This once-lawless UK island is now a place to disconnect

‘Lundy high, it’ll be dry. Lundy low, it’ll be snow. Lundy plain, it’ll be rain. Lundy in haze, fine for days.’ My friend Kirstie taught me this rhyme in 2022 as we sat on Hartland beach in North Devon, looking towards an island in the Atlantic. From that distance, Lundy was just a smudge on the horizon. Kirstie grew up in nearby Bideford and told me stories of the island’s puffins and remote pub that never shuts. I found myself drawn to the idea of a place where the rest of the world simply stops at its shores. That afternoon, we planned our first visit together — now it’s an annual tradition.

Lundy is three miles long, half a mile wide and 12 miles off the coast of England. It’s one of the UK’s most remote inhabited islands — continue west and the next land mass is Canada. There are no roads, no cars and therefore no pollution. There are no street lights and the electricity turns off at midnight, plunging the island into a kind of darkness that’s almost extinct on the mainland. Constellations spill across the sky and the evening orchestra is amplified: wind, waves and the rasping cries of Manx shearwaters that once made seafarers think islands like Lundy were haunted. With sparse internet and phone signal, it’s like the world vanishes. Lundy offers a rare peace.

Getting there is part of the adventure. In winter, a helicopter makes the seven-minute flight, while in summer, the MS Oldenburg completes the two-hour crossing from Bideford or Ilfracombe. The Bristol Channel is unpredictable and crossings can be cancelled. In 2024, we were temporarily stranded.

The landscape is windswept. In the deepest valley is a wooded copse, but most of the island is salt-lashed with little vegetation over hip-height. Above the harbour is a cluster of granite buildings: a church, pub, shop and just 23 holiday properties, from fisherman’s huts to radio rooms.

Being so remote, days revolve around simple pleasures. On our last trip, we spent one afternoon on the pebble beach eating oranges, another taking a picnic to the crumbling quarry ruins to the east, where wild ponies took an interest in our pasties. You can walk the whole island in a day, so we usually dedicate afternoons to different corners: the westward cliffs of Jenny’s Cove, looking down on a shipwreck; Long Roost’s abandoned copper mine.

Every Thursday, the island’s wardens host a nature talk in the Marisco Tavern, Lundy’s pub. It’s the only building on the island to have lighting after the generators stop and it never closes, serving as a sanctuary in storms. Visitors gather in the wood-panelled bar to hear about conservation projects. What makes Lundy remarkable isn’t just its isolation, but what that isolation enables.

Being so self-contained, Lundy is the perfect testing ground for ecological interventions. Every variable can be controlled — grazing patterns, visitor access — to see how the ecosystem responds. Rats were eradicated in 2009 and seabird colonies now thrive. There were five puffins on Lundy before this effort; by 2023, the population had grown to 1,335. Walk to the Old Battery in spring and you may spot them waddling between burrows. Conservation here is grassroots; many people volunteer to do practical work during their holidays. For 25 years, many have been line-searching hillsides for invasive rhododendron seedlings that were introduced in the 1920s and once threatened endemic plants such as the yellow-flowering Lundy cabbage. Where dense, dark canopies prevented anything from growing, native plants now thrive.

One evening at the Marisco, Tara McEvoy-Wilding, the assistant warden, invited us to join a bird-ringing project the next morning. “A lot of places have lost any sense of community,” she told me, explaining why she enjoys living on the island. “I like that I know all my neighbours and there’s never anywhere pressing you’ve got to be.” Tara’s right that time seems different on Lundy. It’s that feeling of being both away from everything and truly connected to what matters most that first captured my heart.