Jersey

Please note: Flights to Jersey have now ceased for 2011. Visit www.hial.co.uk for information on the 2012 schedule.

Islands are in good supply in Scotland – but we don’t quite have a monopoly. Jersey, the southernmost part of the British Isles, is well worth discovering for anyone with a love of scenery, history, water sports or fine food. And visiting Jersey has never been easier, with fantastic charter holidays available from Inverness and Dundee airports until September.

I spent two and a half days there with some journalist colleagues in spring – and came away vowing to return. I was on the go constantly, yet I scarcely scratched the surface of an island which, though only nine miles by five, is packed with possibilities. Many of them are extremely tasty – the island is promoting itself as a gourmet’s paradise, starting from the excellent platform of its renowned cream and new potatoes and giving equal emphasis to seafood, fruit and vegetables.

Not just open space

Jersey is home to 92,000 people, plus visitors, so don’t go there expecting empty expanses. St Helier, the capital, is a busy port. Elsewhere narrow, lanes criss-cross the island and it is never far to the next village.

Yet you can find peace and quiet. We were taken on a walk through a nature reserve at Les Mielles, in the west of the island, where a huge variety of plants thrive in the sandy soil. Our guide, Kazz Padidar, of Jersey Adventures, who is equally at home leading kayak tours or rock climbing sorties, is something of a Ray Mears figure. He showed us how to use willow bark to make rope and how to identify delicacies for the table such as fennel, black mustard and even nettles, which he munched raw without a wince. He also pointed across the marram grass to where a marsh harrier – a bird I had never seen before – was drifting low in search of prey.

Kazz, who has a French mother and an Iranian father, is a well-travelled man, having worked on wildlife projects in Africa and South America. But studying turtles in Costa Rica has not blunted his love of Jersey’s own creatures, such as the splendidly named agile frog. “This island is just as interesting in its way as anywhere else I’ve been,” he insisted.

From creature comforts to... creatures

Then it was time to warm up with an hour in the sumptuous new spa at the Hotel de France in St Helier. Here we enjoyed the pool, jacuzzi and sauna, promising ourselves we would return for one of the Ayurvedic treatments offered here in what is a first for Jersey.

Now it keen to eat, we headed east to Castle Green, a neat gastro pub in a spectacular setting close to the 600-year-old Mont Orgueil Castle. The pub is a sponsor of Genuine Jersey, an initiative promoting food grown, reared, caught or produced locally. My turbot with seasonal vegetables, including incomparable Jersey Royal new potatoes, was superb.

Next day we headed to Durrell, the headquarters of the international conservation trust set up by Gerald Durrell in 1963. To call this delightful place a zoo would be to do it a gross disservice. It has the feel of a park, with greenery everywhere and a pleasing lack of concrete.

Everywhere there are information panels explaining that the birds and animals are there not just as curios but as part of a conservation programme. The Montserrat oriole, for instance, had 75 per cent of its forest habitat destroyed in the island’s volcanic eruption of 1995. Highlights for me were the orang utans, some of which have been successfully resettled on Sumatra having been born on Jersey, and the aye-aye, the perpetually startled-looking lemurs from Madagascar that were a personal favourite of Durrell himself.

The Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust has trained more than 2,000 young people from all over the world so that they can return to their countries and lead conservation efforts there. With a new shop and cafe, it is becoming a very slick visitor attraction, yet it has lost none of its charm or purpose and is well worth supporting.

The freshest seafood

Next on our agenda were some less cute, though still sought-after, creatures – shellfish. We met up with oyster farmer Chris Le Masurier and climbed aboard his tractor trailer to cross the sweeping sands of the Royal Bay of Grouville, heading for his oyster beds.

He explained that the island’s tides created just about the biggest rise and fall in the world. Where we were standing would be covered by 40 feet of water at high tide, bringing in masses of nutrients and creating ideal conditions for shellfish to grow.

We walked among endless rows of wire baskets on wooden racks, each full of oysters that had to be shaken regularly to avoid them sticking together. Even further out in the bay were ranks of wooden poles with mussels growing on ropes by the hundreds of thousands.

Then came the moment of truth: Chris whipped out his knife, picked out an oyster, opened it and offered it to me. I thought: “Food just does not come any fresher than this” and gulped it down. Delicious.

The wind down there at low tide was on the chilly side of fresh, so we headed back to land and the nearby Le Hocq pub for more oysters, this time in sundry dressings and washed down with hearty ales from the island’s Liberation Brewery. Head brewer Paul Hurley was on hand to introduce brews such as Ambree (“robust and biscuity”), Mary Ann (“chocolatey”) and Liberation (“citric notes, goes well with seafood”).

Historic Jersey

Heading back towards the centre of the island, we visited one of the most fascinating museums I have seen – Jersey War Tunnels. These were dug by slave labour from eastern Europe during the Second World War, when Jersey was occupied by the Germans. Intended to house a hospital, they were never used for that purpose but have now been transformed into an outstanding permanent exhibition on a period of great suffering and tension on the island, which Churchill had deemed to be of no strategic importance and thus not worth defending. “Let ’em starve,” he said – and his words are now carved in stone at the entrance to the museum.

Inside there is a photograph of June Sinclair, who spurned the advances of a soldier and was charged with “insulting the German forces”. She was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she died. There is a gold watch presented to an islander in 1966 by the Soviet government in recognition of her kindness to Russian slave labourers. And there are some touching photographs of smiling German soldiers in their swimming trunks on the beach, looking for all the world like happy young holidaymakers today.

Shopping

Emerging into the sunshine, we headed for the Classic Herd farm shop, one of the island’s leading purveyors of home-produced cheeses and ice cream, and rounded off our day with an excellent meal at the lively Boat House, a glass-walled quayside restaurant at St Aubin’s, on the south coast.

The foodie theme continued on our final day with a tour of the garden at our hotel, the five-star Longueville Manor on the edge of St Helier, where head chef Andrew Baird showed us the huge array of herbs, vegetables and fruit that go into his creations.

We then repaired to one of Longueville’s competitors, the Atlantic Hotel, high above St Ouen’s Bay in the west, which featured as a “treat” destination in The Apprentice. Here head chef Mark Jordan took us to a nearby German gun emplacement where the concrete walls now provide the ideal environment for keeping live lobsters and crabs, with sea water pumped in twice a day. Now when a diner at the Atlantic orders crab, one can be pulled out of the water and delivered to the kitchen door in under 10 minutes. It’s a typical example of an adaptability rather like that so often seen in Scotland’s islands. And this “can do” spirit goes a long way to explaining Jersey’s success in swapping its former “bucket and spade” image for something far tastier.

---