You know a place has uplifting properties if even the most torpor-drenched poet of the 20th century found it a tonic. “We are back for 14 days in this jewel of the Channel” wrote Philip Larkin to his friend, the art historian Judy Egerton in 1963.
Larkin was a regular visitor to the bijou Channel Island of Sark with his lover Monica Jones. He adored the absence of noise and the gentle thrill of being here in one of the smallest, most unhurried islands in the British Isles.
But the writer I’m most put in mind of as I sit in the garden of the La Sablonnerie hotel and restaurant is HE Bates. Tables are set up on the springy lawn and I’m sipping a sloe gin amid tall spires of pink and purple foxgloves, drifts of ox-eye daisies, campion, cow parsley and hydrangea shrubs. All that’s missing for the perfect The Darling Buds of May feel is an appearance by a young Catherine Zeta Jones.
There’s a lush feel to Sark, all two square miles of it; positioned slightly east of Guernsey. There are no cars here, and never have been. The narrow lanes are navigated by horse and carriage, bicycle or the occasional tractor. But to get to La Sablonnnerie for a long, languorous lunch, it’s necessary to navigate the island’s most precipitous journey; crossing La Coupee.
This is the high and narrow neck of land between Sark and the peninsula of Little Sark. In places, it’s barely three metres wide, with precipitous drops on both sides. Before the war (when the Channel Islands were occupied by the Nazis) it was necessary to crawl across on your hands and knees in windy weather. But, in 1945, German prisoners of war built a concrete pathway; for which I am exceptionally grateful as my bicycle and I wobble across.
Away from La Coupee, the only high drama on Sark in recent years has been of a political persuasion. The island, which isn’t part of the United Kingdom, was run on a medieval feudal system for centuries, where only landowners got a vote, with the privilege being handed down the generations. The hereditary system was finally replaced in 2008 with democracy, but there are still atavistic quirks; Sark’s Seigneur (head of state) is the only person entitled to keep doves and unspayed female dogs on the island.
