The delights of Jersey, ‘the piece of France that fell into the sea and was picked up by Britain’

Crikey, the English Channel knows how to do it. I’ve just watched the tide rush off St Ouen’s Bay faster than I can run. Left behind are glistening pools and yellow kelp plagues strewn across a vast expanse of sand.

Why isn’t it better known that Jersey has some of the most extreme tides in the world? Nothing short of a natural wonder, this rising and falling of sea levels by up to 12 meters twice a day, with the island surface swelling and shrinking by a third.

I joined Jerseyman Kazz Padidar from Wild Adventures (wildadventuresjersey.com) on one of its forages on the western edge of the island. We comb the freshly exposed rock pools for crabs and Jersey’s native molluscs known as ormers. The latter are appreciated by the island’s gourmet restaurants.

Kazz is bursting with knowledge about these and other delicacies, such as spicy-tasting sea radishes and crunchy samphire. He leaves the beach and picks wild fennel in the grass margins and wood sorrel which he claims is good for the liver and kidneys.

We climb a wooded hill and see a red squirrel high in a treetop. A huge view of the tidal wave unfolds from the top. So far, so different from what I expected.

Stronghold: Martin explores the medieval ruins of Mont Orgueil Castle, which loom over Gorey harbor

The island’s tourist honchos have coined the slogan ‘Curiously Brit…(ish)’ to entice us. Smart. Jersey has much of the familiar, but much more that feels distant, even exotic.

The writer Victor Hugo aptly described the Channel Islands as “pieces of France that have fallen into the sea and been picked up by England.”

Away from the whooshing coast, Jersey has green and pleasant landscapes. I amble down languid country lanes that at first glance seem as English as tea and scones. But place names are French and the food is tempered with flavors from Normandy. I see hedge veg stalls in the front yard with onion rings next to the celebrated Jersey Royal pudding.

Remote: Martin takes a thrilling RIB ride to Ecrehous, the Channel Island dots closest to France

Pictured above is the capital of Jersey – St Helier

The writer Victor Hugo described the Channel Islands as “pieces of France that have fallen into the sea and been picked up by England”

Castles and fortresses are reminders of the proximity to the continent. The Channel Islands have been dependent on the English (later British) crown since the Norman Conquest and the intervening millennium has seen wave after wave of warfare.

During coastal walks I wander through the medieval ruins of the castles of Mont Orgueil and Groznez, and among the numerous round Martello watchtowers from the Napoleonic wars. More in-your-face are the World War II concrete bunkers on the beaches.

Early in the war, Winston Churchill decided that defending the Channel Islands would be impossibly costly, both in manpower and equipment. In 1940, a Nazi occupier landed on Jersey with Hitler’s orders that it be made an “impregnable fortress” and a springboard for the invasion of Britain.

Martin spots gray seals and oystercatchers (pictured) during his tour of Ecrehous

The era comes vividly to life in the Jersey War Tunnels – the island’s main attraction, an underground labyrinth of corridors, chambers, bunkers and a hospital carved out of a hillside by prisoners of war.

My last morning is at a Jersey outpost so remote few people in the UK have heard of it. At St Catherine’s Breakwater in the far northeast, I board a high-speed inflatable RIB from Jersey Seafaris (jerseyseafaris. com), on the way to the Ecrehous archipelago.

Salty sea spray caresses our faces as we bounce over six miles of deep blue swell. The skipper shuts off the engines as we approach a reef where blubbery gray seals hop about on swaying legs. Oystercatchers screech and descend for fish.

We landed at a lagoon on La Marmotiere, the second largest of the scattered rocky outcrops, sandbanks and islets that make up the Ecrehous – the Channel Island dots closest to France. I walk across a headland of white sand and then climb to a group of stone huts.

Jersey’s red saltire flutters on a pole at its highest point, from where I look out at the hazy line of Normandy beaches. The flag is a reminder that the status of Ecrehous is still disputed. French nationalist “invaders” did not claim them until 1994.

British or not, I think the real owners are the seals and seabirds.