Tanya Gold

Murder most romantic: Burgh Island Hotel reviewed

The ghost of Agatha Christie is everywhere

  • From Spectator Life
Burgh Island Hotel in Devon – with the wagon used to transport guests at high tide in the foreground [Alamy]

The Burgh Island Hotel lives on a tidal island in a deserted part of south Devon. The directions for visiting are very detailed. You drive along the deserted country road, and at a certain point – just before you lose mobile telephone reception – you must stop to telephone the hotel, and they tell you where to park your car on the mainland, and they will send the car across the beach and meet you in Bigbury-on-Sea. You drive on and eventually you see a brightly lit Art Deco palace under a cliff. It was built by a filmmaker called Archibald Nettlefold (Human Desires, The Hellcat), the heir to an engineering fortune. I think he was a very odd man. There is very little information about him, but he left this hotel, and there is probably an old monastery underneath it.

If it were high tide, we would be brought across the back by a strange high wagon on wheels: an Edwardian-style amphibious vehicle that appears in the adaptation of Evil Under the Sun, which was filmed here.

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