Ventnor! Here we are at Ventnor West! Not a sign of a town. But most of Ventnor is a park. The shopping streets are tucked away in a hollow. There are more steps than there are roads, for the town climbs up-hill for 400 feet from the sea, and for 400 feet above the top of the town rises the wooded height of St. Boniface Down. Most towns are horizontal. Ventnor is perpendicular. It is all trees and steps and zig-zag roads and everywhere there are beautiful gardens, public and private.
Some thousands of years ago with a roar and a crunch or may be more slowly and less dramatically than that, six miles of these chalky cliffs eight-hundred feet high, subsided into the channel. But these six miles did not quite sink into the sea. What with streams and falling earth and nature, these fallen cliffs became a luxuriant land of their own. Today they are known as the Undercliff. Artists came to see them more than a century ago, when the sea and rocks and huge chasms were beginning to be appreciated. Many books were published with steel engravings of the Isle of Wight. The nobility and gentry built themselves marine villas of enormous size upon the Undercliff—cottages they called them but we would call them palaces. They bought their crabs and lobsters from the fishermen who lived in squalid cots beside the sand at Ventnor cove. Then Queen Victoria and Prince Albert came to live at Osborne so the Isle of Wight was all the rage and no place more the rage than Ventnor. Little Osbornes were built on every available piece of cliff, every ledge and cranny and each little Osborne had its garden of palms, myrtles and hydrangeas and its glimpse of sea.
And there they are today, unchanged. In the Parish Magazine of St. Catherine’s (the Parish Church of the town) the Vicar pleads for more permanent residents. “There are many people anxious to make their homes in Ventnor,” he says. And I, for the moment, am one of them; though I think St. Alban’s up three hundred and fifty steps would be my place of worship, so long as my heart would stand it. In that mild air which is not heavy, how gladly would I live and die.
Of all seaside towns I have seen, Ventnor looks after its outward appearance best. The public gardens are amazing. The rockery around the sea front, is always a mass of flowers; orange, pink and purple seem to be the favourite colours. The Park is wild on the seaward side but on the land-ward leaning slopes it is red, white and blue with municipal gardening which suits so well this Victorian town.
The sudden valleys in Ventnor between one bit of cliff and the next are so hot and still and so full of flowers that one almost expects a bird of paradise to flit from prunus to prunus or an alligator to slither out from underneath a palm. And then in another hundred yards is open cliff and familiar chalky cliff flowers. Swinburne lies in Bonchurch graveyard here by Ventnor town. No one made the sea hiss and clang in English poetry better than he. The sea he sang keeps Ventnor fresh, for all its tropic vegetation. The sound of its waves on chalk and sand is never long out of your ears; the sound of the sea travels upwards in this amphitheatre of wooded and tremendous hills. In and Around Freshwater, I.O.W.
The stone of the Isle of Wight; that is what impresses me most each time I visit it. The stones and sands of the Island seem brighter in colour even than the trees and flowers. And these rocks—bands of sand and half-rock are torn up into such shapes, such stripes and colours, such gorges or chines, that one feels that Western Wight is an earthquake poised in mid-explosion, and ready any day to burst its turfy covering of wild, distorted downs.
One goes to Freshwater via the Lymington Ferry to Yarmouth. The little town spreads out along this flat north coast at the mouth of its tidal river. Old red-tiled roofs contrast with silvery-white stone walls; ilex and seaside elms and firs form a dark background. Yarmouth is mostly a Georgian town, in brick and stone with a sixteenth-century church, uneven, rugged and beautiful.
One of the prettiest buildings in Yarmouth is a private house called “The Mount,” built in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, of white bricks. Its beauty is all in its proportions—the relation of window to wall space, and the planted clumps of trees around it affording its owners a glimpse across the Solent to Hampshire and the New Forest. Most of the finest old houses and towns of Wight are inland, or along this uneventful north coast. The worship of the sea and nature in the raw is at its earliest a late-Georgian cult.
Newtown, near Yarmouth, once a town is now only an oyster fishery, and a few old cottages arranged in streets on an eminence in the salt marshes, with estuary all round. It sent two members to Parliament until 1832. The Town Hall remains, a Jacobean building, but where are the Mayor and Corporation? The market days and fair days? Ask of the sea-birds that sail above its vast, deserted stretch of harbour water. “Gone, gone,” they cry. And
