‘A TASTE OF SCILLY’ STORIES

ISLAND FISH

The Bryher family who have been fishing for crab and lobster for generations

LOCATION Island Fish, Bryher 49.9556° N, 6.3517° W

FIND OUT MORE www.islandfish.co.uk

The world is your lobster - at least, if you’re a Pender. The Pender family have been fishing for lobster and crabs off tiny Bryher for as long as anyone can trace, and still today three generations of Penders venture out in search of the tasty crustaceans. The oldest is Mike Pender, now 78; the youngest, his grandson Shamus, who is 22 but has been hauling pots since he was was 10. Between them is Mike’s son Mark, who has fished since he could walk, and in 2015 decided to join forces with his sister Amanda to make fishing work as a business. They christened it Island Fish.

The fishermen may all be chaps, but two of their boats are named after female family members. Mike’s, which he built 43 years ago, is called Emerald Dawn, after his mother’s favourite colour and Amanda’s middle name (with its early riser connotations). Mark’s is Dorothy Ethel, the names of his two grannies. “Women are the unsung heroes,” he says. “They’re the ones who do the really hard work - the processing.”

Pristine fresh, the porcelainwhite crabmeat flies off the deli counter at Island Fish, and what isn’t sold there is snapped up by the islands’ restaurants and merchants on the mainland. Others enjoy it in Amanda’s famous crab sandwiches and dressed crab, or in mother Sue’s Crab Quiche. “When people buy whole cooked crabs and take them home, they appreciate how much hard work is involved in picking out the meat,” says Amanda. “Usually the next time they buy the picked meat!” It’s pocketfriendly too. Because there’s no middleman, she can sell it at less than half the price it would sell for on mainland Cornwall.

Amanda and Mark have come a long way since 2015. “When we started, we sold our shellfish from the front porch of my house. Mark and I had both given up well-paid jobs and used up our savings to set up the business, so it was a real leap of faith. ¯

TROYTOWN FARM

How ice cream and milk saved a tiny St. Agnes farm after its flower business lost its bloom

LOCATION Troytown Farm, St. Agnes 49.8915° N, 6.3537° W

FIND OUT MORE www.troytown.co.uk

Troytown Farm, at the tip of the one-mile-long island of St. Agnes, is England’s last hurrah before it tumbles into the ocean for good. Next stop west Newfoundland. Troytown is literally the end of the road.

Wandering through the boulder-studded fields above the farm, I meet the providers of the rich milk that’s the base of my ice cream: 11 cows, a mix of Jersey and Guernsey (for creaminess) and Jersey-Friesian crosses (for quantity). Sam Hicks, whose family runs the farm, introduces them: Gem, Daisy, Snowdrop. Unlike industrial milkers which are often exhausted by the age of three, Troytown’s keep going until around 12, so are very much part of the family. Sam or his father Tim milk them two by two in the tiny parlour, then carry the milk in stainless steel pails a few steps down the track to the dairy where it’s churned into ice cream. In winter, milking reduces to once a day, then drops off altogether before the cows calve in early summer.

Troytown is the perfect circular business, with farm feeding campsite and campsite feeding farm and family. But it’s not just about economics, says Sam. “Families holidaying here love seeing where their milk and ice cream comes from - our cows - and we give them an experience they never forget.”

But if you fancy joining the happy campers, you’ll need to get in quick. From January onwards, the phone is red hot with people booking pitches. “People often reserve a year ahead, so it can be hard to get in,” says Sam. “We hate turning people away, but we don’t have water or power supplies to grow any bigger.”

Troytown now has over 40 flavours, with vanilla the bestseller. The most local is its rose geranium, flavoured with essential oil produced from plants grown at Tim’s old family home, Westward Farm. Equally delicious is the salted caramel, using seasalt from St. Martin’s. ¯

SCILLONIAN HONEY

One woman’s mission to save Scilly’s near-native honey bee

LOCATION Tresco 49.9537° N, 6.3519° W

FIND OUT MORE www.tresco.co.uk

I'm with bee buff Jilly Halliday, whom I’ve already secretly nicknamed Queen Bee. And the ‘world’ she’s referring to is Tresco Abbey Garden, in which we’re standing, which explodes with sub-tropical plants from over 80 countries. Even in late winter, it’s a riot of colour, with flaming torches of jagged-leaved aloes, pretty protea rosettes and tiny pink manuka blossoms. Acacia longifolia is flowering too, its furry yellow lambstail blooms trembling in the breeze, and nearby I spot silky sil-ver trunks of eucalpytus.

With a honey as special as this, it’s little surprise its price tag is pretty special too - around £15 for an eight-ounce jar. “People say ‘How could you pay that for a tiny jar of honey?’,” says Jilly. “But this is liquid gold.”

In all, Tresco has eleven hives, eleven being the ‘magic’ number that Jilly believes a Scillonian island can sustain; fewer and you risk inbreeding, more and the bees risk depriving other pollinators of forage. “Honey is a wonderful thing,” she says. “But we mustn’t produce it at the expense of other insects which also feed on the nectar and use the pollen to fertilise a wide range of plants. It’s about balance.”

To achieve that balance, in 2021 Jilly established The Scillonian Honey Bee Project. Another aim was to save Scilly’s native dark honey bee. “Our honey bees are relatively pure and resilient,” she says. “They’ve adapted to Scilly’s particular weather conditions. For example, they have darker and longer fur, which keeps them warmer and allows them to collect nectar in cooler weather. I even saw bees flying during February’s storms!”

When it comes to buying honey, Jilly says love it and eat it, but not too much.¯

SALAKEE FARM

St. Mary’s Farmers Kylie & Dave Mumford are helping Scilly move towards being self-sufficient in food

LOCATION Salakee Farm, St. Mary’s 49.9163° N, 6.2926° W

FIND OUT MORE www.salakeefarm.co.uk

Salakee’s Duchy-owned farmhouse has been home to Dave’s family for three generations and is where Dave himself was born. Its 37 acres have an idyllic situation, bordering Porth Hellick bay on the island’s southeast coast, whose vast strangely-shaped granite rocks look like a Salvador Dali painting. One rock supposedly resembling a loaded camel flanks a memorial to the unfortunate Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Admiral of the Fleet, whose body was washed up here after his ship HMS Association, came to grief nearby in 1707, drowning him and all 800 men aboard. To reach Salakee you follow footpath that’s fringed with ancient twisting elms and in spring, narcissi that have escaped from the neighbouring flower fields.

On the farm itself, beds packed with neat rows of chard and lettuces sit alongside pastures that are grazed by Primrose and Nancy, Salakee’s two house cows who provide the family with creamy milk and yoghurt. As the cows have calves, they’re are milked just once a day to ensure their offspring have plenty too.

Three years ago, realising how much “free” fertiliser they had in the form of animal manure, the pair decided to establish a market garden producing vegetables to sell. They use “no-dig” techniques to preserve the structure of the soil. We want to leave good soils for our children and grandchildren too.”

The stars of the veg beds are salad leaves, from frilly salanova to lacey mustard leaves, baby kale and chard. Equally popular are Salakee’s colourful beetroots (including an eye-catching candy-striped Chioggia), rainbow chard, purple carrots, and bright pink radishes that three-year-old Artie eats like lolipops. “We like growing colourful things,” says Kylie. “It sells well and it makes us feel good too.” ¯

SC DOGS

St. Martin’s farmer experiments with growing sugarcane to produce a field-to-bottle rum

LOCATION SC Dogs, Carron Farm, St. Martin’s 49.9596° N, 6.2864° W

FIND OUT MORE www.scdogs.co.uk

Stroll alongside the fields at Carron Farm on St. Martin’s in spring and you may spot the first tender grassy shoots of a crop that at first glance looks like wheat. Actually, the plants are a lot more exotic - sugarcane. It’s cultivated by islander-farmer Andrew Walder, who has already been spicing up Scillonian dinner tables with his seasalt. The cane is for his latest venture, a distillery called SC Dogs, the name - a blend of ‘sea dog’ and SC, Scilly’s fishing boat prefix - a nod to Andrew’s seafaring past. His dream: to use the cane as the base for Britain’s first field-to-bottle rum.

“We’re already quite unusual in making rum from scratch using just sugar cane molasses,” says Andrew. “If we can now go one step further by creating rum from our own sugarcane, that’ll be hugely exciting. We don’t get frosts here, so Scilly’s the perfect place in the UK to try growing it.”

Perhaps most exciting, though, is Andrew’s honey-spiced rum using honey from Tresco. “The honey’s flavours are complex and utterly unique, thanks to the incredible range of exotic plants that the bees forage on in Tresco Abbey Garden,” he says. To ensure a reliable supply of the precious honey, Andrew has his own beehive which he houses inside a former whisky barrel located just outside the garden.

To find out which rums people liked, on his 40th birthday he invited islanders to a ten-rum tasting at the Seven Stones Inn - an evening he will never forget. It’s also exciting collaborating with other Scillonian businesses and using their ingredients. ¯