The Isles of Scilly are an archipelago of five inhabited islands and roughly 140 islets and rocks, scattered 45 kilometres off Land's End. They are the same Early Permian granite that forms the spine of Cornwall, an exposed crest of the Cornubian batholith pushed up out of the sea. The Irish Sea Glacier stopped just to the north during the last ice age, leaving the islands' geology unscoured and their tide pools full of strange evidence. At spring low tides, the channels between several of the islands turn into walkable sand flats. From Tresco you can wade to Bryher, to Samson, and on the lowest tides to St Martin's, treading on a seabed that briefly remembers it once was land.

Scilly sits on the same latitude as Winnipeg, Canada, where January routinely drops below minus twenty Celsius. Here, frost is a curiosity and snow makes the news. The North Atlantic Drift, an arm of the Gulf Stream, runs warm water past these granite outcrops and gives them the mildest annual temperatures in the British Isles. The lowland fields fill with narcissi from October through April, and Scillonian daffodils reach mainland markets weeks before any Cornish flower. On Tresco, the Abbey Gardens shelter species from South Africa, New Zealand, and Chile that would not survive a single winter forty miles to the north. Walk to the exposed northern end of the same island and the contrast lands hard: low heather and bare granite, sculpted by the gales that periodically tear in off the Atlantic.

During the English Civil War the Royalists used Scilly as a base for raids on shipping. In 1651 the Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp sailed to the islands to demand compensation and, receiving none, declared war on them in June. The Parliamentarians soon took the islands back. Centuries passed. Nobody, it seems, remembered to make peace specifically with the Isles of Scilly. The Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War, as it came to be called, ran on as a paperwork ghost until 1986, when the Dutch ambassador flew out to Scilly and signed a peace treaty. By legend, no shots were fired in all those centuries. The islanders, for their part, claim the unbroken bloodless record as a point of pride.

Because Scilly sticks far out into the Atlantic, it is the first European landfall for North American vagrant birds blown across the ocean. Twitchers, the obsessive bird chasers of British ornithology, descend on the islands every autumn hoping for a yellow-billed cuckoo or a buff-breasted sandpiper. The same isolated position also made the seas around the islands a graveyard. Hundreds of wrecks lie in the surrounding waters, including the Association, the Eagle, the Romney, and the Firebrand that died with Cloudesley Shovell in 1707. The pilot gig, a fast six-oared rowing boat, was developed to carry harbour pilots out to incoming ships through these dangerous channels. The annual World Pilot Gig Championships now bring crews from across Britain to race those same waters every May Day.

Almost all the freehold land on the islands belongs to the Duchy of Cornwall, the estate that funds the heir to the British throne. Augustus Smith leased the entire archipelago from the Duchy for twenty thousand pounds in 1834 and styled himself Lord Proprietor. The Dorrien-Smith family still holds the lease for Tresco. The Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust leases the uninhabited islands and untenanted land back from the Duchy for one daffodil a year. About two thousand people live here, governed by their own unitary council, the smallest in England. Roughly ten percent of the adult population works for that council. Tourism provides eighty-five percent of the islands' income. Vehicles do not require an MOT. Crime is so rare the place gets called the land that crime forgot.

Coordinates: 49.93°N, 6.30°W. St Mary's Airport (EGHE) handles fixed-wing flights from Land's End, Newquay and Exeter, with a 600-metre runway tucked into the island's high ground east of Hugh Town. Tresco Heliport (EGHT) receives helicopter service from Penzance. The archipelago spans roughly 15 kilometres east-west and is best seen from 3,000 to 5,000 feet on clear days, with the Garrison peninsula on St Mary's and Tresco's Abbey Gardens as the principal visual anchors. Watch for variable Atlantic weather; visibility can collapse quickly even when Cornwall is clear.