The delightful island of Sark is unlike any other. To land on Sark is to step back in time, fifty, a hundred or even more years. The only motor vehicles, other than an ambulance and a fire engine, are farm tractors. Most people travel round the island by horse-drawn carriage, by bicycle or on foot. Time seems meaningless on Sark - even the horses move slowly!

The island is surrounded by cliffs of great scenic beauty and, apart from a few poor, modern buildings, the interior of the island presents a totally unspoiled rural landscape.

Sark has no town or village. The island was settled in 1565 by Helier de Carteret, a Seigneur of Jersey. He was granted the island by Queen Elizabeth I in return for his guarantee to have at least 40 men under arms to defend the island against the French. He divided the fertile top of the island into 40 holdings, taking the largest for himself and ensuring all possible landings, and there are few, were covered by a settlement. The other tenements went to settlers who in turn guaranteed to occupy the land and have at least one man with a musket. Each man had a place on the Island Assembly that governed the island.

This feudal system remains little changed today. A Seigneur still lives in the house on the main plot - the Manoir - and the inhabitants are spread over the whole island on the pattern of the original tenements. Each tenement has a box pew in the island church and wherever you look on the island the farmsteads, fields and hedgebanks are virtually as built by the original Elizabethan settlers, who came to a then unoccupied island. The Assembly still governs the island. Queen Elizabeth II. is due to visit the island this month to bestow an honour on the present Seigneur and to meet the Assembly that governs in Her Name.