The lane offers no particular destination, and that, it turns out, is the point. I’m walking above Jamestown after overnight rain, flanked by low stone walls and wild flax. A goat regards me from a verge. A wirebird makes its quick, scribbly dash across open ground ahead. Below, invisible through the cloud, the Atlantic waits. It feels, improbably, like the English countryside. That is, if the English countryside had been carried 4 000km out to sea, softened by volcanic air, and left to its own devices.
St Helena is a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, between Africa and South America, and among the most remote inhabited islands on Earth. Traces of that history appear quietly, in place names, garden walls, cups of tea, careful greetings, country roads, and the unexpected vowels of the Saints, as the islanders are known. Nothing feels staged for visitors. Distance has done subtler work, letting old English habits endure while the island became itself entirely.
Nothing hurries you towards the next thing. The roads teach this first. They wind through cloud forest, curl past dense flax-covered slopes, and drop into valleys where the light thins, gathers, then breaks open again over the sea. I walked them across several days, sometimes with an objective, more often without one. High Knoll Fort, the island’s largest former military structure, offered a stone bench and a commanding view across the capital, Jamestown, and the open sea, a place to sit on walls first laid in 1799 as a Thursday morning moved through its paces.
Finding the Island’s Rhythm
The Saints carry this rhythm in their manner. Their warmth is genuine but unhurried; their conversation makes time for itself. In the shade of an ancient Ficus tree in the Castle Gardens, I fell into conversation with Basil George, a historian, educator, and keeper of island stories now in his late 80s. He traced 16 ethnic threads in his family genealogy, each one a chapter in the island’s deeply layered history. When I asked about the pace of life here, he looked at me steadily. “Things take the time they take,” he said. It was not advice. Around us, the garden seemed to agree.
At Farm Lodge Country House Hotel in Rosemary Plain, the island’s slower era of travel still feels beautifully intact. Owners Stephen Biggs and Maureen Jonas, both formerly of the RMS St Helena – the mail ship once the island’s only link to the outside world – have shaped Farm Lodge around the kind of quiet ritual that turns dinner into an occasion.
As evening gathers, Farm Lodge restores one of travel’s quieter pleasures: the desire to dress for dinner. Pre-dinner drinks kick off the ritual. Dinner follows with silver service, the room warmed by conversation that soon drew strangers into friendship.
After the meal on my second night, Stephen noticed my interest in the sky and led me outside. Then, with the quick efficiency of a host who knew exactly what the darkness could reveal, he disappeared indoors to switch off every light he could. The Milky Way appeared dense and textured above this pixel in the Atlantic, making ordinary measures of luxury feel suddenly thin.
A table in Jamestown
Then there is Dan Flory, a chef trained in some of Europe’s finer kitchens, who arrived when his partner joined the island’s paramedic service. Dan began baking bread at home. Soon, seven loaves became 40. Word on a small island travels fast. By day, Dan’s Bakery in Jamestown serves deli-style lunches. But at his fortnightly pop-up dinners, his training met the island’s pantry and memory.
The night I joined, he opened with crown-prince squash risotto rooted in the island’s beloved pumpkin stew, its sweetness deepened into something silky and earthy. A couscous with fresh tuna followed, its Romesco carrying the smoke and brightness of the local tomato paste tradition. The refinement was quiet but unmistakable. Not formality, but the care of a trained hand listening closely to the island. Each plate seemed to hold two things at once. The warmth of something familiar and the quiet surprise of smoke, sweetness, and sea finding a new arrangement.
Later, walking from Dan’s through Jamestown’s back streets towards my hotel, the island seemed to gather these moments without announcing them. The stone fort, Basil’s steady gaze, the remembered ship, the smoky Romesco, the sky revealing what the darkness held. Somewhere ahead, beyond the town’s narrow streets, the Atlantic waited. The goat, the wirebird, the country lane above Jamestown; each had fallen back into memory. Nothing on St Helena had asked to be hurried into meaning. Its gifts had been there all along, waiting for me to slow down enough to recognise them.
Planning Your Trip to St Helena
- Airlink connects St Helena to South Africa, with weekly flights from Johannesburg and seasonal flights from Cape Town.
- South African and British passport holders do not currently require an advance visa for short visits, but receive a short-term entry permit on arrival.
- Accommodation ranges from B&Bs and guesthouses to hotels. I stayed at Mantis St Helena in a heritage suite in Jamestown.
For more information, visit sthelenatourism.com.
Image Credits: Ryan Enslin
