New Lighthouse Visits Part II (Isle of Wight)

Day 2 of the Isle of Wight lighthouse tour:

The first light of the day was supposed to be at Egypt point, at the far north of the island, but it was actually my dad sparking up his first cigarette as we watched the boats running up and down the River Medina. A nearby clock chimed, setting us on our way.

Egypt point is thought to have got its name from a group of sixteenth century gypsies who inhabited the area and were known at the time as ‘Egyptians’. It was less than half a mile up-river from our hotel, but due to the conspiring of the road system, getting there was like driving through one of those mazes where one has to begin in the opposite direction.

We descended from leafy suburban lanes to an empty, tranquil coastline with a wide, curving, ‘made for coaches’ road around it.

The lighthouse is little more than a beacon which operated from 1897–1989. It consists of a thin red tube upon a squat cylindrical base, with a white, square box perched clumsily on top, anchored to the ground with a few white-painted struts.

From here, we continued westward, with the road narrowing into a tiny lane around the coves and the village of Gurnard. Moving away from the sea, things became more pastoral, with green fields and woods in abundance. We were perhaps getting a glimpse at the ‘real’ Isle of Wight, away from the tourist trail at last.

This respite was brief, for soon we were joining the slow-moving traffic on the A3054. This is the island’s principal east/west route, and I mischievously wondered how things would be if a six-lane M3054 was built to deal with the traffic. Imagine doing 70mph on the Isle of Wight – you would be able to cross the whole island in under 20 minutes!

Of course, it is the diminutive size of the island that protects it from such modern intrusions. It wouldn’t take a lot of building to dramatically alter the feel of the place, hence the only new housing projects we would spot were relatively small.

We waited for several sailing boats to pass the raised bridge at Shalfleet, and briefly detoured up a private road to try to catch a glimpse of Hurst Castle and its lighthouse on the mainland, visible across the Solent. There was a small development of salubrious homes (read ‘Yuppie residences’ if you wish) at the end of the lane from which to point our camera lens before continuing via Yarmouth and Totland to the Needles – the island's most westerly point.

At Alum Bay, there is a car park and a small theme park with a breathtaking chair-lift ride over the cliffs, famous for their multiple layers of coloured sand. After attempting to hard-sell 'England and Wales in a Flash' to a friendly car-park attendant, we stomped off up the combined footpath and bus-lane that runs out along the grassy headland for around a mile. And boy, was it windy!

At the point where the white cliffs disintegrate into a series of chalk stacks, we savoured our first view of the lighthouse, directly ahead. In front of it stands a fort built in 1862.

The red and white striped lighthouse rises 102 feet from the sea and has a helicopter landing pad on top. Built in 1859, it replaced an earlier cliff-top lighthouse that was forever shrouded in mist. The present light stands beyond two brilliant white chunks of rock which rise out of the sea like chalk icebergs.

As we explored the southern side of the headland, we became entangled with a large group of elderly tourists, swarming like bees around the viewpoints, giving off a general hubbub of conversational small talk.

A smoothly curving concrete wall is all that remains of a former engine testing site for rockets (used from 1956–1971). The launching tests themselves took place on the other side of the world in Woomera, Australia. These weren’t the only experiments to be carried out in the vicinity. Back at Alum Bay, a plaque marks the location of the former wireless telegraph station where Marconi did a bit of tinkering around in the late 1890s.

Having absorbed all these facts by cranial osmosis, I glanced around to find that my dad had vanished over the top of the hill, drawn zombie-like towards the old keeper’s cottages - a terrace of four or five dwellings. Rather cheekily we wandered around the backyards, and some of the occupants even chatted to us. But once the approaching babble of voices chanting ‘rhubarb rhubarb’ could be heard, we quickly descended back to the path for fear that we might get swept up in the melee and find ourselves bundled into a Shearings coach bound Bournemouth!

Our next port of call was St Catherine’s Point at the southern corner of the island.

The A3055 follows the coast from west to south to east, effectively a scenic alternative to the A3054. The eastern half of this route consists of a series of popular holiday resorts from Ventnor to Ryde. The west side is very different though, being the island’s most sparsely populated quadrant.

At one point we were diverted onto lanes where the cliff road was subsiding. The terrain became quite wild, resmbling moorland, with the tall hills of the south ever-present on the skyline.

The turning for St Catherine’s is just beyond the village of Niton. We parked opposite a charming little pub in a leafy hamlet and walked along the lane to the lighthouse, descending panoramically to open fields. Our tour guide and his wife were ready and waiting.

Like the Needles light, this octagonal 1838 lighthouse replaced a much higher structure, but even this new light was often shrouded in mist, so the tower was eventually lowered from 120 feet to 86 feet by removing several sections of it.
A second shorter tower, open at the bottom, with tall arches, was added to house the fog signal in 1932, looking like something from an M.C.Escher painting. Both towers have turreted masonry.

Before we went to investigate the light's predecessor, it was time for a pint. The dusky wooden interior of the pub provided a mellow ambience for us and a solitary fellow drinker. Pubs like this have so much atmosphere that they seem cosy even when empty, yet other busier pubs, according to a friend of mine, have about “as much atmosphere as a municipal lavatory”. Sadly it is the more rustic kind of pub that seems to be under threat the most.

We returned across the pretty lawn to the car, accompanied by gentle birdsong, and backtracked to Blackgang Chine, where there is a theme park nestled between the cliffs. Our theme was merely to park the car and climb the steep, desolate footpath on the opposite side of the road.

My father’s heavy strained breaths were lost in the intensifying wind, and at last we reached the 1323 oratory which looked like an octagonal stone rocket with its pointed top, perched on one of Wight's highest points. The sides even look as though they are adorned with stone booster rockets! Bar the 46 A.D. ‘pharos’ in the grounds of Dover Castle, this is England's olderst standing lighthouse

It all came about when a ship from France crashed nearby and its cargo of monastic wine miraculously disappeared and ended up being sold to the islanders. The pope ordered that the culprits build a lighthouse to stop further ships crashing, as penance (and they were expecting a dozen Hail Mary's!). Consequently the tower has even been used as a chapel.

With the late afternoon sun still bright, we drove inland, passing farms until we reached the main road at Godshill.

Carrisbrooke is joined to Wight's capital, Newport, by unbroken housing. Yet somehow it still maintains the character of a busy tourist village. The pub we tried didn’t really fit this notion of quaintness though, with three shaven-headed thirty-somethings providing a continual flow of bawdy masculinity. This wasn’t quite what we were looking for!

And so we returned to Cowes and poured ourselves into a wooden seat to peruse the menu. In my best French accent I ordered the moules mariniere.

Stunned by the huge mound of black cracked shells I was presented with, I proceeded to extract the tasty mussels from within, while my father tried to ply me with additional food, stating that a plate of under-nourished whelks wouldn’t fill me up. After his breathless gasps I'd witnessed on that barren hillside earlier, I took this advice, like my meal, with a pinch of salt!

If you are enjoying these 'lighthouse tours' but fancy something a little more polished to read, 'England and Wales in a Flash' humorously documents our visits to every lighthouse around the mainland coast. It's sequel 'Bordering on Lunacy' covering Southern Scotland will be published shortly. Also available are 'Mud Sweat and Beers' (hiking/humour) and 'Seven Dreams of Reality' (dreamlike fiction). Track all 3 down on Amazon!

- Adam and Roger Colton

New Lighthouse Visits Part I (Isle of Wight)

I have recently been working on two new books.

For details of Seven Dreams of Reality (dreamlike fiction) and Mud Sweat & Beers (non fiction - humorous hiking adventure) check out Amazon.co.uk or email hamcopublishing@AOL.com. One of the proposed new books will be a sequel to 'England and Wales in a Flash', which sees my father and I continuing our mission to visit lighthouses around the mainland coast with a foray into Southern Scotland. As a result, a handful of chapters documenting our visits to a few random lighthouses In England have had to be jettisoned, not quite in keeping with the theme of a book on Scotland.

Rather than waste them, I have decided to edit out some of the more raucous humour and lengthy observational passages (for that you'll have to buy the book) and include the chapters in this blog over the next few months. We begin with Day 1 on our visit to the Isle of Wight.

Joining our queue to board the Isle of Wight ferry, we broke open the ‘Yuk’ milkshakes [a reference readers of our first book will understand] and augmented its milky goodness with some chicken legs, slices of bread and a pork pie that we cut in half with the end of a Biro, not being in possession of a knife or any good preparation skills.

Once upon the ferry, we decided that it would be more pleasant to spend the journey upstairs plotting our course across the Solent, rather than while away sixty minutes in a small hatchback. This was a sensible idea, as the vessel had all the amenities that you would find on a cross-channel ferry (except duty-free of course).

So we ascended to the blustery observation deck, where we were rewarded with an attractive ride into Cowes, with its bright white vessels lining the River Medina, which is like a crack running half way into the island. The sight of the buildings creeping up the surrounding hills as though trying to escape gave a pleasant ambience. This was a gently scenic introduction to the island, only spoiled by my obligation to repeat the old joke ‘What’s brown, steams and comes out of Cowes backwards?’ Answer – the Isle of Wight ferry. The colour scheme has changed since those days.

We docked at East Cowes, a shady village, marooned from the main town by the river, easliy crossed using the ‘floating bridge’. This is what the islanders call a small shuttle ferry that saves the motorist, and indeed the pedestrian, a 12-mile expedition by road.

The River Medina sounds more like a waterway in Spain than on the Isle of Wight. In fact, it is true that the island is not without Iberian influence. After the Stone Age hunters and Neolithic farmers, the Spanish arrived and settled. There would be further influxes of in-migration to come, culminating with a couple of post-modern lighthouse hunters in 2003AD. (By the way, what will they call the post-post-modern era?)

The island, 23 miles from east to west and 13 miles from north to south, was originally joined to Dorset. This is logical really, as the chalk cliffs that disintegrate into the sea at the westerly Needles match up rather neatly with the white cliffs across the water near Swanage.

Cowes is of course famous for its regatta. At the time, a report stated that the people here feel ostracized from big business, and that there should be a drive to encourage such things. The downside is that the place could then resemble just about every other town in the UK. Is this really so desirable? 'What can be so bad about a little bit of individuality?

Our inn had an archway beside it that can be driven through to reach the quayside. We had pre-booked our stay; my father had seen a recommendation for the place in a real ale guide, and that was enough to send him scuttling to the phone to make an inquiry. However, there were no real ales on offer today, so we had to make do with a pint of Guinness which we quaffed by the window, watching the people wander to and fro on this cheery afternoon. A newsagency seemed to be the catalyst for these movements.

My dad Christened our lodgings 'the garret room’, for we were positioned up three or four flights of stairs. This brought to mind a vision of a reclusive author hammering away on an old typewriter by candlelight.

Now to me, the Isle of Wight is a bit like a miniature inverted replica of England. This is because most of the population is crammed into the northeast of the island; whereas on the mainland we shoehorn everybody into the Southeast. Similarly reversed is the topography of the landscape, with the hillier terrain in the south on Wight, whereas in Blighty Major it is the North that is renowned for its uplands. Interestingly, this area of downland can even be seen from Portsmouth and Southampton, making it look as though the Solent isn’t there at all.

Newport, in the centre of the island, possesses the isle's only dual carriageway, this being a mile of the A3020 to the north of the town centre. The town also contains that other great British hallmark – the multi-lane ring road. It is here that one encounters that other stalwart of British life - jams.

The 125,000 islanders own 70,000 cars between them. This increases dramatically in the tourist season and is certainly exasperated by the fact that a once expansive rail network has been whittled down to a single line along the East Coast. At least you can still get a ‘ticket to Ryde’ I suppose!

The nine-mile road journey from Newport to Ryde felt more like fifteen. Here we checked out the island’s only outlet of a high profile pub chain (at the time of our visit, at least). We opted to sample Ventnor brewery’s ‘Oyster beer’. This dark, slightly sweet bitter was the finest we would taste during our trip, and is apparently made with real oysters.

The open-plan pub, located in this seaside town of amusements and fun fairs, was heaving, and conversations knotted themselves into a wall of sound around us.

Although the beer was strangely moreish, this was enough procrastination. It was time to talk ‘lighthouses’ and wend our way to Wight’s most easterly point, across lush, undulating farmland to St Helen’s village, then on past a bay filled with yachts and sailing boats, to Bembridge, a village with its own little one-way system.

Eventually meeting the coast, we parked near a large ‘chain’ hotel surrounded by lawns so neat you wouldn’t dream of stepping on them. It was here that we noticed that the Solent was littered with flat-topped round towers, sticking out like water-borne ‘Martellos’. These Victorian era forts were built to defend the Solent from another perceived French invasion threat (1860s).

I’ve heard that one of these was sold as a bijou residence around the time of our visit (2003) for six million pounds. 'Was it worth the money?' I wonder. Great place to live for peace and quiet; not so great for running out of milk and popping to the local shop!

Standing by the lifeboat station, we moved our plane of vision a few degrees southward and around five miles out to sea, onto a hazy black cylinder protruding from the deep. This was the Trinity House light of Nab Tower, a 90-foot high, 40-foot wide cylinder, designed as part of a defence scheme to protect the English Channel from invaders, which began its work as a beacon in 1920. It was staffed by three keepers until 1983.

The bright sky gave our squinting eyes an effect similar to snow blindness. The distance was too much for the telephoto lens on my video camera to cope with, so we cannot really count it in our tally of lights and felt vaguely unfulfilled during our journey back to Cowes.

Tiredness began to encroach at a rate of knots, and just two things grabbed our attention during our truncated evening at our inn. The first was a ‘Back to the future’ machine. This was just a glorified quiz machine really, but nice to encounter anyway, as I have long thought this trilogy of films to be vastly under-appreciated.

It was holed up in our garret room that we had our second surprise. The only tea bag left for our edification resembled a four-inch-wide parachute. My father managed to dip this unwieldy object into the two cups for long enough to infuse something drinkable from it.

Like I said earlier, it's good to be different!

- Adam and Roger Colton