Tresco Island - The North and North West

 After time on the delightful island, one of several inhabited and the second largest of islands in the group called The Isles of Scilly, it is time to post a few pictures before I launch into the delights of the Tresco Abbey Gardens, for which other posts will follow.

Tresco is a small island, measuring just over 2 by 1 miles, and a saunter out each day means that most paths can be taken very easily in every direction.  The north of the island has a completely different feel to the luxuriant semi-tropical gardens which are on the southern side of the island.  The waved maritime heath at the northern end of the island grows on shallow soil on top of the coarse granite, of which there are some dramatic exposures.  

The area is strewn with the remains left behind by the last retreating ice sheet some eighteen thousand years ago,  and the strong northerly salt wind leads to tight undulating heathers, through which from time to time tell tale stones from Bronze aged cairns, flint works etc stand out above the vegetation.

Here Plantago coronopus, a plantain commonly known as the Stag's-Horn Plantain, is growing in the shelter afforded between two lichen rich granite boulders, together with Rock Samphire which grows more prolifically near the sea along edges of cottages and walls. 

For any lover of lichens there is plenty to see both on stones or any wood that happens to be even just a few years old. 

If you want to see lichen encrusted benches then Tresco will delight you.

I believe this to be Teloschistes flavicans,  this intricately branched golden yellow lichen is very sensitive to sulphur dioxide, so its existence here growing on the north west of the island about 20 metres above sea level.

Teloschistes flavicans growing on Tresco

Lower down the wild flowers such as gorse, honey suckle and on more open sites thrift were in full early summer bloom.

At low tide one distinct type of thickly growing sea weed rings the coast and here looking towards Cromwell Tower you can see its tops floating sideways on the retreating tide. I know virtually nothing about sea weed but their different forms and colours are fascinating and there were many different ones to amuse me in particular during walks on rocks or the more sandy beaches. 

Sea Thrift carpeting the slopes facing Bryher