To pass time during the early days of the pandemic, Robin Trimingham wandered through the East End of the island making videos. Her focus was on places typically ignored by crowds. Thinking others might be interested as well, she put the videos on YouTube “just for fun”, until people started asking to visit the locations with her in real life.

A business was born. Bermuda Heritage Tours offers “unique educational excursions to St George” to small groups.

Courtesy of 250 tours over the past three years, the company has a five-star rating on Tripadvisor.

“Our tours are a fascinating mix of historical and cultural facts ― woven together in an entertaining fashion which enables participants to not just visit historic places but understand the fascinating stories behind centuries of the uniqueness of Bermuda in world events,” Ms Trimingham said.

The tours operate through The Olderhood Group, a company she runs with Bill Storie and Peter Barrett.

Ms Trimingham considered it “a little crazy” the first time someone suggested she allow strangers to join her on her adventures.

“Eventually I thought about it: Well, wait a minute. Go places you love, meet interesting people, where's the problem?”

“On a whim” she created a website, which attracted piles of attention from cruise ship visitors wanting to learn about such places as Blue Hole Park, Fort Albert, Fort George, Cooper’s Island Nature Reserve and Mitchell House.

The first year she ran the tours on her own. Mr Storie listened to story after story and then asked if he, too, could play a part.

“He has a lifelong passion for anything to do with military history. And so we thought, OK, great, he could give a tour and focus on forts,” Ms Trimingham said.

“I was just overwhelmed by the positive response and the feedback that we were getting. We have three variations of the experience that we publicise, and everybody loves all of it.”

The entrepreneur thinks a big part of the appeal is that their packages are designed to suit their customers.

Companies that have participated praise the tours as team-building opportunities and like that they are a novel way to entertain visiting board members or important visitors.

“They're all looking for something new and different to do,” Ms Trimingham said. “For a corporate group, we talk to the company directly about the amount of time they want.

“Is there any place in particular that they want to go? Do they want to include lunch or a corporate gift? We highly customise it based on who's coming and the corporate objectives.”

They typically spend about three-and-a-half hours showing tourists around.

“We find that that is more than enough to give people a fascinating experience without it being tiring or overwhelming,” Ms Trimingham added.

“Our typical group can be as small as two people. We do private excursions. We don't do tours in which there are people who do not know each other and are involved in that one tour.

“Our largest group would be eight people, and Bill and I would both go together so everybody gets a lot of personal attention.”

Mr Storie had a long career in insurance and international business before founding The Olderhood Group with Ms Trimingham, whose experience was in the tourism industry and with internet start-ups.

“We know what a corporation is looking for when it comes to team building, to presentations.

“We lived and we breathed that. We understand that it has to be very professional and it has to meet objectives when it comes to things like perceived value by participants and building engagement and loyalty to the company itself and we know how to customise experiences to meet that kind of objective, because we've lived that life ourselves in former careers,” she said.

What also helped was that they both had an interest in Bermuda’s history and culture.

“We've always been reading about things, and learning about things as we went along. It was sort of a personal hobby. I've written two Bermudian history books.

“I wrote the history of the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, and I also wrote the history of an organisation called the Bermuda Mechanics Beneficial Association. So researching and writing and learning about the past, these are things that come very naturally,” Ms Trimingham said.

“But we were surprised. Everybody is interested in learning about the origin, the very early history of this tiny little island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Today, in our age of aeroplanes and cruise ships, we don't seem disconnected from the rest of the outside world, it doesn't seem very far away at all. But in the 1600s and 1700s this place was 620 miles from the closest point of the US.

“It's a couple thousand miles from the Caribbean, and it's much further than that to the UK and Europe.

“How they maintained the connection with the outside world, and why it was worth it to put a colony on this tiny, little isolated place is a fascinating story.”

• For more information visit bermudaheritagetours.com