Ah, the lure of islands! Naturally romantic places, these spots of sea-encircled land offer a natural sense of escape. An island is a little world of its own where you can feel beyond the reach of workaday mainland concerns. It’s no surprise that many holiday dreams feature islands. Many holiday home dreams feature them too.

Intimacy is part of any island’s appeal, but so too is a unique identity. Islands are very distinctive places where traditions, languages and wildlife have evolved in their own way. Islands are often ‘special’. For leisure travellers, they have also often seemed a bit ‘exclusive’, because it was traditionally harder to reach them without, say, your own yacht.