On one of the world\’s most remote islands, Ryan Enslin discovers that the key to St Helena\’s spirit is found at the table.

The spoon carried a warmth I immediately sensed was both familiar and strange. Sweet earth lingered first, then a smokey essence, faint yet somewhat elusive, drawn from a memory older than my own. What lay on the plate before me unfolded slowly into something layered, alive with echoes of dishes cooked long before I arrived on these shores.

It was a risotto, though not the kind I had known elsewhere. Here on St Helena Island, midway between Africa and South America, it carried within it the heart of the island’s pumpkin stew, folded into grains that seemingly worked their magic on the construct of time itself. And, in that moment, I realised how best to read the soul of one of the most remote places on earth.

Not through the stone walls of forts or the country lanes winding endlessly across volcanic cliffs, but through what was set before me at the table. After nearly a decade of longing to reach this faraway place, I was beginning to taste her truths in ways no map or monument could have revealed.

If you\’re searching for silence, go somewhere remote, right? When Ryan Enslin scratched a ten-year itch to visit a tiny island in the middle of the South Atlantic, he discovered a deep stillness, unexpected friendships and a night sky that made him feel both small and whole.

I first heard whispers of St Helena nearly a decade ago, carried not by wind or wave, but by a band of islanders who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to South African shores, to share of their distant home. A lone outpost adrift in the South Atlantic, four thousand three hundred kilometres away, suspended in that ethereal no-man’s-land between continents. Hearing of this place stirred something within me that I would only truly grasp years later. A quiet yearning not just to reach those distant shores, but to step into a place where the world grows still and my soul, perhaps for the first time, would be free to roam and listen.

Stories of Napoleon’s final exile, of Boer prisoners of war and a banished Zulu king only deepened the intrigue, adding layers to what I’d begun to imagine about this seemingly forgotten corner of the world. Could such a place truly exist? It seemed unlikely. But there it was, on a map. A pixel of mystery floating in the blue.

It’s late on a Wednesday afternoon and I find myself engaged in an active search for meaning under the shade of a giant Ficus tree, in a garden first written about in 1682. I am engaged in a conversation with Basil George, and his wife Barbara, seeking to understand a place I’ve been wanting to visit for the better part of ten years. I’m in the remote reaches of the South Atlantic, far from the tedious hum of 2025, on St Helena Island. As one of the most remote places in the world, the black rock of this volcanic island rises fiercely from sapphire blue waters, and you feel as if you are standing at the very edge of the world.

For the past eleven days, I’ve been immersed in the gentle allure of island life – breathing it in, ruminating on my own life while sitting on the worn stone walls of a fort dating back to 1874, roaming the islands winding country roads in unhurried, soulful meanderings, and savouring the warmth of her local cuisine. Yet something eluded me. I wanted St Helena to reveal itself to me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I was simply too foreign, maybe too rushed to understand its rhythm. I was asking questions, but the island refused to answer in the language I expected. What was the essence of a Saint, as the locals are affectionately known?