By Kenneth Bagnell

One of history’s most loved poets, Alfred Tennyson, truly liked the breezy air of the Isle of Wight off England’s south coast. He liked it so much he said it should be bottled and sold for sixpence a pint. My wife Barbara and I had been there years ago and recently decided to return. We were in the British architectural jewel of Bath, and caught a train heading south. Within a couple of relaxed hours, we were in the old coastal city of Southampton, walked onto a ferry and in half an hour had crossed to the island. We’d booked a room at what turned out to be one of the most hospitable hotels in Britain: the New Holmwood in Cowes.

Cowes, with its population of about 10,000, is at the island’s northern tip, facing Southampton. It’s the location of The Royal Yacht Squadron, probably as fashionable a sailing club as any in the world. It’s best known for hosting international sailing events that double the population, but we liked Cowes for more than its sailing history. It was something softer, quieter: its magnificent morning, and evening walks on the wide promenade by the sea just in front of our hotel.

The Isle of Wight is roughly 43 kilometres long. It has numerous tidy villages and towns carrying names echoing the country’s past: Seaview, Yarmouth, Sandown, Shanklin, Bembridge, Freshwater. The Victorian atmosphere makes it a favoured holiday destination for Britain’s city dwellers, year after year. But North Americans (especially Americans) are virtually absent. It’s not a place to go just to nap. In fact, a summary of events put online month by month, includes stage plays, rock concerts, swim meets and horse races. But all take place in an atmosphere that is unhurried and unruffled: That’s the Isle of Wight. In fact, many local people, especially if they moved from elsewhere, told us its way of life is a decade or more behind the mainland. Artifacts of its past are not gussied up in modern garb. For example, the study of Tennyson’s home, now a hotel, in a village quaintly called Freshwater Bay, has been maintained virtually as it was, almost including its shadows, among which he sat and wrote for about 40 years from the 1850s onwards.

The most popular and regal reflection of Isle of Wight history is the home of the woman who gave us a descriptive we apply to almost anything that’s old fashioned: Victorian. Osborne House is Italianate in style, built between 1845 and 1851 for Queen Victoria and her husband Albert as their retreat near Cowes. After Alfred’s death in 1861, Victoria, in deep and prolonged grief, spent a lot of time there, dying in her bedroom in 1901. Today it’s open for a modest fee, and when we visited we were most taken by the restful grounds and gardens. There’s a space where the children, long ago, grew vegetables, selling them in turn to their father, who saw it as a way to teach them basic economics. Most lower halls and rooms were open when we went last spring, and overall they’re welcoming in the understated British style. A touch of reserve hovers in Osborne House, but it’s genuine, and for that I’m always grateful.

Fortunately for our preferences, the island has an efficient and highly comfortable bus service, Southern Vectis. Though we could have taken take a complete island-round tourist type trip, we decided to use the service local people use. (Its green buses have a telling slogan on their sides: “Island thinkers think Island buses.”) Once we took a short taxi ride to get to a tiny countryside hamlet named Havenstreet, then boarded The Isle of Wight Steam Railway, with seven carriages, for a trip through several miles of countryside, with stops at Smallbrook Junction and Wooten Station — not places where you’re met by surging throngs on arrival.

Hikers can take trips along such routes as the Shepherds Trail, which starts from medieval Carisbrooke Castle and passes by farms and through villages until it emerges at a steep river valley with steps down to a beach, joining it with the Coastal Path. Or, if a promenade stroll appeals, you can walk from Sandown to Shanklin, never far from the sea. Since much of the island’s coast is declared a heritage area, it’s preserved and protected from pollution, including the visual kind.

Shanklin itself has been in my memory ever since we first went years ago, simply because it’s the place old England chose for holidays, and remains that way, with reclining seaside chairs in front of hotels of yesterday, above an ever-calm sea.
Some of our best hours were spent at our hotel, where the dining room’s very wide windows overlook both sea and yachts. The room soon fills with people, all from elsewhere in England, but all obviously knowing the hotel and its people. The service was efficient and unpretentious, as was its manager David Titley, who helps serve the plates of chef Alan Reeves. “For me,” he said, “my work is my way of life, seeing people who come back year after year after year.”

A couple of days later we moved several kilometres to the town of Seaview, where we stayed one night before taking the early ferry to the mainland. The hotel we’d arranged was also called the Seaview, and dated to the early 1800s. It was steps from the silver waters that have washed over the island for countless centuries, and that are still remembered first when someone mentions the Isle of Wight.