THe green tidal mudflats were noisy with gulls and lapwings while the ferry sailed toward Yarmouth. Far from sparkling water, a white sail stands against the misty downs. Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson regularly trampled on chalky hills, stating that “the wind is worth ‘sixpence a pint'”. No need to drive for a holiday on the Isle of Wight. Regular ferries connect to mainland trains and the island has a great network of buses.
I travel as a foot passenger to the 40-minute wightlink ferry from Lymington Pier, where the train arrives with an embankment with yachts, plovers and redshanks out the window. Once on the island, the summer bus service connects the bus service, running from April to late September, stopping at the entrance to Tapnell Farm, where I stayed a few nights in a well-equipped cabin with a hot tub looking towards Tennyson down.
The 14 mile tennyson trail runs on the backbone of the West Wight. It crosses the Studded Compton Down, where there is a clear feeling on an island: the sea views on the three sides, with a long taping white ravine in the west and the Gentler coast circling the east. There are blue butterflies and chalk flowers such as orchids, wild thyme and nod of musk thistles.
The freshwater bay was a few miles away, so I went there on my first day for a swim in the chalk stacks. The most direct route from Tapnell skirts to the site of the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. In an audience of nearly 600,000, it is still the largest concert held in the UK. Jimi Hendrix played there on August 31 that year; Three weeks later he was dead.
A short walk from the beach, a Hendrix copper statue, with his feet in the Spanish daisies, stands in the garden of a ambush. Once home to the pioneer of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, it was a gallery showing pictures of Cameron and other photographers with a change of exhibitions and a room dedicated to Memorabilia from the annual Isle of Wight celebrations (£ 6.90 for adults, £ 3 for children).
Cameron was the uncle of writer Virginia Woolf, and Dimbola was the only setting for Woolf’s playing, a 1935 comedy called a freshwater. Tennyson, the Camerons and the actor Ellen Terry are all the bigger-life characters in Woolf’s satirical drama. True Terry appears to be pensive to one of the many celebrity images shown in the funny. In playing with Woolf, his character complains about having itchy wigs and pose for artists and photographers. He declares: “Nothing changes in this house. Someone always sleeps. Lord Tennyson always reads. Maud, the cook, is always taken with a picture.”
Tennyson’s Creeper-Covered House Farringford is around the corner (Gardens £ 4.50; Book in advance for home tours). A wooden walk, leading left to that neighboring church, leads to the entrance. It runs under a footbridge that Tennyson first built to avoid his many fans. . You can see a cedar tree that is sketched by Edward Lear and the Magnolia whose flowers Tennyson is placed on his wife’s pillow.
Back to The Thatched Church, I caught the open-topped breeze needle for a heart stop to ride the hairpin ride up to the Clifftop Old Battery Fort. The perspective for seeing the sharp rocks of lime and the red and white lighthouse is near. Going back to the next bus, I could see the Alum Bay cliffs of multicolored sand, and Tudor Hurst Castle in the water. The last summer of the day connects the bus back from Yarmouth to Tapnell is also an open-topper and running with Waterside Tennyson Road. A £ 19 Rover ticket gives me 48 hours unlimited bus trip around the island and with open-toppers.
It continues to flow the next morning and my mealing plans are less appealing. I hope to walk east along the Tennyson Trail, previous prehistoric remains with intriguing names like five barrows to reach the National Trust Mottistone Gardens. Instead, I rolled over the villages that avoided the villages in a shocking great series of buses, ending Bus 12, which fell to me at the entrance of Mottistone.
The land around the old mottistone manor house became a flowering garden with subtropical plants, aromatic roses and banks of foxgloves. The rain releases a strong odor of magenta beach roses, the subtler pale pink pink and rich purple catmint. The fuzzy air makes the flowerbeds brighter, and fill the woods and wildflower avenues with romantic fog. The raindrops threw orange lilies, red bottles and deep blue delphins. “This downfall is a blessing,” said head gardener Ed Hinch. He explained that spiraling flowerbeds of sandy lower gardens are inspired by the naturally occurring Fibonacci order (£ 8.50 for adults, £ 4.25 over-fives, without gift assistance).
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The sea was only a mile away, but the weather still felt more suited to castles than the coast, so I caught bus 12 in the village of Carisbrooke, once the island capital. The bus stopped near Medieval St Mary’s Church, and I was walking to Carisbrooke Castle, where Charles was imprisoned under Cromwell. One path leads from Pretty Castle Street, through a sheep field, to appear near the Gathouse, where jackdaws squabbling and spiral stairs lead to ancient walls. There’s a heady scent from the wet mock orange flowers in the relatively new formal garden, with its avenue of fig trees, but Carisbrooke’s smell-scape is more varied: there’s a hint of bat in the darkest corners (more species roost here than at any other southern english site) and a lingering whiff of donkey in the old well House, which the animals still patiently trot over to scheduled days to demonstrate a wheel that raises the deep bucket.
That night at the restaurant like Tapnell, the cow, I ordered a burger of Portobello mushrooms. The Tapnell Farm opened the first Safari Tent 13 years ago, later adding camping pods and an aquapark with a natural lake (two nights on an eco pod from £ 336). There are many different glamping options; Beyond the fields of the rescued Wallabies are five new domes in a flowering as if facing north across the solent.
Newtown, where I was going to my last morning, was once busy with medieval borough with saltworks and oyster beds. Today, this is a small village in the marshes, where the old brick town has subsided into clover carpets. Bus 7 from Yarmouth takes 10 minutes to reach the new Inn in Shalfleet and I follow the island’s coastal path for a mile or more in Newtown Estuary. Here the paths lead to the flowering of hay plants and salty along the sea. There is a causeway of water, a wooden passage and a well -equipped bird.
Back to Yarmouth, there was time for a final walk near the Yar River, round coastal castle of Henry VIII, and past the Yarmouth Church, whose Tall Tower doubled as a seamark. By an hour until my ferry, I headed to the Waterside Terrace restaurant, which opened in 2020, to drink fresh lemonade with mint and watch the afternoon in the water in the water, feeling as if I had a holiday all week.
Combined train tickets and ferries for foot passengers start at about £ 30 every way from London Waterloo to Ryde or Yarmouth.
This trip is supported by Tapnell Farm. The bus trip was provided by the Southern Vectis
