Ninety seconds on Somerset Village
Come on a weekday if the ferry matters: the route into Watford Bridge and Cavello Bay does not sail at weekends. Otherwise buses seven and eight reach the village, and the trail arrives on foot from the bridge.
Riding the trail up from the bridge is the pleasant way to arrive: the last paved section passes below Fort Scaur, opens onto the Great Sound and ends at the old station in the village. The street is short. A bank, a post office, a library, a handful of shops, two or three places to eat at the water's edge. Mangrove Bay is the water the street faces, calm most of the time, good for a swim or a snorkel, mangroves along the curve of the shore and no facilities at all. The boat club and the summer Non-Mariners' Race, a deliberately unseaworthy regatta, are the place at its most itself.
Explore the rest of Somerset
Reckoned the smallest working drawbridge in the world, its opening span no wider than a sailboat mast, raised by hand with a plank. It…
For a century and a half this walled yard of grey limestone, at the far western end of the island, was the Royal Navy's base in the western…
The Navy's old cooperage, its timber roof still carried on the original trusses, given over to stalls of island makers working in cedar,…