Apart from that, how did you enjoy the visit?

Sorry, but I keep finding Blackgang Chine out-takes. This one's from The Quiver and a serialised inspirational novel Borne Back, by Emma E Hornibrook, another late-Victorian writer with more credits than you'd think (cue bibliography).

The Reades' ministry: Blackgang and Punrooty

Another Blackgang, Isle of Wight, story: "Mr. Charles Reid, at Blackgang, in the Isle of Wight, is indefatigable in calling the sinner to sobriety.” notes the author of Drink: the Vice and the Disease, in the October 1875 London Quarterly Review. This one-liner spins off into an unusual saga of 19th century missionary activity by unlikely people in unlikely places.

An Episode at Blackgang Chine

A purge of 'out-takes' from a recent post series - see Blackgang Chine, March 2015 - finds this rather static romance story in an 1878 Tinsleys' Magazine, and a slight bibliographic puzzle relating to the authorship of two obscure 1870s novels.

Blackgang: Five Rocks

"Here once was a fine house
Spacious, warm and bright.
Where the island’s lords and ladies
Danced all thro’ the night.
But then the boggarts and the brownies
And elves, in they came.
Took over the mansion
Now things aren’t the same.
It’s dark and it’s gloomy.
The humans have fled.
It’s a fine house no longer.
It’s Rumpus instead!"
- cited from transcript at jbonline.org.uk/blackgangchine

Wilhelmina Stitch on Blackgang

Reading Geoffrey Grigson's 1945 description of Blackgang Chine bazaar (see Blackgang: a whale of a chine), I assumed that his reference to "Fragrant Minutes of verse by Wilhelmina Stitch" was just a general example of the keepsakes sold there in that era. But no: it turns out that there was actually a specific piece of Blackgang Chine merchandise by this bygone inspirational writer.

Blackgang: a whale of a chine

There aren't many roles for whale skeletons in literature, but one appears in Maxwell Gray's 1913 novel Something Afar (published in the USA as The Desire of the Moth), where the author gets in a reference to her native Isle of Wight and a description (fancifully embroidered by Blanche, the protagonist's wife) of the celebrated whale skeleton at Blackgang Chine.

Blackgang Chine, March 2015

Finally, after years of visiting the Isle of Wight, and many walks starting or finishing at the Blackgang Chine bus stop by the giant smuggler, we visited the Blackgang Chine theme park itself. And an interesting visit it turned out to be ...

Southlands: Puseyites and Polynesian princesses

A bit more about Southlands, the long-disappeared marine villa at Blackgang, Isle of Wight: one segment of its short history links in to the story of two notable figures in Victorian Anglo-Catholicism, and that of a tragic exchange visit.

Lowcliffe and Southlands: from cradle to grave

I've touched on this topic a couple of times before, but I just found in Isle of Wight County Press Archive an editorial that's quite enlightening about the fate of Lowcliff (aka Lowcliffe aka Lowecliffe) and Southlands, two villas built in the 1800s on the unstable cliff terraces near Blackgang, Isle of Wight.

The "Salt Pot"

Base of Old Lighthouse on St Catherine's Hill
© Copyright Bob Embleton and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

I like strange and distinctive places. So further to Edward Edwards - troubled library pioneer, I just checked out online the location of Edwards' apparently self-inflicted exposure on the downs near Niton, Isle of Wight.  As described in the 1902 Greenwood biography:

The days and nights were getting cold, and he had a fire constantly in his room, which he kept so closely that there was some difficulty in getting him out of it when it had to be tidied. One day early in November, 1885, Edwards said to Mr. and Mrs. Harrison "I am going to Freshwater and may not be back for several days". Nothing was thought of this at the time, as he had often gone away on the top of one of the coaches, and remained away a few days. For some days afterwards nothing more was heard of him, till word was brought that he had been found in a perishing condition on St. Catherine's Down, and was being brought home in a cart. By-and-by the cart drew near, and in it, covered with clean straw to screen him from the curious eyes of the children on their way to school, was Edward Edwards, utterly broken down, with eyes looking wild and streaming with tears, but conscious of all that was going on around him. They lifted him out as gently as if he had been a monarch, dressed in purple and fine linen, and put him to bed at once. There he lay for a full fortnight, nursed with the tenderest care, fed and tended like a child, and during night and day his nurses had to apply all necessary remedies to restore animation to his almost frozen limbs. Edward Edwards had been found in what is known as the Round Tower on the Down. He had been out on the Down without food for three nights and days in inclement weather, and a bitterly cold winter was that of 1885-6. The Round Tower is roofless, and in it he was found, lying on the ground, by a shepherd who was taking provender for the sheep. His hands were stained with dirt, and he had manifestly gripped the earth in an agony of spirit, while crying for death to come and release him from his misery and troubles. During the night the sheep on the Down make for the Round Tower for shelter, and Edwards had been kept warm by them, as his clothes showed. They had evidently kept him warm enough to preserve his life.
- Edward Edwards, the chief pioneer of municipal public libraries, Thomas Greenwood, 1902, Internet Archive ID edwardedwardschi00greeiala

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This structure appears in accounts under various names - including the Salt Pot, the Salt Cellar, the Salt Shaker, and Mustard Pot - all reflecting its relationship to an adjacent structure known as the Pepperpot (St Catherine's Oratory, a mediaeval lighthouse). The Salt Pot was also intended as a lighthouse, but not completed ...

Almost adjoining stands the shell of a lighthouse erected in 1785 by the Trinity Board ; but discontinued when it was discovered, as might at the outset have been surmised, that the mists so often gathering about the crown of the hill would render it of little service.
- page 192, Lighthouses and Lightships, William Henry Davenport Adams, 1870

... and superseded by the present St Catherine's Lighthouse.

undated topographical postcard

The Salt Pot appears in old photos (e.g. above) in much the same state as when Edwards took refuge in it. But it's now enclosed and inaccessible due to the building of a radio installation inside and around it (according to Keeper's Log, journal of the United States Lighthouse Society, a radar installation dating from 1952).There are a number of Flickr images, such as this one; the photographer comments on how it "inexplicably" houses radio equipment. When there was a whole down to build on, it does seem rather strange, by modern standards of conservation, for a heritage structure to be commandeered in this way.

View looking northward from the top of Gore Cliff, May 2012
St Catherine's Oratory (aka Pepperpot), left; "Salt Pot" by mast, right

We were in viewing distance in May 2012 - see The road more travelled ... - but it was a monstrously hot day, and the detour up the hill didn't appeal. Next time maybe.

Check out also Stories descriptive of the Isle of Wight:  there's a slight thematic connection, in that one of these inspirational stories, The Children of St Catherine's Chantry, features a group of children sheltering from a storm inside St Catherine's Oratory.

- Ray

The Desire of the Moth.#3

OK, the conclusion to my reading of Maxwell Gray's 1913 novel Something Afar aka The Desire of the Moth.

So, our hero, the retired bank clerk Ronald Leith, has discovered that his shooting in Sicily decades before wasn't down to betrayal by the Italian contessina he loved. So now he's off to Switzerland, with his wife Blanche and daughter Beatrice in tow, to reconnect with the past.

The Leiths get to Lucerne, where Blanche gets a little addicted to gambling on roulette and the Petits-Chevaux. Leith is perturbed by seeing Beatrice crying after talking to a mysterious man; it turns out to be Giorgio, the young baron she knew from London, and Beatrice confesses that he had kissed her passionately. “Who and where was this brute of an Italian?” Leith muses. “And ought he to be kicked if found?”

They travel on Lugano, where they stay at the Hotel Magnifico. Unknown to them, another family is staying there: the Baroness Bice di Gagliardini and her grown-up children Remigia and Gino. The Baroness recognises Leith, and when Leith takes a solo boat trip to a nearby villa, they meet. She turns out to be the Beatrice that Leith fell in love with decades before, and they are reconciled as friends. She never married Leith's rival Malorio, having escaped by having a breakdown after Leith's supposed death, but is now widowed with two surviving children from marriage to another man. Her scheming Mafia-connected uncle Onofrio - the man who shot Leith - is still alive.

Onofrio, now the Count della Rovesca, is getting bad dreams relating to the events surrounding Leith's disappearance. He's also struggling with gossip containment, playing down to Remigia stories that her fiance dishonoured a young woman, who subsequently committed suicide. Although Remigia is really in love with the young composer Mario Melata, for some inexplicable reason she has agreed to marry Malorio.

Leith resolves to help, and starts plans to foil Onofrio in aiding Remigia and Mario, as well as brokering the match between his daughter Bice and Gino (who is the Giorgio from London, and a nice chap despite his hotbloodedness). He begins by telling Gino about Onofrio's criminal past. He also talks to Remigia, who explains that she is bound to marry Malorio through an obligation of family debt; but Leith's investigations have proved that she has been conned – no such debt exists, but their properties have been mortgaged dishonestly by Onofrio. Over the next few days, the Leeses and di Gagliardinis become firm friends; Ronald tries to explain his past to the nice-but-dim Blanche, though she doesn't fully grasp its importance to him.

Onofrio, not yet realising that Leese is in the process of thwarting him, is growing impatient with inexplicable delays in settling the marriage plans. He is enraged on coming with Malorio to the Hotel Magnifico and finding Remigia hasn't turned up for a promised meeting. Remigia takes Onofrio on a mountain walk and springs the first part of the revenge, confronting him with what Leith has told her of his fraudulent dealings. She then leaves him behind, but at the top she runs into Malorio, and tells him she won't marry him. He is enraged, but she threatens to throw herself off the cliff and talks him down by appealing to his better nature. The two then go to investigate a cry for help.

Leith has meanwhile been shadowing Onofrio, and finally confronts him in a wood, explaining how he survived Onofrio's ambush decades before (a silver flask in his pocket deflected the bullet). They grapple – Onofrio has a gun – and as they fight, an accidental shot hits Remigia.

The scene moves to the following Christmas in the Leith household. They are joined by the Baroness, Gino and Remigia (who survived the shooting). Malorio has done the decent thing and formally dissolved the engagement; and Leith has coerced Onofrio (by threatening to reveal the extent of his dodgy dealings) to return to the family the money he has appropriated. The young couples get engaged, and all ends amicably.

I read this book with a floundering sense of dismay in places, and I just had to revise the plot summary, because on first reading, I mistook a large section for flashback, and I was wondering why one character had changed her forename and also named her two children the same as ones in a previous generation. Then I was puzzling how a Pomeranian dog - life expectancy 12-15 years - had survived several decades, until I read back and found I'd missed the detail about the family always keeping the same breed and naming it the same.

It isn't actually a bad novel once you've thoroughly digested the detail and got it into context, but it shouldn't be such hard work. Some of the plotting - particularly the handy bequest that bails the Leiths out of their financial doldrums - is a bit deus ex machina. However, MG nicely describes the atmosphere of pre-WW1 Lugano and its environs, with little of the overblown pathetic fallacy of landscape and weather that plague her earlier books. The Bookseller review is fair enough ...

The Desire of the .Moth, by Maxwell Gray, will attract the attention of all fiction readers, for the author's "The Silence of Dean Mainland" blazed a trail for all her other novels. This is a dramatic and vivid romance of the Italian Lakes, with scenes so full of human passion controlled and uncontrolled that in the hands of a less skillful author would be lurid and sensational. London is the setting of the early situations, where a father of a family is the central figure of a plot as unusual as it is complicated. The man's early romance, which includes a tragic incident that resulted in his friends believing him dead, colors his life and is an ever present background to the love affairs of his daughter which are absorbing. The Italian temperament is depicted with vividness and there are passages of extremely fine writing. The diversity of character introduced and the tenseness of the situation, together with the wreakage that weakness brings in its wake, and the unexpected turn life frequently takes, makes this a novel of prismatic emotional interest with the central figure of Ronald Leith always predominately fine and unselfish.
- The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer, Volume 39, Nov 1, 1913

I did spot an Isle of Wight reference: the well-known whale skeleton, which still exists, at Blackgang Chine.

Como was a favorite place for honeymooning, the baroness thought, commenting on the wastefulness of choosing the most beautiful spots for that class of travelers, who ought to be too happy to care where they went; while Gino cynically hinted at a need of consolation in such cases, to the great indignation of Blanche, who held that a honeymoon could be spent with equal enjoyment in a balloon or a coal mine. "Ours," she said, "was in the Garden of England— that is, in one of them—the darling little Isle of Wight— inside a whale. How happy we were inside that sweet whale!"

"A honeymoon inside a whale, Signora? Una balena?" the baroness asked, mystified.

"So poetic, dear Baroness. It was, of course, quite innocuous—dead, long dead, and may be so still for all I know. Ah me! the days that are no more—just like a church aisle, only the arches got smaller toward the tail and began on the ground so there were no pillars. How it all comes back—the bones, the bliss, the starry night, one is afraid to say how long ago, but that tall child tells such sad tales. We walked up and down the whale, realizing the sensations of Jonah. So sweet and scriptural! There was melon at dessert that very evening."
...
On reaching the terrace, Blanche was much comforted by coffee, which she said reminded her more strongly than ever of the Garden of Eden and that of England, and caused her to produce more reminiscences of the long defunct whale, whose remains embellished the hotel grounds in Blackgang Chine.

- Ray

The road more travelled ...

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At the risk of boring you with endless pictures of woodlands and cliffs - skip if you've already reached saturation - I have some photos from May 26th, a windy and majorly hot day when we took the fairly short walk from Niton to Blackgang, at the southern tip of the Isle of Wight. The interesting point is that this route follows the accessible end of the old coastal road between them, which was cut by a landslip in 1928 - the other end is the "Lost Road" I described previously - and goes up over the spectacular Gore Cliff above the landslip.


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You start by following the main road southward from Niton that descends Barrack Shute - alternatively the Southern Vectis "6" bus will drop you at the foot of it. Then you turn off the main road down a lane running south-west - Sandrock Road - which in turn has a branch prominently signposted Old Blackgang Road. Follow this through the woodland until it just ... stops.

At first it's densely wooded on both sides, but then opens out to give views of the wooded slopes on the landward side, and rolling open pasture on the seaward. There are gates with paths to this pasture, which you might want to follow; because the lane is leading to a viewpoint and parking spot at the end, there is a certain amount of traffic on the road.

And at the end is the location called Windy Corner, with this spectacular view.

The chalk cliffs in the distance are those of Tennyson Down, at the western tip of the Island.

Panorama - sorry, I clipped the top of the cliff

The cliff, capped by overhanging crags of chert-studded Greensand, is called Gore Cliff.  The overgrown slopes are the Undercliff landslip terrain; and the large arc in the cliff, and the ridge of rubble below, are the scene of the 1928 slip that disrupted the road through what is now a wilderness. The isolated segment of road - also disconnected at the other end - is somewhere in all that woodland ahead. And bear in mind that this is on the Undercliff: a ledge some 300 feet above sea level, with Gore Cliff maybe 200 feet more above.

The path down to the beach: that tiny thing mid-picture is a stile.

This pastureland, although still a consequence of landslips, is a very gentle contrast to the overgrown tangle immediately adjacent. We didn't go to the beach; it was so hot that 300 feet down and up didn't appeal (apart from which, it's a naturist beach and the etiquette would undoubtedly get complicated).

Looking down the overgrown landslip to the beach

Gore Cliff at Windy Corner

Instead, we returned along the road part of the way, and around 300 metres along, there's a signpost for a path leading to steps up the cliff.

Old Blackgang Road, looking east

Below, an image from 2011 of the "Lost Road": the section of this very same road in the section near Blackgang isolated by landslips decades ago and only travelled by determined walkers. It's quite a striking contrast as the 'post-apocalyptic twin' of the photo above.

Old Blackgang Road - "Lost Road" section - looking east

Part-way up was this stone basin and tunnel; I don't know what these are about. The steps carry on up the cliffside until you're high above the Undercliff and you can see St Catherine's Point lighthouse.

St Catherine's Point lighthouse and Knowles Farm

Looking along the brink of Gore Cliff

Looking down to the Windy Corner car park

It was stunning, if a little frightening in the stiff wind, at the top of Gore Cliff. The path runs approximately westward, with sheer drop to the left and the St Catherine's Oratory lighthouse ( the "Pepperpot" - the scene of Emma MacAllan's The Children of St Catherine's Chantry) up on the hill to the right.

Shortly after, you see the buildings of Blackgang Chine amusement park, and the vista across the whole "Back of the Wight". The path then descends via more steps to the car park and Chine entrance with its well-known giant smuggler.

- Ray