Recently I went to West Falkland to visit our settlement school at Fox Bay Village and the farm schoolrooms and more importantly to meet the children in those schools, the parents and teachers.

A short aside – the Falkland Islands is made up of over 700 islands from very small to large. The two largest are East Falkland (Stanley is in East Falkland) and West Falkland. Interestingly, unlike the Orkneys and the Shetland Islands, who both call their biggest island “Mainland”, there is no such place here, every inhabited island is referred to by its name.

I’d been told that West Falkland is really beautiful and I listened politely, but didn’t really believe it could be that different to East Falkand. After all it has more or less the same flora, hills, rocks – how could it be that different? Reader, I was wrong. It’s spectacular and I loved it.

First to reach it – we took the ferry on the way over – it runs from Newhaven to Port Howard on the Concordia Bay, which doubles as supply ship to farms and outer islands, so there isn’t a ferry every day, you definitely have to pay attention to the schedule, because missing it could mean a very long wait.

We were driving the Landrover pictured above – not the most up together vehicle (we couldn’t persuade it to engage low ratio when we wanted it, on the day it poured with rain) but it did the job. The white pick-up on the right is the vehicle of one the travelling teachers. They need capable vehicles that will cope with gravel/clay roads all year round and that they can transport key resources from one farm to another.

We drove down from Port Howard to Fox Bay Village – West Falkland is 80 miles long in total and 45 miles wide at some points, but the west coast is full of inlets and bays, so it often doesn’t feel very wide and certainly in the south there are points where you can see sea on both horizons.

80 miles doesn’t sound long on paper – but the distance is deceptive. The road is single track, gravel/clay and goes up and down – in some places like a rollercoaster of bumps and in others with steep hills and curves. So even in dry, summer conditions it is quite slow going. Bizarrely it seemed to take us about an hour and a half each journey:

• Port Howard to Fox Bay – an hour and a half
• Fox Bay to Albermarle – an hour and a half
• Fox Bay to Port North – an hour and a half
• Hill Cove to Port Howard – you’ve guessed it, an hour and a half

We stayed for two nights at Fox Bay Village and were invited in and made welcome – I developed a severe case of view envy, as each house seemed to be built looking out over spectacular views. I was also interested to see people’s walk in pantries/store rooms. Practical as cool storage but also essential in terms of keeping enough of your own stores, that you don’t suddenly run out of essentials. I coveted a lovely, Victorian style conservatory built on the end of one house, which meant that they had fabulous summer flowers and fruit trees – the peaches were small but delicious and we were given some to take away for lunch the next day.

After three days on West Falkland, it was back home from Port Howard. There was no ferry though, as it had gone off to be a supply ship, so it was home by plane, having found someone to put the Landrover on the next possible ferry – to be collected from Newhaven.

For anyone visiting the Falklands as a landbased tourist, I’d thoroughly recommend some time on West Falkland and indeed I’m going back to Hill Cove in a couple of weeks, so standby for more scenic views!