Visitors.

Arranging a visit

Complete Form 7 at the constable’s office fourteen days ahead. The notice period is for the ferry and the guest house, not for permission — no visit has ever been refused, and the Foundation would not know how to go about refusing one.

Visits are not limited in number or in length. A guest may stay a weekend or a season. Several have stayed longer and two, over the years, did not go back at all, which we count among our happier stories.

The guest house

Eleven rooms above the green, kept aired year-round. Guests eat at the refectory with everyone else and are not charged for anything, because we do not have a mechanism for charging anybody for anything.

Children are the one exception. Providence has no school in use and no clinic provision for the very young, so families with small children are hosted on the mainland at our expense, as often and as long as they like. Colleagues tell us this arrangement works well.

What visitors usually say

That it is quieter than they expected. That the food is better than they expected. That they had imagined something more institutional and found a town.

And, almost without exception: that you seem well. Family notice it before anyone else does. We have heard it so many times that we have stopped being surprised and started being proud of it.

Afterwards

Colleagues typically request three or four visits in their first year, fewer in the second, and fewer again after that. We are told this is ordinary — people settle, correspondence takes the strain, and the ferry is a long morning either way.

Nobody is ever encouraged to reduce contact and the Foundation has no view on the matter whatsoever. We mention the pattern only because new colleagues sometimes worry that they will miss people, and it may be a comfort to know that most find they do not.

The quay keeps its own record of who sailed and who came back, and publishes it quarterly for the insurers. Sailings and departures →