I took my six-month-old daughter to Tresco to recreate the care-free holidays of my childhood

Telegraph

08-07-2025

The sand on Tresco – one of the five inhabited isles of Scilly, 30 miles off Cornwall's western tip – is unlike any you'll find elsewhere in England.
Dorset sand, Kentish sand, even the sand of the Cornish mainland – all have their merits, but they've got more in common with gravel than they do with this stuff. Tresco sand is as soft as icing sugar, and almost as white. It sparkles.
It's also very difficult to extract from between the toes of a young child, being adhesive, like glitter. Three decades ago, I was the child in question, and my parents were on clean-up duty – all that intricate towelling. Today, the toes belong to my six-month-old daughter, Beatrice.
It's May, and we're at Green Porth beach on the eastern side of the island, lounging in the late-afternoon glow. Behind us, the flutter of dunes; ahead, the turquoise twinkle of Pentle Bay. Terns scuttle around the shoreline.
A strange sensation, rarely experienced in recent months, comes over me. I believe it's known as 'relaxation'. Then Beatrice, not content with coating her feet, snatches a fistful of sand, scrutinises it, and lifts it slowly towards her mouth.
I am holidaying in a time warp, and in more ways than one. I first visited Tresco in 1994. The trip was my grandparents' idea – a multi-generational family treat – and it became a springtime fixture for well over a decade.
They were drawn to the place because it made them think of an earlier, more decorous age. It's often said that such ages are imaginary. Well, not here.
There is no crime on Tresco, and you won't see any cars either – just tractors and service vehicles (largely electric), plus a fleet of golf buggies with vintage names: Mabel, Hilda, Gloria. Doors remain insouciantly unlocked.
This was where I learnt to ride (and fall off) a bike; my brother and I felt vastly intrepid as we traversed the island's 1.15 square miles. Meanwhile, the grown-ups got on with whatever it was grown-ups did. I remember relaxation being mentioned.
My grandparents are no longer with us. But the rest of us are back, having all moved up a rank in the family hierarchy. We're still learning the ropes in our new roles, and there could be no better place to do it.
When I was a teenager, I sometimes thought Tresco was a little… sedate. Now, as my wife Eleanor and I enter the long 'frazzled parent' stage of life, sedate is exactly what we're looking for.
There are several ways to get to the Scilly archipelago. (Referring to 'the Scillies' is discouraged, inconvenient though that may be for, say, a journalist writing about the place.)
You can fly from various points in the South West, by plane or helicopter, but we went for the old-school option: the boat.
Since the 1970s, the Scillonian III has been making the crossing from Penzance to St Mary's – the largest island, with a frankly extravagant population of 1,700 to Tresco's 150.
It's a flat-bottomed vessel; anything more than a ripple and the sick bags start to rustle. But we were in luck. The water was placid, the sky fiercely blue. We spent much of the three-hour voyage on deck, though I have a certain affection for the sepia-tinted interior, where not a lot appears to have changed since the days when Harold Wilson was a passenger.
I half expected to spot his Gannex-clad form emerging from the gents.
From St Mary's it's a short ride on the Firethorn – the hard-working inter-island ferry – to Tresco. We clambered on to the quay and took it all in: the luminous quality in the air, the distinctly un-English vegetation, the profoundly un-English roads, which are immaculate. Nothing had changed.
The island is dotted with neat granite cottages. Ours was near the church, overlooking a field of blissed-out cows, with a distant view of the Old Block House – a hilltop fortification that last saw action during the Civil War, when the Royalists clung on here for as long as they could (fair enough).
Self-catering is made easy. The cottages are faultlessly equipped ('Don't forget to mention the nice teapot,' my mum impressed on me), and plush but resolutely unflashy.
In the mornings, Eleanor and I deposited Beatrice with my parents and snatched an hour's more sleep. It felt deeply transgressive not opening our eyes again until 7.30.
In the generous garden, fringed by palm trees and echiums, our daughter practised her most recently acquired skill – sideways rolls – and my brother, a ballet dancer, lifted her up higher than I suspect her father will ever be able to.
We had long al fresco lunches, over which critical decisions were made about what to do afterwards. Beach? Bike ride? Spa? ('Your neck has quite a few knots', I was diplomatically informed after a massage.)
You will have gathered that Tresco – leased from the Duchy of Cornwall by the Dorrien-Smith family for two centuries, and favoured by the Waleses in recent years – is at the genteel end of the staycation spectrum.
If Fortnum & Mason teamed up with Boden to design a holiday, this would be it.
Yet for all the impeccable comforts, it's still a small island in the North Atlantic, and we got a healthy dose of ruggedness too. There are gorse-strewn hills, silent woodlands and rough-hewn castles (one for Oliver Cromwell, one for King Charles): modest expeditions that felt like feats of adventure for us.
My parents – very much modern grandparents – added sea-swimming and foraging to the mix (I'd like to see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall snag so much wild garlic). We hired an all-terrain pushchair, which was quickly clocked by other extended families roaming around. 'Give us a demo,' demanded one couple, awaiting the arrival of their daughter and eight-month-old grandson.
The Abbey Gardens are another of Tresco's glories. Established by Augustus Smith in the 1830s near the ruins of a medieval priory, they evolved into a very Victorian, faintly mad enterprise, with Augustus's descendants cultivating wildly exotic specimens that would have died anywhere else in Britain.
Good old subtropical microclimate. Today they contain 20,000 plants from more than 80 countries; parts look Mediterranean, others Jurassic. Golden pheasants patrol, sleeker and fractionally more dignified than their port-faced brethren.
Stealing the show, though, were the red squirrels, which put on a gleeful display. Beatrice was unmoved by the squirrels, but fascinated by the gardens' Valhalla Museum – a collection of figureheads from ships wrecked off the islands.
On our final night, something momentous happened. Eleanor and I went out, just the two of us, leaving my parents on babysitting duty. It was the first time we'd done this since Beatrice was born, and we felt a little unmoored, straining to remember how to be free agents.
Fortunately, there was no need for spontaneity: we'd booked a table at the Ruin Beach Café, a snug, wood-panelled spot. The food was excellent – tangy gildas (Spanish-style skewers of pepper, anchovy, and olive); crab, with a pillowy brioche; hake swimming in a deep ochre bisque.
When we left, there was still some light in the sky, and so, with outlandish impulsiveness, we wandered over to the New Inn, the charming island pub. After-dinner drinks: we used to be good at those. But we were pushing it.
Once we'd arrived, we found that all we wanted to do was scroll through holiday snaps of our daughter, for whom the great Tresco tradition is perhaps just beginning. Look, there she is with sand in her toes.
Getting there
The Scillonian sails between Penzance and St Mary's from March to November. Adult returns cost £102.99. The helicopter, which flies from Penzance to Tresco all year round, offers glamour and convenience, though a return ticket will set you back £379.
Where to stay
The 'traditional cottages' are ideal for families. Prices vary enormously. In low season, they can be rented for just over £1,000 per week. At the height of summer, some go for closer to £10,000. The New Inn also has a suite of bright, cosy rooms.
A perfect day
Hire a bike and cycle over to the Abbey Gardens in the morning. Have a leisurely lunch at the New Inn. In the afternoon, walk along the coast path to Cromwell's Castle, with its archaic graffiti, then round to Gimble Porth or Green Porth for some beach time. Reward your exertions with a cocktail and some snacks at the Ruin Beach Café before dinner. Be sure to go for a stroll after dark and see the stars.