The Box is a major cultural and heritage attraction and archive, which opened in Plymouth’s city centre in September 2020. Its collection, formally the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA), is the regional film archive for the South West of England, comprising the combined programme libraries of Westward Television and Television South West (TSW). It also includes a significant number of donated film collections dating back to the early 1890s.
This film is part of Free
Call of the Islands
Su Ingle explores the beauty and mystery of some of the South West's strange isles.
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Overview
Secrets of the Coast is a series of documentaries on natural history presented by broadcaster and naturalist Su Ingle. This episode was filmed on the islands of Lundy and Steep Holm in the Bristol Channel and on the Isles of Scilly off Land's End in Cornwall. It looks at the havens these fascinating and mysterious islands provide for wildlife and attempts to find out how certain species arrived and thrived.
Lundy is off Hartland Point and served by ferry from Bideford or Ilfracombe. Lundy is the word for puffin in Old Norse and derived from Viking times. At the time of this documentary only fifty breeding pairs survive. Occupants also include Manx sheerwaters, guillemots, cormorants, shags and kittiwakes. Steep Holm lies off Weston-super-Mare and is well known for a wild peony which flowers in May and its colonies of European herring gulls, lesser black backed gulls and even muntjac deer. The mild climate of the Isles of Scilly makes for very un-British exotic plantlife and rare native flowers. The white-toothed shrew is perhaps the smallest inhabitant and the grey seal one of the largest.
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