| Yarmouth to Freshwater This was a day with many "sights" to see. Before leaving Yarmouth, we stopped in the church to see the curious marble statue we had read about. A French ship was captured by the governor of the island in the mid-1600s, Sir Robert Holmes, and on the ship was an unfinished statue of King Louis IV. It lacked the head, and as the sculptor was captured, too, Holmes demanded that he substitute Holmes's head for the King's! |
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The path through Fort Victoria Country Park was in a mature woodland, with views across to Hurst "Castle" on the mainland, just a mile away. This was begun in Henry VIII's time because of concerns about the French, and added to by the Victorians.
We wound our way down to the water's edge again, and again were on a seafront promenade. But then we climbed back up and suddenly were in a quite different environment, a heather downland. Headon Warren isn't a large area, but it seems to be in another world. Besides the heather and gorse, there was another flower that we found striking. We tried unsuccessfully to find it in our flower book.
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Then after a while we ran into a local couple walking their dog, and asked what the flower was. They said "Oh, it's just a weed." They told us it's rosebay willowherb. Weed or not, we still think it's pretty! The soil here seemed to be halfway between chalk and seashells, a curious terrain. |
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We soon were excited by seeing the Needles, the famous chalk stacks at the west end of the Isle of Wight. We could even see the lighthouse at the far end.
With the Needles still in view, we walked the ridge to the end of the hill, to the ruins of yet another fort. The photo shows the top of the chair lift that one can use to go down to the bay.
And the reason that one wants to go down to the bay is that it's Alum Bay, with the celebrated multi-colored sands. We did in fact take the chair lift and ate our sandwiches while sitting on the beach, admiring the colors of the sand cliffs.
| After we came back up by the lift, we continued on toward the Needles, frequently stopping to look back toward Alum Bay. |  |
In the photo below, Headon Warren with its heather stretches across the top. The chair lift (at the left) descends from a theme park where we bought figures filled with sands of various colors from the bay.
We walked out to the "Old Battery" at the end of the point nearest the Needles. The fort there wasn't used for long, because it turned out that the chalk cliffs crumbled whenever they fired a cannon! Hence the "New Battery", up the hill. But in the Old Battery there's a passageway underground for 200 feet out to a searchlight emplcement. At that point, you're at the westernmost tip of the island, just overlooking the chalk stacks of the Needles.
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After appreciating the views at the Needles, we climbed back up the hill, and followed a pleasant path over the chalk downland for a mile or so, down and then back up again to Tennyson Down. Tennyson lived near here, and his popularity attracted many eminent scholars to the island. There's a monument to him at the crest of the down.
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From Tennyson Down, we walked down to Freshwater Bay, while enjoying the views over the chalk cliffs and sea. From our B&B in Freshwater, it would have been only a few miles to where we started the day, in Yarmouth! We had walked southwest, out to the Needles, and then southeast, bringing us back just south of Yarmouth. Very inefficient, but a great day!
