Burgh Island and Greenway: on the Agatha Christie trail

25 July 2025 – Agatha Christie’s Burgh Island and Greenway House

Burgh Island

Going over the hill, especially when the term is used figuratively to describe the juncture between youth and old age, is not recommended. Likewise, when you reach the top of the hill on the approach road to Bigbury-on-Sea, I suggest that you step on the brakes and stop. From this point your first spectacular view of Burgh Island is likely to be not much different to the one offered to Agatha Christie, Noel Coward, Winston Churchill and Mick Hart.

You see that large building fronting Burgh Island, the white one in the striking Art Deco style, well that’s the Burgh Hotel. It was first constructed in 1929, modified and improved in the early 1930s and, as that decade unfurled, rapidly established itself as one of England’s most in-vogue venues for socialites and celebrities, a premier destination for those with money, those with influence and for those in search of inspiration.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie, one of England’s most prolific and arguably most famous literary figures, was so taken by the inspirational ethos of the island, the sophistry of its hotel and the fictional source material offered by its top-drawer patrons that the hotel built her a beach house to use exclusively as a writer’s retreat. There, she is reputed to have written two of her greatest novels, And Then There was None and Evil Under the Sun, the latter extensively filmed on Burgh Island and in and around its hotel as part of the David Suchet series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot.

Burgh Island and Greenway House: on the trail of Agatha Christie

Before Agatha Christie made it her own, Burgh Island, known in ancient times as Borough Island and thereafter variously as Burr and Bur Isle, had a colourful reputation for smuggling, pirates and wrecking — where coastal in Cornwall and Devon does not? On a more prosaic level, the island in the 18^th century was a base for Pilchard fishing.

That small, ruined structure sitting on the island’s summit, the one you can see with your naked eye and in more detail through your trusty binoculars, is not a Victorian folly but the remains of a one-time monastery, the remnants of a chapel and what is left of a ‘huers’’ post — a place where ‘huers’ kept watch on the sea. When shoals of pilchards came in sight, the huers would kick up a ‘hue and cry’, alerting the fishermen at shore level that it was time to knock back their beers, exit the Pilchard Inn and put out to sea in their fishing boats.

The Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island

Burgh Island’s Pilchard Inn, unmissable from the mainland even had its name not been emblazoned across its front in welcoming large black letters, is reputed to have made its debut in the fourteenth century. How much of the fourteenth century remains of it today is a matter of conjecture — something to keep you occupied whilst you sit there sipping your beer, gnarled oak beams above your head, much-trodden flagstones beneath your feet and, without a pilchard in sight, without a care in the world.  

^ Mick and Joss Hart outside the Pilchard Inn, Burgh Island

The Pilchard Inn, the Art Deco hotel, Agatha Christie’s beach house, a couple of private houses, oh, and not forgetting the huers’ hut, plus a garden shed or two, these are the sole structural occupants of the island’s-built environment.

The island’s natural environment, criss-crossed as it is with a cobweb of tiny footpaths, is a dream of a place for ramblers. It offers spectacular views across a beautiful seascape to the mainland’s rugged and ragged cliffs and on the island itself imparts to the roving explorer awesome sights of precipitous drops into the foaming surf of the ocean below. Rumour has it that someone, mention no corporate names, took the legal route in an attempt to prevent the public from enjoying this gift from God, but thankfully for once on this occasion when money talked no one wanted to listen and justice came out on the side that it should. So gleefully put on your walking shoes and celebrate the ‘right to roam’.

^^ “It’s not true that we wish to deter people from walking across the island. Just follow the line of the fence and you’ll be fine …”

Burgh Island and Greenway House: on the trail of Agatha Christie

Burgh Island is a tidal island, meaning that at certain times of the day the sea recedes like so many hairlines, leaving behind a stretch of sand, similar to a widow’s peak, across which, if the mood so takes them, prospective visitors can plod.

When the tide is in, reaching the island by Shank’s Pony is still a possibility, providing you like wet trousers, but staying with the majority, it is easier and more fun to pay the two-quid passage and make the crossing on the Burgh Island sea tractor.

This intriguing shallow-water machine has been thrilling and ferrying passengers from Bigbury-on-Sea to Burgh Island and back since the 1930s. You may recall Poirot and Hasting travelling on the tractor across the causeway at high tide as guests of the Burgh Hotel in the TV adaptation of Christie’s Evil Under the Sun. On June 25 (2025, that is), we followed in their wheel tracks.

The current tractor, I have been told, is not the original 30s’ model, but the carriage and its application differ very little. I have scant regard for boats but enjoyed the trip to Burgh on this unusual four-wheeled vehicle. It may not be the exact same tractor that ferried Agatha from A to B, but the view of the island that it provides from its elevated platform of the historic Pilchard Inn and what is described consistently as the island’s iconic landmark, the mainland-facing Art Deco hotel, cannot be substantially different from the scene with which the famous writer would have been familiar.

Restored and refurbished in such a manner as to replicate the glamour of its 1930s’ heydays, today’s Burgh Island Hotel is widely regarded to be a faithful representation of what it would have been before it entered a period of slow but steady decline after the Second World War.

The hotel’s golden years are also said to be echoed in the many period events hosted there on an annual basis, with their observance of the sartorial elegance for which the thirties is famous and their ‘take you back to the time’ music of hot jazz, swing and Lindy hop.

A flick through the pages of the hotel’s website should be enough to convince you that no punches are being pulled in guaranteeing paying guests refinement, luxury and exclusivity on an unprecedented Art Deco scale.

It is said that to stay at the Burgh Hotel is a ‘Once in a lifetime experience’, and this is hardly surprising. It is difficult to ascertain what exactly a bed for the night will set your wallet back, but £480, £650 and climbing seem to be the ballpark figures, with afternoon tea ringing the till at £110 for two. At these prices ‘once in a lifetime’ is perfectly understandable’; staying there twice, highly unlikely; and never, more likely than that. However, should you win the lottery …

Whether extortionate hotel tariffs are an evil under the sun, a sure-fired way of keeping the riff-raff out (it’s odd that I’ve never stayed there?) or just an unpredictable gamble on a typical English coastline, often chilly, frequently windswept and not uncommonly pelted with rain, are points on which you may wish to ponder before you part with your hard-earned cash.

Agatha Christie beach house

Ardent fans of the Art Deco period and of Agatha Christie alike may take comfort in the knowledge that what you pay for is what you get. Recent refurbishments at the Burgh Hotel are said to have been made with utmost care and consideration for heritage authenticity. However, I wonder how true this is of Agatha Christie’s beach house?

It is written almost everywhere that Agatha Christie thought of the Burgh Hotel as a ‘home away from home’. What she would make of it now, now that her once authorial haven has been turned into – I quote – “One of the sexiest hotel rooms in the UK …” is difficult to say.

I cannot help feeling that this rebranding, as well as being vaguely tasteless, is a rather short-sighted move. Think about it, if you will. Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE, celebrated author of 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, creator of the world-famous Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, the best-selling fiction writer of all time, conceived and wrote at least two of her novels at the Burgh Island beach house, and now that beach house is being promoted as a place for potentially unwanted conceptions.

You would have thought, would you not, that this made-sacred-by-Agatha place would have better been preserved as a museum to her memory or alternatively restored to the inspirational model it was, no matter how basic by modern standards, so that those in search of the ultimate Christie experience, to whom it seems money is rarely an object, would unconditionally flock. Either of these two options have a more in-keeping ring, don’t you think, to the hotel’s glittering past, than words that would seem to cast it as a 21^st century bordello. But then who knows what the future holds for England’s imperilled heritage?

Greenway House

Our personal ultimate Christie experience was to follow up our excursion to Burgh Island, with a visit to the much-loved author’s South Devon summer home, Greenway.

Greenway House, a late Georgian mansion enclosed within extensive grounds on the River Dart near Galmpton in Devon, had been Christies’ dream house since childhood. It came on the market in 1938 at a time when Christie and her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, were masterminding their escape from Torquay, which, as early as the 1930s, was rapidly falling from grace. [Visiting Cornwall and Devon: Is it a good idea? – Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia]

Christie refers to the house and grounds as “beautiful” and her summer home as “cozy”. There’s no argument to be had that architecturally the house excels in every respect, but of all the grand English properties that I have visited (the invites are overwhelming!), my take on Greenway House, or to be more precise its location, or to be more precise than that its singular isolation, is that it leans a little on the eerie side. 

Greenway’s isolation is one of a particular kind. It owes much to the lay of the land and the place it occupies within that landscape. Yet, its sense of exclusion begins a mile or two before being vetted and admitted at the gatehouse. Once you have crossed this threshold, the perception of leaving the world behind intensifies immensely, growing proportionally stronger as you wind your way along the shadowy woodland lane to arrive at Greenway itself.

Unlike many English homes of its stature, Greenway House does not possess a sweeping, open driveway with statement views of itself and of a customised, limitless landscape. Closed in on arrival by the estate’s former stable block, since converted by the National Trust into a tea room and specialist shops, at the back and to the opposite side, the house is a claustrophobia, albeit an attractive one, of landscaped rock and foliate banks. A short gravelled forecourt, embroidered with a strip of lawn, lies at the front of the property, from which the ground slips steeply away under a formidable curtain of woodland interspersed with thickets of shrubbery down an eye-squinting awesome descent to a wide plateau of water belonging to the River Dart.

I have read reviews that claim that from Agatha’s former bedroom window lovely views are to be had across the Greenway estate, when, in actual fact, the view is restricted to the sliver of lawn that borders the house at the front, and below, way down below, through the mire of trees and bushes, the wide expanse of the River Dart, which, resembling a barrier moat, consolidates the feeling of being locked away and locked within. The seclusion is extraordinary, and its effect upon a fanciful mind more extraordinary still.

Not by choice but by fate decreed, the day that we had chosen to pay our respects to Greenway was the wettest day of the week. No sooner had we entered the house than the heavens poured forth its contents. Trapped within the house, which is trapped within the grounds, whilst trapped within one’s imagination, with the rain streaming down the windows in an endless succession of tears, it was easy to comprehend how vulnerability might find a mind encircled by circumstances such as these susceptible to its intimidation, and then inhabit it and haunt it with scenes of unspeakably brutal murder. In their own different but similar ways, Burgh Island and Greenway House are made to measure locations for the propagation and proliferation of such disturbing thoughts.

There’s a little of each of these locations in a good many Christie novels and considerably more of both in And Then There Were None’s Soldier Island: the inescapable reckoning ground where Christie’s helpless, hapless victims are lured to share a collective fate of serial execution.

As for the house itself, with the exception of the library, I would stop short of calling it cosy, at least with respect to the way in which the word is routinely applied: imposing, yes; interesting, certainly; intriguing, delightfully so; imbued with singular Christie character, of that you can be sure; but if cosiness, the ordinary cosy, the commonplace cosy, the little, the cute and the cushioned cosy, had ever made its home here, then someone or something had come along whilst we were busy splitting hairs on the nuanced notion of ‘cosy’, and quietly done away with it. 

I think that it was done in the Max Mallowan dressing room, either with the fax machine or the script of Dead Man’s Folly signed by David Suchet.

Below – literary genius: A copy of the script from Dead Man’s Folly, filmed at Greenway House, inscribed and signed by David Suchet, the eponymous Hercule Poirot, together with first editions of Agatha Christie’s masterpiece novels.

Below – antiques & collectables: Agatha Christie and her husband Max Mallowan were keen collectors. They loved antiques and curios. Greenway House is full of them. Even if the house hadn’t belonged to one of the most famous writers of all time, there is enough heritage on display to warrant more than one visit.

Below – over-fertile imagination: Quite easy to imagine any number of assailants lurking in the seclusion of the walled gardens, the undergrowth, in every nook and cranny, of which there are inconceivably many, and likewise behind every tree. Look at her, for example!

Below – bogged down in thought: If I lived at Greenway, I would thank the Lord every day that unlike the house I was brought up in, Greenway has an inside toilet. Would you want to venture late at night, outside, in the dark at Greenway! Thus, here I am on the Greenway throne, not exactly rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, but feeling rather cheeky all the same.

Below – Greenway library: During the Second World War, Greenway House was requisitioned by the US Coast Guard. The library, then the recreation room, became the canvas for a unique series of 13 murals, which travel across the frieze of all four walls.

The murals, which gain maximum impact from the four restrained shades used to create them  — black, white, blue and khaki — tell the story of the US Coast Guard’s 11-month’s journey to England in preparation for the D-Day Landings.

When the property was decommissioned, Agatha Christie admitted that she had been “somewhat surprised” to discover on her library walls Lt. Marshall Lee’s ‘graffiti’. Fortunately, however, as well as writing masterpiece novels, she also seems to have possessed a highly developed sense of respect for our national heritage. She rejected the offer by the commanding officer of the US Coast Guard to have the frieze painted out, preferring to preserve it for posterity as another chapter in Greenway’s history, a memento of the Coast Guard’s stay and for its significance as a wartime record.

Above – Greenway library: Important point: During WWII, when Greenway library became the US Coast Guard’s recreation room, the bar was in the alcove.

Below – echoes of a past life: It is said that in taking on Greenway House the National Trust strove to preserve as much as was humanly possible of the home as it was when the Christies lived there. In this they did achieve, for you enter the property as a guest not in spirit as a paying visitor.

And then there was one (isn’t there always) who couldn’t find the pet cemetery
As the rain eased off and the chance of getting soaked diminished, I finished soaking up the pre- and Agatha-Christie atmosphere of Greenway House, and, consulting the ground map of the estate given to me with my entrance ticket, went in search of, and never found, the Christie family pet cemetery. We did locate certain walled places, such as the tennis courts, the peach house, the croquet lawn and allotment, but the cemetery was not in the place where the map told me it would be. I knew I should have taken that course in elementary map reading.

As the appointed time rolled round to rendezvous with my brother — he hadn’t been prepared to pay Greenway’s 17-quid admission and had gone instead in search of fish and chips, which he found but never bought because they were too expensive  — Olga wandered off to meet him where we had prearranged, leaving me alone with my map in the befuddling network of gardens.

With a few minutes to spare, I decided to explore further, wending my way at a pace through a series of narrow paths between the gardens’ dividing walls, which, without familiarity to tell me otherwise, took upon a maze-like character. Time conscious, I hurried along,  passed beneath an old brick archway, found myself in a sunken garden alone with a  trickling fountain, twisted my way through a rock ravine buried in ferns and backed with bushes, which hissed at me in the wind like rattled snakes in a steam iron, and, at one point having popped out briefly where I didn’t really want to be behind a garden gazebo, eventually materialised on a hard-surfaced lane wide enough for vehicular use and good enough for me.

You would have thought that being alone on a National Trust estate would hardly, if ever, be possible, but I was alone, quite alone, or was I? The strong winds rushing like panic through nature’s leafy and bowered confinement seemed to come from every direction, including the fourth dimension, instilling vulnerability, which I am sure our Agatha would have approved of, in my gathering sense of predicament.

There and then, I should have retraced my steps, should have headed off back to the rendezvous point, but the sight of an enormous tree stopped me in my tracks. It was a terrible magnificence, the scene of its uppermost branches spinning and writhing in wind-propelled ecstasy, that I felt the need at once to capture the wanton graphics of it, and, since the tree had no objections, or was otherwise preoccupied, I stooped as low to the ground as I could go (surely not at your age, Mick!) and took some lousy photographs. Alas, my smartarse camera proved itself insufficiently clever to adapt the lens to the angle wanted.

Fast developing cramp, and because the wind cried Mary, thrashing through the boughs of the trees and charging through the bushes like a machete wielding migrant let loose on the streets of London – it seemed to be a someone or failing that a something (a country, for example) descending into liberal madness – or was I merely thinking of my tumble drier at home (?), I gave up with a vengeance on my lonely pet-cemetery quest.

Having no desire to be remembered as victim number one in the unsolved case of the Greenway Murders (which, it would be postulated later, were committed by a psychopath, or psychopaths unknown, who, mesmerised by Agatha Christie’s 66 murder mysteries, all of which had been solved, had decided they would go down in history for getting away with the perfect murder at Agatha Christie’s home), I reviewed my situation with greater urgency than hitherto.

I wanted no part in this drama, that is to say the specific part that my predicament seemed to have singled me out for, so, with a furtive glance around me, and the wind in the trees growing louder than ever, I shoved my phone back into my pocket and nipped off rather sharpishly, not the way I had come, but back to Greenway’s ticket office via the tiny zig-zag path that runs down the bank at the side of the house. And do you know to this very day I couldn’t begin to tell you, even if I was that person who continually makes things up, where, exactly, on Greenway estate, Agatha Christie buried her pets. So, there’s another mystery for you; granted not a whodunit as such, more of a whereisitat, but a teasing, taunting mystery all the same.

You may wish to visit Greenway to solve the mystery of the missing pet cemetery and to reach those parts of Greenway, the famous boating house for instance, which the conspirators of rain and time prevented us from seeing — a good excuse for us to return again. You may also want to prove me wrong that, in contradiction of touristy websites, Greenway doesn’t do cosy, although, in its defence, I doubt that any house of its imposing size ever could or does. What Greenway has, however, is a lurking, lingering aura, which is as close a clue to homeliness as it gets.

The family photos on the grand piano, the umbrella in the hallway stand, the trilby on the table, the linen on the beds, there to create an effect you might say, but then how would you account for that essence of something else, that something quite intangible? The feeling that the house is waiting for those with whom it shared so many years of history, they who loved it and lived in it, to make their way back home again. It’s a persuasive sentiment and that’s a fact, yet is it a red herring? Do any of us ever leave the homes we really love?

Perhaps it really is true that ‘Time is just a mode of thought’. Perhaps this is the concept that holds the key to almost all life’s mysteries, including those we find ourselves in and find inside ourselves when we enter the gardens and beloved home of Agatha Christie’s Greenway.

Copyright © 2018-2025 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.