Exmoor Lockdown Diary 21 - Flat Holm
You’ve got to play fair - if you mention one Bristol Channel island then you’ve got to do something about the other. I was up on the ridge above our house in the fine weather again today - and this time I was looking across at the isle of Flat Holm - and I recalled visiting the place with my Uncle William several years ago…
The boat careered up and down like a rodeo horse, the short steep stubby waves came at us like 10 foot brick walls and the massive currents of the second highest tidefall in the world swirled around like a river in full spate. But it was the warning on the skipper’s electronic navigation screen that rang warning bells. There’s something about the word “whirlpool” that makes you sit up and take notice.
“You would see it if it wasn’t for all the waves,” said the captain of the Lewis Alexander. “It can get pretty big. We sailed through it once and it span this boat around.”
The Lewis Alexander is not exactly a super-tanker, but it’s big and sturdy enough to carry 45 passengers to and from the island of Flat Holm. And right at that moment I, for one, was very much looking forward to steeping safely ashore on a bit of terra-firma that I’ll admit here and now is not part of the West Country.
Flat Holm is officially the most southerly bit of Wales – but as it is twin to Somerset’s Steep Holm, and as it is very much part of the Bristol Channel scene and can be spotted from a lengthy section of this region’s coast – it has a rightful place in this series.
After all, didn’t it act as a refuge for a bunch of marauding Vikings after they’d been ousted by a group of West Country locals in what must have been one of the region’s proudest ever defensive victories?
History has it that a Viking fleet from Brittany - led by two earls, Ohter and Hroald - took refuge on the island following their defeat by the Saxons at Watchet. That’s a story which still goes down well on my native West Somerset coast to this day.
So it was a somewhat bitter pill when I discovered I’d have to go all the way to Wales to reach Flat Holm. Our sea journey began in Cardiff Bay and we had to negotiate the great sea-locks that protect to giant new lagoon to reach the real waves.
Not that there were many bumpy bits until we’d passed the Victorian pier at Penarth and rounded Lavernock Point. But then… Well, it was as though the old sea-gods of Exmoor’s coast had something to say about one of their minions crossing from the wrong side, so to speak. All hell let loose.
Flat Holm’s Landing Bay
But we made it all the same – maybe because the mate of the Lewis Alexander confided that he’d originally been a Watchet man. And the fact that skipper Karl was able to beach the vessel on a surprisingly sheltered shingle strand with great skill.
Flat Holm, or Ynys Echni to give it the unpronounceable Welsh name, is a limestone island lying four miles off Lavernock Point, due south of Cardiff – or more relevant to people in West Somerset, seven miles north west of Brean Down.
Not surprisingly, being situated plonk in the middle of a busy seaway, the island has a long history, dating at least from the Bronze Age. There have been religious recluses, saints and their disciples, smugglers, farmers, gunnery officers, lighthouse keepers, hotel keepers, the doctors and nurses of a cholera hospital – it was even the founding site of the Bristol Channel Mission, which later became the Mission to Seafarers.
Now it is home to a warden and his two helpers, occasional volunteers, occasional campers and work-group members, and gulls. Lots and lots of gulls.
Like its sister island already mentioned in this series, Flat Holm is seagull central. Go there at certain times of the year – like now, for instance (he says through gritted teeth) – and you will enjoy the company of gulls. They make a great song and dance about seeing you. They screech, they yell, they even reach for the heavens with joy only to dive down in an attempt to give you a little welcoming peck on the top of the head. Some, rather generously, prefer to offer you the contents of their stomach.
“You get used to them,” shrugged Matt Lipton, the island’s warden. “You really do – I don’t take any notice of them at all.”
I did, and borrowed a hat.
“They are just being good parents,” said Matt. And of course he was right – the lesser black backed and herring gulls have been living on Flat Holm for a good deal longer than humans and they get a bit miffed when you stroll to close to their nests, which they position with no seeming care on the ground just about everywhere. Once the eggs have hatched and the fledglings have gone – which will be soon – you apparently have no problems.
Anyway, let’s describe Flat Holm. For a start, it’s not flat. The cliffs at the south-eastern corner of the round-ish isle rise some 160 feet from the swirling waves.
It is on this high point that the 90 foot lighthouse stands. There’s been a warning light here for many years - the first one was a simple brazier mounted on a wooden frame. But in 1733 the Society of Merchant Venturers of Bristol claimed it was unreliable and petitioned the authorities to erect a proper lighthouse.
Their bid failed, but two years later William Crispe of Bristol submitted a proposal to build one at his own expense. This proposal also failed but negotiations soon resumed in 1736 when 60 soldiers drowned after their vessel shipwrecked off Flat Holm. In just a year the tower was built, and by 1738 it was in operation.
The lighthouse was the last signal station in the UK to come out of private ownership - Trinity House finally bought the lease for £15,838.10 in 1822. It was renovated in 1929 to include accommodation for four keepers and was staffed until 1988, when it became fully automated.
From what could be described as the island’s summit the ground slopes gently down towards the north and west. And there are the remains of human yesteryear to be found almost every step of the way.
Flat Holm’s first human occupants were denizens of the late Bronze Age - more than 1000 years later it became a retreat for Saint Cadoc, who apparently lived on the island as a hermit. His great pal Saint Gildas did the same thing on neighbouring Steep Holm, and legend has it that the two occasionally met up to say a few prayers.
After having sailed so close to the whirlpool – which is between the two islands - I imagine they needed all the prayers they could get if they were relying on small leather-clad coracles for their inter-island journeys.
After the saints, came the Anglo-Saxons - who called the island Bradanreolice. “Reolice” is said to come from an Irish word meaning graveyard – adding fuel to the belief that Flat Holm had religious significance as a place of burial to people at the time. Certainly a couple of graves have been found, including one with a Celtic cross.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 1067, Gytha Thorkelsdóttir, mother of Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, stayed on the island before travelling to France after the Norman invasion.
Heading in the opposite direction was Lord Robert Fitzhamon - a cousin of William the Conqueror - who formed the Shire of Glamorgan with Cardiff Castle at the centre of his new domain. Flat Holm was made a hereditary property of the Norman Lords of Glamorgan.
There’s plenty of archaeological evidence to show that people lived on Flat Holm during these times. Some sandstone roofing tiles and a fragment of a 14th-century glazed ridge tile indicate the possible existence of a substantial medieval building - maybe a chapel.
Other records show that the island was farmed. In 1542 King Henry VIII granted the lease to one Edmund Tournor whose family remained on Flat Holm until the end of the 17th century.
Flat Holm leeks
Like Steep Holm, Flat Holm had long played a cosy host to smugglers. There is even a legend that various secret tunnels were dug around an old mine shaft – certainly I saw what looked to be the ends of a couple of man-made tunnels when we somewhat bumpily circumnavigated the isle.
Next came a far more worthy era of island history. John Ashley, a clergyman from Clevedon on the Somerset coast, was ministering to the population of the island when, in 1835, he hit upon the idea of creating a mission to serve seafarers on the hundreds of sailing vessels which regularly used the Bristol Channel. The Bristol Channel Mission would later become the well known national Mission to Seafarers.
And talking of sailors, I’ve so far neglected to mention the giant foghorn built in 1906. It was originally powered by a massive engine which gave blasts at two-minute intervals that could be heard by people as far away as Exmoor. The weird looking foghorn still dominates a corner of the isle today.
Still on the subject of sailors, we come to the island’s sanatorium – now a ruins surrounded by nettles. It was in 1883 that the steamship Rishanglys left three cholera stricken seamen on the island – it was the sort of inhumane thing skippers did in those days. They had only a canvas tent to be ill in - one of the sailors subsequently died and islanders petitioned for compensation saying they’d lost income from the fact visitors were too frightened to make day trips. They even had difficulty in selling vegetables in Cardiff market.
It was obviously a problem and by 1896 an isolation hospital had been built. It is said to be the only isolation hospital sited on a British offshore island. The last patient to die there was a victim of bubonic plague and he was cremated on the island at the end of the 19th century. The sanatorium closed in 1935 and has remained derelict since.
Flat Holm slow worm
Today people go to Flat Holm for fun rather than for medical purposes. The place is a Local Nature Reserve, managed by the Cardiff Council as The Flat Holm Project. The management team operates the Lewis Alexander boat which was purpose-built as the island’s one and only means of transport to and from the mainland. And the project is supported by the Flat Holm Society, a registered charity.
While on the island I talked to project manager Natalie Taylor and Matt the warden in one of the converted military buildings. They told me Flat Holm draws around 2000 visitors a year between March and October: “Through the winter we get a few volunteers who help our small team so it is occupied all year round,” said Matt.
One of the modern developments is the transfer to greener forms of energy. “We have a diesel generator but we very rarely have to use it – it’s only been on once in the past three months and then only to train volunteer staff,” Matt told me. “The wind turbine charges batteries so that we normally have a supply of at least three days.”
“When I was warden out here we used to put generator on two or three hours in the morning then six hours every evening for fridges and freezers,” said Natalie. “Our diesel consumption was huge.”
Natalie also told me something of future plans for the island. “We’re planning to try and increase opportunities for birds – we’re looking at more traditional crops we could grow on an arable basis along with some sort of beet that we can feed sheep. We have 92 sheep at the moment - we recently bought some Soay sheep and we've had 22 lambs to add to the population.”
“There are plenty of ghost stories and other legends,” said Matt when I asked. “One member of staff won’t even come into this building - there was a soldier who used to stand in that doorway over there.”
“There were two generations of Harris family who came from Steep Holm to here to open a hotel,” said Natalie. “It had a skittle alley - everything - a lot of people used to apparently row over for a drink on a Sunday when Wales was ‘dry’. Then there were the Robinsons - father and son - they were well known smugglers and they had a bright red boat, which showed they weren’t particularly scared of the authorities.”
I left Natalie and Matt musing over swashbuckling times to go down to the landing beach where I expected to be in for a bit of swashbuckle myself. Fortunately, the tide and wind – though still raging - had done some sort of deal together and the crossing back to Wales was a lot smoother.
Later I returned to England having enjoyed what was a fascinating, wonderful and swashbuckling adventure in a foreign country.
If you’d like to know more about Flat Holm or find out how to visit the island go to www.flatholmisland.com
