Isle of Wight has something for everyone

Author: By William Miller, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, October 19, 1997

Page: M1

Section: Travel

Instead, he proclaimed,``It's a great day for the Isle of Wight.''

The Isle of Wight?

To put it mildly, Minghella, 43, has an enduring love affair with this diamond-shaped island just a couple of miles off the south coast of England, only 21 miles wide and 13 miles deep with a population of 125,000.

For one thing, Minghella was born here, the son of Italian cafe owners turned ice cream manufacturers. For another, he believes that his upbringing on this relatively secluded and peaceful isle helped shape his work.

``A lot of the way I think and feel about life comes from growing up on the Isle of Wight,'' he says.

So much so that in ``The English Patient,'' as writer-director he slipped in a couple of references to his beloved island.

``I wanted to give something back to the island that has given me so much,'' he says.

In truth, the Isle of Wight has much to give to residents and visitors alike in terms of history, literary resonances, and an uncluttered way of life. It has something for everybody.

Its appeal has been ever thus.

In her novel,``Mansfield Park,'' Jane Austen summed up the attraction with one character saying of another, ``She thinks of nothing but the Isle of Wight and calls it the Island as if there were no other island in the world.''

Thomas Hardy, too, in his Wessex stories always identified the tiny isle that guards the great seaports of Southampton and Portsmouth as the Island -- with a capital I.

Served by four ferry routes, the Island was the last part of Britain to be conquered by the Romans, who arrived in AD 43 and stayed around for another 400 years. Remnants of their villas remain, the best preserved being just outside the village of Brading, where a mosaic floor exhibits the still unexplained image of a man with a rooster's head. There are the remains of another Roman villa in the Island's capital, Newport, a bustling market and shopping town.

The Island was also the last part of Britain to be Christianized when the pagan Islanders were made an offer they could not refuse: Those who declined the benefits of the Cross were put to the Sword.

In the center of the Island stands the Norman castle of Carisbrooke, open to visitors. It was here that Charles I was imprisoned by Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads. He tried to escape but got stuck in a window and was carted off to his execution in London in 1649. The castle is also noted for its donkeys who take turns walking in a great wheel to draw water from the castle well -- a task once performed by prisoners.

In the following years, the quiet charms of the Isle of Wight attracted the likes of the poet John Keats (``A thing of beauty is a joy forever'') who, in 1819, stayed in the then tiny coastal village of Shanklin at Englantine Cottage (now Keats Hotel) and noted that ``when the ships sail past the cottage chimneys you may take them for weathercocks.''

Shanklin -- like its companion town of Sandown -- is today a bright and breezy holiday town expanding outward from its original Old Village, a collection of thatch cottages now converted into tearooms and gift shops. Central to the Old Village is the Crab, a 300-year-old pub, outside of which stands a public fountain where Longfellow stopped for refreshment. He marked the occasion with a short poem that is now inscribed on the fountain together with the crossed flags of Britain and the United States.

Despite these historical and literary connections, the Island did not really come to prominence until after 1846, when Queen Victoria took up summer residence on the north of the isle, where her husband, Prince Albert, built the Italianate-style Osborne House. Victoria loved Osborne House as a spot to get away from the restrictions of the royal palaces and called it ``a place of one's own, quiet and retired'' and died there in 1901. The former royal residence is now open to the public, and the visitor can inspect, among other relics of an imperial past, the exotic Durbar Room designed by Rudyard Kipling's father to mark Britain's conquest of India. A bit of a shocker to some visitors, however, may be the alabaster models of the arms and legs of Victoria's children displayed on velvet cushions. Currently, the grounds are being restored to open up views of the sea.

With Victoria, the Island, which had previously been largely populated by farmers, fishermen, and smugglers, became fashionable. Today, despite the advances of modernity, it still retains much of its Victorian charm.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate, took up residence at Farringford House in Freshwater in the west of the isle and declared the bracing air to be ``worth sixpence a pint.'' He lived there 40 years. Now, his old home is a hotel where the visitor can stay or just drop in for a pint at the bar and then climb to his study where he penned ``Idylls of the King'' and other works.

Tennyson -- very much a pop star in his day -- made the mistake in 1846 of walking through the village of Bonchurch, whereupon the local women mobbed him and tore his hat to pieces for souvenirs.

It was to this same village, one of the most charming in the isle, that Charles Dickens came in summer 1849, renting a house, now Winterbourne Hotel, which he called the ``prettiest place I ever saw in my life at home or abroad.'' At Winterbourne, he wrote several chapters of ``David Copperfield.'' The hotel restaurant, open to nonresidents, is called the Copperfield Room.

The poet Swinburne spent his boyhood in the village, and is buried in the local churchyard. The village pond was donated by another Bonchurch resident, H. de Vere Stacpoole, author of ``The Blue Lagoon.''

Close to Bonchurch stands Ventnor, a town that cascades down to its tiny cove from 800-foot-high St. Boniface Down. (In English parlance, a down is an upland.) In its heyday, Ventnor was called the English Madeira, and attracted hordes of chest complaint sufferers seeking the benefits of its clear air and mineral waters. When Karl Marx sought medical help there in 1883, he called the Island ``a little paradise.'' Earlier, in 1860, Turgenev, while swimming in Ventnor Cove, conceived the idea for ``Fathers and Sons.''

In 1880, a young Winston Churchill stayed in Ventnor with his nanny and heard a story that was to give him nightmares. Two years earlier, HMS Eurydice has gone down in Sandown Bay with the loss of more than 300 lives, many of them returning troops. Churchill later recalled, ``It was a sear on my mind that some of the divers had fainted with terror at seeing the fish eating the bodies of the poor soldiers.''

Within a few yards of a seafront plaque marking the place where Turgenev stayed, young Geoff Blake -- following a family tradition started in 1830 -- fishes just about every day in his high-powered fishing craft with the proud boast that ``Ventnor crab and lobster are the best in the world.''

Nearby, his parents run a museum dedicated to the memories of Ventnor's longshoremen. At the end of the cove, the Spyglass pub welcomes ``children, dogs, and muddy boots.''

Today, Ventnor is down on its luck, with many of its small stores empty, the result of the death of the railroad that once served the town and the onslaught of out-of-town shopping centers. It is trying to reinvent itself as the Island's antiques and bric-a-brac center.

At the northern apex of the Island stands Cowes, one of the world's great yachting centers attracting thousands of yachtsmen for a season that runs from May until September and is highlighted by Cowes Week in early August. Every second year, Cowes Week is combined with the fearsome 600-mile race to the Fastnet Rock off southern Ireland -- a contest that in 1979 took the lives of 19 yachtsmen.

The America's Cup race was born here in 1851 when the US schooner ``America'' crossed the Atlantic to sucessfully challenge the British for what was then called the 100 Guineas Cup. The ``America'' won the race far ahead of her rivals, prompting Queen Victoria to ask, ``Who came in second?'' The answer: ``There is no second.''

The Isle of Wight has a number of other sailing villages, including Bembridge, Seaview, and the charming, Old World-ish Yarmouth on its northwesterly shore with its guardian fort built by Henry VIII and the George Inn, once the home of the Island governor. It was here in the late 1600s that a swashbuckling Island governor captured a French vessel carrying the half-finished white marble statue of the French King Louis XIV. The governor had his own face imposed on the statue. It can be seen today in the local church.

The name of the buccaneering Islander was Sir Robert Holmes, who led the English forces that in 1664 captured the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam -- now known as New York.

The Island, which is a walker's heaven with 60 miles of coastal paths and countless miles of inland footpaths, can be roughly split in half: The eastern section is heavily tourist-oriented with seaside towns catering to thousands of holidaymakers in hotels or bed-and-breakfasts; the western half is still largely agricultural.

Off the western tip stand the Needles, massive chalk rocks that mark the entry to the Solent, the strip of water between the Island and the mainland.

The scenery is so varied that almost every turn brings a new vista: rolling countryside, sandy beaches, fenlands, the vineyards of Adgestone and Barton Manor, the colored sands of Alum Bay, the garlic fields of Newchurch, the oysters beds of Newtown, the manor houses at Mottistone and Nunwell, village pubs in such places as Shorewell and Brighstone, Bronze Age funerary barrows. Here and there can be spotted reminders of the Island's front-line position in World War II: abandoned machine gun pillboxes, derelict troop huts. At Shanklin Chine, a steep ravine that cuts from the Old Village to the sea, parts of the oil pipeline that ran from the Island to Normandy to supply the allied invasion forces after D-Day in 1944 are still on view.

Along part of the southeast coast runs the Undercliff, formed thousands of years ago when the great cliffs collapsed leaving a terrace some 6 miles long and a quarter mile deep and providing one of the most entrancing marine drives in the country.

The barren southwestern coast -- called the Back of the Wight -- has been the graveyard of many a ship driven onto underwater ledges by seas crashing in from the Atlantic. If one sails straight out from the Back of the Wight, the next landfall is not France or Spain but Brazil. In 1313, when the St. Mary of Bayonne was driven ashore, its cargo of wine was looted by the local lord of the manor, who, unfortunately, was not aware that the wine was the property of the church. As a penance, he was ordered to build the Island's first lighthouse and keep it manned by monks. It still stands -- but without either warning fires or monks -- and is known locally as the Pepperpot.

Along this coast, the crumbling cliffs have become renowned as one of the great fossil hunting sites of Britain with so many relics found that the Island plans to build a $3 million dinosaur museum. Most recent finds include the remains of a new dinosaur species that has been named Neovenator Saleri (Salero's new hunter) after the family on whose land it was found.

The Island's tranquillity took a bit of a battering in 1970. That was the year of the last and infamous Isle of Wight rock festival -- the British Woodstock -- that saw 600,000 weed-smoking rockers massed in a field with Joni Mitchell pleading with the rambunctious audience, ``You're acting like tourists. Give us some respect.'' When non-payers encamped on what became known as Devastation Hill broke down the surrounding fences, the festival was declared free, and the organizers went broke. Residents say you can still dig up discarded caftans at the site.

There has not been a rock festival since.

But as Anthony Minghella would no doubt agree, the Isle of Wight has just about everything else.