Thorney Island, West Sussex: The beauty spot accessed via a secret button through a barbed wire fence

The beaches of Thorney Island, next to Chichester Harbour, are our Secret Britain selection today.

The remote sandy beach at Thorney Island juts into Chichester Harbour in West Sussex.
The remote sandy beach at Thorney Island juts into Chichester Harbour in West Sussex.
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

A channel called The Great Deep partially separates the mainland from Thorney Island, part of the watery maze that is Chichester Harbour.

Owned by the MoD, the island played an important part in the Battle of Britain. Now a rather idyllic station for the Royal Artillery, walkers following the Sussex Border Path can gain access by pressing a button at barbed-wire-topped gates and enjoy a nine-mile circular stroll.

You'l spot seals out near Thorney Island.

Surrounded by deserted white-sand and shingle beaches and with mudflats beyond, this peaceful island connects via a sandbank with Pilsey Island (no public access), a habitat for Brent geese, curlews, skylarks, egrets, shelduck and osprey.

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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.