![]() Its leading politician became a powerboating world champion in 2014. Sark is the world’s first Dark Sky Island, benefiting from an absence of streetlights. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times on his sixth attempt, in 1998, he ruptured a heart valve. Temperatures avoid extremes camellias bloom at Christmas. Swinburne wanted to be its king and drink ‘rapture of rest’. In 1815, an admirer lamented that Rousseau had died before discovering his ideal island. Artists have come for 150 years: the pre-Raphaelite William Toplis Mervyn Peake and the Sark Art Group the New Zealander Rhona Haszard. Sark’s appeal remains its rugged coastal scenery, sunshine, peacefulness, birds, butterflies, dolphins and absence of carbon monoxide. In the 1930s, the young Alan Turing went skinny-dipping off the rocks, photographed by an enthusiastic housemaster. When Sybil Collings inherited the island fiefdom to become Dame of Sark in 1927, she had already stamped her authority on it by climbing and swimming around the whole coastline, though one of her legs was two and a half inches shorter than the other. They waded or swam into caves accessible only at low tide, where sea urchins, sponges and anemones shimmered like jewels. They scrambled over the cliffs, marvelling at the stupendous impact of time and tide – and the Creator – on these superficially solid forms. Visitors admired rocks rising out of the sea like titanic cathedrals. Once steamers opened the Channel Islands to British travellers in the 1830s, Sark’s salubrious air and equable climate became celebrated. Victorians and Edwardians who took this sort of thing in their stride made Sark a tourist destination. Walkers could access one of the best beaches, at Port es Saies, by means of a rope hanging over the cliff. Whenever strong easterlies made it impossible to land at Creux beach, travellers had to anchor at Havre Gosselin instead, which meant mounting a precarious fifty-step ladder straight up the rocks: a proper jetty was built only in 1912. In 1862, the lords of the Admiralty of the world’s greatest naval power came to inspect its defences but sailed away, finding nowhere suitable to disembark. Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on almost all sides that rise to over three hundred feet. Sark has its own parliament, its own taxes and its own traffic laws (permitting only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). ![]() T he quirkiest of the British Isles is a self-governing jurisdiction between Guernsey and France just over three miles long and less than two miles wide.
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