Herm

Herm is twenty minutes by ferry from St. Peter Port and one and a half miles long. It has a population that varies between sixty and a hundred depending on the season, a single hotel, a pub called The Mermaid, a farm, a Saxon chapel in the middle of a field, and a beach at the island’s northern tip called Shell Beach that is covered not in sand but in millions of tiny shells — white, pink, cream, yellow — deposited by the tidal currents that converge on the island’s northern coast. I arrived on a Tuesday morning in June with almost no other visitors present, and I walked the island’s main path north to the beach in a state of increasingly disproportionate anticipation, which was entirely justified.

The shells at Shell Beach are not the decorative ones that children collect in buckets. They are small — most under a centimetre — and the beach is composed of them to a depth of several feet, crunching underfoot with a sound different from sand, softer and more complex. The water beyond the shells is genuinely turquoise in the right light — the same shallow, clear green-blue you find over white sand bottoms in the Caribbean, produced here by the light quality of a June morning and the pale shell floor extending under the water. I sat on the beach for two hours and the only other presence was a pair of oystercatchers working the tideline and a grey seal that emerged from the water fifty metres offshore, regarded me for a long moment, then slid back beneath.

The farm at Herm’s centre produces dairy and is responsible for the milk used at The Mermaid, which matters when you are eating crab sandwiches at an outdoor table in the afternoon. The pub is exactly what a Channel Islands pub should be: low ceiling, stone walls, the kind of beer garden that makes you want to extend lunch into dinner without formal decision-making. There is one accommodation option, the White House Hotel, which is comfortable and operates with the unhurried patience of a place that knows its guests are not going anywhere until the ferry departs.

The cliffs on the island’s south and east side are the dramatic counterpoint to Shell Beach’s gentleness. The cliff path from the harbour south to Belvoir Bay takes forty minutes and passes through gorse and heather above water that falls away steeply, and Belvoir Bay itself is a small, sheltered beach of proper golden sand, busy in summer but never overwhelmed by virtue of the island’s limited visitor access.

When to go: May through September, with June and early July the sweet spot before the school holidays bring larger day-trip crowds. The ferry from St. Peter Port runs regularly in season — check the schedule carefully, as being stuck overnight without a booking is not as romantic as it sounds in October.