Notes from a very small island: wonderful, eccentric Ascension

‘This is one of the strangest places on the face of the earth,’ wrote a Victorian naval officer. Another early visitor called it ‘the abomination of desolation’ — and to this day, on the 200th anniversary of the British occupation, Ascension remains decidedly odd.

The summit of an extinct volcano, it pokes up out of the Atlantic eight degrees south of the Equator, and although the latest eruption is thought to have taken place 70,000 years ago, most of it still looks raw. Vegetation cloaks the summit and shoulders of the 2,800-foot Green Mountain, but steep ravines and petrified lava-flows — jet-black, grey, brown and white — plunge away towards the coast. From this desert rise brick-red cinder cones, several topped with the gleaming domes and dishes of space-watching installations.

Spirits are high this weekend among the 800-odd inhabitants, for they are celebrating the bicentenary with a succession of junketings: a cricket match, a treasure hunt, dances, a concert by the Royal Marines Band, speeches, a church service, a flag-raising, fireworks, and party after party. The culmination will be the unveiling of a memorial made by a gifted itinerant metal-worker, Nick Tayler, in a newly created little park.

Yet the greatest cause of jubilation has been the announcement of an air-link between Ascension and its neighbour St Helena, 700 miles to the south-east. The Royal Mail ship which served the islands for many years will cease next July, and without it the 600-odd St Helenians (known as ‘the Saints’) who work on Ascension would have had great difficulty in returning home. Now they will be able to fly direct.

The Saints came as manual workers, but many have achieved much higher status — witness Jacqui Ellick, one of the seven councillors who advise the Administrator at monthly meetings. Stedson Stroud, who believes that his great-great-great grandmother Sarah Bateman was a freed slave, is now warden of the national park on Green Mountain.