Tennyson, Virginia Woolf and Jimi Hendrix – all on a car-free trip to the Isle of Wight

The Guardian

20-03-2025

The green tidal mudflats are noisy with gulls and lapwings as the ferry sails towards Yarmouth. Far out on sparkling water, a white sail stands out against misty downs. The Victorian poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson regularly tramped over those chalky hills, declaring 'the air is worth 'sixpence a pint''. There is no need to drive for a holiday on the Isle of Wight. Regular ferries connect with mainland trains and the island has a good network of buses.
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I am travelling as a foot passenger on the 40-minute Wightlink ferry from Lymington Pier, where the train arrives along an embankment with yachts, plovers and redshanks outside the window. Once on the island, the Summer Links bus service, running from April to late September, stops at the entrance to Tapnell Farm, where I'm staying for a couple of nights in a well-equipped cabin with a hot tub that looks out towards Tennyson Down.
The 14-mile Tennyson Trail runs along the spine of West Wight. It crosses tumuli-studded Compton Down, where there is a clear sense of being on an island: sea views on three sides, with long tapering white cliffs to the west and the gentler coast winding off to the east. There are blue butterflies and chalkland flowers such as orchids, wild thyme and nodding musk thistles.
Freshwater Bay is a couple of miles away, so I head there on my first day for a swim among the chalk stacks. The most direct route from Tapnell skirts the site of the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. With an audience of about 600,000, it's still the biggest concert ever held in the UK. Jimi Hendrix played there on 31 August that year; three weeks later he was dead.
A short walk from the beach, a bronze statue of Hendrix, with his feet in Spanish daisies, stands in the garden of Dimbola. Once home to pioneering Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, it is now a gallery displaying pictures by Cameron and other photographers with changing exhibitions and one room dedicated to memorabilia from the annual Isle of Wight festivals (£6.90 for adults, £3 for children).
Cameron was the great-aunt of writer Virginia Woolf, and Dimbola is the setting for Woolf's only play, a 1935 comedy called Freshwater. Tennyson, the Camerons and the actor Ellen Terry are all larger-than-life characters in Woolf's satirical drama. The real Terry appears pensively in one of many celebrity photos on display at Dimbola. In Woolf's play, her character complains about having to wear itchy wigs and pose for artists and photographers. She declares: 'Nothing ever changes in this house. Somebody's always asleep. Lord Tennyson is always reading. Maud, the cook, is always being photographed.'
Tennyson's creeper-covered house Farringford is just around the corner (gardens £4.50; book ahead for house tours). A wooded footpath, heading left beyond the nearby thatched church, leads to the entrance. It runs under a footbridge that was first built by Tennyson to avoid his many fans. (In Freshwater, his character complains: 'Twenty earnest youths from Clerkenwell are in the shrubbery; six American professors are in the summer house; the bathroom is occupied by the Ladies Poetry Circle from Ohio.') Beyond Farringford's colourful walled garden are parkland walks and the 'careless-ordered' feel that Tennyson describes in a poem. You can see a cedar tree sketched by Edward Lear and the magnolia whose flowers Tennyson laid on his wife's pillow.
Back at the thatched church, I catch the open-topped Needles Breezer for a heart-stopping hairpin ride up to the clifftop Old Battery fort. The viewpoint for seeing the sharp limestone rocks and the red and white lighthouse is close by. Heading down again on the next bus, I can see Alum Bay's cliffs of multicoloured sand, and Tudor Hurst Castle over the water. The day's last Summer Links bus back from Yarmouth to Tapnell is also an open-topper and runs along waterside Tennyson Road. A £19 rover ticket gives me 48 hours' unlimited bus travel around the island and includes the open-toppers.
It's drizzling steadily next morning and my hiking plans look less appealing. I was hoping to walk east along the Tennyson Trail, past prehistoric remains with intriguing names like Five Barrows to reach the National Trust Mottistone Gardens. Instead, I roll through rosy thatched villages on a surprisingly efficient series of buses, finishing with bus 12, which drops me at Mottistone's entrance.
The land around Mottistone's old stone manor house has become a flowering garden with subtropical plants, scented roses and banks of foxgloves. The rain brings out the strong scent of the magenta beach roses, the subtler pale pink shrub roses and abundant purple catmint. The misty air makes the flowerbeds seem brighter, and fills the woodland and wildflower avenues with romantic fog. Raindrops spangle the orange lilies, red bottlebrush flowers and deep blue delphiniums. 'This drop of rain is a blessing,' says head gardener Ed Hinch. He explains that the spiralling flowerbeds of the sandy Lower Garden were inspired by the naturally occurring Fibonacci sequence (£8.50 for adults, £4.25 over-fives, without Gift Aid).
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The sea is just a mile away, but the weather still feels more suited to castles than coasts, so I catch bus 12 to the village of Carisbrooke, once the island's capital. The bus stops near medieval St Mary's church, and I walk to Carisbrooke Castle, where Charles I was imprisoned under Cromwell. A path leads steeply up from pretty Castle Street, through a field of sheep, to emerge near the gatehouse, where jackdaws are squabbling and spiral stairways lead up on to the ancient walls. There's a heady scent from the wet mock orange flowers in the relatively new formal garden, with its avenue of fig trees, but Carisbrooke's smell-scape is more varied: there's a hint of bat in the darkest corners (more species roost here than at any other southern English site) and a lingering whiff of donkey in the old well house, which the animals still patiently trot over to on scheduled days to demonstrate a wheel that raises the deep bucket.
That evening in Tapnell's barn-like restaurant, the Cow, I order a portobello mushroom burger. Tapnell Farm opened its first safari tents 13 years ago, later adding camping pods and an aquapark with a natural lake (two nights in an Eco Pod from £336). There are now several different glamping options; beyond fields of rescued wallabies are five new domes in a flowering meadow facing north across the Solent.
Newtown, where I'm heading on my last morning, was once a busy medieval borough with saltworks and oyster beds. Now, it's a tiny village in the marshes, where the old brick town hall is subsiding into carpets of clover. Bus 7 from Yarmouth takes 10 minutes to reach the New Inn in Shalfleet and I follow the island's coastal path for a mile or so to Newtown estuary. Here paths lead through flowering hay meadows and salty stretches of sea purslane. There's a waterside causeway, a wooden walkway and a well-equipped bird hide.
Back in Yarmouth, there's time for a final walk near the River Yar, round Henry VIII's coastal castle, and past Yarmouth church, whose tall tower doubled as a seamark. With an hour until my ferry, I head for the waterside Terrace restaurant, which opened in 2020, to drink fresh lemonade with mint and watch the afternoon sun on the water, feeling as if I've had a whole week's holiday.
Combined train and ferry tickets for foot passengers start at about £30 each way from London Waterloo to Ryde or Yarmouth.
This trip was supported by Tapnell Farm. Bus travel was provided by Southern Vectis