Burgh Island

View from Bigbury across the Causeway to Burgh Island Separated from the mainland by some 200 metres of silver sand, the island can be be reached at low tide on foot with ease or you can call for 4WD transport. At high tide the famed sea tractor, a purpose built unique vehicle, will transport you when the conditions are right.

You can walk around this small island, call in at the Pilchard Inn or visit the Burgh Island Hotel, which has retained it's 1930's Art Deco style. Agatha Christie did much of her Hotel entrance writing here at this time. The whole essence of the place revolves around a ready sense of the relaxed formality of this era.

Depending on the time of day you are visiting, you can take coffee, lunch or afternoon tea at the hotel, or for a less formal lunch, there's the Pilchard Inn. Initially a 14th century hideout for those wishing to keep reasonable space between themselves and the law, those same gentry would have approved of the 'robust and rounded English food' now served at the Inn via the hotel's kitchens, though what they would have to say about the excellent Sushi night on the first Saturday of each month might be less certain.

There is something special about leaving the mainland for an island anywhere, even if it is only two hundred metres away. Winston Churchill, who had a wonderful penchant for seeking out unusual, eccentric even, places in which to relax, was a visitor to Burgh Island. When you go there watch out for a brief glimpse of the ethereal but portly figure sat on some vantage point, easel before him, there one moment, gone the next, or listen in a quiet corner of the ballroom for the faint echoes of a spirited Charleston.