No more than an hour into my stay at the Hell Bay Hotel, on the Scillonian island of Bryher, I was sure that its name was a misnomer. Sumptuous rooms are complemented by an art collection to die for. There are works by luminaries of modern British art, such as Rose Hilton, Patrick Heron and Ivon Hitchens, and the hotel’s views, of the unruffled waters of a small lake and the tranquil crescent of Great Porth beach, are every bit as enchanting. If this is hell, there is a reason for sinning.

At nine o’clock the next morning I watched as a man left a house at the edge of Great Porth and set off across its wreck-strewn sands. It didn’t take me long to find Richard Pearce, the island artist, for his journey took him all of 300 yards to an old gig shed that now serves as his studio. “It had all but disappeared into the sand 20 years ago,” Pearce said. Its owner, the Duchy of Cornwall, didn’t know the shed existed, but was amenable to his idea of restoring it, which he did largely with timbers washed up on the beach. The studio opened in 1993, giving Pearce possibly the most idyllic daily commute in the British Isles.

Born and bred on the Scillies, Pearce was a crofter who took up painting when a slipped disc rendered him immobile. From his studio the antediluvian offshore outcrops of the Scillies loom; behind them, Britain’s tallest lighthouse, Bishop Rock, glints as the evening wears on. It was built in the mid-1800s by a group of men who, for nearly a decade, lived on nearby Rosevear, the last landfall before America.

Pearce’s ancestors were among those who worked on Rosevear, a bleak and inhospitable place where the rocks and vegetation are white with guano. It is reputed to reek worse than a latrine and is haunted by the ghost of Ann Cargill, an actress returning to Britain from India on The Nancy when it sank in 1784. She died clutching her baby, for whom she croons to this day: a vision of hell not evident back at the Hell Bay Hotel.

See tresco.co.uk/stay/hell-bay and rpearce.blogspot.com.

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