At Tris Boukes Bay in the wild southern end of the island, an olive grove shelters the grave of the English poet Rupert Brooke, who died here in April 1915 while en route to Gallipoli. The grave is simple — a white marble headstone with an inscription in Greek and English — and the setting is striking: a remote bay surrounded by barren hills, accessible only by boat or a long walk across the southern peninsula.
Brooke had written some of his most celebrated war poems just weeks before his death, and the fame he achieved posthumously meant his grave became a place of pilgrimage almost immediately. Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in The Times. The isolation of the site, and the contrast between the heroic rhetoric of the poems and the unglamorous reality of his death from a mosquito bite, gives the visit a particular weight. The journey to reach it — a boat from Linaria or Skyros Town — is itself part of the experience.