The crossing
Most guides to Sark repeat three facts. There are no cars. The cliffs are dramatic. The night sky is dark.
These things are true, but they do not begin to explain what makes Sark special, or why a few days here resets you deeper than a week at a conventional destination.
Getting to Sark asks a little more of you than most places, and that is precisely its gift. This is slow travel in its purest form, a gentle going back to basics, and it begins the moment you set out.
There is no airport on Sark. I read somewhere that with the exception of royalty and seabirds, every single person who has ever come to Sark has come by sea. I love that line. It’s true going back centuries, and it’s true today, and you become part of it the moment you step onto the boat.
A century ago, two brothers from Lancashire wrote a guide to this island, and in doing so set a bar that all others have subsequently struggled to reach. Geoffrey and Leslie La Trobe Foster spent three summers on Sark, from 1911 to 1913; they were fifteen and nineteen on that first visit. They published their guide in 1914, and within months went from this account of a carefree island to the trenches of the First World War.
Few have described Sark better since, save perhaps their own descendants, who brought the guide back into print. We recommend it without reservation.
When the Latrobe’s Guide was first published, the journey from Guernsey to London took almost ten hours longer than it does today. The passage from Guernsey to Sark however still takes about as long as it did a hundred years ago (at about forty five minutes), and the moment you leave, the mainland and your ‘to-do list’ lets go of you. The modern world has spent a century engineering friction out of travel. Sark gives it back as a gift.
None of this feeling of returning to old ways is enforced. The modern world is entirely available here, Sark has wifi, there is phone signal. The island simply has a way of reordering what matters, until a day or two you find yourself looking up more, taking in your surroundings, and reaching for your phone less.
“Once a visit has been paid to Sark, the visitor always longs to repeat.. the happy weeks.. in the Pearl of Islands.”
The Latrobes, 1914
The first sight
The houses on Sark are tucked into folds and hollows all over the island, turned away from the winter winds. So from the water Sark keeps itself hidden, and reveals itself slowly instead, piece by piece, the way it likes to do everything.
If the sea’s behaving, the boat comes in round the north, hugging little Jethou with Herm sitting off to the side, and then you start picking the island out detail by detail as you thread through the rocks. First the old mill up on the high ground. Then the Pilcher Monument, and Brecqhou splitting off across the Gouliot passage.
There’s a stretch off the north point where the water turns rough and the boat pitches through it, and then, quite suddenly, you’re round the corner and into calm, and the whole eastern coast opens up: the rocks and the little islets, Point Robert and the lighthouse, and the cave underneath it that barks like a dog when the tide’s right.
What you get from the boat is only a glimpse. Wide bays, enormous caves, grim headlands going past one after another, just enough to make you want to come back and climb into every one of them. And if you’ve timed it for late Summer when the cliffs are on fire with colour and the whole island turns into a rock garden, the moment will stay with you for good.
Ashore
Then you come round Point Robert and there’s Maseline harbour, tractors waiting with their luggage trailers, all the small busy chaos of an island receiving its people. Around the next headland is the old harbour at Creux, which is the prettier of the two and barely used now, kept for the days the wind won’t let the boat land at Maseline.
And here’s the first kindness the island does you: once you’re ashore, you hand your bags to the carters and forget about them. They’ll find you. Your only job is to get yourself to the top, and there are two ways to do it.
The bit that always makes people smile is how you get up there. For most of the island’s history you walked, or you went up by horse and cart. Then, in the 1970s, the crowds got bigger and the quayside got busier and somebody looked at the horses doing all that hauling up the hill, load after load, and decided enough. So now a little tractor pulls everyone up instead, in a contraption the whole island affectionately calls the toast rack. The horses were spared the worst of it, and they still meet you at the top, where you climb down off the tractor and carry on the proper way, by carriage. It’s a very Sark solution. Kind to the horses, slightly absurd, and it works.
By the time you come out at the top by the Bel Air Inn and the crossroads, on the plateau, something in your shoulders has already started to drop.
That’s really the whole of it. You can spend a lifetime of holidays here and not know the place completely. I’ve stopped trying to describe it to people.
Seeing is believing. Come to Sark and see.
