Alderney

You reach Alderney by a small twin-propeller aircraft from Guernsey, a flight that takes twelve minutes and offers views of the Casquets lighthouse below and the island rising ahead — a flat-topped plateau of pale limestone, surrounded on three sides by the treacherous tidal race of the Swinge. The aircraft makes a steep approach to a grass airstrip at the island’s centre, and you are deposited in a building that is very much an airport in the same way that a shed is very much a building. There are no taxis waiting because the island is two miles long and you can walk anywhere in twenty minutes.

St. Anne, the single town, is a street of Georgian granite houses — Royal Connaught Square, Victoria Street, High Street — arranged with a civic neatness that seems faintly improbable given how small the island is. There are several pubs, a bakery, a handful of restaurants, a shop, and a museum that documents the extraordinary and largely unknown history of the German occupation. During that period, slave laborers from across occupied Europe were transported to Alderney to build fortifications in conditions that killed a significant number of them. The museum does not flinch from this, which matters, because most Channel Islands material tends to treat the occupation as primarily a British story of resilience rather than as a European story of atrocity.

The coastal path runs around most of the island’s perimeter and takes about five hours at a comfortable pace. The north coast is the dramatic section: the Nunnery, a Roman fortlet later used as a German command post, stands above the beach at Longis; the cliffs at Essex Hill drop vertically into the Swinge; and the gannet colony at Les Etacs — a rock stack off the southwest corner — is visible from the clifftop path as a blizzard of white, thousands of birds nesting on every available surface with an intensity of occupation that is almost violent. Gannets at close range are enormous, with yellow heads and a wingspan of nearly two metres, and when they dive from height for fish in the shallow water around the stack the sound carries clearly on the wind.

The pace of life on Alderney has a particular quality. The pubs fill up early. The post office is also a café. The same faces appear at dinner that you saw at breakfast. There is a community of around 2,400 people that has operated at this scale for centuries, and it has developed the easy sociability of a place where solitude is available in infinite quantities just by walking to the coast, so the interior spaces tend toward the generous and the gregarious.

When to go: April through October for reliable flights and full opening of accommodation and restaurants. The gannet colony is active from March through October. Winter on Alderney is genuinely remote and demands either a serious constitution or a prior acquaintance with the locals.