Qualla: Gugh

Gugh: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Davey, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk south from the church on St Agnes at low tide, and a strip of pale sand emerges from the sea. The tombolo is called The Bar, and for a few hours twice a day it joins one inhabited island of Scilly to another. The second island is Gugh, pronounced Goo, and it is barely a kilometre long, with two granite hills and a saddle of bracken between them. Two houses sit on the saddle, built in the 1920s and still occupied by a population that fluctuates around three. What you cannot see from the shore is what the island holds. Five entrance graves and fourteen cairns on the north hill. Nineteen more cairns and two more entrance graves on the south. A 2.7-metre standing stone at the foot of Kittern Hill called the Old Man of Gugh. An English Civil War battery built directly on top of one of the Bronze Age burial mounds. For an island most people have not heard of, Gugh has been holding human history for around four thousand years.

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Image: John Davey | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gugh: Stones the Bronze Age Left

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0. Scillonian entrance graves are a distinctive form of late Neolithic and early Bronze Age burial monument, found almost nowhere else in Britain. They are low mounds, edged by upright slabs, with a narrow chamber accessible through an opening in the perimeter. The acid soils of Sci...

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Image: David Lally | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gugh: The Old Man of Gugh

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rowan Legg, CC BY-SA 2.0. Down off the slope of Kittern Hill stands the only menhir on the Isles of Scilly that has ever been excavated - the Old Man of Gugh, a leaning granite slab 2.7 metres tall. The dig produced no features and no finds, which is a frustrating result but a common one for standing ston...

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Image: Rowan Legg | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gugh: Civil War, Kelp, and a Wimbledon Surveyor

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bohemian Arcade at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. On Carn of Works, halfway across the island, an English Civil War battery sits squarely on top of a prehistoric burial mound, and somebody at the time saw the original chamber and decided it would do nicely as a powder magazine. The deep-water approaches to Scilly mattered in the...

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Image: Bohemian Arcade at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Gugh: The Rats Are Gone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0. Brown rats came to Gugh the way they came everywhere in Scilly - on the wreckage of ships. For two centuries they bred among the storm-tossed flotsam and stole the eggs and chicks of the seabirds nesting in burrows on Annet, a kilometre west. Scilly's breeding seabird populations...

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Image: David Lally | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gugh: A Library of Wind-Pruned Heath

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Maidment, CC BY-SA 2.0. Most of Gugh is wind-pruned maritime heath - heather, bell heather and western gorse, low and tight against Atlantic gales. A small dune system above The Bar grows sea holly, sea spurge, sea bindweed and the western clover that is one of Scilly's rare floral signatures. In the so...

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Image: Sarah Maidment | CC BY-SA 2.0