WE’RE FLYING low over the English Channel, looking down at a fortress almost camouflaged on the rocky shore of a tiny island. Conversation is impossible above the din of the engine, so the 10 other passengers and I sit in silence throughout the descent, watching the waves get closer as the plane approaches the cliff upon which our pilot apparently intends to land. Propeller blades whirring, the plane lands bumpily onto a landing strip beside the tiniest tin shack of an airport I have ever seen.
Within minutes of stepping off the plane, I climb into a taxi that will take me across Alderney, an island of three and a half square miles, to the fortress I spotted from the air. I notice the taxi’s short license plate, reflecting a car-owning population of just 2,013 on an island that inhabitants affectionately describe as “2,000 alcoholics clinging to a rock.” Alderney, a self-governing island owned by the British Crown, is the nearest of the Channel Islands to both the British and French coasts, lying just a few miles from each.
My friends have hired the fortress for the weekend, and in a few minutes the taxi has driven me down a green hill populated by lazy cattle and up the tidal causeway, a concrete isthmus that connects the fortress to the rest of the island. We pass through the drawbridge, and I open the heavy front gate onto a view of the sea and 19th-century stone ramparts built by Queen Victoria’s government to protect the island from the French. Beyond the ramparts, a solitary lighthouse and two smaller islands break the horizon.