WHEN you come to Scilly you naturally land first upon St. Mary’s Island, for there is the quay, where the steamer from England unloads her passengers and cargo.
You may or you may not on first arriving feel capable of appreciating the picturesqueness of the stone walls and gateway of the quay, with Star Castle appearing on the hill behind; but through this gateway you must pass in order to enter the town. The pier now in use has only been built just over seventy years, and was lengthened twenty years ago; yet already again the sand is silting up against it, and making it less serviceable.
From the pier you can see the houses of Hugh Town stretching in a long line round the curve of St. Mary’s Pool, the back walls of many of them rising straight out of the sea, if it happens to be high-water of a spring-tide.
This Hugh Town on St. Mary’s Island is the metropolis, port, and shopping centre of the little archipelago, and, generally speaking, the hub of the Scillonian universe. Formerly the presence of the fort behind it gave it yet another kind of importance, and made it the centre of the military as well as of the civil life. It is built chiefly on the narrow sandy neck which unites the promontory of the “Heugh” or “Hugh” (now better known as Garrison Hill) to the rest of the island.
Over and over again the prophets of evil have foretold that one day there would come some big sea and wash the little town away. Several times in days gone by the sea has entered the houses, carrying off the furniture, and driving the inhabitants to the upper floors; the waves have even swept across the isthmus from Porth Cressa to St. Mary’s Pool; but the banks have been raised since then, so still the little town stands, and the inhabitants seem to entertain no fears for their safety. The houses were built when the people feared foreign foes more than they feared the sea, so they clustered close under the shelter of Garrison Hill and Star Castle that crowns it.
The formation of Hugh Town is of necessity strictly determined by the shape of the land on which it is built. There is a group of houses just under Garrison Hill; and then a narrow, winding street runs the length of the sandy strip between the two bays, with a few short branch-streets where there happens to be room. As the isthmus widens out to join the main island the principal street also widens and divides into two branches, one of which soon ends in the country road leading to “Old Town” (of which more anon), and the other follows for a short distance the curve of St. Mary’s Pool, but also soon becomes a country road, and leads into the heart of the island.
THE ENTRANCE TO HUGH TOWN, FROM THE OLD PIER
It has been suggested that the Hugh, which gives its name to the town, was once, like Plymouth Hoe, the station for the “huer,” who stands on high places to indicate to fishermen by a particular “hue” or cry the approach and direction of shoals of fish; and that the Gugh, a similar promontory connected with St. Agnes, is a corruption of the same word.