by The green tidal sludge stains are loud with seagulls and surfaces, while the ferry sails towards Yarmouth. A white sail against Misty Downs falls far on sparkling water. The Victorian poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, regularly switched off these calcareous hills and explained: “The air is ‘Sixpence a Pint’. It is not necessary to go a vacation on the Isle of Wight. Regular ferries connect to the trains on the mainland and the island has a good network of buses.
I travel as a foot passenger on the 40-minute Wightlink ferry from Lymington Pier, where the train arrives outside the window along a embankment with yachts, plovers and reducks. Once on the island, the Summer Links Bus Service, which runs from April to the end of September, holds at the entrance to the Tapnell Farm, where I take a few nights in a well -equipped cabin with a whirlpool that looks down for Tennyson.
The 14-mile Tennyson trail runs along the spine of West Wight. It crosses Compton, where there is a clear feeling on an island: sea views on three sides, with long white cliffs in the west and the gentler coast rejuvenate to the east. There are blue butterflies and challand flowers such as orchids, wild thyme and nodding muscles.
Freshwater Bay is a few miles away, so I go there on my first day to swim between the chalk tapes. The most direct route from Tapnell roasts the location of the Isle of Wight Festival from 1970. With an audience of around 600,000, it is still the largest concert that ever took place in Great Britain. Jimi Hendrix played there on August 31 of this year; He was dead three weeks later.
Beyond the colorful wall of Tennyson’s former homeland house, Parkland Walks and the “carelessly ordered” feeling that he describes in a poem are
A short walk from the beach is a bronze statue from Hendrix with its feet in Spanish daisies in the garden of Dimbola. Once at home the pioneering Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, it is now a gallery that shows pictures of Cameron and other photographers with changing exhibitions and a room that is dedicated to the memorabilia of the annual Isle of Wight Festivals (£ 6.90 for adults, £ 3 for children).
Cameron was the great aunt of the writer Virginia Woolf, and Dimbola is the backdrop for Woolf’s only piece, a comedy from 1935 called Freshwater. Tennyson, Camerons and the actor Ellen Terry are all survival -sized characters in Woolf’s satirical drama. The true Terry appears in one of many celebrity photos that are exhibited at Dimbola. In Woolf’s piece, her character complains that you have to wear itchy wigs and pose for artists and photographers. She explains: “In this house never changes. Anyone always sleeps. Lord Tennyson always reads. Maud, the cook, is always photographed.”
Tennyson’s creeper-covered house Farringford is just around the corner (Garden £ 4.50; advance payment for house tours). A forested footpath that goes beyond the nearby straw church leads to the entrance. It runs under a pedestrian bridge that was built for the first time by Tennyson to avoid its many fans. (His character complains in fresh water: “Twenty serious young people from Clerkenwell are in the bushes; there are six American professors in the summer house; the bathroom is occupied by the women’s poetry circle from Ohio.)) Beyond Farringford’s colorful garden are parking walks and the” inattentive “feeling that tennyson describes in a poem. You can see a cedar tree outlined by Edward Lear and Magnolia, whose flowers put Tennyson on his wife’s pillow.
Back in the straw-covered church, I catch the Breezer of the open needles for a heartbreaking hairpin trip to the adhesive old battery test. The viewpoints for the sharp limestone rocks and the red and white lighthouse are nearby. When I went down with the next bus, I can see Alum Bay’s cliffs made of multicolored sand and Tudor Hurst Castle over the water. The day of last summer connects the Yarmouth bus back to Tapnell and runs along the Waterside Tennyson Road. A 19-pound rover ticket offers me 48 hours of unlimited bus experience through the island and includes the open topper.
The next morning it navigates steadily and my hiking plans look less appealing. I was hoping to walk east along the Tennyson Trail, past prehistoric remains with fascinating names such as five Barrows to reach the National Trust Mottistone Gardens. Instead, I roll through rosy straw villages with a surprisingly efficient buses that ends with bus 12, which drops me at the entrance to Motiston.
The foggy air from Mottistone makes the flower beds appear brighter and fills the forests and wildflower paths with romantic fog
The country around Mottistones Old Stone Manor House is a blooming garden with subtropical plants, fragrant roses and foxglove. The rain brings the strong fragrance of the Magenta beach roses, the subtle light pink shrub roses and plenty of purple catmint. The foggy air makes the flower beds appear brighter and fills the paths of forest and wildflowers with romantic fog. The orange lilies, red bottlebrush flowers and deep blue dolphinia are spanging raindrops. “This drop of rain is a blessing,” says Gärtner Ed Hinch. He explains that the spiral flower beds of the sandy lower garden were inspired by the naturally occurring fibonacci sequence (£ 8.50 for adults, £ 4.25 over-fives, without gift aid).
The sea is only a mile away, but the weather still feels better for castles than for coasts, so I catch the bus 12 in the village of Carisbrooke, once the capital of the island. The bus stops near the medieval St. Mary’s Church and I go to the Carisbrooke Castle, where Charles I was locked up under Cromwell. A path leads steeply from the Pretty Castle Street through a conductor to dive near the Gatehouse, where Jackdaw’s argument and weighing stairs lead to the old walls. There is a intoxicating fragrance from the wet mock orange flowers in the relatively new formal garden with its Avenue of fig trees, but Carisbrookes odor landscape is more diverse: there is an indication of bat in the darkest corners (more species roast here.
That evening I order a Portobello-Milzburger in Tapnell’s barn-like restaurant The Cow. The Tapnell Farm opened its first Safari tents 13 years ago and later added camping shells and an Aquapark with a natural lake (two nights in an ÖKO pod of £ 336). There are now different glamping options; Beyond rescued Wallabies there are five new domes in a flowering meadow that is facing north over the Solent.
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Newtown, where I am on foot on my last morning, was once a busy medieval district with salt forest and oysters beds. Now it is a tiny village in the swamps in which the old town hall in bricks in bricks waned into carpets from Klee. Bus 7 from Yarmouth takes 10 minutes to reach the New Inn in Shalfleet, and I follow the island’s coastal path for about a mile to Newtown mouth. Here paths lead through flowering hay meadows and salty strips of soul. There is a Waterside Causeway, a wooden sidewalk and a well -equipped bird house.
Back in Yarmouth it is time for a last walk near the Yar river, in the coastal castle of Henry VIII and on Yarmouth Church, whose high tower acted as a sea brand. With an hour to my ferry, I drive to the restaurant on the water opened in 2020 to drink fresh lemonade with mint and watch the afternoon sun on the water.
Combined train and ferry tickets for foot passengers start at around £ 30 Every way from London Waterloo to Ryde or Yarmouth.
This trip was supported by Tapnell Farm. Bus trips were provided by Southern Vectis
