The smallest of Scilly’s inhabited islands, Bryher is home to around 80 people on a scrap of land you can walk across in under an hour. Boats land at Church Quay, or, at low tide, at the quay volunteers built for the television programme Challenge Anneka in 1990; from here it’s a short hop to Tresco or on to St Mary’s. Its west coast is fully exposed to the Atlantic at Hell Bay, where ships are said to have wrecked on the rocks for centuries. At the north end, Shipman Head Down is windswept heath and granite, its clifftop scattered with more than 130 Bronze Age cairns, stone burial mounds, where razorbills, fulmars, shags and Manx shearwaters also nest. To the south, Rushy Bay and Heathy Hill has a white sand beach and some of Britain’s rarest plants, including the dwarf pansy, found nowhere else in the country. The Pool of Bryher, where fresh water meets salt, is the only lagoon of its kind in Scilly.
© Derek Harper / Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0
