Burgh Island

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Burgh Island at low tide with the Burgh Island Hotel (left) and the Pitchard Inn

Burgh Island is a privately owned 11 acre tidal island in Bigbury Bay, near the seaside town of Bigbury-on-Sea , about 15 miles southeast of Plymouth , on the south coast of Devon in England .

On the island, lined with rocky bays and high cliffs, which offer shelter for bird colonies, there are several cottages and a medieval ruin, only two buildings of importance - the Art Deco- style Burgh Island Hotel and the one dating back to the 14th century smaller public house The Pilchard Inn .

history

The traces of the settlement can be traced back to 1000 BC. When the Phoenicians settled on the island and exchanged spices for indigenous metals such as tin . For the centuries that followed, the island was inhabited by monks who lived together in quiet contemplation and dedicated themselves to brewing honey wine . Today ruins of a medieval chapel testify to this. The monks were supported by the local population who used Burgh Island to catch sardines for centuries .

Connections to the mainland

The "Sea Tractor"

The island, which is only 200 meters from the mainland, can be reached on foot over a sandbank at low tide. At high tide, Burgh Island is completely cut off from the mainland and a ferry service with the "Sea Tractor" , a kind of long-legged beach mobile, is offered from the hotel . The water depth in Bigbury Bay is too shallow for normal boats and so the first Sea Tractor was designed by an engineer in 1926. The first two means of transport of this type were tracked vehicles . The third amphibious vehicle currently in service dates from 1969, was designed by a Mr. Jackson and built in Newton Abbot . Like a boat, the Sea Tractor is classified as a maritime vehicle, has appropriate position lights and reaches a top speed of five knots . Its wheels move hydraulically underwater on the sandy bottom, while the driver and passengers take their seats on a platform and are thus protected from the sea three meters below and the strong current. It is powered by the engine of a former harvesting machine and offers space for 35 passengers. At night the number of people is limited to twenty.

A Land Rover is also used to translate hotel guests when the conditions are favorable .

The Pilchard Inn

The Pilchard Inn, a pub, dates back to 1336, making it one of the oldest pubs in England. It used to be a place frequented by pilchard fishermen (sardine ), pirates and smugglers. Beach robbers also used the pub on Burgh Island, where many ships wrecked on the cliffs, which is why the area is also a good diving area .

Burgh Island Hotel

Beginnings and establishment of the hotel

View of the front of the Burgh Island Hotel

In 1895 the singer George Chirgwin built the first hotel on the island. After the First World War , his widow Rose had to sell it to Archibald Nettleford, co-founder of today's automobile and space company GKN . The eccentric millionaire, called "Uncle Archie" , kept the dark green wooden building as accommodation for the workforce and had a new and larger building built in white Art Deco style according to plans by Matthew Dawson . He was inspired by the luxury of the passenger ships of the time and in 1930 acquired the captain's cabin of the war sailing ship HMS Ganges , built in 1821 and the decommissioned flagship of the Royal Navy , which he had connected to the building to the now known "Ganges Room" . The "Art Deco cruise ship stranded on dry land" was used by Nettleford as a holiday residence for himself, his wife, an opera singer, and friends from show business . In 1932 the building was enlarged by Paul Roseveare and rebuilt in the 1930s style. It was opened as a hotel in 1933. In the 1930s, the Burgh Island Hotel also experienced its heyday and became a meeting place for British high society. At the time, it was considered the most elegant hotel west of London's Ritz . Extravagant parties were held, so the Bigbury Parish News, in a 1936 article, complained about "the behavior of certain hotel guests" picnicking naked on the top of the island.

View of the rear view of the hotel with the "Ganges Room"

During the Second World War , the hotel was forced to close due to fear of German troops landing on the south coast of Devon. The connection to the mainland was broken and the island was used as a military base. The top two floors and a tower were destroyed by the German Air Force during an air raid in May 1942 . Although repaired, the building was split into self-catering apartments in the post-war period and fell into disrepair. The last bookings were made in 1955.

Sale and repair

Thirty years later, on December 5, 1985, Tony Porter, PR consultant and initiator of London Fashion Week , and his wife Beatrice bought the entire island from Landstone Estates before it was put up for auction. The Porters gave up their careers as fashion designers and saved the hotel from deterioration. They had it renovated for several million pounds for two years . The glass dome of today's Peacock Bar in the palm garden was restored and central heating was installed. £ 50,000 went to laying the power supply and £ 60,000 to cover the leaky roof. The Porters rented the hotel's rooms as self-catering accommodation for two years before restoring the art-deco interior, which had been destroyed or badly damaged.

On March 12, 1988, the hotel reopened with the performance of a scene from a Noël Coward play , which was itself a guest at the hotel for three weeks. It now had 14 suites, each with a sea view, their own dining room and some with balconies. In addition, there was a billiards room, a tennis court, a sauna, a golf course and a helicopter landing pad. Although the hotel had 90 percent occupancy in the peak season in 1992 and bed occupancy of around 30 percent in the winter season, Burgh Island was put up for sale by the Porters for £ 3 million in the mid-1990s. Tony Porter later wrote a book of anecdotes about the redevelopment and running of the hotel, published in 2002 under the title The Great White Palace .

The "Peacock Bar"

In 2001, six years after the property was put up for sale, the island was sold to aviation attorney Deborah Clark and her husband, Tony Orchard, an asset advisor, who had married months earlier at the hotel. A year later, the hotel complex was refurbished and rebuilt with a £ 2.6 million loan from the Bank of Scotland , maintaining the Art Deco style and not adding modern amenities such as televisions or internet places. The 14 suites were converted into 23 hotel rooms with original furniture from the 1930s, some of which were named after the famous hotel guests who lived in them earlier. Pencil drawings, paintings, small maps and photos around the staircase are a reminder of the hotel's heyday in the 1930s.

In 2004, the Burgh Island Hotel was ranked second in the Independent's list of the five most beautiful Art Deco hotels in the world, behind La Mamounia in Marrakech . In 2005, the Peacock Bar was nominated for the Bar Awards 2005 by the industry magazine Class . In the same year there was a scandal after the island's owners had banned day trippers from going beyond the advertised hiking routes. As a result, the highest vantage point on the island could no longer be reached and most of Burgh Island with its landscaped gardens and the natural swimming pool on the rocky coast, the so-called "Mermaid Pool" , fell to hotel guests. It was only through a vigorous campaign by locals, Bigbury Parish Council and members of the Devon Parish Council that the island was generally reopened to the public in late 2006.

Famous guests

Burgh Island is primarily associated with the famous English crime writer Agatha Christie (1890-1976), who was friends with the builder of the hotel. Archie Nettleford owned the London Comedy Theater , where Christie's Whodunnits were regularly performed. Christie stayed at the Burgh Island Hotel, collected ideas for her novels and went surfing on the coast .

The island served as the inspiration for one of her best-known works, Ten Little Negroes (1939, today also under the title And then none were known anymore ) and the Hercule Poirot thriller The Evil Under the Sun (1941, also under the title Rätsel known around Arlena ). The latter novel was in 2001 on the island as part of the British television series Agatha Christie's Poirot with David Suchet as Belgian master detective filmed . As early as 1987, the film adaptation of the novel Fate in Person was filmed in the hotel rooms for the British television series Miss Marple with Joan Hickson as the title character . In 1965, John chose Boorman for his film Catch Us If You Can! Burgh Island as a film location.

Other well-known visitors to the Burgh Island Hotel in the 1930s were the playwright Noël Coward , the later abdicated British King Edward VIII and his American lover Wallis Simpson , the young Louis Mountbatten , the writer Nancy Cunard , the singers Geraldo and George Formby , the pilot Amy Johnson and the Odeon cinema chain operator Oscar Deutsch . The British Dansband representative and clarinetist Harry Roy played with his band for Charleston on a floodlit platform in the middle of the rock swimming pool , while Dwight D. Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as part of the preparations for the during World War II Landing of the Allies in Normandy should have returned to the hotel. Later guests included the well-known English ballet dancer Wayne Sleep , who one evening let himself be carried away to an improvised dance in the great ballroom, the American actor Kirk Douglas and the English pop band The Beatles .

Apparitions and sagas

Ruins of the medieval chapel

Burgh Island is said to have two ghosts , a monk who lives in the ruins of the medieval chapel that once stood on the island's hill and Tom Crocker, a notorious pirate. Using the island as his headquarters, Crocker was shot dead on the doorstep of the Pilchard Inn by a customs officer (according to other sources, he was tried and hanged in 1395). His mind is said to roam every year during the third week of August, during the local celebrations held in his honor.

One of the most famous ships that fell victim to the island's cliffs was the Chanteloupe , which returned from the West Indies with rum, sugar and coffee in September 1772 . According to legend, a young local girl is said to have found a wealthy, jeweled survivor of the ship disaster, who wandered confused along the beach. She told her parents about it, who advised the girl to leave the matter alone. When the noble lady was found dead a week later, her ring finger and earlobe had been cut off and a knife rammed into her stomach.

literature

  • Barber, chips; Chard, Judy: Burgh Island and Bigbury Bay . Pinhoe: Obelisk, 1988. - ISBN 0-946651-25-6
  • Barber, Chips: Around & about Burgh Island and Bigbury-on-Sea . Pinhoe: Obelisk, 1998. - ISBN 1-899073-65-5
  • Porter, Tony: The Great White Palace . London: Doubleday, 2002. - ISBN 0-385-60303-7

See also

Web links

Commons : Burgh Island  - album with pictures, videos and audio files


  • "The Pilchard Inn"

  • Panorama from the highest point on the island

  • Rocky bay on Burgh Island

  • sea-view

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d cf. Lee, Duncan: It'll Make You Cross. In: Daily Mirror, May 27, 2006, Features, p. 44
  2. ↑ a b cf. Weighty Brown crab evokes culture of seas . In: Western Morning News (Plymouth), April 25, 2007, p. 28
  3. ↑ a b c d cf. Gray, Frank: A risky escape route - A couple who bought an island complete with hotel . In: Financial Times (London, England), December 12, 1992, Minding Your Own Business, p. VI
  4. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from January 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.divernetxtra.com
  5. ↑ cf. Glancey, Jonathan: Travel: Five go mad on fantasy island . In: The Independent (London), March 19, 1994, Weekend Travel Page, p. 45
  6. ↑ cf. Heptinstall, Simon: Three million and it's yours . In: July 15, 1998, p. 59
  7. ↑ cf. Edge, Simon: Glamorous Burgh Island off Devon is associated with Christie's best whodunnits but that may not have been the only reason that kept the author coming back . In: The Express, June 30, 2003, News, p. 29
  8. ↑ cf. Phillips, Andy: Recreating the White Palace at Bigbury . In: Evening Herald (Plymouth), April 23, 2003, News, Consumer, Products, p. 7
  9. ↑ cf. Books: The White Palace of Devon . In: Birmingham Post, June 29, 2002, Features, p. 49
  10. ↑ cf. Woods, Judith: The other side of a reception desk . In: The Daily Telegraph (London), July 28, 2007, Travel, p. 12
  11. ↑ cf. Couple buy Art Deco Burgh Island Hotel for GBP 3m . In: Western Morning News, Oct 3, 2001; News, People, p. 8
  12. ↑ cf. Reavley, Morag: Moderne romance Morag Reavley finds deco heaven in Devon, where islanders bask in the high Twenties all year . In: Sunday Telegraph (London), 23 March 2003, p. 5
  13. ↑ cf. British Isles: Drops in the ocean . In: The Guardian (London), October 24, 1998, The Guardian Travel Page, p. 10
  14. ↑ cf. Alexander, Tania: Five Best: Art Deco Hotels . In: The Independent, May 8, 2004
  15. ↑ cf. Step back to the thirties . In: Western Daily Press, November 12, 2005, Features, Hobbies, Travel, p. 32
  16. ↑ cf. Walkers are free to use island paths . In: Western Mourning News (Plymouth), December 2, 2006, p. 30
  17. ↑ cf. The magical story of Burgh Island hotel . In: Western Morning News (Plymouth), Aug 17, 2002, Features, Books, p. 33
  18. ↑ cf. Burnett, Bruce I .: Ghosts are permanent guests on Devon's art deco island . In: The Globe and Mail (Canada), October 31, 1987
  19. ↑ cf. Brooks, John: The Ghosts of Britain: A Guide to Over a Thousand Haunted Locations . Freiburg i. Br.: Eulen-Verl., 1995. - ISBN 3-89102-316-2

Coordinates: 50 ° 17 ′  N , 3 ° 54 ′  W