Pins & Needles

---

I sat on the deck at the yacht club and surveyed the view. I had a pint of very passable real ale in hand, which was going down nicely. The boats bobbed gently in the marina. The water was flat calm. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The dinghy racing was turning out not to be the greatest event. The lack of wind meant what racing there was, was strictly at very low knots. It eventually ceased and a series of boats were slowly towed back to their berths by friends with motors. The sun was gently setting, but still contained some warmth. I took another sip of my ale and thought I could get used to all this, before venturing back into the clubhouse for my meal.



There had been an interruption to the searing heat of earlier in the week half way through. I woke on Wednesday morning to see the sky heavy with black clouds. They eventually dropped their cargo of rain just as the plans were in hand to cut the lawn. We headed up through the murky weather to Cowes. It seemed that everybody else on the island was of a same mind to go out in the car in search of entertainment. The outskirts of Ryde were in chaos due some temporary traffic lights near Tesco. Progress was slow. Newport was similarly congested, but we finally parked up on Medina Road. The glamour of Cowes that I had experienced 2 days before was absent this morning. The yacht people from Bank Holiday had either gone back to London to earn some more big bucks or had chosen to stay in their apartments or on their craft. It was mid-morning and a number of shops and cafes had decided not to open or having seen the lack of foot fall, shut up and gone to do something else. The Other Half and her mother wandered a few shops, before we settled for a seat in Costa to plan the next port of call. I am not prone to farm shops, but I figured a stop at a garlic farm on the way back would hold more interest than a wander round some bland retail establishments in Newport. A garlic farm was established on the island towards the end of World War 2. It transpires that some Free French motor torpedo boats based in Cowes bemoaned the lack of flavour to be had in the English cuisine and the landlord of the Painters Arms managed to get a bag full of seed garlic brought back from the French mainland. The said garlic farm was a the bottom of a steep single file road with limited passing places and I was thankful we didn’t meet anybody as I turned off the main Sandown road. As much as I detested the actual road, it had an interesting name – Lime Kiln Shute. Shute seems quite a common name for a road in these parts. The car park and establishment was fairly busy, taking advantage of the many uses to which one can put garlic to. Anybody for garlic ice cream? It didn’t inspire me either. The other recipes were doing a bomb. The café was packed. An education centre explained the history and the many advantages of garlic. I had never stopped to think of whether a wide variety of garlic existed, but samples were all laid out on the table to try. Elephant garlic. Smoked garlic. Black garlic looked almost as though it was a black pudding. Quite nice too! The other side of the room was awash with samples of various chutneys – all of course containing garlic. The sting in the tail was the shop next door to relieve you of the hard earned coin. The garlic theme extended to chopping boards and chutneys, as well as many forms of the raw product. As far as I could ascertain, real ales from the Yates Microbrewery in nearby Newchurch had no connection with garlic at all. We climbed back up to the impressively titled “The Downs Road”, once again fortunately meeting no-one on the way up. The views from the ridge were quite spectacular. We dropped back down through Barding and on to St Helens.



The weather was back to bright and sunny on the following morning and the Other Half and I went for a road trip using the bus. We circled Bembridge and moved on to the first port of call at Sandown. The Isle of Wight Zoo and Dinosaur Isle were just waking up. A dog was having a styling in Shampoodles. The Old Comical was closed, but had an interesting series of murals painted on the side. Coaches were parked up outside the seafront hotels, waiting patiently for their cargo eager to experience the “excursion” of the day. The tide was out and we wandered across the beach. The pier loomed overhead and out across the water. We wandered back up to the High Street to catch an Island Coaster bus, which headed down through Shanklin and Ventnor and along towards Freshwater. The bus was already busy when it arrived. We criss crossed our way round through Lake towards Shanklin. This immediate area was quite congested by traffic and seemed the epicentre of the island supermarket shopping. Whilst Sandown looked a little tired, Shanklin had an overall more prosperous feel. The fortunate sat out on their decks, soaking up the morning sun and gazing out to sea. We passed through Ventnor, home of a micro climate that supports the Botanic Garden, before waiting time at an amusement park called Blackgang Chine. A 60 foot plastic pirate watched over us. The drive down towards Freshwater Bay is quite spectacular. A series of limestone cliffs stretch out before you, all the way to the Freshwater area and beyond on to the Needles. The road is called the Military Road – a relic from the last war now providing tourist access. The Other Half pointed out Isle of Wight Pearl, where she had been spending money with her mother a couple of days back. The bus skirted through Freshwater village, Totland and we alighted at Alum Bay.



Alum Bay is a bit of a circus. A series of shops and restaurants lead down towards a chairlift, that whisks people skyward for a distant view of the Needles – at a price naturally. Alum Bay below has multi coloured sand, that was reflecting in the sun. We climbed up Tennyson Down and walked towards the Needles Battery at the point. You could see across to Sandbanks, Bournmouth and Lymington across the water on the mainland. The chunks of limestone jutted out into the water with the lighthouse on the very end. We walked on to the “new” Needles Battery on the cliff. The site was used for rocket testing in the 1950s and 1960s. Under a code name of Blue Streak, Black Knight rockets were assembled in underground bunkers like something off a sci-fi film and then tested before being shipped over to the top security site at Woomera in the middle of nowhere in South Australia. I’ve been to Woomera and I can’t recall them saying anything about the Needles role in the programme. The concrete bases for the rocket launchers are still in situ. Black Knight was subsequently abandoned in favour of Polaris. In the late 1960s, the Black Arrow project was based here and that culminated in 1971 with the first and only British satellite launch using a British rocket. We headed back down the hill to the “old” Needles Battery. It was built in 1861 to guard the western approaches to the Solent, but didn’t have the sci-fi role of the “new” Battery. We used our National Trust cards to gain access. The most interesting part is perhaps the tunnel leading to the very forward position, which grants the best view of the actual Needles. The other main military landmark visible from the vantage point is Hurst Castle on the mainland. Charles I was briefly detained there in 1648 before trial in London, after losing the Civil War and his enforced holiday on the Isle of Wight.



We caught the bus back to Yarmouth, where our entry to town was delayed by the swing bridge being open. The extra berths at the back of the marina were being accessed buy a couple of yachts on our approach. We alighted by the marina. A Wightlink ferry was loading up at the jetty for the return journey to Lymington. Yarmouth is technically one of the smallest towns in the UK with a population of under 1000. As I found with the visit to Brading, it was once a more important place and also sent 2 MPs to Parliament as late as 1832. A castle nestles into the side of the ferry port. It was built in 1547 to dissuade the French from carrying away the treasures of the town. A pier – the longest wooden pier open to the public - opened in 1876. We walked out along the pier. I was taken by an old sign raving about the quality of North Eastern coal. We had an ice cream, by which time the bright sun was giving way to clouds and rain was visibly falling over Lymington. An interesting boat parked on the road had all options covered. Sea Legs was an inflatible with wheels - water or road, no problem. We departed on the bus back to Newport and thus to St Helens.





It was a completely different day at the other end of the island. There was no wind here and the grey skies of Yarmouth were but a memory. We spent the evening down on the Duver, eating fish in the Baywatch and looking out across the bay. An example of one of the Solent Forts lies just off the shore. The series of 4 forts – St Helens, Spitbank, Horse Sand and No Man’s Land - were originally built to protect Portsmouth from the prospect of seaborne attack. The building project lasted from 1865 through to 1880. St Helens was the cheapest to build – presumably due to the shallow water – and came in at £123,000. No Man’s Land racked up a staggering £462,000, which I read equates to £43 million pounds in the value today! They were never used for defensive purposes, but they continued in use and were upgraded up until the First World War. The following day I was gazing out at another concrete structure in the bay – the lifeboat house at Bembridge – which extends on concrete pins out into the blue sea. The weather was once again warm. I was only a few miles from the UK mainland, but as they say in another blog I read “It is like living in a foreign country”.

---

Photos

St Helens
...beach huts on the Duver

Yarmouth
Wightlink Ferry at berth

St Helens
...... old Mill

The "New" Needles Battery
.....rocket testing launch site

The "Old" Needles Battery
Fog Horn

Yarmouth
Wightlink Ferry at berth