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The Flare Path: Ticket to Ryde (part II)Fascinating facts and superannuated snacks
Fascinating facts and superannuated snacks
Flare Path Sky Tours, the virtual airline happy to wheel like a buzzard or plunge like a peregrine falcon when it spots an interesting bit of history beneath its wings, is mid-way through a clockwise flight around England’s largest island, the Isle of Wight. In today’s instalment, Tarka, theGeoFSTwin Otter, returns to his starting point, Solent Airport, via landmarks that include a medieval lighthouse, Britain’s Cape Canaveral, a Stone Age Atlantis, a royal prison, a battle-scarred shipyard, and one of the strangest cricket pitches imaginable.
(Clickherefor Part I)
The Ventnor currently unfurling beneath us is a very different resort to the one described in Roman’santique guidebook. Deprived of its remaining* railway station in 1966, itsimposing sanatoriumin 1964, and the last remnants of its pier in 1993, it has - reluctantly perhaps - regained some of the sleepy insignificance it possessed in the days before the Victorian tourists and TB sufferers arrived in their thousands.
- There are few better illustrations of Railway Mania folly than Ventnor. Working independently,two railway companiesburrowed through the massive chalk bulwark of St. Boniface Down to reach the town.
“Be quiet and calm, my countrymen. What is happening now is what you came to do…you are going to die… Brothers, we are drilling the death drill. I, a Xhosa, say you are my brothers…Swazis, Pondos, Basotho…so let us die like brothers. We are the sons of Africa. Raise your war-cries, brothers, for though they made us leave our assegais in the kraal, our voices are left with our bodies.”
See where the road out of Brook adders through that cleft in the downs? The bald patch of chalk on the left (b) marks the spot where a Short Solent flying boat struck the hillside in 1957. ‘City of Sydney’ was on her way from Southampton Water to Madeira (which, at that time, lacked a runway) with 58 people aboard when one of her four Bristol Hercules engines packed up not long after take-off. She turned for home but, due to the unexplained stoppage of a second engine, only made it as far as that shoulder of downland.The accidentclaimed the lives of 45 and sounded the death knell for Aquila Airways and commercial flying boat operations in the UK.
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…scuppered prospects of a 1971 festival. It would be thirty-two years beforethe Island’s next music festival, and that revival, when it came, was comparatively small-scale and almost entirely free of angst, aggro, and acid.
Tarka raising his nose to ascend Tennyson Down is my cue to draw your attention toFarringford House, the residence of one of Britain’s best known and most quoted poets. If you’ve ever uttered “Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”, “Their’s not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die”, or “Nature, red in tooth and claw” you’ve quotedAlfred, Lord Tennyson, a Victorian Poet Laureate who produced much of his best work while living at Freshwater. The prone-to-melancholy* wordsmith behind compositions such as The Charge of the Light Brigade, Crossing the Bar, and In Memorium of A.H. (a poem that “soothed and pleased” Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert) strolled daily on the down that now bears his name. According to him, the air up here was worth “sixpence a pint”.
- T. S. Eliot described him as “the saddest of all English poets”.
Prepare to gaze in disappointment at the Island’s famous calciferous coccyx!
I see some of you haven’t touched your Dino Bones. Realising Marmite-coated wheat snacks might not be to everyone’s taste, we did bring an alternative. Advertised in Roman’s Edwardian guidebook and sourced with the help of a food historian pal of ours, the delicacies I’m about to hand round are guaranteed to keep hunger pangs at bay until we get back to the mainland.
Blimey, I don’t like the look of those fuel gauges. If we’re to avoid a repeat of that incident in 2017 when Flare Path Sky Tours passengers ended up uninvited guests on Geopotes 15, a Greek suction dredger moored off Malta, I think we’re going to have to loiter less from here-on. Onwards to Alum Bay, Roman..
“The tints of the cliffs are so bright and so varied that they have not the aspect of anything natural. Deep purplish, red, dusky blue, bright ochreous yellow, grey nearly approaching to white, and absolute black, succeed each other, as sharply defined as the stripes in silk."
Palmerston’s pale pachyderms(see part 1) dot the next four miles of coastline. Keep your eyes peeled for shrub-softened battery sites and repurposed casemates. FacingHurst Castle, a much older strait sentry on the mainland, Fort Albert is one of the more interesting as its arsenal once included a steampunk guided missile. Any hostile surface vessel using the Solent’s western entrance during the final decade of the Nineteenth Century would have had to dodge wire-guidedBrennan torpedoeslaunched and directed from Fort Albert.
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From Bouldnor we cut inland, following the serpentine course ofa long-gone railway line, to a village which, in 1916, was hospitality embodied (“Every other house bears the legend ‘Teas provided’”). The reason for Carisbrooke’s incredibly high CSPC (cake stands per capita) was the motte-and-bailey fortress below us.
- Some comically. One bid had to be abandoned after Charles got wedged in a window frame.
Roman, do you reckon we have sufficient avgas to take inanother prisonon the way to Cowes?
Shame. I had a mind to tell the story ofthat 1995 breakout. The one where the escapees tried to pinch a Cessna from Sandown Airport.
Straight up the River Medina to Cowes it is then.
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As Tarka’s fuel gauge needles are both nudging zero, and several of you seem to be in urgent need of toilet facilities (I was assured those lozenges were fit for consumption!) a swift return to Lee-on-Solent would seem sensible at this point.
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Watch on YouTube
The final kink in our flight path is over a landmark that’s only visible a few days a year. Roughly two miles north of Cowes, bramble-freeBramble Bankhosts an annual cricket match between two yacht clubs, and hit the headlines most recently in 2015 when it wasused as a sandy crutchfor listing roll-on/roll-off/roll-over car carrier MV Höegh Osaka.
Ladies and gentlemen, in preparation for landing, please fasten your seatbelt, turn off all electronic devices, stow your tray table, and put all thoughts of bird strikes, blown tires, carelessly parked fuel bowsers, and undiscovered WW2 runway explosives out of your mind.
Three out of ten, Roman. If GeoFS modelled chain-link fences, Tarka would be wearing one like a stole now.
This Flare Path Sky Tours flight ends here, a convenient twenty second sprint from the terminal’s public conveniences. Thank you very much for flying with us and apologies again for the meat lozenges.
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