Day four | Day three| Day two | Day one

On any small island with a large peak, there's a strong temptation to get to the top and look around: to feel like the master of all you survey as your eyes scan 360 degrees of coast. Ascension Island denies its visitors that pleasure. Stand on the top of Green Mountain, 2817 feet (858 metres) above sea level, and all you can see is the thick, mist-dampened bamboo that towers above the thin muddy path along the summit ridge.

Bamboo is not native to Ascension. Nor are the ficus trees, the Bermuda cedars, the pandanus, the Cape yews, and the remarkably vigorous ginger which cover the top of the mountain's northern slopes. Nor are the Norfolk Island pines, bananas and eucalyptus to which they give way further down, with a profusion of other plants—jacaranda, mango, coffee, quinine—thrown in along the way. These species were all introduced, mostly in the latter part of the 19th century, with the express intention of making the island wetter and greener. At the top of Green Mountain they have succeeded to an impressive degree: this is said to be the only tropical forest in the world assembled from scratch.

The Portuguese sailors who discovered Ascension in 1501 were so daunted by its barrenness they didn't even bother to land. It didn't improve with time. When Captain Cook passed by in 1775, Georg Forster, a member of his expedition, dismissed the island as a “ruinous heap of rocks” that “surpassed all the horrors of Easter Island and Tierra del Fuego”. Forster's father, though, who was also on board, saw potential:

“If the common furze [a gorse], which thrives so well on St Helena, were planted on this island...grass and other plants would no doubt immediately after grow between them ... and gradually form a soil of Mould capable of bearing more and more plants. The more the surface of the Earth is covered with plants, the more would they not only evaporate but even attract the moisture of the air, and keep it within the soil and consequently if there are any springs in the soil, they would soon increase their water and perpetuate their supplies...after grass and water were more plentiful in the isle certainly many a tree would soon grow and thus afford fuel.”

Given that the island was uninhabited, Forster's insight was taken no further. It is significant, though, in that it shows that sea-faring naturalists of the time were becoming ever more aware of the effects humans could have, for good or ill, on island environments. That microcosmic insight was one of the starting points for modern ecological thinking.

In 1843 the idea surfaced again when the botanist Joseph Hooker, son of the director of Kew Gardens, and later their director himself, visited the island on the way back from Antarctica. He, too, thought that deliberately introduced greenery could do a lot of good, and outlined a plan in which the mountain would be capped with trees well suited to capturing the moisture that condenses spontaneously as the moist warm wind blows off the ocean and up the mountain's heights. A different selection of trees and plants would be used on the slopes to build up soil and forestall erosion. This time round, with the island now inhabited, and with a farm on top of the mountain, the impetus for environmental improvement was much greater, and Hooker's ideas were acted on. The current forest is the result.

But the greening of Ascension goes well beyond the top of Green Mountain. The steep southern slopes of the mountain, moistened by the ever prevailing trades, are extensively if sometimes thinly covered with sedges, spurges, ferns and grasses, cedars and guava, not to mention some gorse, which was eventually introduced about 100 years after Forster first suggested the idea. They look like the moderately barren slopes of a Scottish sea-loch.

More striking, and more recent, is the greening of the island's more extensive northern and western hills and lava fields. Casuarina trees have spread so successfully over the slopes to the north of the island that some parts of this once-wasteland are actually woods. In the middle of the island there is a pervasive thick scrub of invasive species, made up mostly of yellowboy, a member of the jacaranda family, prickly pear cacti, wild tobacco and Mexican thorn, a type of mesquite. It is the thorn which is the ringleader. Introduced to help control erosion when the BBC was building Two Boats village in the 1960s, it has spread like a blight across most of the island's lower terrain, helped by very deep roots, a tolerance to salt and its seeds' facility for passing happily through the digestive tracts of the island's feral donkeys.

These invasive species mean that the island is now far greener than at any time in living memory, and in some ways and some places a good bit greener than one might wish. Seed borers introduced for the purpose may, in time, get the thorn under some sort of control, but for now the conservation team still relies on chainsaws, strimmers and herbicides, and carefully prioritises the locations it tries to protect. Even so, the Devil's Riding School, a strange once-flooded volcanic formation that was cleared just a year ago looks like a plantation today. Mountain Red Hill, once as barren as any of the island's cinder cones, is newly and distinctly green (see picture, taken from Green Mountain).

Is it possible that the invaders are getting some help from climate change? Some of the locals swear that the past months have been the wettest they remember, with drizzle or worse almost every day. Stedson Stroud, the island's conservation officer, says that people simply forget, over the dry months, how wet the wet months are, and always say such things. The island's rain gauge, at the airstrip in the south, tends to bear him out: it shows no trend towards heavier or more prolonged rainfall over the past 25 years. But the story may be different in the band of land downwind of the mountain itself, which is where the thorn invasion is most noticeable, and which contains the three major settlements. More productive cloud making at the peak might well mean more rain over this central strip; and since warmer oceans mean moister air rising up on the mountain's windward side, climate change might be expected to thicken at some point, even if it hasn't hit yet.

It's also possible that Hooker's experiment is bearing fruit. Increasing rainfall was originally meant to help with farming and freshwater supplies for the garrison. Neither aim matters now, as the labour costs of farming on the island make it pointless and water comes from the two desalination plants. But the fact people have no need for these “ecosystem services” doesn't mean the vegetation might not be benefiting from them. More precipitation caught at the mountain peak should mean more soil moisture migrating down the slopes. Much more speculatively, the plants at the peak may in some way make the clouds downwind more pluvious. Such effects are seen in much larger forests, which recycle their water in towers of cloud, but perhaps stretch credulity on so small a scale as Ascension's

Meanwhile, what of the sparse vegetation—largely ferns—that was native to Ascension before all this? It has a doughty defender in Stroud, who seeks out its seeds, propagates them in shade houses, plants them out in enclosures and the wild, and protects them from budleias, Koster's curse, rabbits and other foes. It's an interestingly cosmopolitan conservation, one that aims to keep the old from being overwhelmed by the new, rather than to simply restore the way things were; one that enforces, more than seeks, some sort of balance.

And one which, at the same time, embraces change. There is debate among ecologists about the extent to which the island's cloud forest is a real, functioning ecosystem, one that embodies emergent relationships between plants, herbivores, pollinators and so on that have never been seen before, and the extent to which it is simply a pastiche, stitching together bits of ecosystems from elsewhere. Is it a patchwork quilt, or a new woven fabric? Saying for sure is hard, and though the conservation work on the island is first rate, the amount of published scientific research remains thin.

But there is definitely novelty. Stroud points delightedly to a tiny endemic fern, Xiphopteris ascensionis, which happily grows on the mossy branches of trees, filling a niche it first encountered only 150 years ago. Other new habits are spreading. Fairy terns, after millennia on the cliffs, now roost in the woods, shining white in the green.

Whether this all adds up to an emergent whole or a contingent mess, whether life is spreading because its presence makes the island ever more inhabitable or just because more and more invaders are getting a crack at it, no one can say for sure. But there is something going on here that's worth studying, shaping, and celebrating. In every other respect, Ascension is a way station, of importance only to the extent that it is on the way to some more interesting destination, audience or target. Economically and politically the island depends entirely on events and decisions beyond its shores. Only ecologically is it its own unique self—more distinctly so with every year that passes.

Day four: Belonging and departing

The fact that there are no native people on Ascension Island does not mean there are no native traditions. There are lots. Two of them have their physical manifestation at a road junction called One Boat. It has become the custom that when sporty types depart from the island, they leave their trophies inside the bus-shelter-like boat that gives One Boat its name, perhaps on the basis that they mean more on Ascension than anywhere else.

A few hundred yards away sits the rather garish lizard rock. The tradition here, a more longstanding one, is that if you are leaving Ascension and keen not to come back, you have to paint the rock, unseen, at night. It is a live enough tradition that some of the paint looks pretty fresh.

That both these traditions focus on departure is not that surprising. Departure is a central fact of Ascension life. To be on Ascension, you must either have a job contract, or be the dependent of someone who does. When your contract is up, you must find another job or leave—which for most people means returning to St Helena, a more populated island 1,100 kilometres away in the direction of Cape Town. Though there are adults on the island who were born and educated here, and have lived nowhere else for any length of time, no one is an Ascension Islander by right.

In the early 2000s, this looked like it might change. Part of the incoming 1997 Labour government's “ethical foreign policy” was to do something about the status and rights of the inhabitants of Britain's overseas territories, including St Helena and Ascension. This agenda got under way at the same time that the “London User's Committee” that represented Ascension Island's corporate managers, the BBC and Cable and Wireless, started to see advantages in selling off some businesses, such as shops and hotels.

In 2002, Ascension Island got its first elected advisory council. Some of the key questions it faced revolved around “belongership”, a quality which in dependent territories partially parallels what citizenship provides in states. Possible definitions of belongership might include new rights to hold property and stay indefinitely. One of the effects of this would have been to attract investment into new businesses, such as tourism, that could build on assets bought from the London Users. But there was more to it than that. Departure would no longer be a fact of life. People who had lived on the island might retire here; people born here would always be able to come back. There would be a new continuity stretching from past to future.

In 2005 this process came to a shuddering halt as the British government made clear that it did not intend, under any circumstances, to allow a right of abode on the island, and that all property was to remain Crown property. The British government argued that the island had no reasonable expectations of becoming self-sustaining. If it developed an indigenous population, looking after that population—its elderly, its unemployed, and so on—would be a new expenditure, probably for the department of international development, which deals with such issues on St Helena.

Another possible point of resistance in London and Washington may have been strategic: the desire not to recapitulate the problems of Diego Garcia, part of the British Indian Ocean territory. The indigenous population of Diego Garcia was effectively expelled in order to allow the island to become a very large American air base. Ascension has a significant US military presence, mostly to do with monitoring satellite launches and providing communications; and Ascension's history is driven by events beyond its shores that are hard to predict, such as a sudden American interest in landing on the moon, or Argentinean interest in landing on the Falklands. If a future turn of events in Africa was seen as requiring the island's military role to be embiggened and its facilities rendered much more secure, it might be convenient if the islanders had no legal right to remain where they were. Locals noticed that it was at the time that talk of a right of abode was at its height that, for the first time, a fence went up about the American base.

Its forward momentum sapped, the elected council eventually resigned en masse in 2007. But though the islanders had made little progress on belongership, the early zeroes did bring them a government. The Ascension Island Government (AIG) came into being in 2002, taking over some of the roles of the London Users, and supported by taxes on incomes and on the property that the island's users make use of. Most of the employers cushioned islanders from the income tax bills by increasing salaries to match (though not necessarily overtime rates) and paid their property taxes. However the Ministry of Defence felt its property tax bill too large, and has only ever paid about half of it.

This is one reason the AIG faced a budget crisis in 2009; another is that the population, and thus the tax base, has shrunk. The contractors running the island's installations have become more efficient, reducing payrolls and property usage. A third reason, say critics, is that the government's staffing has grown more than the services it provides. In response to the crisis there were cuts and those in education brought considerable disquiet. The school at Two Boats has an enthusiastic, experienced new headmaster, but there is no longer a fund to provide for the sixth-form education of its most promising students in the UK (the island's school only goes up to Britain's GCSE level, and thus to the age of about 16). Teachers have been made redundant, and the curriculum has been cut back; the school no longer offers language lessons, or GCSE history.

With a declining population and little incentive to commercial investment, Ascension is in a period of contraction. The proposed airport on St Helena may tighten things further, providing attractive jobs back home for St Helenans on Ascension. The smaller the population becomes, the harder it becomes for the government to provide the schooling, the hospital and the other things which the community needs for it to be a place with a future, rather than just a work camp. The less such things can be afforded, the less attractive the island is to potential workers with families who might give it that sense of a future.

To some, this past decade has been one of disappointment. Caz Yon was one of the councillors who resigned after it became clear that property rights and the right of abode were not going to be forthcoming. On the island since the early 1990s, she has trained herself up as a vet, and been a justice of the peace, as well as running the receiver station that monitors the rockets that the European Space Agency launches from French Guyana. She is particularly critical of the cuts at the school, and thinks that when her children need a secondary education she and her partner may well decide to head to the UK.

The shift from a vision of future growth and empowerment to one of near term contraction has had its impact on the spirit of volunteerism that Ms Yon illustrates, she thinks. But it is still there—not so much a can-do spirit as a well-no-one-else-will spirit, a fact of life in a technically competent workforce at the end of a long supply chain. There are new possibilities for using the island's natural assets: possible revenue from commercial fishing, perhaps more visitors to work on and learn from its remarkable natural environment and conservation efforts. There is a newly refurbished building near the top of the Green Mountain that could be a terrific conference/retreat venue for small eco-minded groups looking for a place to think big, and not too worried about the carbon costs of getting there.

And the frustrating fact that the island's future is not, and never really has been, in its own hands has a flip side—something outside may change in a way that redefines the island's purpose yet again, and brings in new enthusiasms and possibilities. Even disillusioned, Caz Yon can hope for such a possibility. She may leave, she says. But she will never paint the lizard.

Day three: Cats v birds

ASCENSION Island was built, quite recently as these thing go, by volcanism. Yet it is widely shaped by wind. The scoria cones that dominate the landscape in the west of the island – huge symmetrical piles of red grit such as Cross Hill, which towers almost 300 metres over Georgetown, or Command Hill, which overlooks the airbase - are steep on the windward side, less so on the lee. When they were created by fire-fountains of lava punching high into the air, the pummicey fallout fell predominantly downwind, providing the long lee sides. It's easy to imagine that the overall topography of the island – a large volcanic massif in the south east, fanned out lava flows spotted with scoria cones to the west and north of it – is also somehow to do with the sweeping of the wind, though the notion would probably topple over if exposed to the slightest draught of geological scrutiny.

On some of the lava plains the wind has left a subtler sign: pillars of rock that are black on one side and white on the other, the difference marked enough that the plain looks distinctly different seen from down wind or upwind. These are the ghost colonies. Before the island was settled, they were covered in roosting birds; they stood on their rocks with their faces all to the wind, to avoid ruffled feathers, and thus with their cloacas all facing the other way. The rain, which comes with the wind, has been slow to wash off the guano.

The colonies died out soon after the humans moved in. The culprits were cats. When the island was garrisoned in 1815, its rat population was already so large and so fearless that a diary purporting to be by an eighteenth century Dutch sailor marooned on Ascension as punishment for sodomy says he feared they would eat him. The Navy's custom and practice was that the answer to rats was cats. The cats, though, quickly learned that seabirds were a lot easier to kill than rats were. Most of the island's seabird colonies became ghost colonies.

The damage done by the cats was obvious pretty immediately, all the more so when the officers of the garrison tried to introduce game birds to shoot. According to Duff Hart-Davis's history of the island, cat hunting had already become a mixture of sport and duty by the 1820s; in the 1840s the bounty for a cat was raised from half a gill of rum to a whole gill. By 1870s the bounty was up to a shilling and sixpence, and over 4 guineas was paid out in 1879.

The profit motive, though, was never enough. The cats flourished, though their numbers probably reduced as their prey got used up. By the twentieth century depleted stocks of the island's 12 species of sea bird remained only on inaccessible cliffs, spires of rock and Boatswain Island, a rat- and cat-free knoll knee-deep in guano off the island's eastern tip. Only the bellicose sooty terns, also known as wideawake birds, which flock down by the tens of thousands to hatch chicks on the southern plains by the airfield, remained.

And so, ten years ago, conservationists started to put in place a thoroughgoing eradication campaign. A new ordinance decreed that all domestic cats be neutered; they were also given distinctive collars. Then, in 2002, live-capture traps started to be set around the settlements and across the rest of the island poisoned bait was put down in a highly methodical way, starting at the eastern tip. The eradicators also carried rifles, in case opportunities arose.

Most of the bait was taken by the indigenous land crabs, to whom its poison was harmless. Most of the creatures caught in traps were land crabs, too. But 70 feral cats were trapped, four caught in other ways, two shot and perhaps as many as 500 poisoned. After some mopping up operations, the feral cats were declared no more.

And the birds are beginning to take notice. Perched on Louie's Ledge, a sharp ridge of trachyte, a white and disconcertingly crumbly volcanic rock that sticks out about 400 metres above the ocean, you can look down on the teeming terns, frigatebirds and boobies of Boatswain Island. But you can also see a growing colony of birds establishing itself on Letterbox, a mainland promontory, and even nearer to hand. On the walk to the ledge, along a cliff-hugging path that is just slightly less perilous than it looks from afar, you may well be visited by fairy terns, snowy white and almost diaphanous of wing, hovering curiously close by. (While admiring them you can snack on the fat of the land, as represented by purslane, a tiny salad green, wild cherry tomatoes and fresh guavas.)

The avian reconquista is slow, mostly still constrained to the desolate corner overlooked by Louie's Ledge, on the steep, wetter and windswept Eastern side of the island, far from the vast ghost colonies of the west. Sea birds live a long time and breed slowly; a colony wiped out in years may take centuries to return. Still, according to Stedson Stroud, the island's conservation officer, all but one of the species present at the coming of the cats have now moved back to the mainland.

The exception is the bird that bears the island's name: the Ascension frigatebird, which is the largest of the island's birds, with a wingspan of two metres, and the only one of its sea birds not found elsewhere. For now it remains restricted to Boatswain island. It is widely seen elsewhere around the island, taking fish, baby turtles and sometimes fledgling wideawakes. But so far, it will not lay its single, fragile eggs on the mainland.

Ensconced on Louie's Ledge, though, as the airborne aristocrats climb effortlessly above you and their fellows below, it hardly matters. The land will be ready for the frigatebirds when they choose to return. They can take their time. Soaring effortlessly, they hang on the wind, as if made for it. Which, of course, they were.

Day two: Powering soft power

You can't get BBC television on Ascension. But you can get BBC electricity, and BBC water. The World Service transmitters at English Bay, at the northernmost tip of the island, can suck up megawatts of electricity as they broadcast news and more across Africa (and, for a short while each day, South America). As by far the largest consumer of electricity, it makes practical sense for the corporation's installation to be the island's main generator, too; transmission lines from English Bay provide the power for the villages of Travellers, built by the Air Force in the 1980s, Two Boats, built by the BBC in the 1960s, and Georgetown, the original garrison settlement built by 19th-century marines which is now the administrative centre. (The fact that an island with less than a thousand inhabitants manages to spread them around quite so many hamlets – there's a significant population at the US Air Force base, too, and a few up on Green Mountain – is one of Ascension's eccentric charms, if sometimes frustrating for those trying to keep the place running rationally.)

As the people with the power, it naturally falls to the BBC, or rather to its contractors, to do most of the island's desalination work, too. The BBC – or rather, the engineers employed by its contractor, Babcock – use some of their power station's output to run the desalination plant that provides the fresh water for most of the island's drinking water. Now they do the same with reverse osmosis systems. And they carefully add minerals to give their product the right taste and feel in the mouth and prevent it corroding machinery in the way pure distilled water does. A good job they do of it too; the tap water here is quite as tasty as waters that trade on the minerals nature added to them.

The power for all this came, until recently, from a battery of seven V-12 marine engines, each of which delivers over a megawatt. Every 18 months or so a tanker moors off English Bay and delivers about 6000 tonnes of fuel to the tank farm there through a floating pipeline. This powers many of the island's cars, as well as the generators. But it is an expensive and troublesome undertaking, and recently the BBC invested in a big chunk of fuel-free generating capacity – five Enercon E-33 330 kilowatt wind turbines, spinning ceaselessly in the southeast trades, the whole system officially inugurated just a couple of weeks ago.

The turbines are still bedding in – a couple of German engineers are currently working on the software of number four to counteract the fact that its pylon tends to oscillate a little alarmingly at some wind speeds. And they have had to face a few unusual difficulties. In the duty room at the transmission facility a plaintive note on the whiteboard asks operators to tell the power station when they are going to switch on antenna 17, as it knocks out wind turbine number five. The complex circuitry that controls the turbine did not respond well to being right next door to hundreds of kilowatts of radio transmission, though the problem has now been solved. No one doubts, though, that once settled in they will do much to reduce the transmitters' running costs by reducing the fuel bill and easing the wear and tear on the generators.

They are not the first wind generators on the island. The American Air Force operation, which for reasons of strategic self sufficiency provides its own power and fresh water, has an array over by the Devil's Riding School, but it is not an unmitigated success. One of the four original turbines stands idle, apparently for want of parts. The two larger ones appear not to work. But if the Enercons are not the beginning of large scale renewables on Ascension, they do take the process to a new level.

In the English countryside there is much opposition to turbines. Here on the volcanic plains, already dotted with antenna arrays of various sorts serving not just the BBC but also a number of military communications systems, not to mention intelligence agencies, they are unquestionably magnificent, poised on their wave-splashed crags. But for all their shiny newness, sublime siting and green credentials, they are not the machines that inspire the most awe on a visit to the station. Those are the two original Marconi transmitters that can between them suck up a megawatt or more of the power station's output. No one knows how old they are, but they were already in use at the BBC's then-main transmitter at Daventry before being shipped to the island in the mid 1960s.

If H G Wells had been asked to picture the pumping heart of a global information infrastructure, these are the things he would have imagined. Each transmitter is the size of a three horse boxes parked side by side. The brushed-metal casings give off a palpable heat as the hundreds of kilowatts flow through. Their inspection windows reveal an orderly, spacious geometry of dials, gauges, relays and cables that looks like a cityscape from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Glass conduits down which cooling water gushes are its thoroughfares, vast electronic valves its citadels. While most of the valves are ceramic, one is still glass; it glows like an open oven in a temple of Baal.

The engineers look at them with pride and affection, as zookeepers might a dinosaur, aware that their day is mostly passed. Four of the original Marconis have already been replaced with modern transmitters from the Croatian company Riz that are far more efficient, and should in the long run prove more reliable, though whether they'll be still pushing out the megahertz in 50 years remains to be seen.

They have also brought about a small addition to the BBC's accuracy. In the days of the Marconi transmitters, which use the most power when sending concentrated bursts of noise, the pips of the time signals sent by different transmitters to different regions were sometimes staggered so as to avoid six seconds of synchronised power surges. The new transmitters never peak in quite the same way, so the time can be truly universal.

All this – broadcasting, power supply, desalination – is done in the BBC's name without anyone from the BBC actually being here. The engineering company Babcock works it all, with the overwhelming majority of its employees from the neighbouring (if not exactly close) island of St Helena, like most of the rest of the island's workforce. It also operates some facilities for the British military, for the intelligence agency GCHQ, and for scientists. And as technology gets better, communications get better and such contractors become more cost conscious than the big companies they work for used to be, the need for labour to do all this decreases. Ascension is not in danger of going completely automatic – a glance at the way that engineers all over the island keep it running shows that. But it is slimming down as, in the words of one veteran, “the companies get more corporate.”

When the BBC was first here it built a village for its staff and their families. Now the operation no longer needs its separate receiver station, from which tapes would be ferried over for retransmission from English Bay, or the part time announcer it used to employ. The programmes come direct to English Bay by satellite downlink; shifts at the transmission centre have gone from nine people to two. The new wind turbines are watched over by a systems control and data acquistion system in Germany: “Sometimes they call us if something goes wrong,” says a Babcock engineer. “Sometimes they just fix it.” Even on Ascension Island, which is pretty much as off shore as you can get, jobs can still go offshore.

Day one: Off the map

EIGHT hours or so after leaving Britain, the captain tells the cabin we're ten minutes from landing. The video screens dotted throughout the cabin to relay the plane's position to its passengers, though, show nothing to land on within an hour's flying time, let alone a few minutes – just featureless blue Atlantic Ocean, almost equidistant between Africa and South America, eight degrees below the equator. Ascension Island, part of Britain's overseas territories, is fascinating in many ways. But it is so small and off the beaten track that it's not even worth a few pixels' worth of programming to the providers of on-board entertainment.

The blue emptiness of the screens in the cabin is merely symbolic; a little more disturbing is that the pilot, too, is doing without some of the computerised help he is accustomed to. The sun set with tropical suddenness just after the flight crossed the equator, an hour or so ago, so it will be a night landing in low cloud. And there's no approach radar or instrument landing system at Ascension Island's Wideawake Field; there's a beacon, and there are lights at the ends of the runway, and that's it. But on the plus side, the runway is very long indeed, having reportedly been extended to accommodate space shuttles in distress, should one need to drop by, and it obligingly runs right along the line of the southeast trade winds which blow over the island incessantly; no risk of crosswinds here. The chartered Air Italy jet touches down smoothly.

Unfortunately for most of the passengers, though, this is as far as it will be going. Most of those on board are heading down to the Falkland Islands, and normally, after refuelling, the plane would take off again and deliver them there. But the weather down south is a lot worse and the pilot does not have much experience of the windswept Mount Pleasant airfield. The transit passengers, mostly military, will bed down in barracks for the night.

Wideawake Field is, at present, Ascension Island's most obvious attraction. It allows aircraft from Britain direct access to the Falklands. The military flies down twice a week, using charters to cut costs. As well as Air Italy, Air Seychelles also has part of the contract. Air Tahiti used to, too; islanders remember the contrast of Polynesian flight attendant garb on military flights with affection. Over the past couple of years other charters have started coming through the field, catering to the increased demand for access to the Falklands by oil exploration companies; the island's hotel, the Obsidian, is currently home to a relief crew waiting to take over a delayed plane heading north. The only person to spend time in the island's police station cells so far this year was thrown off one of the charter flights for drunkenness.

Ascension Island turns on its head the old sailors' folklore about islands that move from place to place. It sits still, but the world shifts around it in a way that sometimes, unexpectedly, put Ascension Island between an A and a B that people want to get to. Such a realignment happened at the onset of the Falklands war; similar ones have shaped the island's whole history.

Discovered in 1501 by the Portuguese, Ascension Island was on the way to nowhere and deemed uninhabitable, so it was left uninhabited, most of the time, for centuries to come, though goats were introduced to give anyone with the misfortune of being ship wrecked something to eat. Then in 1815 the British decided to exile the most important man in the world, Napoleon, to St Helena, further south in the Atlantic. Now the island was on the way back to Europe from St Helena, and it was pre-emptively garrisoned lest it be used by vile Buonapartists to ease his escape. After Buonaparte died in 1821, it took on a new role as a base for the navy's actions against the Atlantic slave trade. As the garrison developed better (though still meagre) water supplies, and gained expertise in the slaughter of turtles, deemed a delicacy, ships on the way back from the Indian Ocean called in more often; the way the trades blow mean that while Ascension is not on a sailing ship's way from Europe to India, it is on the way back.

As sail gave way to steam, Ascension again found itself on the way to nowhere. But the development of trans-oceanic cables put it back on the map, providing that the map was one of electronic communications. Ascension's administration was passed from the Royal Navy to one of the companies that eventually became Cable and Wireless. Then, in the second world war, Ascension found itself on the way from the Americas to the African theatre, and later to Europe. American troops built Wideawake Field in a couple of months, and 20,000 aircraft were ferried through it on a route down from the United States to Brazil and north through Africa. (They also killed the last goats, which was probably fair enough since the shipwrecked now had other options, including vegetables grown in experimental arrays of hydroponic tanks, the island lacking the fertile soil needed for their support.)

In the 1960s Ascension found itself again on the way to somewhere: space. It was used to launch research rockets into the upper atmosphere, and to track spacecraft far beyond, including the Apollo flights to the moon. Cable and Wireless found itself building satellite ground stations instead of cable relays. At the same time the BBC realised that Ascension was on the way to much of Africa and South America, if you were travelling by short wave radio, as World Service news did, and built a set of broadcast antennae on the island.

Like previous excitements, that of the space age died down and moved away. By the 1980s the island was left with a dwindling Cable and Wireless presence and some BBC staff and contractors. Then Argentina invaded the Falklands, and Wideawake woke up.