Qualla: St Agnes, Isles of Scilly

St Agnes, Isles of Scilly: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrewrabbott at English Wikipedia, Public domain. If you stand at Troy Town Farm, on the western shoulder of St Agnes, you are standing on the southernmost piece of inhabited land in the United Kingdom. Eighty-five people live here, give or take, on 366 acres. The island has no hotel, one pub called the Turk's Head, one post office, an ice cream shop and a campsite. It also has a labyrinth of beach pebbles arranged in seven concentric rings that may be Viking, a lighthouse that no longer lights, a freshwater pool that recorded the 1755 Lisbon tsunami, and a playing field where children play cricket on summer evenings - over what may be the largest unmarked mass grave in the western British Isles. St Agnes is small. It is also, by acre, one of the most layered places in Britain.

Image: Andrewrabbott at English Wikipedia | Public domain

St Agnes, Isles of Scilly: The Troy Town Maze

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Bagshaw, CC BY-SA 2.5. Tradition says the labyrinth was laid out in 1729 by the son of the St Agnes lighthouse keeper. Tradition is probably wrong. The Troy Town Maze - it is technically a labyrinth, not a maze, since there is only one path - is made of beach pebbles arranged in seven rings around a ce...

Image: Daniel Bagshaw | CC BY-SA 2.5

St Agnes, Isles of Scilly: The Lighthouse

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Downer, CC BY-SA 2.0. St Agnes' lighthouse is the second-oldest lighthouse in Britain, built in 1680 by Trinity House and lit by a coal brazier. The tower stands at the highest point of the island, a daymark visible from every direction. It guided shipping through the dangerous southwestern approaches...

Image: Chris Downer | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Agnes, Isles of Scilly: The Playing Field

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrewrabbott at English Wikipedia, Public domain. In October 1707, the four ships of Cloudesley Shovell's squadron struck the rocks off Scilly and went down with nearly 2000 men aboard. The dead washed onto every shore on the south side of the islands. There were not graveyards big enough to bury them. According to the strong lo...

Image: Andrewrabbott at English Wikipedia | Public domain

St Agnes, Isles of Scilly: Wingletang Down and the Tsunami Pool

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The southern third of the island is taken up by Wingletang Down, a stretch of heather moorland and dune grassland that is one of the strangest pieces of botanical ground in Britain. It is the only place in the country where the fern called the least adder's-tongue grows - Ophiogl...

Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Agnes, Isles of Scilly: Birds from Elsewhere

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0. St Agnes is one of the great rare-bird sites of Europe. During the Scilly season, the few weeks of September and October when North American migrants overshoot their normal range and land here exhausted, birdwatchers crowd the lanes and parsonage gardens of an island they outnumb...

Image: David Lally | CC BY-SA 2.0