Christie used Burgh Island twice. It became Soldier Island in *And Then There Were None*, where her ten guests are picked off one by one, and it served as the setting for the Hercule Poirot mystery *Evil Under the Sun* in 1941. The 2001 television adaptation of *Evil Under the Sun* filmed on the actual island, closing a circle that opened sixty years earlier. The Pilchard Inn, the pub that still serves drinks on the island, traces its history back to 1336. It may have begun as guest lodgings for a medieval monastery, the rest of which is believed to lie beneath the current hotel's foundations. After the Dissolution, fishermen took over: pilchard fishermen, who used the old chapel atop the island as a 'huers hut' from which to raise a 'hue and cry' when shoals appeared offshore.

The island has been called many things. Early records knew it as St Michael's Island. Maps from 1765 hedge their bets with 'Borough or Bur Isle.' An 1908 postcard called it Burr Island. As late as 1947, the Ordnance Survey was still labelling it Borough Island. The current name, Burgh, is what's left after centuries of shortening. The Romans may have known the area too: tin ingots recovered from the River Erme estuary wreck, just a few miles east, suggest this stretch of South Devon was an ancient tin trading port. The 1st-century BCE writer Diodorus Siculus described tin being traded from a tidal island off the British coast, a passage usually attached to St Michael's Mount in Cornwall. The Erme ingots have made some historians wonder if he meant Burgh instead.

The hotel that dominates the island today was built in the 1930s and remains one of England's most complete Art Deco buildings: white walls, curved balconies, peacock-feather motifs, the whole vocabulary of inter-war glamour set against a backdrop of Devon weather. During World War II, the strategic position that drew smugglers and pilchard fishermen drew anxious British generals: anti-tank defences and two pillboxes were dug in on either side of the causeway in case German landing forces tried to use the island as a beachhead. An observation post went up on the summit. None of those defences were needed. The island sold in 2018 to a venture called Project Archie, and went back on the market in 2023 for fifteen million pounds.