The Dorrien-Smith family have leased Tresco from the Duchy of Cornwall since 1834, when Augustus Smith took it on and began building Tresco Abbey Garden into the ruins of a Benedictine priory. Tresco is the only privately leased island in the Isles of Scilly. Free-roaming red squirrels and golden pheasants wander its paths among subtropical plants that wouldn’t survive on most of the mainland. Boats land at New Grimsby or Old Grimsby, the island’s two small settlements, or you can fly there direct by helicopter from Penzance.
At the north end, above New Grimsby harbour, the ruined King Charles’ Castle was built in the 1550s to guard the channel, but its guns were set too high to hit ships passing below. After Parliamentary forces captured the islands in 1651, ending Royalist resistance, they built Cromwell’s Castle on the shore beneath it, a round gun tower better placed to do the job. Inland, Great Pool, the largest freshwater pool in Scilly, has ducks and waders on the water year-round.
