(Almost) around the Isle of Wight part 2

[nigheandonn]

I managed to miss the bus I meant to get the next morning by going in the wrong end of the bus station just too late, and so ended up getting a bus to the centre of Shanklin instead - it turned out to really make no difference timewise, as the bus I had meant to catch wandered so slowly round Ventnor that I met it driving up as i was walking down, but this was going to be the longest day, and even half a mile or so added on to the day felt like a bad idea.

From where I joined it, the path followed a minor road for a bit, then a path between trees, then oddly passed straight through someone's garden.

Through a garden

Having gone to the effort of climbing up way above the sea, the path doesn't stay there for much more than a mile before headed down again, The Landslip - with a capital L - was a bit like a well-behaved rainforest - green and dim and tangled, but well supplied with paths and labels.

Well behaved rainforest

Bonchurch is named for its tiny 11th century church, dedicated to St Boniface - covered in scaffolding when I passed, but still interesting inside and out.

Bonchurch church

Although the map showed a lot of houses up above, the next section of walk was along a long empty seawall below white cliffs, enlivened by a solar system running from a model of the sun through signs describing all the planets to Pluto, and including a sign describing the Glanville Fritillary butterfly, apparently in orbit between Neptune and Uranus.

Bonchurch seawall

Ventnor in the sunshine looked quite attractive, and seemed to be full of many things, but even at nearly 10 they were reluctant to open - I had had a snacky first breakfast quite a while earlier and was hoping to find a bacon roll or similar for a second, but this was a hope that never came true.

Ventnor

Ventnor is either very proud of itself or worried that it will forget its name, as it's written in great white letters on a slope just beyond the town - visible from the sea, so maybe designed to attract people in boats.

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I didn't explore a diplodocus shaped labyrinth or take the chance to Walk With Dinosaurs Here! Now! - I didn't have the right kind of phone, anyway - but I did like a direction sign in the shape of an adventurous mouse. The path wanders on through what is more or less a garden, then past a tiny seaside spot at Steephill Cove, and along the edge of an actual botanical garden.

All this area is known as the Undercliff - sometimes it's above a cliff just the same, but there's always another cliff, or at least a steep slope, up above between it and the rest of the island. The Undercliff has its own microclimate, some degrees warmer than the average around, which is part of what made it so popular as a seaside resort, but it was formed by a huge landslide, and occasionally still remembers that.

The Undercliff

At St Lawrence the path suddenly heads up to the top of the upper cliff, zigzagging up through the roads and finally a slanting path - the post office halfway up provided me with tea and biscuits, very welcome on the climb.

At the top of the cliff I was suddenly in among enormous sweetcorn, not something I am used to seeing growing.

Monstrous sweetcorn

Two lighthouses are landmarks on the next part of the walk, the medieval St Catherine's Oratory on the hill above, and the 19th century lighthouse on the edge of the land below.

St Catherine's lighthouse

All this coast is literally falling to pieces, most obvious on the map between Ventnor and Niton where the main road just stops and starts again and cars, like the path, have to head up to the top of the cliff. Down beyond the lighthouse, too, two paths come to what seems to be a parish boundary and stop - I thought at first this was just careless record keeping, but they appear to have also been the victims of a landslide, along with the road above which now leads only to a car park.

The cliffs are still crumbling, if mostly more slowly, and in places the path was drifting inland.

Cliffs

The viewpoint at Blackgang had a very welcome food van, which fed me a bacon roll for lunch to make up for the one I hadn't had for my breakfast, and a monument to the 1928 landslide which took out the road below.

The view itself was a bit of a magic trick - this is the end of the high ground, and from one point all that can be seen is the low ground stretching out beyond, but take a step or two forwards and suddenly the amusement park at Blackgang Chine is revealed in the drop.

Blackgang Chine

The path follows the road for a bit as it curves round the head of a valley and the outside of the amusement park - it started to rain unexpectedly, and then thought better of it and stayed dry for the rest of the day.

Blackgang village is falling to bits in two senses, with only a handful of houses left inhabited, although some of the original village is now inside the park.

Blackgang

Chale had another attractive church - I wandered up into the village to look for toilets, which it didn't have, and ended up slipping into the pub toilet which was conveniently by the door. I thought 'Wight Mouse' must be a reference to some old story, and didn't realise until I was walking past the sign for the lane in from the back that it's just a pun - my white having a definite 'wh' in it!

Dinosaurs were obviously still the order of the day - Chale had a bench with supports in the shape of ammonites, and this one just seemed to be lurking in someone's garden.

Dinosaur

This is the land of chines - cliffs up above and beach down below, and only these very occasional gaps between them. The first was Whale Chine, now closed off because of erosion which destroyed the old steps.

At Atherfield Point there were benches and various odds and ends way down below, but no apparent way of reaching them - a bit further on an odd kind of wire hoist ran from the top to the bottom of the cliffs, but it explained at great length that it didn't transport people.

Mystery possessions

Shepherd's Chine was a bigger valley with a burn running through it, and the path drops into it and climbs out again - officially by turning inland a bit, but I followed an unofficial path which ran right down the point, quite steeply at the end.

Shepherd's Chine

The beach stretched along from here, but if I stayed down I wasn't sure I could get up again, aside from scruples about sticking to the path.

Cowleaze Chine is close by, but the path skirts the top of it, through a campsite and caravan park, then climbs very slowly to a trig point, and falls again just as slowly.

Grange Chine was another climb down to beach level and steep climb up again, but the campsite on the other side had a toilet that didn't say I couldn't use it and a shop that sold me juice and chocolate, as well as an odd collection of animals in a field.

A holiday park further on was an odd experience, the path leading past little chalets with blue and green and red and yellow doors which at first looked whole, just deadly quiet, and then further on had boarded up windows.

Old chalets

Brook suddenly produced a field of sheep, after I had more or less come to the conclusion that the island had none and past Hanover Point I finally made it onto the beach which had been tantalising me for so long - a map there showed steps further along (which I could find on the map once I knew where to look), and so I headed off over a great low tide expanse.

On the beach

The steps back up were hard work, but I decided it had been worth it just the same!

I was now finally reaching the chalk which had been lurking in the distance all day - paths led across the grassy tops, and it was all quite reminiscent of the early parts of the South Downs Way.

Meeting the chalk

A gentle descent towards Freshwater Bay brought me to odd shapes sticking out of the sea - from this side the first one seemed very like a butterfly, with a shark's fin further along.

Shapes in the sea

I couldn't really understand why Freshwater Bay had its name - all the fresh water around seemed to run off north to become the Yar, as if the whole island was tilted to the north (which it maybe is). But it looks like a nice little holiday spot, with a hotel and a beach and a museum as well as the downs.

Freshwater Bay

It was after 6, and if I was going to drop out early I had to do it now, because the last bus down to Totland was coming along soon - and I had no very definite idea about buses further on, having somehow lost the bus timetable.

But it was a very different kind of evening from the night before, and on ground open to the west, so there seemed to be no reason not to carry on until the light ran out - there were places where I could drop off Tennyson Down if necessary, and I would get back somehow.

The way led down a lane, and then quite a pull up the southern side of the down to the smooth grass on the top - from up here I suddenly had a view north to the mainland again, after more than a day on the far side.

Hurst castle

It was pretty windy - it had been all day, but up here there was more space for it to rush about.

The main landmark, of course, and the reason for the down's name, is the monument to Tennyson, put up in 1897.

Tennyson monument

I was suddenly making good time again - the light was lasting well, and the down stretched on gently ahead. Beyond the monument it dipped to a little crossroads of paths, then rose again to the slightly lower summit above the Needles.

I was a bit disappointed by the views, or the lack of them - plenty to look at, but no sign of the Needles themselves. From the cottages I wandered out towards the Old Battery, but there was still nothing to be seen and the wind was now howling round wildly, so although a sign offering a viewpoint still led on it seemed too far to go and too exposed.

Alum Bay behind me was showing off its colours well, however - it was just about sunset, but the light was still pretty good. It's an odd looking place - the map does show a path down to the beach, but it doesn't look very plausible from up here.

Alum Bay

Until now it had been a very quiet sunset, especially compared with the colours of the night before, just the sky slowly growing paler, but as I headed back along the access road the first colours appeared - one of those odd reflected sunsets which begins in the east and spreads round the sky.

Sunset

If the next part had been a road section I might well have kept walking, but although the light had lasted better than I expected, it was far too late in the day for hillside paths.

The bus stop at Alum Bay only told me that there were no more buses from there, and the wifi pretended to work but didn't - I was about 99% sure that there were buses from Yarmouth until late on, and had a hazy idea that there were still buses from Totland, as I'd looked them up when I hoped to stay at the hostel there, but it would have been nice to know for sure, because if I had to go to Yarmouth in a taxi I might as well go right from Alum Bay.

So I just had to walk on down the road and hope - a long mile as it got properly dark. I made a slight detour to the youth hostel in Totland as I thought they'd have a bus timetable and probably let me wait in the warm if there was a while to go, but although they claimed to be open the door was locked and no one answered, although I did manage to get onto their wifi from the doorstep! Then on to the main street, represented by a shop, chip shop and a war memorial, through what google maps thought was a sensible way to go, but turned out to be a briefly pitch black alley.

The buses were still running here, as I thought, but I'd missed one quite recently and had a while to wait for the next - sitting on the ground against the wall of the bus stop, because there didn't seem to be anywhere else to sit, and I was too tired to care.

It was more or less 10 by the time I got back to Newport, and I went to a certain chain pub as the only place really still doing food, and almost fell asleep in my dinner - I was too tired to eat and too tired not to, and almost too sore to move, although I don't know if it was plain distance that did me in so much as the rushing and hanging about at the end.