boulders on islands where the Gulf Stream keeps frost at bay and the light turns the sea a turquoise that belongs to the Caribbean, not Cornwall. The Scilly Isles sit twenty-eight miles off Land's End — five inhabited islands and over a hundred uninhabited rocks where the mainland feels like a distant concept.

Around 2,200 people live across the five inhabited islands — St Mary's, Tresco, St Martin's, Bryher and St Agnes — linked by an inter-island boat network whose schedule bends to tide and weather rather than the other way around. Tresco Abbey Garden, planted in the ruins of a Benedictine priory, grows some twenty thousand plants from eighty countries in a microclimate that rarely dips below five degrees. The surrounding waters, a Marine Conservation Zone, run among the clearest in Britain — over nine hundred recorded shipwrecks litter the seabed, including the 1707 loss of Sir Cloudesley Shovell's flagship in one of the Royal Navy's worst disasters. The small plane from Land's End takes fifteen minutes; the ferry from Penzance takes the better part of three hours; cars are all but absent once you arrive.