Across the Solent
Ramble through space and time in the Isle of Wight’s wild west.
THE ISLE OF WIGHT measures 13 miles from tip to top and 23 across. It’s hunched 791 feet above the English Channel at its highest point. And at a moseying step, you can walk its 67-mile coastal path in four days. But as a discerning Yorkshireman put so well, its dimensions are deceptive.
“Any man from America or Australia might take one glance at the Island as something on a map, and then decide to give it a couple of hours. But you can spend days and days exploring the Isle of Wight, which, if you are really interested, begins magically enlarging itself for you.”
The writer JB Priestley sums up why I will never tire of walking here. It’s why Freshwater Bay is the background picture on my phone. Twice a year, every year, I make a ritual trip across the Solent to see my extended family. And every time I set foot on this breakaway morsel of southern England, I stumble across something new: a copse, coombe or uncharted notch in the island’s receding coast. Like so many ‘overners’ (the island term for residents not born here) who’ve fallen under its spell, I’ve come to learn that on foot, there’s more to the Garden Isle than a cursory glance of a map reveals. Victorian seaside resorts line its eastern shores. But away from the chintzy distractions gracing postcards and tea towels, there’s another side of the island: a bubble of ‘somewhen’ time, as I like to think of it. This Wightish word for ‘sometime’ embodies the sense of calm I feel when I’m walking here. Separated from the mainland by at most six miles of water, life in the Wight’s west seems to bumble on at a more forgiving pace. It’s a microcosm of mainland England at its cosiest; a tapestry of fields, farms and hedgerows, and twee cottages wearing straw toupées. I admit that sounds kitschy, but let me give you a proper introduction to the island’s best side. I promise you will struggle to find anywhere else more accommodating to walkers.
After its world-famous pop festival, the next biggest event in the island’s calendar is the annual, two-week walking festival. It culminates with the Walk in the Wight challenge, which sees participants cross the island in a day. Neither would be possible without the island’s paths.
If you could unspin the island’s web of footpaths and bridleways, and join them end to end, you’d get a trail that’s nearly 500 miles long. These routes traverse an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, threading between the island’s mishmash of chalk downs, wetlands and pocket-sized forests (the last outposts of red squirrels in southern England). The network’s finest miles make up nine waymarked trails, marked on OS maps. When you tot up these particulars, this island sounds bigger than it looks. The question is, where do you begin to explore it?
The middle is a good place to start. Roughly like a diamond in shape, the island is almost cleaved in two by the estuary of the River Medina, pointing you south towards the county town at the centre. Set on a hill to the southwest of Newport is Carisbrooke Castle, historically the key to the island. There are few better spots to find your bearings than the top of its Norman keep, which
commands 360 degree views of the island.
Earning its place in history for Charles I’s farcical attempt to escape during the English Civil War, when he was discovered wedged in a window by his jailers, the castle is also the start point of a trail that most outsiders miss. It’s the quietest route into the island’s beguiling west. Not the stay high, go hard Tennyson Trail, which barrels across the downs to the Needles (the row of chalk stacks at the island’s western tip), but a meeker path that skulks its way south. It’s called the Shepherds Trail.
From a hillside flanking the castle, it disappears into sunken track and rises across the shallow ridge of chalk separating the Bowcombe and Medina valleys. Briefly, you’re walking eye-to-eye with the Tennyson Trail, which follows the far crest of Bowcombe Down. Unlike this westward path, named for the poet laureate and one-time island resident Alfred Tennyson, the Shepherds Trail isn’t christened for a famous figure. It doesn’t have much to do with sheep either, apart from those you can count along its route. It’s named for Shepherd’s Chine, a small coastal ravine it’s aiming for. Characteristic of the island’s shores, ‘chines’ are gnawed by streams into soft sandstone and clays.
Both trails cross into a part of the island known as the ‘Back of the Wight’: the slumping tract of downland and coast stretching from the Needles to St Catherine’s Point (the island’s southern extremity). Tennyson said of it: “...one feels that western Wight is an earthquake poised in midexplosion and ready any day to burst its turfy covering of wild, distorted downs.” It’s not quite as still and lifeless as the picture he paints however.
In high summer, the oak, ash and elm nuzzling in the folds of every hill are tickled by sea breezes. They sway in harmony with a ripening quilt of cereal crops and rapeseed in the valleys. On the crest of every down, sheep and cattle graze around gnarled hawthorns, bent double by the prevailing wind. The brawniest slice of the island’s AONB, it remains unspoilt, sheltered from the attention of most bucket and spade tourists.
Dipping through Gatcombe and diverting from the Shepherds Trail on a track through Tolt Copse, you’ll come to a path the mapmakers don’t yet