2
Having looked my own flying carbon footprint in the eye – and discovered that aviation really was as bad as all those activists made out – I decided that my first flight-free forays should prioritise the domestic. Yes, I was going to swap the far-flung destinations of yore for my home turf, the UK, making the most of glorious local landscapes that didn’t require a passport to visit.
It coincided with being released from lockdowns during the pandemic, meaning any escape from my home city of London was imbued with an intense sense of the exotic. I wasn’t alone in this staycation spree – hundreds of thousands of Brits were doing the same. Prevented from heading off to their usual international haunts by draconian travel restrictions, holidaymakers were forced to rediscover the beauty that lay within their own borders. It was a trend reflected around the world, too, as citizens were encouraged to spend their hard-earned cash on domestic trips – Australia’s tourism campaign tagline even being ‘holiday here this year’.
Well, I may not reside in Oz, but there was no reason I couldn’t take up their mantra. Wanting to make the most of my new-found freedom, I planned two trips – one north, one south – on the UK’s two sleeper train services, to explore this green and pleasant land for myself.
A highland’s life for me
You know that feeling, when it’s getting properly dark and you’re in the middle of the Scottish Highlands and you’re walking down a woodland path strewn with obstacles and over the side is not-quite-a-sheer-drop-but-almost and you haven’t encountered anywhere to wee in seven hours and it looks like you still have another eighty minutes to walk before you get to the next town but now it’s all got to be done in the pitch black?
No? Well, I do.
We’d set off on the first section of the Loch Ness 360, a fairly new walking and cycling trail that goes all the way around the world’s most famous loch, almost as soon as we’d reached Inverness on Saturday morning on the Caledonian Sleeper (the overnight train that trundles all the way from London to various Scottish destinations). We strolled through town – itself a gorgeous proposition, complete with pedestrianised streets, a brooding castle on a hill and that stone that Scotland specialises in, the type that seems to radiate light through the gloom. And all of it carved in two by the mighty River Ness, its clear-looking waters surging through the landscape at breakneck speed. Next, to our hotel for the night, to drop off the bags. And then out we went, setting off at around 9.45 a.m. for what had been described to me as ‘a walk of around four hours’ by a person who shall remain nameless, who’d helped me organise the trip.
My companion Oli and I are amateur-level but enthusiastic walkers, and so four hours had sounded like a fine distance. Not long enough to worry too much about provisions – we didn’t even pack any water, like the optimistic fools we are – or to think about what facilities there might be en route. We had good footwear, layers, hats, phones – but not much else. Luckily, I also had tissues (not a whole lot of toilets in the Highlands, as it turns out).
Off we set, hearts lifted by the winter sun that occasionally deigned to peek coquettishly out from the churned-up cloud and illuminate the world with fresh touches of beauty. The River Ness was set all aglimmer; the distant hills looked bright and inviting. We steadily made our way out of the city, buoyed up by the immediacy of everything. The evening before we’d been in London. Now, here we were, somewhere completely different, without having lost a single day. In fact, by travelling overnight on the train, it felt like we were living on stolen time – there’d been no leaving work early or getting up at the crack of dawn to get to the airport. The whole thing was a world away from flying, where the stress of the journey taints the first eight hours of nearly any trip with mild exhaustion.
We clambered our way up through Dunain Community Woodland at a leisurely pace, stopping to sit on benches and look out over the handsome city we’d left behind. After all, we didn’t need to rush. We would reach our destination, Drumnadrochit, by mid-afternoon for a late lunch; neither of us was particularly hungry, so there was no need to curb our natural pauses. Or so I thought.
After walking for a couple of hours, I checked Google Maps, just to review our progress. Drumnadrochit was five hours away, it told me. Hmm. Right. I tried not to panic. Maybe the map was wrong? (The map wasn’t wrong.) Maybe we’d gone the wrong way? (We hadn’t.) Maybe we’d walked so slowly we’d actually gone backwards? (Obviously not.)
I looked back at the walking instructions – and there at the top, three little words sat clear as day, as if mocking me: ‘Route: 20 miles’. Ah. So, yes, about seven hours then. The woman from the Scottish tourist board team who’d told me it was four, I deduced, had typed ‘Inverness to Drumnadrochit’ into an online route finder, and it had shown her the most direct way to get there along the road – not the official footpath.
Now, an extra three hours might not sound like a lot, but anyone who has done much walking will know it makes quite a big difference. Especially when you haven’t taken any snacks. Still, we were young(ish) and nimble and we’d just slept on a train, for crying out loud! What couldn’t we do?
Walk seven hours before the sun went down, as it turned out.
One night prior, I was tucked up in bed, breathing in a lavender-scented pillow mist. Exhausted from a long week, I patiently waited for sleep to take me into her clutches – but she struggled to oblige. I was way too wired to go gently into that good night. Well, it could have been that, or it could have been the fact that the bed in question was rattling back and forth as we blazed along at 80mph.
It was my first time on the Caledonian Sleeper – in fact, it was my first time on any sleeper train. I defy anyone to not be overcome with childlike excitement when they step on board one. The tiny rooms with their tiny bunk beds! The nifty toilet-slash-wetroom! The little bag of assorted miniature toiletries left on the bed!
Every activity feels fresh and fun in a way that it simply does not in a hotel, from plugging in your phone to charge in the purpose-built wall-mounted holders, to filling in the breakfast card and hanging it on your door (if you forget to do this within half an hour of the train’s departure you WON’T GET BREAKFAST, we were told multiple times, imbuing the task with a thrilling sense of urgency).
The Caledonian Sleeper got a much-publicised upgrade in 2019, and we were ensconced in one of its new suites, the most luxurious room type, complete with double bed. Our procurement of superior digs was less to do with the fact that I am a fancy journalist lady, and more to do with the fact that the bed in my original bunk room had been sopping wet due to some unspecified leakage issue.
Curled up in an actual double bed really did give the impression we were sleeping in a hotel room, albeit one in a noisy, moving hotel. But, as much as anything, it was the pure novelty that kept my brain from slowing down and switching off. ‘I’m on a train, I’m on a train, I’m on a train!’ kept hurtling around my head in time with the rattling carriage. I did get stretches of slumber here and there, but every time I came to I’d feel a sucker punch of excitement in my gut all over again as I remembered ‘I’m on a train!’, before sighing contentedly and rolling over.
The next morning, after a bracing shower over the toilet, enlivened by the free toiletries, we shuffled blearily along to the breakfast car to gobble down eggs royale – which were, in my travelling companion’s accurate description, ‘the best eggs royale I’ve ever eaten on a train’ – and surprisingly good coffee. And then, the part I’d been waiting for: we watched the sun slowly creep over the Highlands in all their bleakly majestic glory. The far-off dull blue of Loch Moy; the green, russet, brown, sand-coloured blurs as we clattered past fields and rolling hills, all eerily quiet but for the rat-a-tat-tat of the train on the track. I considered it more than a fair trade for a mediocre night’s sleep.
I haven’t seen nearly enough of the British Isles. I’m always painfully aware of this when I get sent lists of new openings and events in the UK, and my eyes skitter down the list, alighting at one place in ten that I’ve actually been to.
Perhaps this is true of everyone, no matter their country of origin – that we’re always looking for greener pastures. Why stay at home when you could bugger off somewhere different (and, crucially, hot)? But Britons are surely more susceptible to it, purely because of our island status; we’ve always looked to the sea, searched beyond our confines to discover the new.
Given this outward-looking quality, it’s hardly surprising we embraced aviation with such gusto. For a long time, going on holiday has been synonymous with hopping on a plane. But that is starting to change, according to the various UK tourist boards – especially amid the coronavirus pandemic, which turned foreign travel into a kind of Russian roulette.
In 2019, British residents spent just under £11 billion on 46.4 million holiday trips in England – a 3 per cent increase compared to 2018. Taking Britain as a whole, spending in 2019 was £14.5 billion on 60.5 million holiday trips, up 4.4 per cent from the previous year.1 Far from being a win for Little Englanders everywhere, this could actually be a positive step in reducing our reliance on aviation; travelling closer to home doesn’t have to mean you’re closed off to new ideas and experiences. Far from it.
And this is a nation that deserves to be explored. What it lacks in dramatic scenery – towering mountains, insanely hot deserts, raging rivers – it makes up for in sheer loveliness. Don’t worry, I’m not going to burst into an impromptu recital of ‘Jerusalem’, but the more I do see of Britain, the more invested I become. For a small island with an un-extreme climate, we pack in a hell of a lot of diversity, although the whole ‘green and pleasant land’ bit is undoubtedly our strong suit.
When you’re a travel writer, people will often ask you the ‘best’ place you’ve ever been (impossible to answer) and, next, the most beautiful. I can tackle this second question more easily, but I know the asker will never be happy with the answer. They want to hear it’s somewhere far-flung, untouched and – cliché of clichés – ‘off the beaten track’.
‘I once saw this pod of dolphins dancing in a hidden waterfall in Tibet, and it was the most … powerful moment of my life,’ I can feel them willing me to say in a quiet, serious voice while gazing broodingly off into the distance.
The real answer is the Lake District. It’s such an obvious one that it feels embarrassing to even admit to. I mean, Wordsworth even wrote that bloody poem about it. There were no international flights involved, no jetlag, no ‘exotic’ locals (well, not in a good way). But when I spent a few days in Keswick, next to Derwentwater – in my opinion the prettiest of the lakes – I fell so deeply and utterly in love with the landscape that I kept trying to hug it. I would stroke the bark of trees and the undersides of leaves as I went, like an infatuated lover, stopping every thirty seconds just to stare. It was like when you fancy someone and you just can’t stop looking at them – my eyes tried to pull away but kept getting drawn back to the water, a pair of iron filings to a magnet.
I’ve had similar experiences elsewhere in the UK and Ireland too: the lush green banks of the River Wye; the remote wildness and pristine beaches of the Aran Islands; even the low-key charm of the bluebell woods at Ashridge in my home county of Hertfordshire.
But I’d never been to the Highlands before. In fact, to my deep shame, I’d only been to Scotland twice, once on a swift city break to Edinburgh, the second time to Paisley to watch a bagpiping competition (don’t ask). Given my total lack of exposure, I’ve always carried a special place in my heart for Scotland based on nothing more than an instinct. This time, I wanted to go as high as I could get in a single weekend. All aboard the Caledonian Sleeper: last stop, Inverness.
The interesting thing about the Highlands is that there really is nothing there. People say it’s ‘wild’ and ‘remote’, but it’s hard to visualise what they really mean by that until you experience it for yourself, especially if you hail from a city. Well, let me tell you – they ain’t lying.
By ‘wild’, they mean you’ll find yourself picking pine needles out of your pants because you squatted for an al fresco wee and the rotten tree stump you were using for stability snapped off and sent you rolling around in the undergrowth on your bare arse. By ‘remote’, they mean you won’t see another living soul for six straight hours and will seriously wonder if the apocalypse has already happened and 28 Days Later-style zombies will start lumbering out from the trees.
Yet that is part of its attractiveness: the emptiness; the stillness that blankets the landscape, save for the screeching wind; the subtle differences in the million shades of brown, ranging from mocha and café au lait through to burnt orange and umber tinged with dusky purple. The stark peatlands and moors give way to softly undulating hills rendered dark green by their coverings of pine trees. It’s not pretty, exactly – rather, it’s striking, hauntingly so. Bewitching in its lonely grandeur.
The wind pummelled us as we went, but the sun occasionally shone too, and the expectation of adventure hung heavy on the horizon. There’s an intangible magic about walking – the steady rhythm of it, the fact you can’t distract yourself with Netflix or Twitter – that means you feel the rare pleasure of being wholly present. It opens up your mind to the now, and allows you to talk to someone – really, properly talk to them – without your attention being snagged by something digital every thirty seconds.
Over the course of the day, our conversation roamed wildly from issues of life and death to first kisses and dreams for the future. At one point, I described the entire storyline of an unfinished teen-fantasy novel I’ve been working on for the last decade in painstaking detail (and identifying at least three gaping plot holes in the process). But the topic we came back to most frequently was how much we’d like a mug of something hot – a drink to wrap our hands around as a buffer against the biting cold. And maybe some chocolate. Or a sandwich. Or crisps. Or just a lump of sugar. Anything at all, really. And then, the most amazing thing happened.
I don’t think you can fully appreciate the miraculous nature of what occurred next unless you’ve been walking for six hours without coming across so much as a Londis. For 24km all we’d seen was the very occasional house or sheep wandering the barren landscape. Then, all of a sudden, a flurry of hand-painted fluorescent signs appeared in the woodland.
‘Hot chocolate, this way!’ they read. ‘Cheese toasties!’ ‘Homemade cake!’
I thought I must be hallucinating – this, surely, was a mirage, the Highlands equivalent of seeing an oasis in the desert. That, or we were about to be abducted by the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Perhaps I wouldn’t have sold out my entire family for a Turkish delight, but I almost certainly could have been persuaded in exchange for a brownie and a nice sit down.
We kept following the signs, in a state of near hysteria by the time the arrows pointed us through a wooden archway into a clearing set up with picnic tables and benches adorned with charmingly mismatched teapots. Two other tables were occupied – one by a man with his bike, the other by a mother and her toddler.
A man who had the look of the Highlands about him – an unkempt, russet-red beard and wide, pale eyes – made his way over slowly.
‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting – I’m run off my feet today!’
I looked, puzzled, at the two other tables of customers, before it dawned on me. Ah, we’re on Highlands time now. This was the busy period.
‘Do you have any menus?’ I asked. A shake of the head.
‘Just tell me what you’d like.’ A pony? Gold-flaked profiteroles? A lift to bloody Drumnadrochit?
‘Hot chocolate?’
‘Coming right up. Would you like a piece of my wife’s homemade cake, too?’
We answered in the affirmative before he’d even finished speaking.
Off he ambled, returning some time later with two steaming mugs and a generous wedge of sponge cake delicately flavoured with lemon. It was all I could do to refrain from ripping the plate out of his hands and sinking into it, face first.
Presented with our bill, I was unsurprised to find it a little steep – £4 for an instant hot chocolate made in his kitchen, £5 for the cake – but I couldn’t blame him. Talk about a monopoly: he could have charged five times that and still had customers. It turned out he was an enterprising farmer who had taken advantage of the walking trail running right past his land by offering a few treats and drinks to hikers and cyclists, which I can only applaud him for. Heck, he was offering a public service.
‘Leave the money on the table,’ he said, inadvertently sounding like a hooker in a movie. ‘I know in London you just wave a bit of plastic and they move the numbers around in Zürich. But you’re in the Highlands now.’
Move the numbers around in Zürich?
Still, I rather enjoyed the idea of being a fancy Londoner, with my fancy London ways, and a private banker on call in Switzerland to tinker with my investments. We left the money on the table. I’d have to speak to Klaus about it later; get him to transfer some funds from the Cayman Islands account. But it was worth it.
Onwards and downwards. By the time we actually saw the fabled Loch Ness the sun had almost ducked behind the horizon. We only caught glimpses of her through the trees, the blue-grey vastness just hinted at. And then she was gone, her inky depths hidden by the coming night.
Whenever I’ve gone walking in the dark before, I’ve been properly prepared, with my trusty head torch on hand (well, head) to guide me. All I can say is, thank goodness for smartphones. They all come with built-in torches these days – you can rail against big tech all you like, my friend, but you can’t tell me that’s not useful.
We soldiered on in the pitch black, trying to stay upbeat when faced with the fact that Oli’s mobile was almost out of battery and we still had ninety minutes to go. The woodland path we were on was uneven and treacherous; I kept thinking about what I would do if I slipped and fell down the steep verge over the side of the path as a ‘fun’ way to pass the time.
The benefit of playing this mental game was that it helped distract me from the overwhelming terror of being in the middle of the woods at night. It was a kind of primeval fear – I couldn’t even say what I was scared of, exactly. Perhaps it’s inbuilt from our ancient ancestors being ambushed in the woods by predators and rival tribes. Or maybe it’s the rather more modern fear imbued by the Blair Witch Project. All I know is, trees make weird creaking noises in the dark and it makes me want to curl up in a ball and wait for death.
But, just like watching a horror film, there was a tang of exhilaration beneath the paralysing fear. I could feel my heart pumping in my chest, strong and urgent, my senses heightened so that every rustle of leaf, crack of twig and expletive of Oli as he tripped over a tree root seemed ten times too loud. The second we got clear of the trees, the words ‘that was spooky!’ tumbled out of my mouth, unbidden. It’s not a word I use often, and thank goodness.
Thoughts turned to what we would drink when we reached Drumnadrochit, so close it was palpable now: definitely a whisky or two, something peaty with the taste of liquid smoke, to warm us up from the inside out. I had visions of a cheery, cosy pub, aglow with lamps and filled with beaming locals who would instantly befriend us. Maybe there’d be a fire! And music! It was Saturday night, after all.
We finally crossed the bridge into Drumnadrochit, the promised land, the hallowed place we had made an eight-hour pilgrimage to reach. We walked down the dark, silent street to the Fiddlers Highland, a pub with food that had come recommended. Its windows were black; its door locked. A sad little sign informed us that it was closed for the winter: ‘come back in March!’ Oh.
We gloomily trudged our way back up the road to the only place in town that was open: the Loch Ness Hotel, which had a café-bar out front. We were the only customers.
Still, this was Scotland, and so even a mediocre café with red plastic seating boasted a whisky selection better than you’d find in most London gentlemen’s clubs. The hospitable barman, clearly about as rushed off his feet as our bearded friend had been earlier, let us taste as many as we liked before committing, and we sat down in a daze of tiredness and ecstasy that our labours were complete. We massaged our feet back to life; cheeks grew rosy from the sweet warmth of alcohol. I looked back on our day and felt a flicker of, yes, it could only be described as pride. There’s a masochistic pleasure in doing something slightly difficult and uncomfortable, if only for the luxury of stopping and rewarding yourself afterwards.
Clearly, we weren’t going to find much else in Drumnadrochit; sustenance would have to be sought in Inverness. We boarded one of the excellent but diabolically infrequent buses back, and found ourselves returned to civilisation in a mere half-hour. Yes, after walking for eight hours, the journey by motor vehicle took thirty minutes. It was a touch disheartening.
Thankfully, things could only get better. That cosy pub I’d been fantasising about, all fire-warmed and filled with beaming locals? We found it. And it was every bit as good as I’d imagined.
Scottish nationalists are very different from English nationalists. Wander into a pub of the latter by mistake, and you might try to make yourself seem smaller, avoiding looking anybody directly in the eye lest they interpret it as a challenge and hit you with a blunt instrument. Wander into a pub of the former by mistake, and they’ll most likely buy you a drink and give you a blue and white flag to wave while you all sing along to the Proclaimers.
That’s what happened to us, at any rate. We were firmly installed in a warm nook of MacGregor’s bar, sipping on Thistly Cross cider and cheerfully heaping steaming forkfuls of vegetarian tatties and neeps pie into our faces while a guitarist and singer worked their way through covers of Scottish bands. The owner had told us that there had been a Scottish independence rally in the area during the day, so things might get a bit ‘lively’. What this translated to was a lot of full-throated singing, cheery, non-discriminatory flag-waving and some impromptu chants of ‘f*** Boris’ that we happily joined in with.
We ate, drank and screeched that we certainly would walk 500 miles and then, quite possibly, walk 500 more (accompanied by flashbacks of our day’s never-ending hike). But soon even the creaking trees became a distant memory as two new musicians took to the floor, one of them being the bar owner, Bruce MacGregor. He had mentioned that he ‘played a bit’. It turned out he was actually one of the most gifted Highland fiddlers in the world, storming through traditional Scottish tunes as if the violin were an extension of himself – an extra body part he just happened to be able to pick up and put down at will.
Accompanied by a skilled guitarist with a deep, resonant singing voice, he segued effortlessly between languorous ballads and fast-paced jigs. On the former, the audience joined in, misty-eyed, singing along to songs they’d clearly known since childhood; the latter prompted them to jump to their feet and dance in whatever space they could find. It made me feel a little wistful. These were old Scottish folk songs, passed down for generations – what was the English equivalent? Chumbawamba’s ‘I Get Knocked Down’? ‘Three Lions on a Shirt’?
I came to from my reverie to discover Bruce was telling the entire place that there were ‘two special guests up from London’ and that they were to make us feel welcome. The pub fell deathly silent for a moment; all heads swivelled towards us. A beat passed. And then a cheer went up.
People came over to introduce themselves and ask about our visit; a woman insisted we get up and dance with her as the musicians started up again.
All of this is not to say that Scottish nationalists are perfect or that there aren’t any issues with the movement – just that no one wearing an England flag as a cape has ever invited me to jig or asked with genuine interest how my day was. And that’s a crying shame.
After the excitement of Saturday, Sunday was a rather pedestrian affair (albeit without the walking). A day of mooching, if you will, spent wandering Inverness town in pleasant aimlessness amid the unrelenting drizzle. At some point we decided to start drinking because, hey, Scotland! And a lazy, meandering pub crawl ensued, which took us from more down-at-heel establishments (at one, a round of three drinks cost less than £3), to the more sophisticated Malt Room, where battered leather sofas and dim lighting were the perfect backdrop to perusing its hundred-strong whisky menu.
Slightly swaying, we fought our way back through the biting cold for a final dinner at our hotel. Scallops with black pudding; blackened miso cod: we ate ourselves into a stupor, all the better to fall asleep on board a moving vehicle.
On the return journey, we were back in our bunk beds, adorably tucked and cocooned. It was like being back in the womb – if the womb had come with a constant rattling soundtrack loud enough to wake the dead. I even resorted to reading the painfully obvious tips from a sleep expert helpfully provided in the Caledonian Sleeper literature (‘don’t have a coffee just before bed’ and ‘limit your screen time’ – most enlightening). Once again, my body had other plans. But it didn’t matter. Every time I woke up, I remembered ‘I’m on a train!’ Every time, I felt overcome with childlike excitement all over again.
Sleep is overrated. Sleeper trains are not.
Carbon comparison
230kg of CO2e for a return flight London Gatwick–Inverness2
74.6kg of CO2e for a return train London Euston–Inverness3
Carbon emissions saved: 155.4kg of CO2e
No man is an island
Train tickets in the UK can be some of the cheapest you’ve ever seen – but only if you know exactly when and where you want to travel in advance, preferably so far in advance you haven’t even been born yet. For those of us who are less prescient, the price can leave you peeling your jaw off the floor ten minutes after purchase.
Such was the case when I bought tickets to try the second of Britain’s two sleeper trains: the fetchingly titled ‘Night Riviera’ service from Paddington to Penzance, operated by Great Western Railway. I was desperate to get away after months of going nowhere thanks to Covid-19 restrictions. And where better for feeling like you’re ‘away’ in the UK than the Isles of Scilly, a little archipelago nearly 50km off the Cornish coast with, thanks to the Gulf Stream, a temperate microclimate, white-sand beaches, palm tree-lined paths and seas a shade of aquamarine more closely associated with a Caribbean-inspired Instagram filter?
A well-meaning woman from GWR I’d been emailing about the upcoming trip had made me a reservation, so I pootled along to the station to pay for and pick up the tickets. I wish I’d asked her how much they would cost beforehand, if only to spare the National Rail customer service rep the embarrassment of having to watch a grown woman holding back tears.
‘How … how much?’ I croaked in disbelief, my throat doing that tightening thing that makes your voice go all wibbly.
The man looked uncomfortable and tapped the screen again. The journey came to nearly £200.
Now, Penzance is a long old way, I’m not disputing that. What I am disputing is that the outbound journey, booked a month in advance, cost £146. For a seat. Not a fancy deluxe berth, just, y’know, a chair. The strange, hard-to-understand rules of British rail tickets mean there are a certain number of cheap fares and, once they’re gone, you’re at the mercy of the ticket-pricing gods. Unlike with flights, where you can shop around for the best deal, the nature of trains means you generally don’t have this option. Don’t like the price? Don’t travel. There is usually no competitor to give your business to instead, swanning out of the metaphorical shop like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman while shouting, ‘You work on commission, right? BIG mistake. Big. Huge!’
It is hard not to compare train prices with air fares when you’re new to the flight-free life. I chuntered to myself all the way home from the station: ‘I could’ve gone to Mallorca for that price. To Morocco. To New York (well, in the heyday of Norwegian’s super-cheap fares). I’m not even leaving the country!’
But part of the shift in mindset needed to stop flying long term is to nix the comparisons. No good can come from it. Flying is almost always cheaper – it’s why so many of us do it – and it will continue to be so until governments start taxing aircraft fuel and make a concerted effort to truly encourage terrestrial travel. This actually happened in Luxembourg – the government made all public transport (trains, buses and trams) free in 2020 to ‘alleviate heavy congestion and bring environmental benefits’.4 Unbelievable scenes. But until change is more widespread, it’s best to steer clear of flight comparison sites and just look at rail prices as their own stand-alone (and, at times, inexplicably expensive) thing.
The rest of the process did not go smoothly either. There was a mix-up with the ferry, meaning I would have to stay an extra day. There was talk of staying a night in Penzance. I was forced to take another trip to St Pancras station and change all my train tickets on one muggy, sweaty evening, as the queue behind me grew and I felt twenty pairs of eyes on me, all belonging to people who wished me dead.
I say all this not to put you off, which may indeed be the end result, but to illustrate a potential difference between travelling by land and sea and travelling by air. Although the former can be much more difficult, by the time I set off, I cannot stress enough how invested I am in this trip. I am more than just excited – I feel the desperate need to enjoy every second of the experience, having already put so much time, money and energy into the whole affair. I’m the guy at the roulette table who’s already lost his car, remortgaged his house and used up his child’s university tuition fee fund, and now has no choice but to push all his chips into the middle of the table and declare he’s ‘all in!’ on black fifteen. I’m in too deep; not having a good time simply isn’t an option at this stage.
It’s in stark contrast to flying for work, when I’d book months in advance and then totally forget I was even going away until the day beforehand. There was no jeopardy; I never felt I had much to lose if the trip was a little lacklustre. And where’s the fun in that?
I depart on a Thursday night, arriving at Paddington station at the thrillingly late hour of 11.30 p.m. – the train sets off at quarter to midnight. The Night Riviera (which I keep prefacing with ‘Murder on the …’ in my head, an excellent title for a never-written Agatha Christie novel) is a proper sleeper train, with sleek little berths, complete with individual beds all trussed up with duvets and pillows, sinks that double as nightstands, charging points and a range of lighting options.
They do look nice and cosy as I trundle past all the carriages, with train staff popping their heads out like benevolent sprites offering to help me find my cabin at regular intervals. I shake my head grimly. There is no cabin ahead of me tonight. Only seat.
After all the hoo-ha changing the tickets, I decided, out of respect for my dwindling bank balance, to forgo comfort and embrace a life of spartan endurance on the outbound leg. I’d surmised that, on board a sleeper service, they wouldn’t just be any old seats – they must surely be special ones, extra comfortable and reclinable, maybe with a footrest, possibly with a natty reading lamp.
On all points I was sorely mistaken. It’s just … a seat. Hard, unyielding, upright. The one gratifying feature is that the entire carriage contains just a handful of passengers when I travel, meaning there’s an entire row to lie across, provided you don’t mind the occasional ‘excuse me’ as people come up and down the aisle.
I don’t usually think of myself as a high-maintenance traveller, but after I’ve taken out my neck pillow, executive moulded blackout eyemask and wireless headphones, I concede that, actually, I might just be. I decide I can make my peace with it. You have to embrace life’s luxuries once you’re past the age of 30 and accept the fact that there are no prizes for ‘who spent the most uncomfortable night’.
One fun thing I quickly learn is that they leave the lights on in the carriages the whole night through, like it’s some kind of Vegas casino. It is a fitting punishment, I suppose, for being too stingy to shell out for a cabin.
And yet, for all this, for all my grumbles, for all my regret that I hadn’t stumped up the readies for a bed, I feel the stirrings of … could it be … exhilaration? Call me a masochist, but after years of working as a travel writer, when the concept of ‘slumming it’ was so alien as to be from an entirely different galaxy, there is something inherently adventurous in setting up camp in my little corner of the carriage. And, you know what? I only go and sleep. I wake to find the sun slowly rising over the Cornish countryside, pastorally pleasing in the half-light, and treat myself to a blueberry muffin and iced coffee.
We pull into Penzance and I’m off along the harbourfront, ready to carpe this diem like nobody’s business.
The Vomit. That’s what locals call the Scillonian III, the ferry that makes the three-hour journey between the mainland and the islands. It’s an … accurate nickname. I do not partake in the festivities, but I can tell that several other people do based on the harassed-looking staff members running around with mops and buckets, and the sharp tang of antiseptic in the air.
It’s all part of the boat’s design; it has to have a shallow hull in order to avoid running aground when it docks at the islands, and the result is a vessel that is more ‘go with the flow’ than any boat has a right to be. The ‘flow’, on a stormy day, being a bucking broncho ride tossed unceremoniously from wave to wave. I pride myself on my strong stomach and, at first, I rather enjoy the rolling sensation, the rise and fall as we dance across the peaks and troughs. In fact, it has a soporific effect, and I find myself merrily drowsing for the first few hours. Then, forty-five minutes before we’re due to dock, the rollicking churn becomes rather more serious. I engage in some deep breathing that makes it sound like I’m in the early stages of childbirth; I try to distract myself by watching episodes of The Durrells on my phone and sternly tell myself that I have never been travel-sick in my life and I am not about to start today, pal. Somehow it works, and I manage to step onto dry land with my breakfast still in my stomach, a feat so Herculean I am somewhat surprised to find the local community aren’t waiting to applaud me as I arrive.
Again, this tale may make you think, ‘Why on God’s green earth would I do that rather than flying?’ And again, I say that, strangely, this mode of transport comes with unexpected benefits. It bakes into the traveller such a deep relief to be standing on solid ground that Scilly seems even more of an absurdly idyllic paradise than it already is. It inspires the feeling that you really have travelled somewhere – that you are far from home, about to intrepidly explore somewhere fresh and unknown. And, most importantly, it instils a very real sense that you have somehow earned your right to be there.
The place is sublime. My mum tells me before my trip that she and my dad had visited, just once, as newlyweds, and had planned to return. ‘But it’s not easy,’ she warned. ‘People go back every year, and they book their accommodation twelve months in advance. You’re basically waiting to fill dead men’s shoes.’
It’s a morbid thought, but it only takes me an afternoon to see what all the fuss is about. Even in the rain, the pale sand seems to glow as if illuminated by an internal light source; flowers the colour of flaming sunsets and flamingos pop even brighter against overcast skies. I scramble around St Mary’s, the main island and my base for the trip, marvelling at the way the weather changes on a dime, from incessant drizzle to eye-watering sunshine and back again, and at the tropical-looking vegetation on succulent- and palm tree-lined paths that make me feel I’ve stepped into a Jurassic Park sequel. Yes, I think to myself sombrely. I could wait for someone to die to come back here.
And then there’s the sea. When the sun peers out, bam! – the water becomes the piercing turquoise of a chlorinated pool. Shut your ears to the south-west accents and you really could be in the Bahamas. Until you dip a toe in, at which point the fantasy promptly unravels.
‘It’s colder than it looks,’ says Bryony Lishman of Adventure Scilly, who’s kindly agreed to accompany me on a brief swimming tour from Porthcressa Beach. She is sensibly trussed up in full wetsuit, as is her husband Nick, while I stand shivering in a swimming costume. ‘A lot colder. It’s the gulf stream – it means our waters are chillier than Cornwall’s.’ It shouldn’t make sense, but it’s true: as we make our stately procession into the big blue, the icy zip and zing of the water dances around my ankles. I’ve done enough outdoor swimming that I take a perverse pleasure in the pain of this experience: the gasp as the cold first hits you; the shock that somehow jolts the landscape into laser-sharp focus.
The hard part is always ducking your head under, but the rewards are instant – I find myself squealing with delight at the uncanny clarity, feeling like I’m exploring an underwater gallery as we paddle. ‘Look at that!’ one of the three of us will cry every few minutes upon spotting a fish, an anemone or a weird, translucent worm, and the others will join them, taking in wide lungfuls of air to prolong our stay beneath the waves. I’m as happy as a seal pup, ducking, diving and rolling as my limbs waft free as seaweed and forget they were ever numb to begin with.
Part of the joy of Scilly is island hopping, and I follow my porpoise instincts to two of the other options, St Martin’s and Tresco. Speeding across the Celtic Sea in one of the transfer boats is like the ocean equivalent of an Uber – just slightly damper from the spray. Each island has its own distinct personality, everyone tells you, and they’re right. St Martin’s has a quiet, rugged elegance. She’s shy yet charming, reserved yet blessed with an unfussy, untamed beauty. The main street naturally winds its way from Lower Town to Middle Town to Higher Town (displaying a very literal approach to place naming), all within the space of twenty minutes on foot. But for such a small strip there are all the essentials – the Seven Stones pub with an expansive terrace offering unblemished sea views, the Island Bakery serving up doorstep baps stuffed with local crab – and plenty of non-essentials too, from a workshop making bespoke Scilly-inspired jewellery to a tiny art cooperative selling homeware created by craftspeople on the islands.
With each new enterprise I make a nuisance of myself by asking the owners the tiresomely inevitable question: ‘How did you end up here?’ It’s something I find endlessly fascinating about island living, as if the inhabitants had all accidentally washed up on shore, like flotsam and jetsam after a shipwreck. The population here are modern-day pioneers – most of them upped sticks and moved to what feels like the edge of the world, the last populated place to the west of Britain until you hit America, in a community so tight-knit it could end up feeling as much like a noose as a safety net.
What amazes me most is how many residents’ origin stories are totally and unashamedly mad. The owners of the pub, Emily and Dom Crees, were locked into the London commuter rat race until about seven years ago. They loved coming to Scilly on holiday, saw the local boozer on St Martin’s was up for lease and just … went for it.
‘Were you in the pub business before?’ I ask.
‘Nope,’ says Emily. ‘Well, we were experts at drinking in them. That’s got to count for something.’
Knowing no one on Scilly and nothing about the industry, they abandoned their lives on the mainland, threw themselves into life as part of a 150-strong community, and taught themselves the business along the way. They now have a toddler, who bimbles around the terrace merrily chuntering to herself. By all accounts, they don’t seem to regret their decision to execute a life swap of epic proportions.
The other place to get a drink on the island boasts a similarly bonkers tale. Having dug my toes in vanilla-coloured sand and submerged myself once more in the freezing aquamarine sea, I warm up with a tour of the island’s very own vineyard. I learn about grape varieties and terroir as I amble up and down vine-strewn hills, before new owners James and Holly Falconbridge treat me to a tasting of their red, white and rosé wines while their black cat curls and uncurls contentedly in a patch of sunlight.
‘We came here on holiday last summer and loved it,’ says Holly. ‘The owners of the vineyard were planning on retiring, and asked if we knew anyone who’d be interested in buying a winery. And we thought … why not us?’
Again, they had no connections to the islands. Again, they had no background in wine. When I meet them, they’ve been on St Martin’s for less than a year, having moved over just before Covid-19 swept the globe, plunging them into a winter of self-isolation while living out of a teepee onsite. Yet they’re two of the most upbeat people imaginable. ‘It was a strange start, but it’s going really well now,’ enthuses Holly. ‘We’ve pretty much sold out of the rosé!’
Like I say, the place attracts pioneers. As I whip back across the waves on the return boat to St Mary’s, the late-afternoon sun setting the sea ablaze with twinkling lights, I wonder whether I could ever be that brave – or that crazy.
‘It’s nice. It’s very … manicured.’ This is the most common response when I tell locals I’m visiting Tresco, the one Scilly Isle that’s privately owned. I instinctively feel the sting beneath the choice of word. The unsaid implication is that it’s not truly wild, like its peers. It’s not rugged. It’s not authentic.
At least, that’s how I bitchily interpret it. The islanders are far, far too polite to say such things themselves. ‘Manicured’, as it turns out, is incredibly apt. There’s a full team of staff here to manage the land, to prune, to pare back, to maintain. It has the same ecological make-up as the other islands – peroxide blonde beaches, sea-blasted heathlands peppered with plum-hued blooms – but the feel here is like stepping into another world. Tresco is essentially car-free, and so the smooth paths encircling the island are populated only by bikes, pedestrians and electric buggies, used by employees to get around or transport well-heeled guests hither and thither. I opt to cycle, trying and largely failing to use the prettily illustrated map to navigate by, and eventually just settling for following my nose.
The place is as quiet as the other islands – visitors have a way of magically melting into the scenery after they get off the boat, and I sit on one expansive beach, so wide I can’t fully see where it ends, without encountering another soul for over an hour – and yet there are perhaps more spots where guests congregate, creating a holiday-resort vibe. In fact, the island is largely given over to luxe holiday cottages and accommodation, and I start to notice certain commonalities between the guests: hale and hearty families, ruddy-cheeked and flushed with good health as they bike along in uniform lines, dressed in identikit ‘Isles of Scilly’-branded rugby shirts that look vaguely nautical. As the day goes on, the more the impression galvanises that Tresco, more than anything, resembles a very, very fancy Center Parcs.
It doesn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that this is the island most frequented by celebrities – Amanda Holden is a regular, often spotted pausing to take frequent selfies while on her daily constitutionals, while Kate, Wills and their royal offspring all came for a break just before my visit. Judi Dench, too, is allegedly a fan. I can certainly see the appeal; it is impossible to imagine any celebrity, no matter how famous, getting mobbed here.
The island also holds one truly magical attraction you can’t find elsewhere: the Abbey Garden. Presided over by curator Mike Nelhams, who strolls about the grounds like a proud peacock, the site takes visitors all over the world, gathering together 20,000 species of plant from eighty different countries, including Brazil, New Zealand, Myanmar and South Africa. The effect is a bombastic yet well-ordered mix of flora. ‘We’ve introduced red squirrels, too,’ Mike tells me. ‘There are no grey squirrels on the islands, so we thought, why not?’ Twenty were delivered by helicopter to much fanfare in 2014; there’s now an estimated population of more than a hundred.
We climb to the top of the gardens for a view of lofty palms backed by the sea in the distance, and he tells the story of how the garden came to be. Augustus Smith, a man who has been described as ‘the saviour of Scilly’, turned up on the islands in 1834, bought the lease from the Duchy of Cornwall and set about creating all sorts of infrastructure that would revolutionise the place. His reforms weren’t always popular – a good deed never goes unpunished – but he was the first in the UK to introduce mandatory schooling for children up to the age of 13, alongside setting up a magistrates’ court and repairing and building new roads and quays. He set himself up in Tresco Abbey and somehow managed to find time to establish the garden, ordering plants from Mediterranean climates all over the world. Another example of a pioneer forging a new path. There must be something in the water.
Back on St Mary’s that evening, I follow up a few G&Ts by chomping down on perfectly salted chips on a bench by the beach at sunset. The sky is aglow with marmalade streaks and my eyes swim with unbidden tears that splinter the light into 1,000 kaleidoscopic colours. The overwhelming beauty meets my booze-addled soul and I come loose at the seams a little. I muse that, although you have to be a little crazy to move to the edge of the world, perhaps you have to be even crazier to live the life that most of us are prisoner to – concrete-laden, hemmed in, grey and jaded. Surely we’re really the mad ones? I wonder if I’m onto something.
Or if, far more likely, I’m just pissed.
The days pass fast in paradise. I go from touring a high-welfare duck farm with a family so warm and hospitable that I consider begging them to let me set up camp in their herb garden and live off the land, to horse riding on the beach, the swoosh of tails and grind of hooves on shingle the only sounds; from learning about the islands’ bronze- and iron-age heritage while standing in the remains of a 2,000-and-something-year-old village now covered in grass, to chowing down on exquisite smoked seafood pâté, seared scallops, and so much fresh Scillonian crab that I feel I might start growing pincers.
There is a feral and unbridled majesty to Scilly and, although I’ve not left the UK, I certainly feel like I’m in another country, if only because each new person I meet is bursting with a friendliness that is the most foreign thing of all. That’s the thing about small communities. There isn’t the option of anonymity; you cannot go unnoticed. And so they breed openness and tolerance, excitement for new faces and affection for old ones. The people here truly rely on each other, even without the extra pressures of a pandemic – relationships are forged in fire and must be trusted upon to hold fast when things get tough. If no man is an island, then who could understand that better than those who inhabit them?
The journey back catches me off guard, like I’ve slipped into a parallel universe where everything is just a degree off kilter. The Vomit is there in all her flat-bottomed glory, waiting to be boarded – but she lilts gently on a sea that’s calm as a millpond. I take a seat on deck this time, and marvel at the cornflower blue of a sky that’s mirrored by the water, the sun warm on the back of my neck. The boat barely moves, bar a slow, drawling kind of rocking, like a woman swaying her hips in time to her favourite song. I oscillate between trying to read my book and scouting for pods of dolphins, which often jump alongside the boat during clement weather. Unlike the endless outbound leg, now the time seems to elapse at double the frame rate. It’s such a pleasurable passage that I feel a pang of disappointment when the mainland drifts into view.
Still, there’s more journey to come and, after a hefty meal and large goblet of red wine in Penzance, I’m ready for the final stage. I’ve finally been kind to myself and booked a bed on the sleeper; the type that’s soft and flat, with a pillow and duvet, and comes in a room with a little sink and a place to put your things. I cannot tell you how luxurious it feels after my previous stint in cattle class – only that I fall asleep smiling and I wake up still smiling in London, where the train has been pulled in for ninety minutes. The Night Riviera is just so darn accommodating that they let you stay on and kip, only asking that you vacate your berth by 6.45 a.m. I float across London on a cloud of fine memories; at 8.30 a.m. the same morning I’m back at my desk, ready to work, the islands already feeling like a distant, technicolour dream.
Every time I close my eyes, I see dizzying flashes of turquoise sea and porcelain sand projected across my lids. Every time I close my eyes, all those pioneers seem less and less mad.
Carbon comparison
180kg of CO2e for a return flight London Gatwick–Newquay;
60kg of CO2e for a return flight Newquay–Scilly
= 240kg of CO2e5
39.9kg of CO2e for a return train London Paddington–Penzance;6
22.6kg of CO2e for a return ferry Penzance–St Mary’s7
= 62.5kg of CO2e
Carbon emissions saved: 177.5kg of CO2e