Lundy is an English island in the Bristol Channel. It forms part of the district of Torridge in the county of Devon.
At about long and wide, Lundy has had a long and turbulent history, frequently changing hands between the British crown and various usurpers. In the 1920s, the island's owner, Martin Harman, tried to issue his own coinage and was fined. In 1941, two German Heinkel He 111 bombers crash-landed on the island, and their crews were captured.
In 1969, Lundy was purchased by British millionaire Jack Hayward, who donated it to the National Trust. It is now managed by the Landmark Trust, a conservation charity that derives its income from day trips and holiday lettings, most visitors arriving by boat from Bideford or Ilfracombe. A local tourist curiosity is the special "Puffin" postage stamp, a collector's item in a category known by philatelists as "local carriage labels".
The de Marisco family were the first known tyrannical owners of Lundy in the 12th century. They recognized the island as an impregnable stronghold and held it despite the crown granting it twice to the Knights Templar.
As a steep, rocky island, often shrouded by fog, Lundy has been the scene of many shipwrecks, and the remains of its old lighthouse installations are of both historic and scientific interest. Its present-day lighthouses, both of which are solar-powered, are fully automated. Lundy has a rich bird life, as it lies on major migration routes, and hosts many vagrant as well as indigenous species. It also contains a variety of marine habitats, with rare seaweeds, sponges and corals. In 2010, the island became Britain's first Marine Conservation Zone.
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Lundy is the largest island in the Bristol Channel. It lies off the coast of Devon, about a third of the distance across the channel from Devon to Pembrokeshire. Lundy gives its name to a British sea area.Collyer, Peter (1998) Rain Later, Good: illustrating the Shipping Forecast. Bradford on Avon: Thomas Reed Lundy is included in the district of Torridge in Devon. In 2007, it had a resident population of 28 people. These include a warden, a ranger, an island manager, a farmer, bar and housekeeping staff, and volunteers. Most live in and around the village at the south of the island. Visitors include day trippers and holiday makers staying overnight in rental properties or camping.
In a 2005 opinion poll of Radio Times readers, Lundy was named as Britain's tenth greatest natural wonder. The island has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest and it was England's first statutory Marine Nature reserve, and the first Marine Conservation Zone, because of its unique flora and fauna. It is managed by the Landmark Trust on behalf of the National Trust.
Etymology
The place-name Lundy is first attested in 1189 in the Records of the Templars in England, where it appears as . It appears in the Charter Rolls as Lundeia again in 1199, and as Lunday in 1281. The name is Scandinavian and means 'puffin island', from the Old Norse meaning 'puffin' (compare the three Lundey islands in Iceland); it appears in the 12th-century Orkneyinga saga as .Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names, p.307.
Lundy is known in Welsh as , 'Gwair's Island', in reference to an alternative name for the wizard Gwydion.
History Lundy has evidence of visitation or occupation from the Mesolithic period onward, with Neolithic flintwork, Bronze Age burial mounds, four inscribed gravestones from the early medieval period,See the discussion and bibliography in Elisabeth Okasha, Corpus of early Christian inscribed stones of South-west Britain (Leicester: University Press, 1993), pp. 154–66.Lundy Field Society 40th Annual Report for 1989. pp. 34–47. and an early medieval monastery (possibly dedicated to St Elen or St Helen).
Beacon Hill Cemetery
Beacon Hill Cemetery was excavated by Charles Thomas in 1969.Charles Thomas, And Shall These Mute Stones Speak? (1994) Cardiff: University of Wales Press The cemetery contains four inscribed stones, dated to the 5th or 6th century AD. The site was originally enclosed by a curvilinear bank and ditch, which is still visible in the southwest corner; however, the other walls were moved when the Old Light was constructed in 1819. Celtic Christian enclosures of this type were common in Western Britain and are known as in Welsh and in Cornish. There are surviving examples in Luxulyan, in Cornwall; Mathry, Meidrim and Clydau in the south of Wales; and Stowford, Jacobstowe, Lydford and Instow, in Devon.
Thomas proposed the following sequence of site usage: An area of round huts and fields. These huts may have fallen into disuse before the construction of the cemetery. The construction of the focal grave, an rectangular stone enclosure containing a single cist grave. The interior of the enclosure was filled with small granite pieces. Two more cist graves located to the west of the enclosure may also date from this time. Perhaps 100 years later, the focal grave was opened and the infill removed. The body may have been moved to a church at this time. Two further stages of cist grave construction around the focal grave.
Twenty-three cist graves were found during this excavation. Considering that the excavation only uncovered a small area of the cemetery, there may be as many as 100 graves.
Inscribed stones
Four Celtic inscribed stones have been found in Beacon Hill Cemetery: 1400 OPTIMI, or TIMI;Elisabeth Okasha, (1993) Corpus of Early Christian Inscribed Stones of South-west Britain. Leicester: University Press the name (or perhaps epithet) Optimus is Latin and male. Discovered in 1962 by D. B. Hague. 1401 RESTEVTAE, or RESGEVT[A], Latin, female i.e. Resteuta or Resgeuta. Discovered in 1962 by D. B. Hague. 1402 POTIT[I], or [PO]TIT, Latin, male. Discovered in 1961 by K. S. Gardener and A. Langham. 1403 --]IGERNI [FIL]I TIGERNI, or—I]GERNI [FILI] [T]I[G]ERNI, Brittonic, male i.e. Tigernus son of Tigernus. Discovered in 1905.
Knights Templar Lundy was granted to the Knights Templar by Henry II in 1160. The Templars were a major international maritime force at this time, with interests in North Devon, and almost certainly an important port at Bideford or on the River Taw in Barnstaple. This was probably because of the increasing threat posed by the Norse sea raiders; however, it is unclear whether they ever took possession of the island. Ownership was disputed by the Marisco family who may have already been on the island during King Stephen's reign. The Mariscos were fined, and the island was cut off from necessary supplies. Evidence of the Templars' weak hold on the island came when King John, on his accession in 1199, confirmed the earlier grant.
Marisco family
The de Marisco family were a prominent Anglo-Norman family who controlled Lundy between the 12th and 13th centuries. Their tenure was marked by piracy, defiance of royal authority, and ultimately the construction of the island's first castle.
The documented history of Lundy under Norman rule began with the de Newmarch family, who held the island from around 1100. Sometime around 1150, the de Newmarch family leased Lundy to the de Mariscos.
In 1235, William de Marisco was implicated in the murder of Henry Clement, a messenger of Henry III. Three years later, an attempt was made to kill Henry III by a man who later confessed to being an agent of the Marisco family. William de Marisco fled to Lundy where he lived as a virtual king. He built a stronghold in the area now known as Bulls' Paradise with walls thick.
In 1242, Henry III sent troops to the island. They scaled the island's cliff and captured William de Marisco and 16 of his "subjects". Henry III built the castle (sometimes referred to as the Marisco Castle) in an attempt to establish the rule of law on the island and its surrounding waters. In 1275, the island is recorded as being in the Lordship of King Edward I but by 1322, it was in the possession of Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster and was among the large number of lands seized by Edward II following Lancaster's execution for rebelling against the King. At some point in the 13th century, the monks of the Cistercian order at Cleeve Abbey in Somerset held the rectory of the island.
Piracy Over the next few centuries, the island was hard to govern. Trouble followed as both English and foreign pirates and privateers – including other members of the Marisco family – took control of the island for short periods. Ships were forced to navigate close to Lundy because of the dangerous shingle banks in the fast flowing River Severn and Bristol Channel, with its tidal range of , one of the greatest in the world. This made the island a profitable location from which to prey on passing Bristol-bound merchant ships bringing back valuable goods from overseas.
In 1627, the Salé Rovers, from the Republic of Salé (in modern-day Morocco) occupied Lundy for five years. The Barbary pirates, under the command of the Dutch Muslim Jan Janszoon, flew an Ottoman flag over the island. Slaving raids were made embarking from Lundy by the Barbary pirates, and captured Europeans were held on Lundy before being sent to Algiers to be sold as slaves.
From 1628 to 1634, in addition to the Barbary Pirates, the island was plagued by privateers of French, Basque, English and Spanish origin targeting the lucrative shipping routes passing through the Bristol Channel. These incursions were eventually ended by John Penington, but in the 1660s and as late as the 1700s, the island still fell prey to French privateers.
Civil war In the English Civil War, Thomas Bushell held Lundy for King Charles I, rebuilding Marisco Castle and garrisoning the island at his own expense. He was a friend of Francis Bacon, a strong supporter of the Royalist cause and an expert on mining and coining. It was the last Royalist territory held between the first and second civil wars. After receiving permission from Charles I, Bushell surrendered the island on 24 February 1647 to Richard Fiennes, representing General Fairfax. In 1656, the island was acquired by Lord Saye and Sele.
18th and 19th centuries The late 18th and early 19th centuries were years of lawlessness on Lundy, particularly during the ownership of Thomas Benson (1708–1772), a Member of Parliament for Barnstaple in 1747 and Sheriff of Devon, who notoriously used the island for housing convicts whom he was supposed to be deporting. Benson leased Lundy from its owner, John Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Gower (1694–1754) (who was an heir of the Grenville family of Bideford and of Stowe, Kilkhampton in Cornwall), at a rent of £60 per annum and contracted with the Government to transport a shipload of convicts to Virginia, but diverted the ship to Lundy to use the convicts as his personal slaves. Later Benson was involved in an insurance swindle. He purchased and insured the ship Nightingale and loaded it with a valuable cargo of pewter and linen. Having cleared the port on the mainland, the ship put into Lundy, where the cargo was removed and stored in a cave built by the convicts, before setting sail again. Some days afterwards, when a homeward-bound vessel was sighted, the Nightingale was set on fire and scuttled. The crew were taken off the stricken ship by the other ship, which landed them safely at Clovelly.
Sir Vere Hunt, 1st Baronet of Curragh, a rather eccentric Irish politician and landowner, and unsuccessful man of business, purchased the island from John Cleveland in 1802 for £5,270. Hunt planted in the island a small, self-contained Irish colony with its own constitution and divorce laws, coinage, and stamps. The tenants came from Hunt's Irish estate and they experienced agricultural difficulties while on the island. This led Hunt to seek someone who would take the island off his hands; he failed in his attempt to sell it to the British government as a base for troops.