10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #5 Anthony Bailey's "Island Walk"

Illustration based on photo from thegeorge.co.uk

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Anthony Bailey’s great “Island Walk” (September 8, 1975)

In this evocative piece, Bailey circles the Isle of Wight on foot, tracing its resorts, ruins, poets, ferries, prisons, and family history. The island is located a few miles off the south coast of England. Bailey walks it in five days. He starts and ends in Ryde. Here’s a summary of each of his days:

Day 1

Bailey crosses from Portsmouth, on the mainland, to Ryde. He goes by hovercraft: 

The hovercraft dashed with a buzzing, chain-saw noise and a mushy, limousinelike motion across Spithead. The March morning was clear, but spray flew in thick sheets past the windows. There was no view. The twenty passengers looked at each other for their reactions. Then the driver, who had a veteran-R.A.F.-fighter-pilot mustache, throttled back, and the machine climbed Ryde beach like a fat crocodile, scattering shingle, and finally—as if punctured—settled slowly with its engine cut.

He walks through Ryde, stopping at the entrance to Ryde’s nine-hole golf course “to choose a path that would start me counterclockwise around the island, along the north shore—with the wind, if not quite at my back, at least behind my right shoulder.” He takes a path that runs between hedges across the links. The path becomes a lane in Binstead Village and then a path again through a grove of trees. Bailey keeps walking and comes to the meadows of Quarr Abbeys:

The church, built in 1911-12, has Catalan motifs, while the gables of the nearby abbey rise in steps, like those of houses in Amsterdam. The effect of the buildings was strong, though for me diluted by the trees, and not at all displeasing. No monks were visible. In their stead, a herd of Friesian cows ambled up to a hedge and peered at me in a friendly fashion as I walked by. 

Bailey continues on toward Osborne House, “a favorite hideaway of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.” He’s not impressed with the place: “Osborne is ugly.” He heads downhill into East Cowes, “a scrappy collection of houses, factories, and boatyards on the east bank of the Medina River.” He takes a ferry across the river and books in at the Gloster Hotel: “From my room at the Gloster Hotel I looked out over the mouth of the Medina. Out in the Solent, large ships passed on their way to Southampton.”

He has dinner on the Medway Queen, a paddle-wheel ferry steamer that has been converted into a club and restaurant. It’s moored in a former millpond a few miles up the Medina. The Medway Queen reminds him of other old paddlers he used to see when he visited the island as a child. In one of the piece’s most beautiful passages, he writes,

None of the old Isle of Wight paddlers were rescued from the breaker’s yard, but the Medway Queen furnishes an upstanding example of the type—plumb-stemmed and flush-decked, with a skinny twenty-five-foot-high yellow funnel, sharply raked aft, and an open bridge lined with brass handrails and white canvas dodgers. The white wooden paddle boxes are elegantly made, with the ship’s name set into the curved top, and the crest of her first owners—a white horse rampant—surrounded by scrollwork over the hub of the paddle wheel. Below, the engine room can be seen from open alleyways. The engine frames are painted bright green, the pistons, rods, and cranks are polished steel, and the controls and steam gauges are shining brass and copper. There is checkered steel plating underfoot. Without much difficulty, you can imagine steam whistling up from the cylinders, bells ringing, the handles of the engine-room telegraph moving, and then the pistons going slowly in and out and the long, polished arms cranking the paddle wheels round. Coming to the island as a child, I would watch this and then run up the companionways to stand on deck behind the funnel out of the wind or perch on one of the seats that looked like rolltop desks and also served, if needed, as life rafts. The decks were of pine laid over steel and caulked rather sloppily with black tar. Approaching Ryde Pier, I used to watch the lad who had the job of heaving the line used by men on the pier to haul up the first mooring warp. He had a dedicated expression, and wore black boots, navy trousers, and a coarse black turtleneck sweater with the words “Southern Railway” curved across his chest in red.

After dinner, Bailey returns to the Gloster and has a nightcap in the bar.

Day 2

He has breakfast at the Gloster and then heads out, walking by the Royal Yacht Squadron and along the stone-walled Princes Esplanade. He walks on: 

Then the mid- and late-Victorian houses suddenly stopped, and, past a pink marine beacon, the Solent stretched away to the mainland—marked by the three-hundred-foot-high chimney of a power station. To judge from the tilt of a buoy off Egypt Point, the tide was rushing east. Small waves sucked and splashed between moss-and-seaweed-covered rocks. A group of men, wearing the tieless shirts, pullovers, and old suit jackets favored by British laborers, were working at the end of the footpath. 

He heads inland, “past some quite horrible little corrugated-iron bungalows, several old railway carriages converted to living quarters, and small houses covered with the stucco pebble dash that was the popular between-the-wars facing material.” This is Gurnard. 

Beyond Gurnard, he walks south for a mile or so:

A westerly fork brought me right through a muddy farm, where two milkmaids, quite fetching in white smocks and hoots, were moving churns into a shed. And then, abruptly, I was on top of a rise looking south toward the interior of the island: green fields with white gulls and black crows sitting in them; the dark woods of Parkhurst forest; and, farther distant, the range of downs, now patchily illuminated by shafts of light that fell dramatically from a thick group of curdling creamy-gray clouds. What British forecasters term a “bright” day had quickly become what they call “unsettled” and was on the way to becoming “showery.” Two schoolboys bicycled past, wearing blue gabardine raincoats of a kind I remembered as being not altogether waterproof. I donned my black lightweight plastic mac. Rain fell for a minute, and afterward the air was sweet with it—it hung in the grass verges and bramble hedges. A second shower fell—big drops this time, splashing me in the face while the sun shone in the fields beyond.

His road passes through a wood: “tall trees with a northeasterly tilt and, in their tops, a rookery, full of noisy, gregarious black birds with ragged wings.” Then he’s in Porchfield. He follows a road that parallels one of the arms of Newton Harbor: “The smell of marsh and mud envelops the village, which lies at the head of a network of creeks.” 

For lunch, he stops at the New Inn, in Shalfleet, the village at the southwestern fork of Newtown Harbor. He spends the afternoon walking from Shalfleet to Alum Bay, near the western extremity of the island. He passes through Yarmouth, crosses the River Yar bridge, and follows a path through fields to Colwell Bay, and the village of Totland, “a shabby-genteel region of bungalows, holiday chalets, caravan camps, and boarding houses.” At Alum Bay, he views the Needles, “worn chalk pinnacles that form the ragged western point of the island.” Here he boards a bus and returns to Cowes and the Gloster “in time for a restorative drink and dinner.”

Day 3

Next morning, Bailey’s father, who grew up on the island, drives him back to Alum Bay to resume his walk. They agree to meet up that evening at the Savoy Hotel in Shanklin. Bailey sets off up the north face of Tennyson Down. This is near the western end of the hills that run all the way across the island. He climbs diagonally, “occasionally using a well-anchored clump of grass for a handhold.” At the top, he takes in the view “of everywhere,” and notes the presence of “a stone Saxon-type cross, with a lightning rod at its top, a beacon to mariners and a monument to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, raised ‘by the people of Freshwater and other friends in England and America.’ ” He then descends to Freshwater Bay where he sees a kestrel “high on a thermal above the downs, winging across the wind with its wings still, banking and unbanking in easy flight.” He goes along the beach, “smooth, oval, oyster-colored stones, a few inches long, cracking together dryly” as he walks over them. He heads uphill again, across the golf course which covers the west flank of Compton Down. 

He walks six miles across the downs— Compton, Brook, Westover, Brighstone, and Limerstone—in two hours, “on the best walking surface in the world: turf planted on chalk.” Past a radar station on Limerstone Down, he descends into Shorwell and visits the Church of St. Peter. He climbs out of Shorwell on the road to Chale. After a mile or so, he turns off at a place called Beckfield Cross and heads eastward along a muddy lane, past a farm, and across fields into a broad valley. This is the headwaters of the Medina River:

There was no bridge, but a small embankment carried the footpath across the low, wet ground. At one point, where the two-foot-wide stream trickled through a conduit, short, ivy-covered brick walls made a place to lean and look down the valley, an unprepossessing area of scrubby copse called the Wilderness. The hand of man was more visible in the ditches here, with clean mud showing on their sides, roots cut, bracken and branches stacked in neat piles, and black ash on the ground where hedges had been burned back. 

He comes out beyond the Wilderness onto a country road by Great Appleford Farm, “whose house and buildings seemed to grow out of the ground in the same fashion as the surrounding trees.” After a slight jog to the northeast, he follows a course he hopes will bring him to a disused railway line running south from Newport to Ventnor. Past a farmyard and a village, past a site on which new bungalows were being built, past the Yarborough Arms public house, he reaches the track—or, rather, he reaches the embankment on which the track had been: “There were no rails or sleepers left—only a suspicion of a footpath, which wandered through brambles, gorse, and bracken, and was occasionally crossed by a barbed-wire fence, under which I slithered.” This location, where the railroad tracks used to be, triggers a vivid memory:

Long ago, when I travelled on the island trains, the Newport-Ventnor line had already been abandoned, but the trains on the rest of the system were recognizably trains, with three or four small carriages, each divided into perhaps a dozen compartments, and a locomotive with a late-Victorian smokestack at one end and a coal bunker at the other, behind the cab. The cab had porthole-like windows front and rear, for the engines ran forward up the line and back in the other direction. Each passenger compartment was lined with facing banks of heavily upholstered straight-backed seats, behind whose plump, stiff cushions I always as a child ran my hands, having once found a ten-shilling note. Above the seats was a handle, to be directed one way to cold, the other to hot, connected haphazardly to heating pipes underneath. Next, set behind glass in mahogany frames, came a row of faded brown photographs depicting the delights of, say, Seaview Pier, Blackgang Chine, or Sandown High Street. Above them was a luggage rack of net strung from wrought-iron supports. In the curved ceiling three small light bulbs glowed a dim yellow when the train passed through Wroxall tunnel. The carriage doors had handles only on the outside. To get out, you had to seize a leather strap and lower the window sash so that you could reach the outside brass handle, which always seemed stiff. Having failed to get out in time, you could resort courageously to the red emergency cord running above the windows (“Penalty for Improper Use Five Pounds”). Most of the railway system was single-track. To avoid accidents, the engine drivers had to collect a handle from a signalman at one end of a single-track section and hand it over at the other; oncoming trains could not work the switches to enter the section without the handle. My father took the train to school in Ryde, and had to put up with a lot of joshing because en route he delivered milk from my grandfather’s Shanklin dairy to his store in Ryde. When Grandfather took the train, he annoyed the engine drivers (and embarrassed my father) by never using the underground passageway between platforms but always crossing the tracks in front of the engines, at the last moment. Like the paddle-wheel ferry steamers, the engines bore the names of island towns and villages. It was my hope as a boy to ride behind each one of them—Ashey, Havenstreet, Godshill, Calbourne, Chale were the names of some—but I didn’t make it, and they are gone. 

He walks the old track for a while and then, when it gets boggy, heads off across several fields – “thickly hedged and fenced” – that slanted down in one corner. He writes, 

I should have realized what this tilt meant: the field drained that way. But I had a nervous, trespassing feeling and kept going, for the road was now visible. I began hopping from dry clod to dry clod, and soon was clodhopping in a morass. My last hop landed me shin-deep in something like quicksand, but stickier. I glucked slowly forward, reaching at, last the bank of a little stream and what looked like a footbridge, made of a single pipe, with a sign beyond it facing the road. I thought I should peer round at the sign before setting foot on the bridge. It said, “11,000 Volt Cable.” Well, it was perhaps thoroughly insulated, but I did without it, gathering my reserves and visions of old Olympic feats—I swung my arms and lifted the weight of my muddy shins across the brook, and, with a slither and flump on the far brink, just made it.

Covered with mud, he heads for St. Lawrence, on the south shore, just round the tip of St. Catherine’s Point. He briefly stops at St. Lawrence Old Church, “a little twelfth century stone shed stuck, like a root barn, under the shoulder of the road,” and then carries on to the south shore. Here there’s a formation called the Undercliff, “a giant step formed in the edge of the island when long sections of cliff face collapsed and slid down.” He walks along a “rough, rabbit-warreny path” through fields and then down past “putting greens, a miniature artificial waterfall, tea gardens, and a series of little lawns with dinky green-and-yellow shelters, seats, and benches” into Ventnor. He takes a bus back to Shanklin, gets a room at the Savoy Hotel, and dines with his father.

Day 4

Bailey has breakfast at the Savoy, in Shanklin. He talks on the phone with his Uncle Jim, “who apart from running his chain of stores is a local magistrate and chairman of the Board of Visitors at Parkhurst Prison.” At the invitation of Uncle Jim, Bailey visits the prison that morning. His account of his visit is omitted from “Island Walk”; it appears in the longer version of the piece (retitled “The Isle of Wight! The Isle of Wight!”) included in Bailey’s 1986 collection Spring Jaunts.

In the afternoon, Bailey walks with his father from Godshill, a few miles in from Shanklin, to Appuldurcombe, where his grandfather used to rent pasture for his herd and his father had come daily for milk. They return to Godshill and have a drink (Burts Special Bitter) at the Griffin pub. On their way back to Shanklin, they visit Horace Hoare, the town’s meteorological observer and have drinks (homemade curacao, raspberry wine) with him. Following that, they return to the Savoy and have dinner together. After dinner, they go for drinks at the Wine Lodge, where they’re joined by Uncle Jim. 

Day 5

Bailey walks from Ventnor out through Bonchurch, pausing in St. Boniface churchyard to look at Swinburne’s grave: “Time is dense here, and even the road, called Bonchurch Shute, is deep between banks and hedges, like a river worn into the ground.” He walks through Shanklin, “past the Savoy and Bailey’s, past private hotels with names like Sandringham and Manor Lodge, past the tumbled gardens of the Chine, and past the thatch and bargeboards of the few cottages left from the Shanklin of Keats’ time.” The tide is out. He walks along the beach from Shanklin to Sandown. He stops at the boathouse of Ivan Hooper, his uncle’s father-in-law, for a short visit, and then carries on to Sandown Pier: “I walked out over its weathered planking, between whose cracks one could see the sea rising and falling like a concertina.” He has half a pint of Double Diamond draft bitter, two Scotch eggs, a cold sausage, tomatoes, and some pickled onions in the Islander bar, and then walks up Sandown’s curving, hilly streets. He stops in front of a candy store window and notes the ranks of tall glass jars on the shelves – 

butter Brazils, acid-drop thins, mint scotch, mint bonbons, sherbet fruits, chocolate dragons, butter mints, kop kopps, butterscotch, assorted butters, chocolate-éclair candies, glacier mints, mint lumps, old-fashioned humbugs, chocolate toffees, clear mints, fruit drops, Brazil patties, licorice all-sorts, almond crescents, and barley sugars, not to mention innumerable brands and types of chocolate bars and indescribable cheap confections for children. 

He walks north from Sandown to Culver Cliff. He descends the north side of the cliff and walks the last ten miles of his trip – Bembridge, St. Helens, Seaview, and Ryde. He pauses at Brading Harbor to take in the view:

At Brading Harbor at low tide is a muddy creek, lined with houseboats— old patrol boats, fishing boats, cabin cruisers, and wartime floating bridge pontoons with all-year-round bungalow superstructures. Struts and posts hold the slimmer craft upright in their mud berths. Stovepipes come out at odd angles; decks are covered with tarpaper; one boat had a letter box where its anchor hawse pipe might once have been. At the head of the harbor, where the smell of the gasworks was strong, two swans and three pearl-gray cygnets cruised in the fresher waters of the eastern Yar.

Then onwards through St. Helen’s, “a pleasant and unpretentious village set round a long village green, across a muddy field and past a holiday camp,” and through the wet woods behind Node’s Point. At Seaview, he goes to the water. On Ryde East Sands, the tide is out a long way. He walks along the shorefront promenade, with its stone railings and sheltered seats, past Puckpool Point and St. John’s Park, and into Ryde. His father is waiting for him at the entrance to Ryde Pier, at the far end of which the ferryboat to the mainland is waiting.  “We’re in no hurry, are we?” his father says, over the racketing noise of a hovercraft coming in. “How about going the old way?” Bailey agrees. 

I love this piece. I love its details. I love its structure. I love its deep sense of place. Nothing dramatic happens. It’s just a vivid, wonderful, leisurely journey through a walker’s paradise.