Flare Path Sky Tours, the digital airline glad to wheel like a buzzard or plunge like a peregrine falcon when it spots an attention-grabbing little bit of historical past beneath its wings, is mid-way by a clockwise flight round England’s largest island, the Isle of Wight. In at the moment’s instalment, Tarka, the GeoFS Twin Otter, returns to his start line, Solent Airport, through landmarks that embrace a medieval lighthouse, Britain’s Cape Canaveral, a Stone Age Atlantis, a royal jail, a battle-scarred shipyard, and one of many strangest cricket pitches on the planet.
(Click here for Part I)
The Ventnor presently unfurling beneath us is a really completely different resort to the one described in Roman’s antique guidebook. Deprived of its remaining* railway station in 1966, its imposing sanatorium in 1964, and the final remnants of its pier in 1993, it has – reluctantly maybe – regained a few of the sleepy insignificance it possessed within the days earlier than the Victorian vacationers and TB victims arrived of their 1000’s.
* There are few higher illustrations of Railway Mania folly than Ventnor. Working independently, two railway companies burrowed by the large chalk bulwark of St. Boniface Down to succeed in the city.
Beyond Puckaster Cove, a smuggler-friendly scrap of sand the place a storm-spooked Charles II as soon as got here ashore, is St Catherine’s Point. The Point’s whitewashed navigation assist is proof that lighthouses will be constructed too tall. Constructed in 1838, St Catherine’s was shortened by 13 metres in 1875 to deliver its lantern room under the extent of the mist that ceaselessly shrouds the hilltops in these elements.
The web site of three WW2 deaths (keepers killed in 1943 when the engine home they have been utilizing as a shelter was struck by a Luftwaffe bomb), the lighthouse was the blind witness to a tragedy of far better magnitude on the morning of February 21, 1917. That was the fateful day SS Mendi, a troopship making for Le Havre with 823 males of the South African Native Labour Corps aboard, sank in thick fog ten miles south of the Point after being run down by the Darro, a recklessly captained cargo vessel. The Darro did not cease, and regardless of the very best efforts of HMS Brisk, the Mendi’s escort, 646 individuals drowned. The phrases spoken by Isaac Williams Wauchope to the lads who crowded the deck of the doomed vessel after the collision, have entered South African folklore:
“Be quiet and calm, my countrymen. What is happening now is what you came to do…you are going to die… Brothers, we are drilling the death drill. I, a Xhosa, say you are my brothers…Swazis, Pondos, Basotho…so let us die like brothers. We are the sons of Africa. Raise your war-cries, brothers, for though they made us leave our assegais in the kraal, our voices are left with our bodies.”
St. Catherine’s isn’t the primary beacon-topped tower to sentinel the Island’s southern-most cape. The stone rocketship a mile to the north, is Britain’s solely surviving medieval pharos. A neighborhood lord constructed St. Catherine’s Oratory in 1328 to placate the Church, after he was found in possession of ecclesiastical property (wine) plundered from an area wreck. Today, the Pepperpot, because it’s affectionately recognized, seems to be down on the oldest amusement park within the UK. Named after a ravine lengthy since obliterated by landslips, Blackgang Chine nonetheless boasts the crooked home, wild west avenue, and life-size fibreglass dinosaurs that dropped the jaws of juvenile guests like me again within the 1970s.
Ahead stretches the Back of the Wight, a portion of the Island devoid of cities and shunned by 19th Century railway engineers. Although sparsely populated, the world has produced dozens of embellished heroes over time. If these heroes had received their medals with assistance from pistols, rifles and machine weapons, reasonably than oars, tillers, and ropes, then, at the moment, tiny villages like Brook and Brighstone could be well-known all through the land as kindergartens of braveness.
Not that each one the rescues on this infamous stretch of coast concerned native lionhearts in open boats. On October 8, 1832, oilskinned villagers braving gale-force winds on that headland down there, plucked nineteen souls from a vessel lodged on the infamous Atherfield Ledge, with assist from what was then unproven expertise – a line-carrying rocket. The rocket in query was designed by John Dennett, an Isle of Wight man who had learnt his commerce engineering life-taking rockets for the Army. Metal-cased, 2.5m in size and with a 230m vary, Dennett’s fireworks went on to avoid wasting 1000’s extra lives earlier than a more sophisticated design outmoded them.
Two landmarks seen on our two o’clock proper now are worthy of consideration. That tree-hemmed mansion above Brook (a) was the house of Jack Seeley, a dashing cavalryman and high-flying politician. The depth of Seeley’s affection for Warrior, the horse that carried him, nearly unscathed, by the Great War, will be judged by the truth that “the luckiest man in the army” penned a biography of his mount within the 1930s.
See the place the highway out of Brook adders by that cleft within the downs? The bald patch of chalk on the left (b) marks the spot the place a Short Solent flying boat struck the hillside in 1957. ‘City of Sydney’ was on her means from Southampton Water to Madeira (which, at the moment, lacked a runway) with 58 individuals aboard when one among her 4 Bristol Hercules engines packed up not lengthy after take-off. She turned for residence however, as a result of unexplained stoppage of a second engine, solely made it so far as that shoulder of downland. The accident claimed the lives of 45 and sounded the dying knell for Aquila Airways and industrial flying boat operations within the UK.
Legislation designed to discourage a sequel to the music pageant featured within the first a part of this tour, wasn’t profitable, however did imply the 1970 event went forward at a web site that was removed from ultimate. Held at East Afton Farm – passing on the suitable at current – the third IoW pageant enticed a veritable multitude to the Isle with a stellar line-up that included Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Miles Davis, Sly and the Family Stone, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Chicago and Jethro Tull. Many of the estimated 700,00zero who attended have been capable of watch performances free of charge from the slopes of Afton Down. This, along with low ticket costs and bother attributable to French Maoists…
…scuppered prospects of a 1971 pageant. It could be thirty-two years earlier than the Island’s next music festival, and that revival, when it got here, was comparatively small-scale and nearly solely freed from angst, aggro, and acid.
Tarka elevating his nostril to ascend Tennyson Down is my cue to attract your consideration to Farringford House, the residence of one among Britain’s greatest recognized and most quoted poets. If you’ve ever uttered “Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to loved at all”, “Their’s not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die”, or “Nature, red in tooth and claw” you’ve quoted Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a Victorian Poet Laureate who produced a lot of his greatest work whereas residing at Freshwater. The prone-to-melancholy* wordsmith behind compositions resembling The Charge of the Light Brigade, Crossing the Bar, and In Memorium of A.H. (a poem that “soothed and pleased” Queen Victoria after the dying of Prince Albert) strolled each day on the down that now bears his identify. According to him, the air up right here was price “sixpence a pint”.
* T. S. Eliot described him as “the saddest of all English poets”.
Prepare to gaze disappointedly on the Island’s well-known calciferous coccyx!
Brutally flattened by GeoFS’s open-weave elevation mesh, the Needles lengthen a west-pointing promontory, that, within the 1950s and 60s, was on the centre of Britain’s ballistic missile and area programmes. The Black Arrow rocket that made potential Blighty’s one and solely ‘single-handed’ satellite launch, relied on engines constructed at East Cowes (on our itinerary) and examined on the concrete pads at every finish of that quarter-circular service highway. To the aid of native fauna, the deafening exams ceased in 1971 when Whitehall cancelled Black Arrow on financial grounds.
I see a few of you haven’t touched your Dino Bones. Realising Marmite-coated wheat snacks may not be to everybody’s style, we did deliver another. Advertised in Roman’s Edwardian guidebook and sourced with the assistance of a meals historian pal of ours, the delicacies I’m about at hand spherical are assured to maintain starvation pangs at bay till we get again to the mainland.
Blimey, I don’t just like the look of these gas gauges. If we’re to keep away from a repeat of that incident in 2014 when Flare Path Sky Tours passengers ended up uninvited visitors on Geopotes 15, a Greek suction dredger moored off Malta, I feel we’re going to need to loiter much less from here-on. Onwards to Alum Bay, Roman..
Alum’s candy-striped cliffs learn like a geology textbook’s index. Not solely has Mother Nature surrounded the cove with an astounding vary of sediment beds, the pricey outdated factor has thoughtfully rotated stated strata by ninety levels to make inspection of them that bit simpler. The 1916 Ward Lock believes the rainbow-hued ramparts, ruthlessly pillaged over time by souvenir crafters and sand painters, are greatest seen from the deck of a steamer:
“The tints of the cliffs are so bright and so varied that they have not the aspect of anything natural. Deep purplish, red, dusky blue, bright ochreous yellow, grey nearly approaching to white, and absolute black, succeed each other, as sharply defined as the stripes in silk; and after rains, the sun, which, from about noon till his setting, in summer, illuminates them more and more, gives a brilliancy to some of these nearly as resplendent as the bright lights on real silk.”
Palmerston’s pale pachyderms (see half 1) dot the subsequent 4 miles of shoreline. Keep your eyes peeled for shrub-softened battery websites and repurposed casemates. Facing Hurst Castle, a a lot older strait sentry on the mainland, Fort Albert is among the extra attention-grabbing as its arsenal as soon as included one of many world’s first guided missiles. Any hostile floor vessel utilizing the Solent’s western entrance in the course of the ultimate decade of the Nineteenth Century would have needed to dodge wire-guided Brennan torpedoes launched and directed from Fort Albert.
Amazingly, the revolutionary weapon wasn’t simply steered by metal cables, it was powered by them. The explosive eel contained no motor, solely spools of wire. A shore-based engine propelled it by quickly winding within the wire.
That’s Yarmouth useless forward. Robert Holmes, an aggressive Royal Navy sea-dog who began the Second Anglo-Dutch War just about on his tod, and secured a point out in Flare Path Sky Tours’ Dutch dawdle by torching West-Terschelling in 1666, resided within the city on the few days a 12 months when he wasn’t busy bothering Netherlanders. He’s buried and memorialised at St. James’ Church, a stone’s throw from his outdated waterside residence, now the George Hotel (x).
You could possibly be forgiven for lacking “probably Europe’s most important Mesolithic site” a number of miles up the coast from Yarmouth. Hidden underneath brine near shore fringed by Bouldnor Forest, it doesn’t precisely catch the attention. Archaeologists found “Britain’s Atlantis” with the assistance of an industrious lobster. The house-proud crustacean was within the strategy of eradicating labored flints from his burrow when noticed by divers. Subsequent excavations* revealed the unusually well-preserved stays of an 8000 year-old pre-Solent forest settlement and objects resembling instruments, labored timbers, and string which have modified the best way teachers take into consideration the Middle Stone Age.
* By people not lobsters.
From Bouldnor we reduce inland, following the serpentine course of a long-gone railway line, to a village which, in 1916, was hospitality embodied (“Every other house bears the legend ‘Teas provided’”). The cause for Carisbrooke’s extremely excessive CSPCR (cake stand per capita score) was the motte-and-bailey fortress under us.
While it’s John Trenchard and Elzevir Block I have a tendency to think about first after I hear the identify Carisbrooke Castle, it could be churlish to disclaim that the place has had extra notable visitors in its time. Charles I fled to the Island in 1646 after escaping home arrest at Hampton Court, however rapidly realised he’d merely swapped one jail for one more. Restricted to the confines of the fortress after Parliament realised he was endeavouring to restart the Civil War with help from Scottish Presbyterians, he devised a number of escape plans all of which miscarried*. The worth he paid for the failures was excessive. After a short sojourn at Hurst Castle, the inveterate schemer was whisked as much as London for a speedy trial and a bloody appointment with a headsman’s axe.
* Some comically. One bid needed to be deserted after Charles obtained wedged in a window body.
Roman, do you reckon now we have ample avgas to absorb another prison on the best way to Cowes?
Shame. I had a thoughts to inform the story of that 1995 breakout. The one the place the escapees tried to pinch a Cessna from Sandown Airport.
Straight up the River Medina to Cowes it’s then.
On the evening of 4-5 May, 1942 the water of the river that cleaves the Island’s solely port in two, was put to a use it had by no means been put to earlier than. It was used to cool anti-aircraft gun barrels aglow from sustained firing. The weapons belonged to a Polish Navy destroyer that occurred to be in Cowes present process a refit when the city sustained its worst air raid of the warfare – an assault by 160 bombers. The Błyskawica’s doughty defence of her birthplace (the ship was the product of native shipbuilder J. Samuel White) has by no means been forgotten by native residents. Francki Place within the coronary heart of the city is known as after the ship’s captain, and trendy Polish warships pay common visits to take part in commemorative occasions.
One of the explanations the Luftwaffe lavished a lot H.E. on Cowes was the Saunders-Roe works that after hugged the shoreline subsequent to the East Cowes ferry terminal. Known for its flying boats, the final of which was the gargantuan Princess (a sort that by no means carried a paying passenger however was briefly thought-about as a candidate for conversion to nuclear energy) the corporate was the pure midwife for Christopher Cockerell’s weird brinechild, the SR.N1. Recall these big cross-Channel hovercraft we inspected firstly of our journey? Like the SR.N1, the three Princesses, and the world’s first flying-boat jet fighter, their womb was that Art Deco hangar by the concrete quay (x).
As Tarka’s gas gauge needles are each nudging zero, and a number of other of you appear to be in pressing want of bathroom amenities (I used to be assured these meat lozenges have been match for consumption!) a swift return to Lee-on-Solent would appear smart at this level.
The ultimate kink in our flight path is over a landmark that’s solely seen a number of days a 12 months. Roughly two miles north of Cowes, bramble-free Bramble Bank hosts an annual cricket match between two yacht golf equipment, and hit the headlines most just lately when, in 2015, it was used as a sandy crutch for itemizing roll-on/roll-off/roll-over automobile provider MV Höegh Osaka.
Ladies and gents, in preparation for touchdown, please fasten your seatbelt, flip off all digital gadgets, stow your tray desk, and put all ideas of hen strikes, blown tires, carelessly parked gas bowsers, and undiscovered WW2 runway explosives out of your thoughts.
Three out of ten, Roman. If GeoFS modelled chain-link fences, Tarka could be sporting one like a stole now.
This Flare Path Sky Tours flight ends right here, a handy twenty second dash from the terminal’s public conveniences. Thank you very a lot for flying with us and apologies once more for the meat lozenges.
* * *
This way to the foxer
