Last visit: June 2026

The first time I stood on this beach, decades ago now, I didn't know what a sea tractor was. I remember the particular, almost childlike astonishment of realising that the pub I was about to walk into would, in a few hours, be completely cut off from the mainland — that I could be genuinely holed up on an island, in a proper pub, waiting for the sea to let me leave. When "awesome" still meant awesome, that was about as awesome as Devon got.

The pub name, at least, is refreshingly simple. Not a person, not a ship, not a smuggler — just the pilchard itself, the shoals of sardine that this whole coast once fished, cured and lived off, spotted from a lookout hut at the top of the island and signalled to the boats below by a cry, a "hue," that gave the hut its name too. The pub has carried that plain, working name since 1336.

You already know the rest, because everyone does: a possible monastery guesthouse, fishermen turned smugglers, Agatha Christie, the tractor. It's on every postcard rack in the county, and I'm not going to pretend I can tell it better than the fifty websites that already tell it identically. What I can tell you is what forty years of coming back has actually shown me, which is a quieter story than the one on the postcards.

The wonder and excitement is still there. It's just a little harder to find than it used to be.

In the years since Covid sent half the country looking for a foreign holiday at home instead, Burgh Island has picked up a certain kind of visitor who seems to expect the same standard of service they'd get on Marylebone High Street, delivered at the same brisk metropolitan pace — which is a genuinely strange thing to demand of a pub that gets cut off by the sea. The odd thing is, it's the staff who've become more travelled and more polished over that time, while it's the customers who've somehow got less patient. That's backwards from how it's supposed to work, and it's cost the place a little of the local innocence I remember — local service, delivered at local speed, by people who weren't in a hurry because the tide wasn't either.

But here's what I've learned, and it's the real reason to make this walk: come when the tide is against you, not with you. Come in autumn or winter, when the crowds thin and the Pilchard becomes something closer to what it must have felt like a century ago — a small stone room holding out against actual weather, while everyone who wanted underfloor heating and a hot tub is tucked up in a holiday let somewhere, entirely missing the point.

Or, failing that, just wait. Watch the tide come in on a summer afternoon and you'll see the same thing happen every single day: the crowd checks its watch, remembers the causeway won't wait for anyone, and scuttles back across the sand toward the car park. You can almost feel The Pilchard exhale. What's left behind is a comfortably marooned community, something much closer to the pub I remembered all those years ago.

Whatever the crowd, whatever the season, I'll say this: the two young staff working the bar this week, Millie and Joe, handled a long queue of thoroughly impatient people with a calm I found genuinely impressive to watch. If the old innocence has gone from the visitors, it clearly hasn't gone from the people serving them — and they deserve to be named, in print, rather than folded anonymously into "the friendly staff" the way every other write-up does it.