Freshwater with its red brick villas is quite out of tune with the local styles and colours. Once, no doubt, it was lovely—a little straw-thatched village with cottages and church of honey-coloured stone on the most inland reach of the tidal river Yar. But there are still hilly lanes in it, and a few fields.
In its best days Tennyson knew it. His house at Farringford, now an hotel, is still the loveliest big house in Freshwater.It is a long, low Georgian building in a sweet and fancy Gothic style of the period, a good deal older than Tennyson. It has its little park of elm and ilex, and its main views, as usual, away from the elements. It is an enlarged version of Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire, where Tennyson was born. Even the scenery is somewhat similar, being chalk downland. But the sea, instead of lying beyond miles of Lincolnshire marsh and fen, is almost at your feet.
“Something betwixt a pasture and a park
Saved from sea breezes by a hump of down”
wrote Sir Henry Taylor, and that still describes Farringford; the hump of Down is High Down with Tennyson’s monument on top of it, and white chalk cliff falling sheer for five hundred feet into the channel.
To walk along High Down towards the Needles is like a thrilling and terrifying dream. Behind stretches the coast of Wight to St. Catherine’s Point, a series of changing effects from this whitest of white chalk (white paper or linen look cream-coloured beside it), to the pink and honey and gold and grey of the points behind us. Probably this south-western coast of Wight is the longest stretch of unspoiled and colossal landscape in the south-west of England. The few houses visible along it are old thatched farms in hollows of the downs. Not even the convoys of luxury coaches bowling along the coast road take the remoteness from these stupendous stretches of coloured and distorted rock. And here ahead are the Needles. The turf narrows, till suddenly you are aware that there is sea on either side of you, milky-green four hundred feet below, and the Needle rocks themselves glitter and lean sideways out of the sea. Then just when the point might have narrowed to but a razor’s edge of turf, there is a fence so that you have to turn back. And this is the time, if it is afternoon, to take a look at Alum Bay which is on the Solent side of the Needles. I came to it first the usual coach way, parking where the ice cream kiosks stand among the gorse bushes, came from the villa-dom of Totland which is like Bromley or Muswell Hill set down by the sea.
Alum Bay is a well-known “beauty spot,” and I suspect such places. But of all “beauty spots” I have seen, Alum Bay is the most certainly entitled to be called beautiful. An L-shaped bay—the long part of the L a pearly height of chalk cliff 400 feet high, stretching out into the sea, no sand below it and the great merciless cliffs cf chalk glittering brighter as the sun moves round to the west. And here above a shingly shore is a series of promontories not quite so high as the chalk. Walk along the shingle to the arm of chalk, and then look back at these capes. One is brilliant gold; the next is white; the next purple; the next grey; the next black with streaks of green. In great broad bands these strips of colour run down the cliffs, turning the sky pale with the richness of their colour. “Alum Bay; one side of it a wall of glowing chalk, and the other a barrier of rainbows,” says my good Victorian guide book, and it does not exaggerate.
I am torn in mind between the three great beauties of Western Wight: the silvery-green inland country along the railway line from Yarmouth to Newport with its glimpses of old stone manor farms, thatched cottages and protecting hump of Downs, Dorset without the flint; the colossal untamed landscape of the south-west coast from the Needles to St. Catherine’s point, and Alum Bay. They are all beautiful and all can be seen from Freshwater. Hayling Island
Hayling Island! Hayling Island!
What did I expect to see?
Beetling cliff and chalky highland,
And the salt spray splashing me?
But this was quite the wrong picture. If it was not for the long wooden toll bridge from Havant—a halfpenny for foot passengers, 8d. for motor cars—or the short, choppy ferry from Portsmouth, you would never know you were on an island at all. The Hayling people certainly must always remember they are islanders, for if ever they wish to go shopping, or out to tea in some place that is not Hayling, they must pay toll or ferry fare.
Hayling is just a piece of inland Hampshire that has slithered—oaks, elms, winding lanes and all—out of England into the sea. As for beetling cliffs and chalky highlands, they are not to be seen, the twelve square miles of the place are flat as a pancake. As for salt spray splashing me, even the open bit of coast at the southern end is rarely troubled by great waves, for the Isle of Wight and Selsey Bill protect Hayling from any big seas that come charging in from the English Channel.
The island is like the letter T lying upside down in salt water, the cross beam of the T facing the open water. Along the four and a half miles of this cross beam is a stretch of windy beach with a great deal of fine greyish-silver sand. Then the long narrow upright part of this inverted letter stretches north
