



Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)







                      [Illustration: THE NEEDLES]




                             ISLE OF WIGHT

                              PAINTED BY

                           A. HEATON COOPER

                             DESCRIBED BY

                         A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                                LONDON

                        ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

                                 1908




Contents


CHAPTER                                                             PAGE

   I. THE ISLAND                                                       1

  II. RYDE                                                            19

 III. NEWPORT                                                         33

  IV. THE EAST SIDE                                                   54

   V. THE UNDERCLIFF                                                  77

  VI. THE BACK OF THE ISLAND                                          92

 VII. FRESHWATER AND THE NEEDLES                                     104

VIII. YARMOUTH                                                       119

  IX. COWES                                                          139

   X. THE GATES OF THE ISLAND                                        154




List of Illustrations


1. The Needles                                             _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE

2. Ryde--Moonrise                                                     20

3. Newchurch--the Mother Church of Ryde                               24

4. Newport                                                            34

5. Carisbrooke Castle                                                 40

6. Godshill                                                           50

7. Water Meadows of the Yar near Alverstone                           58

8. Sandown Bay                                                        60

9. Shanklin Village--Moonlight after rain                             72

10. Shanklin Chine                                                    74

11. Bonchurch Old Church near Ventnor                                 84

12. The Landslip near Ventnor                                         86

13. The Undercliff near Ventnor                                       90

14. Blackgang Chine                                                   96

15. Shorwell                                                         100

16. Farringford House                                                106

17. Freshwater Bay                                                   112

18. Totland Bay                                                      118

19. Yarmouth                                                         120

20. Shalfleet                                                        124

21. Calbourne                                                        138

22. Yachting at Cowes                                                144

23. Osborne House                                                    148

24. Whippingham Church                                               152

_Map at end of volume_




ISLE OF WIGHT




THE ISLAND


_The_ Island, as its people are in the way of styling it, while not
going so far as to deny existence to the adjacent islands of Great
Britain and Ireland--the Wight, as it is sometimes called by old
writers--has for the first fact in its history that it was not always an
island. It once made a promontory of Dorset, cut off from the mainland
by a channel, whose rush of encountering tides seems still wearing away
the shores so as to broaden a passage of half a dozen miles at the most,
narrowed to about a mile between the long spit of Hurst and the
north-western corner of the Island. It may be that what is now a strait
has been the estuary of a great river, flooding itself into the sea,
which, like Hengist and Horsa, is apt to prove an invading ally
difficult to get rid of. _Wight_ is taken to represent an old British
name for the channel, that, by monkish Latinists, came to be christened
_pelagus solvens_; but the Solent may have had rather some etymological
kinship with the Solway.

The Channel Island, as thus its full style imports, has a natural
history of singular interest to geologists, who find here a wide range
of fossiliferous strata, from the Upper Eocene to the Wealden clay, so
exposed that one scientific authority admiringly declares how it “might
have been cut out by nature for a geological model illustrative of the
principles of stratification.” Perhaps the general reader may thank a
writer for not enlarging on this head; but a few words must be said
about the geological structure that shapes this Island’s scenery,
forming, as it were, a sort of abridged and compressed edition of no
small part of England. It divides itself into three zones, which may be
traced in the same order upon the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. Through the
centre runs a backbone of chalk Downs,