Qualla: Wingletang Down

Wingletang Down: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nick Andrews, CC BY-SA 2.0. The fern in question is two centimetres tall. It comes up in winter, turns yellow, and disintegrates by early April - before most botanists are out walking. That is why it took so long for anyone to notice that the only place in Great Britain and Ireland where Ophioglossum lusitanicum grows is the wind-pruned heath at the southern end of St Agnes, on the Isles of Scilly. A young botanist named John Raven found it in March 1950. A hundred fronds, in a single square metre of heath. Above his head: 43 Bronze Age cairns, a saint's well of unknown age, and a beach where ceramic beads from a seventeenth-century Venetian shipwreck still wash ashore. Wingletang Down is small. It is also, layer for layer, one of the densest places in Britain.

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Image: Nick Andrews | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wingletang Down: The Saint Who Wished for Wrecks

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the western side of St Warna's Cove stands a stone-lined well of great age. The cove is named for a saint - Warna - whose name appears nowhere else in the Celtic calendar. She may not have been a saint at all. The name is suspected to belong, originally, to a Celtic water godd...

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Image: David Lally | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wingletang Down: Cairns on the Skyline

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Forty-three Bronze Age cairns have been recorded on the down. Some have granite kerbstones still in place; others are linked by old hedge walls. A cairn usually marks a burial site - a heap of stones above an interred individual, sometimes more than one. In the Bronze Age, the in...

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Image: Public domain

Wingletang Down: Heath, Sand, and the Three Adder's-Tongues

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harry Legg, CC BY-SA 2.0. The geology is austere: Hercynian granite, the same deep stone that builds the whole Scillonian archipelago, covered by thin skeletal and podzolic soils. On the higher ground, salt-laden Atlantic wind has 'waved' the maritime heath into low, sculpted cushions of western gorse, he...

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Image: Harry Legg | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wingletang Down: The Fight to Stay Open

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Bagshaw, CC BY-SA 2.5. Wingletang Down is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall and managed by the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust. It sits inside both the Isles of Scilly Heritage Coast and the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. As of September 2009 the SSSI was classed as 'unconditional recovering' - botani...

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Image: Daniel Bagshaw | CC BY-SA 2.5