In 1565 Sark was a nest of pirates. Elizabeth I, eager to put a stop to that, granted the island to Hellier de Carteret, then Seigneur of St Ouen in Jersey. The conditions: settle the island with forty loyal men, give each one a plot of land, require them to keep muskets and be ready to fight. De Carteret laid out the plots and they have endured. The word tenement on Sark still refers to those forty hereditary landholdings, and the rules attached to them produced the most quietly eccentric legal system in Europe. The Clameur de Haro, a Norman custom for halting an act of trespass or harm by reciting the Lord's Prayer in French before witnesses and crying for the Prince's protection (the actual words are A l'aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!), was last invoked on Sark in 1970 over a garden wall, and again, unsuccessfully, on Jersey in 2021 to try to block an eviction.

Sark has no motor vehicles other than farm tractors. No cars, no buses, no scooters. Walking is first option. Up the steep Harbour Hill from Maseline jetty, a tractor pulls a passenger trailer called the toast-rack for one pound fifty. Horse-drawn vans run guided tours of the island for twenty pounds an hour. Bicycles are legal except on La Coupee and down the harbor hill, where the wisdom of restriction becomes clear the first time you stand on either. La Coupee is the celebrated causeway between Grande Sark and Little Sark, a ridge three hundred feet long with sheer drops on both sides. Before 1945, getting between the two halves of the island in a gale meant crawling on hands and knees against winds that locals said could literally pick a child up and throw them off. The current railed causeway was built in 1945 by German prisoners of war supervised by Royal Engineers, in one of the few constructive things to come out of the occupation.

For most of the twentieth century the public face of Sark was Sibyl Hathaway, the Dame of Sark, born 1884, died 1974. She held the seigneurship through the German occupation of 1940 to 1945 and is credited locally with keeping the island governable through that period, both with the Germans and with her own population. Her tenure included the small but bloody Operation Basalt in 1942, in which British commandos raided Sark, killed bound German prisoners, and helped provoke Hitler's Commando Order. The seigneurship passed through her family until 2016, when Christopher Beaumont, born 1957, became the current Seigneur. By that point the office had largely been ceremonial for nearly a decade. In 1993 the Barclay brothers, David and Frederick, media tycoons, bought extensive property on Sark including the entirely separate island of Brecqhou. They came into conflict with Sark's primogeniture rules and other feudal arrangements, sued, lobbied, agitated, and in 2008 the old feudal legislature, the Chief Pleas in its hereditary form, dissolved itself in favor of an elected council. The Barclays sold their Sark property in a huff and retreated to Brecqhou.

Today Sark's quieter celebrity is its sky. With no streetlights, no traffic, and only modest light from a population of around five hundred, the island became in 2011 the first designated Dark Sky Island in the world. Once full dark falls (in midsummer, after ten in the evening), the Milky Way stretches horizon to horizon. Sark Astronomical Society, headquartered in an observatory with the local reputation of looking exactly like a chicken coop, runs evening events when the nights are long enough. Below the cliffs are Venus Pool and Adonis Pool, natural rock basins refilled by the sea at high tide and warmed by sun in the shallow hours of low water. The cliffs themselves are riddled with caves, the Boutique Caves at the north end and the Gouliot Caves on the west coast among the best-known, accessible only at low tide and only to people careful about how the tide is coming. Sark is small enough to walk in a day, eccentric enough to keep telling stories about long after you have gone home, and dark enough at night that the stars can feel as close as the next house down the lane.