The Times They Are A-Changing An Island Parish

Nestled amongst the Channel Islands is picturesque Sark.

Part of the British Isles, but self-governing,

with its own parliament and laws.

All those in favour, raise your hand.

Tourism is Sark's lifeblood, and visitors flock in the summer

to witness the island's beauty and eccentric charm.

With no cars or streetlights,

a visit to Sark is a step back in time.

People that come to Sark like its uniqueness.

It is different, and I think as long as we can retain that,

people will still want to come to the island.

Up to now, Sark's independence has enabled it

to reject many of the trappings of modern life

and to protect its natural heritage.

But things are changing...

That's no longer there, unfortunately.

..and those on Sark face difficult choices,

all the while protecting the unique characteristics

that make the island so special.

If we ever see the day that our government officials

are persuaded that we need cars, that, you know,

we need anything more, really, than we've got now,

I think it would be a disaster.

For visitors,

much of the appeal of Sark comes from its lack of modern ways.

There is no bus service here. Instead, you're pulled by a tractor.

And with no cars, people get around by horse-drawn carriage...

..by bike...

..or on foot.

Sark's roads are resolutely old-fashioned too,

largely laid with stone that comes from Sark's only quarry,

owned by farmer and leader of the church choir Kevin Adams.

Well, they're dirt roads, or stone roads.

They're not bound together with bitumen or anything.

Bitumen makes the roads very hot

and you'd have to have different horseshoes for the horses.

So, Sark has always had stone roads,

and they do suffer from wear and tear.

Like the rest of the UK, we had lots of rain

and it erodes the roads.

There's still some time, before the busy summer season,

for a spot of maintenance on the roads,

and that's going to need a lot of new stone.

So, busy feeding the rock crusher at the quarry

is the double act of Zoe Adams and Jill Gill.

We're quite an attraction in the summer.

So, lots of people stop and take pictures of us.

There was one group of chaps that were passing, older guys,

and they were mouthing something to Jill

and she wasn't sure what they were saying.

Eventually she realised they were saying, "Is it community service?"

They thought we were doing community service!

No, it's our job! This is what we do.

-It's not an unusual job for women, not in Sark.

-No.

The rock crusher might not seem cutting-edge

but, in the past, everything was done by hand,

from the crushing of the stone to the laying of the roads by fishermen

out of season in the winter to keep them in work throughout the year.

Now we have a machine which comes once a year from England,

which is called a MERI crusher,

and it rips up the road, and then it will relay the road for you.

For the last four years,

the road gangs have been superseded by the MERI crusher, arriving today.

But getting almost ten tonnes of machinery off the boat

tests the crane and its operator,

Jeremy La Trobe-Bateman, to the limit.

It's quite a tricky lift for the crane, really.

It makes me a little nervous.

We're pretty near crane capacity lifting the thing off.

A Japanese lady starts shouting when it gets into the yellow sector

and she gets very, very hysterical when you get towards the red!

The MERI crusher is a sign of changing times on Sark.

It'll be crisscrossing the island for the next two weeks.

With the lambing season now over,

shepherd Dave Scott has a little more time

to spend with those animals who've achieved a more elevated status.

Come on, then, Pers! We're going out!

SHEEP BLEATS

Dave's pet sheep, Persil, is now a one-year-old.

Bottle-fed when born, he's always been a member of the family.

He's off!

Come on, Persil. Come on, then!

Come on! Here he comes!

Look at that.

Almost as obedient as the dogs.

Ahh...

Ehh...

You're getting quite fat, Persil, aren't you? Yes!

Growing quite meaty.

-MAN:

-Is he always going to be a pet?

I suppose he probably will be, yeah.

He's quite a friendly little chap.

And he has got celebrity status now, of course, you know.

People flock from miles around to come and see Persil, you know.

All right, Pers.

But Persil isn't the only animal

who's found a special place in Dave's heart.

Hello, piggy-wig. Hello, piggy. Come on, out you come.

There's another, called Scarlett O'Hara.

She's a nice big pig. Aren't you, Scars? Come on, piggo.

Come on. Out you come.

Come and see the sunshine! Eh? Come on, old girl.

She's due to farrow in about a month's time. She's not that old.

She's only just over a year old.

Shall we go and inspect your patch?

Come on, then, Scarls.

It's a bit muddy.

Off you trot, then.

Come on, then. You all right?

How are you doing?

Come on, then, piggy-wig. Come on, Scarly.

'I swapped Scarlett for a sheep, actually.'

We had three piggies

and Scarlett just sort of touched a nerve, really.

Come on, porker. Come on, piggus.

She got out a couple of weeks ago and...

I found her in the middle of a vineyard.

But, luckily, she wasn't there very long.

Hopefully, yeah, we'll see some piglets in a month's time.

BICYCLE BELL DINGS

Dave's wife, Estelle,

and their daughter, Robyn, have had to learn to share him.

-MAN:

-He does love that pig.

-He does, he does.

He was home for about five minutes yesterday, we got off the boat,

he went home, picked up the dogs,

and he said, "I'm just off to do the pig!"

I mean, she's lovely, Scarlett. Aren't you, Scarls? Aren't you?

She loves him. Most other men go to the pub, they do whatever.

Dave just hangs out in the pig pen, yeah.

Come on, then.

Sark's rich natural heritage

provides much inspiration to the island's artists,

who have a healthy tourist trade to support them.

Artist Rosie Guille is a Sark native

whose family line goes all the way back to the original settlers.

We go right back to 1565, so it's nice to be able to say that.

Yeah, I've got strong roots in Sark.

Rosie sells paintings from her own gallery,

with most of her work showing Sark's most iconic views.

I just love painting, especially in watercolour.

I think it's the environment that I grew up in.

Just idyllic, idyllic way of life,

you know, up and down from the beaches,

off on our own quite a lot of the time.

My sister and I, we were always down the rocks, fishing.

I just think it's so perfect for an artist.

For the last few years,

Rosie has worked with an organisation

called Artists for Nature,

who use art as a way of highlighting conservation issues.

Artists like Bruce Pearson are invited to the island.

Well, the project started in 2009, when I had this bright idea

of bringing a group of world-renowned artists to Sark

to highlight the nature and our way of life over here, which is unique.

I've found Sark particularly exciting.

There's a wonderful sense of timelessness in the landscape.

It's an absolutely extraordinary place, fantastic.

For one previous artists' weekend,

Rosie organised for over 50 of them to visit the island,

and it resulted in the publication of a book.

It's a big coffee table-type book

and it's full of paintings by the artists, like Bruce.

That's no longer there, unfortunately. That's a field now.

-There we are.

-There we are. That doesn't look like that any more.

So, Sark's landscape is not immune to change.

But Rosie's project attempts to stop it changing too much.

Sark has a responsibility to look after its natural beauty,

maintain what we have, maintain our roads,

you know, maintain our dark skies,

hang onto everything that everybody else is losing.

The whole point of this

is really to make people think about how special Sark is

and, hopefully, to protect it for the future.

One of Sark's unique natural characteristics

that has so far been protected comes alive as night falls.

A result of Sark's lack of streetlights

and, hence, lack of light pollution.

The night sky on Sark is as vivid now as it's always been...

..and makes keen amateur astronomers out of many on the island.

Sark is brilliant for looking at stars just with your naked eyes.

You can lie on a lawn, look upwards, let your eyes adjust to the dark.

You gradually see more and more stars.

It's like a whole carpet of diamonds.

Members of Sark Astronomy Society gather whenever the skies are clear.

It really is lovely to see the stars in Sark, cos they're always...

They're right there, you know, you just go outside your back door.

-MAN:

-That's Mars, is it?

Three years ago, Sark became the first island in the world

to get official dark sky status

and, in so doing, became well-known to professional astronomers too,

like Dr Marek Kukula,

Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

I think the residents here have done a really amazing job

in protecting this part of their natural environment,

which, in many other parts of the world,

we've kind of lost without really realising it,

and I hope that it will bring more people to the island

to appreciate the dark skies that they have here.

I think just anybody walking the lanes of Sark at night,

looking up, it's a really beautiful, romantic sight, it's gorgeous.

I think Sark's been so fortunate.

Because we have no streetlights,

we've managed to preserve these dark skies,

hence we've got this status of the first dark sky island in the world.

We're all here tonight looking up at the stars,

and it's great to think that generations to come

will be able to do the same thing.

Sark has two churches,

both very much at the centre of the island's community.

There's the Methodist Chapel and the Anglican St Peter's Church.

For over six months now, St Peter's has been using locum vicars,

usually covering a month or so at a time,

as they continue to search for someone permanent.

The only full-time resident minister on Sark at the moment

is Methodist lay preacher Karen Le Mouton.

Hello, Sheila.

Hello, Persil!

For the last three years,

Karen has spent most of her time

away from her home on neighbouring Jersey

amongst the parishioners of Sark.

She's worked hard to bring the church to the people,

and the people to the church.

She's now a well-respected member of Sark's community.

But recently,

Karen has been accepted for pre-ordination training,

and that throws her future on Sark into question.

It could either be a two-year full-time course

at Queen's Foundation in Birmingham

or a three-year part-time pathway

which would allow me to continue to do the job here, I hope.

I've put my preferred options in,

so I have to wait to hear what will be offered to me

and what they feel would be right for me.

For members of Karen's congregation,

the idea that she might be leaving is causing great concern.

We should be so sad.

You know, we'd be really very, very sorry if she had to go

and we'd miss her greatly as a person, as well as our pastor.

You have made each one of us unique.

She's a friend to the wider community,

so she would be missed, the whole of Sark would miss her.

If I was moved at the moment, I'd feel...

I'd find it quite difficult, because this is my third year here

and it takes a long time to build up trust and relationships,

and I feel I've just got to that point now

and feel that my ministry's just sort of taking off, really,

and to move at this point, I think, would be quite hard for Sark.

I'm just trusting God and trusting the people involved

that it's all done very prayerfully

and that the right decision will be made.

About to get started on a programme of road maintenance

is the MERI crusher.

The entire project is overseen by Paul Williams.

OK. As usual, I've put the list on a fag packet.

-Well, it's a Christmas card.

-A Christmas card.

-Yeah, yeah.

This is Owen Cronk. He's been over...

Call him Cronky, naturally.

He's been over a couple of times with this monster that's behind us.

It's...

We need a big tractor like that to handle this machine,

which is the MERI crusher.

This machine will rip up the road

and then Owen will take this machine off

and he will put on this machine, which is the grader,

and then when that's finished,

we will come along with our own roller

and they will end up as we would like them.

In two weeks, the MERI crusher will cover more of Sark

than a road gang of men could have done in an entire winter.

But its presence throws up difficult questions for Sark.

Importing machines like the MERI crusher,

meaning that it's taking away from local work,

inevitably lowers that sense of community

because there's less collective work to do,

and what are those people going to do

who used to work in the winter?

They'll find other work, but it's not working as a gang together.

I think, for Sark, it's that tension between allowing change to happen

to benefit the community and to benefit the economy,

but also retaining the uniqueness that is Sark.

Modern technology faces a stern test today.

The Coupee, French for "gangway",

links Sark to the peninsula of Little Sark.

The roads there are in a poor state,

so the MERI crusher will attempt to become

the biggest and heaviest vehicle ever to get across.

-Good luck!

-I'm going to need it!

ENGINE STARTS

It's a huge machine. It's 200 horsepower of tractor.

Potentially, the problem with that big machine

is that our roads aren't very big.

It has to breathe in, let's put it that way!

-With minuscule clearance either side...

-Good Lord above.

..and an almost sheer 300-foot drop to the left and right,

the MERI crusher enters the Coupee.

Under pressure is driver Owen Cronk.

OWEN LAUGHS Oh!

How did I get myself into this?

This is the bit I've been dreading.

Oh, dear!

Certainly the last part, looking down over, is petrifying.

Phew! Hallelujah! Thank you.

And there we are. The Coupee still stands.

-You've got to get back yet!

-Yes, thank you!

There's another member of the Artists for Nature organisation

on Sark this week.

Sculptor Harriet Mead

specialises in transforming old and discarded items.

It's made entirely of found objects. I collected them all from Sark.

It's rather fun looking at the objects.

I mean, here's a bottle opener here.

There's a bicycle, because on Sark, everyone goes around with bicycles,

so I end up with quite a few bits of bicycle.

Alfie Adams is my absolute hero.

I've been to his sheds on a number of occasions

and he always comes up with some absolute gems.

Hello, Alfie.

Hi!

On Sark, the undisputed king of old and discarded items is Alfie Adams.

Born and raised on the island,

he's a descendant of the original settlers

and a hoarder par excellence.

Ah!

Look at that, then!

-Oh, it's a candle snuffer!

-Correct. I thought you could do a witch's hat.

SHE LAUGHS You want to put these in, then?

-Yeah, I'd love them.

-Yeah.

-Oh! Those are lovely.

You know, already, I'm looking at that

and you can imagine this is the head and the neck of the bird

and this is the wing feathers coming back at the back.

I thought it would make a perfect catapult!

Alfie lived through the German occupation of the Channel Islands

during World War II,

but some of his trinkets date back further than that.

-Periscope.

-Correct. I presume it was used in trenches.

Yeah, because you can look round the corner.

You look through, up there.

-There you are.

-Look at that!

1914-1918.

Remind me the story behind that, Alfie.

It was a fisherman...

..shooting, he shot his foot, I think.

But then the British Legion got him another one made of aluminium,

and it took him months to get used to it,

-because he couldn't get the swing.

-Because this was so heavy.

Because this one was so heavy and he could swing it with the other one.

-Thanks, Alfie!

-OK!

-Bye!

Armed with a fresh collection of Sark's most treasured clutter,

Harriet meets up with painter Bruce at Sark school

for a workshop with Class 1's children,

connecting art to the natural world around them.

These are all the goodies!

Look at what Keana's found.

Quack, quack, quack!

-It's a duck's head.

-With an eye.

-With an eye and a beak.

That's perfect.

Let's put him along the back, as part of the duck's back.

What could we use that for?

So, this is his head. Can everyone see what's going on here?

Who wants to help me make a horse? What does this look like on a horse?

Can anyone think what that looks like?

Class 1's teacher is Alison Mills.

That's too big.

As you can see, they're just so motivated now and enthusiastic

and the imaginations are really starting to come out now.

It just fits in so well with Sark,

because it's getting them to notice the environment around them,

the animals and everything that's on Sark.

It's making them a lot more aware, I think.

Does this look like a rabbit's back paw? I think it does.

-What do you reckon?

-Yeah.

Over at Dave's shed, one pig has become 11.

Come on out, piggies.

Hello, little piggies.

Scarlett O'Hara's piglets are now a few weeks old.

Hello, piggy-wigs. Why aren't you all going out?

They like it when the sun's shining, they come out,

but they're not too keen when it's as cold as it is.

They're getting quite tame now, anyway. 'Ey up, piggos!

We'll bring up most of them,

but we've got friends, they like to have a couple of pigs.

They have the pigs for the summer

and then they get to eat them in the autumn.

Are you getting up, Scarlett?

Come on, up you get. Go on!

Go on, pig! Up, piggy!

Up, piggo!

While Karen waits to hear whether her pre-ordination training

will take her away from her beloved Sark,

over at the Anglican St Peter's,

the mission to find a new permanent vicar has stalled.

It's an unpaid role, though it does come with the vicarage

as a so-called House for Duty.

For the last six months now,

they've only been able to find locums to provide temporary cover,

a frustration to committed members of St Peter's congregation

like Puffin Taylour.

I'm not sure what it is.

I think there's a shortness of supply generally for vicars,

We're open up to anything, really.

We don't mind who we get, so long as they've got a Christian faith

and they want to bring the mission to Sark.

Visiting the island is the man responsible for finding a new vicar.

The Dean of Guernsey, Paul Mellor.

There isn't a plan to go on with locum ministry here.

It is fulfilling a need at the moment.

Our aim is to find that elusive person

who would come and fit in here

and also be able to serve the parish into the future.

Whoever comes, that special person, or that special family, man, woman,

will find Sark a treasure, and I'm hopeful that they will come,

so anybody out there, come and have a look at us.

Things change slowly on Sark...

..and some things hardly change at all.

Fishing for lobsters and crabs here

has been done pretty much the same way for hundreds of years.

Bas Adams, another descendant of Sark's original settlers,

has fished almost all his whole life.

My grandfather and my uncle, that's how I started.

I was only about six and I used to go with them.

If they didn't want to take me,

I used to cry, cos I wanted to go so much, you know.

It means everything, because it's my hobby as well.

It's a trade that defies modernisation,

using methods that could never be industrialised.

Any changes that HAVE happened have been small.

Some of them have changed.

You buy little red bands now

and you put them on with like a pair of tweezers.

I do it in the old-fashioned way.

I don't know why.

Old habits die hard, I think.

See, that's a nice one.

Come on, you! Stop it!

The 21st century has arrived in some ways on Sark,

but for an island founded and marketed to tourists

as being resolutely old-fashioned, many believe Sark needs protecting.

If we were to lose that natural beauty

and our unique way of life, we would become like everywhere else,

and who would want to come to Sark then if we lost all that uniqueness?

Sark does embrace the modern world, very much. We have to,

but I think we do it at our own pace

and we will take what we want from the modern world

if it's appropriate for Sark, and reject the rest.

Hopefully, we're all working for the same kind of thing,

which is to preserve Sark, keep the dark skies,

you know, we don't need 24-hour supermarkets.

If we ever see the day

our government officials are persuaded that we need cars,

that, you know, we need anything more, really, than we've got now,

I think it would be a disaster.

Over at the Methodist Chapel,

Karen has finally had word on whether she's staying on Sark.

It's really good news.

I've been offered the part-time pathway

and that means that I can stay here and continue this role

while I'm studying at the same time.

Let us pray.

Heavenly father...

Karen's future on Sark is assured for at least the next three years,

amongst her island parish.

When you move to any community, you become part of it,

you build up relationships and trust and become part of that

and, you know, that's very much my love for the people of Sark

and my love for Sark.