I was surprised to see a train in the little station at Braye. The guide book is perfectly clear; the only railway in the Channel Islands operates at weekends and Bank Holidays. It does not run on Tuesdays ...

In the diminutive booking office the clerk explained that today's train was a private charter. But sensing my disappointment, he brightened up; the railway might also be open on Thursday, he said. It depended on the weather, really. Later that afternoon we met a man on his way from the Tourist office; there will definitely be trains on Wednesday, he'd been told. We were starting to understand that here on Alderney, things are done differently.

The trip had started differently, too. Out on the tarmac at Southampton we boarded a little yellow plane with a row of doors down each side. There had to be doors down each side, because there was no gangway; the seats folded forward, and we had clambered in right behind the pilot. "It's just a local bus service really," he said, looking over his shoulder and fixing us with an avuncular grin. My hopes of an in-flight breakfast were evaporating fast.

Half an hour later, Alderney popped up over the horizon. From the air it was shaped like a huge elongated skull, its lower jaw formed by the massive Victorian breakwater that dominates the coast at Braye harbour. The story of the breakwater is the story of Alderney itself.

In the middle years of the last century the British government looked anxiously across the Channel at the massive new French defences at Cherbourg and, to counter the threat, decided to develop Alderney as 'the Gibraltar of the Channel'. No less than fourteen forts were constructed along Alderney's vulnerable north and east coasts, and work began on a naval harbour planned as the equal of Portland.

The project was a spectacular white elephant. Twenty-five years later the harbour breakwater had grown to nearly a mile in length but, although the fortifications had cost more than £1½m, military opinion already judged them to be obsolete. Much of the breakwater was later allowed to collapse, and the giant wall now guarding Braye harbour is little more than half its original length.

All this was still in front of us as we touched down at La Grande Blaye. Within the hour we had settled into a charming, spotlessly clean guest house, made friends with our hosts, and pottered into town to get our bearings. Drinking coffee in the sun-dappled shade of Victoria Street, we debated the merits of visiting the optician's (to book for the Alderney bus tour), or McAllister's fish shop, for round-the-island boat tickets. Once again, Alderney was doing things differently.

The boat trip gets it. On a calm, clear day in late spring there was never really any choice, and after a leisurely lunch we joined the little knot of people gathering by the pontoon at Braye harbour. There's a general feeling that Voyager will leave from somewhere near here; and so it does - eventually ...

Skipper Brian Markell, deputy second cox of the Alderney lifeboat, is a tanned, wiry man with a huge smile and a Captain Birdseye beard. He runs us across the harbour for a proprietorial look at the sparkling new Trent class lifeboat before heading west through the broken waters of the Swinge towards Burhou island, uninhabited but for the comical little puffins that spill off the rocks on an endless treadmill of fishing trips.

There are coastal forts, wreck-sites and the screeching gannet colony on Les Etacs, before we push on up Alderney's southern coast past Telegraph Bay and Cachalière Pier. All too soon we round Chateau a l'Etoc, pick up our mooring, and wait for the inflatable launch that will ferry us back to the pontoon.

Sunshine and sea air are good for the appetite, and for a small island Alderney boasts a remarkable number of attractive places to eat. One guide claims at least eighteen establishments in all - but really, who wants to count them? We settled for some hot South African chicken at the nearby Rose and Crown, and fell gratefully into bed.

Voyager had introduced us to Alderney at arms length, and we spent the next couple of days exploring the island on foot. A good place to start is the Alderney Society's fascinating museum, housed in the former Town School in Le Huret. In a room given over to the second world war we soon discovered that the Nazis, like the Victorians, well understood Alderney's strategic location. They occupied the island in July 1940 following the fall of France, and poured enormous resources into strengthening the existing defences and adding still more of their own.

Yet ironically, a hundred years of military endeavour only adds to the island's allure. The old military road ringing the cliff tops is now for the most part a peaceful green lane, used mainly by walkers and cyclists to catch the spectacular views. With few exceptions, the surviving German works lie hidden within the older defences or burrowed deep into the granite cliffs; and as for the British forts, Captain Jervois' romantic designs are 'more in keeping with the defences of Elizabeth I than those of Victoria.'

Nowhere is this more true than at Fort Clonque, an engaging huddle of low towers and massive walls that tumble around their rocky islet south of Clonque Bay. But unlike some of its neighbours this remote westerly fortress, accessible only by a causeway at low water, is not lying in ruins; it has been restored by the Landmark Trust as a unique holiday home.

And Clonque is Alderney in microcosm; picturesque, remote, steeped in history and carpeted with wild flowers, a tiny island to explore and return to time after time. But above all, delightfully different.

© David Foster 1996