This sublime Channel Island is now easier to reach – go before the Instagram masses do
The sunny Channel Islands have long been a popular choice for those who want to avoid flying. The ferry company Condor operates a daily service out of Portsmouth and Poole to the two larger islands of Jersey and Guernsey, and from the latter you have always been able to explore car-free Herm as a day trip by boat.
However, until last year, if you wanted to include northerly Alderney in your exploration, you would have been compelled to board a tiny Dornier propeller plane for a wobbly 20-minute flight.
But now there is another option: a one-hour sea crossing in a 12-seat passenger ferry operated by the Little Ferry Company. The service was trialled last year and proved popular with both tourists and locals, and so the States of Alderney approved the service for the 2019 season, which started in May and will run until Sept 29.
“On sunny weekends, we are popular with Guernsey golfers, who pop across to Alderney for some tee time,” said the skipper as we sped along the Channel. The vessel is not much bigger than a RIB but has a fully covered interior with sprung seats, so you literally bob along.
While Guernsey golf courses get booked up, the nine-hole green in Alderney with its fabulous coastal views is rarely oversubscribed. The island is only three miles by a mile and a half (5km by 2.5km) and the population is just under 2,000 people.
The outlying rocks of Ortac and Les Etac are much more densely populated: with more than 11,000 nesting northern gannets. We pass them in the ferry, taking care not to get too close so as not to disturb them. It is a phenomenal site, thousands of elegant white seabirds jostling for a granite ledge to call their own.
I go back for a closer look the next day on Sula, the boat run by the Alderney Wildlife Trust, which has a less noisy engine and an outdoor deck. Our first stop is the tiny island of Burhou where each year 140 pairs of puffins come to make their nests. We watch about 15 of them bobbing in the water and flying over our boat before they are joined by some seals. A massive bull heaves himself on to a rock where he is joined by his mate and they bask in the late spring sunshine. This is not rare for the Channel Islands. The gannets, however, are unique to Alderney, which is home to two per cent of the world’s population.
There is another wildlife phenomenon not found on the other islands: blonde hedgehogs. Living in a city, I usually only ever see a hedgehog when it’s been hit by a car. So I was delighted to see these little creatures on a night-time walk. The brilliant blonde hair was a bonus. Cars aren’t really a threat to them here, with the upper speed limit set at 35mph, so hedgehogs remain a common sight in gardens and even sometimes wandering in town.
But it’s not only hedgehogs that benefit from the lack of traffic. This is heaven for walkers and cyclists, too. There are a few gentle slopes on what is essentially a flat island, but feeling lazy I hired an e-bike to explore.
Alderney is one of the most heavily fortified islands in the world. The Victorians built 18 forts and batteries on the island in response to France extending the fortifications in Cherbourg, just 25 miles (40km) away. Perhaps the most striking is Fort Tourgis, on a headland to the north-west of St Anne, which was designed to house 346 men. It is mostly derelict but makes a nice picnic spot.
The rest of the fortifications were constructed during the German occupation of the island in the Second World War, when forced labour was used to build 600 bunkers and defences. From every road you can see at least one of these looming concrete structures, which provide a sombre tone to an otherwise tremendously pretty wild-flower-strewn landscape.
In a place with so few people, you instantly feel as though you have friends. As I get off my bike to take a picture of the striking black and white lighthouse on the north coast, the guide I’d been with the day before steps out of his house carrying a little bird he is rearing. That is the other truism of a small place: everybody has more than one job.
The island has a rich birdlife and a new bird observatory, on the site of an old nunnery, is the most recently accredited example in the British Isles. It is attracting attention from the ornithological community who come to enjoy the 270 species of bird found on the island.
Alderney has a bit of a reputation on the other islands for being a little quirky: you certainly won’t find any high-street chains in the tiny capital St Anne, you can’t buy fast food, and the bus shelter is a fallacy – there is no bus service. But the community has surprisingly captured the zeitgeist in some ways. In an attempt to do away with plastic, locals fill up their milk bottles from a dispenser in the greengrocer and buy sausages from the butcher wrapped in brown paper.
Down in the vaults at the Braye Beach hotel, you’ll find a cocktail bar worthy of any capital city, and one of the Georgian town houses is being turned into the island’s first boutique hotel. Blonde Hedgehog is the brainchild of entrepreneur Julie-Anne Uggla, a friend of actors Idris Elba and Lena Headey.
When she starts to entice her jet set to the island in the autumn, it will be all over Instagram – so go soon, while it is still relatively unknown.
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