History
People have been coming to the island since the Iron Age. Evidence of early habitation includes pieces of Roman amphora as well as stone boat anchors. In the Dark Ages, the island was used a seat of early Christian settlement. There was a chapel and dwellings.
In the later Medieval period, the island came under the control of Glastonbury Abbey. Lammana Priory was a priory on the island consisting of two Benedictine monks until 1289. It was owned by Glastonbury Abbey and the property was sold in 1289 to a local landowner. The priory was replaced by a chapel served by a secular priest until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536 when it became property of the Crown. From the 13th to the 16th centuries the island was known as St Michael's Island. After 1584 it became known as St Georges Island.
Through the 17th and 18th centuries the island was a popular haunt for smugglers avoiding the British government's revenue cutters out of Plymouth and Falmouth.
In the 20th century, Looe island was owned (and inhabited) by two sisters, Babs and Evelyn Atkins, who wrote two books: We Bought An Island (1976, ISBN 0-245-52940-3) and its sequel Tales From Our Cornish Island (1986, ISBN 0-245-54265-5). They chronicle the purchase of the island and what it was like to live there. Evelyn died in 1997 at the age of 87; Babs continued to live on the island until her death in 2004, at the age of 86. On her death, the island was made a bequest to the Cornwall Wildlife Trust; it will be preserved as a nature reserve in perpetuity.
Read more about this topic: Looe Island
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“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
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