DID you know that Brownsea Island was once a holy island? Or that it was once owned by "Mad" Benson?

Or that next year will be the 100th anniversary of the first camp that launched the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movement?

A 30-page booklet called The History and Mystery of Brownsea Island has just been published that explores the story of the intriguing Poole harbour island.

Written by Devina Symes and James Langton, this publication begins by telling you that people had settled on the island by 500BC, then takes you on a journey through the centuries to the 9th century when monks from Cerne had a chapel and hermitage built there that was later devastated by the marauding Vikings.

The original castle on Brownsea, the booklet tells us, was built by Henry VIII to protect the entrance to Poole harbour and passed on through royal hands until Queen Elizabeth gave Brownsea Island to one of her favourites, Christopher Hatton, who forced all passing ships to pay him a toll.

A succession of subsequent owners transformed the island, including one William Benson MP, an eccentric given to fits of madness who dabbled in the black arts.

Brownsea had undergone many changes and owners before it played host to Baden-Powell's camp that launched the Scout movement in 1907.

Davina Symes and James Langton's booklet traces the ownership of Brownsea Island through the Van Raalte days when famous guests would stay, through the years when daffodil-growing was an island industry and on to the ownership by another eccentric, the reclusive Mrs Bonham Christie, who bought it in 1927 and owned it through the years of the Second World War, when it acted as a decoy island to divert enemy bombers away from the cordite factory at Holton Heath.

Now it is in the hands of the National Trust.

This thought-provoking publication finishes with a look at the landscape and wildlife to be encountered on foot once you have explored its colourful pages.