This is usually either the first or the second post of the year but here we are in the last week of February because I had the bright idea to document our Christmas Adventure on film this year. I’m not very good at taking 36 film photos in a single day, so it took until mid-February to use it all up and then another 10 days to get the pictures back.
My friend Tom and I have two rules for our Christmas adventure: it needs to be by the sea and there needs to be wine. Over the gap between Christmas and New Year, a lot of small seaside places are quieter than usual, so the wine can be tricky but we can usually find a pub or a bar. I have a Google Map where I list all our previous adventures in blue and potential future adventures in yellow (you don’t get to see this map because it’s got my house and Tom’s mum’s house pinned on it so give me an idea of travel distance) and I generally start looking at it somewhere around October to start to think about where we might go this year, although we don’t tend to make the decision until the day of the adventure. This year we went to Milford on Sea, right in the south of the New Forest and walked out to Hurst Castle, which is on the end of a shingle spit about a mile and a half long.
We started at the Needles Eye Cafe, so-called because the Isle of Wight is looming large on the horizon just a couple of miles across the Solent. At its closest point, from the very tip of Hurst Spit to a small headland on the Island, it’s just a kilometer and a quarter away. I could swim that in well under 45 minutes. I thought I’d be struggling with the minor issue of the Solent being one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world but it’s so narrow here and probably quite shallow just here that surely traffic goes the long way round the east of the Isle of Wight rather than here at the west? Anyway, we tend to stop first thing for coffee and although the cafe looked nice and we were considering it for lunch, the coffee was judged to be among the worst Tom had ever tried.
Hurst Spit is a hook-shaped thing stretching most of the way from the mainland to the Isle of Wight and enclosing salt and marsh flats. On our walk out to the Castle, we didn’t really see much of that once we’d got properly onto the Spit but we stopped to find a bin for the coffee cup and came across a flock of swans on the stream that empties out into the marshland – perfect spot for a few film photos, I thought. Having got them back, I’ve discovered that the results of using film that expired a few years ago was that the pictures are quite spectacularly green. I’m not unhappy with that – I knew it was expired and deliberately chose to use it on this adventure rather than some of my new in-date film and the results can be very unpredictable, which is always fun, and anyway, I put the pictures on Instagram last week and two people have told me that some people would kill for that kind of Instagram filter.
I’ve walked along Hurst Spit before but I’d forgotten how far it is. This is our tenth Christmas adventure and so to celebrate the anniversary, we did the same thing we did on the first, which was collecting hagstones on Chesil Beach – so rather than walking along the reasonably flat and easy top of the Spit, we skidded down the side and walked along the shore, heads down, hunting for stones with holes through them. It took quite a while to start finding them – a lot of had holes only partway through and I christened them something I now absolutely can’t remember but we found it hilarious and very much overused it for the day. Pseudo-holes? No, that wasn’t it. It was much better than that.
I’m a terrible rock collector, in that I want to collect them all. Tom was more discerning but, penguin-like, I tended to just pop any pretty or eye-catching rock in my pocket. Many of them are hagstones but many of them are just interesting and some are weird. Hurst Spit has been here a long time – the nucleus of the castle at the end of it were built by Henry VIII as part of his south coast defences, specifically to defend the unusually narrow passage between here and the Isle of Wight. Charles I was held here after the English Civil War. It was then significantly enlarged and strengthened during the 1850s in fear of an invading French army and minorly improved again for use in both the 1st and 2nd World Wars. But the Spit threw us for a minute with a large rock memorialising it being “built” in the 1990s. Well, that couldn’t be true, not with that fort down there. We concluded that what had actually happened was some major engineering works when coastal erosion and age began to pull the spit apart. A lot of the rock used to re-build it all up is something called “larvikite” from Norway, an igneous rock composed mostly of silica and feldspar. Not initially realising that, I’d spent some time trying to figure out what rock this spit is made of. It’s off the end of the Jurassic Coast, so it’s not 250m+-year-old limestone or chalk and my knowledge of local rocks pretty much runs out at Poole Harbour. The larvikite confused matters a bit.
By the time we’d walked all the way down to the Castle, we were getting hungry. It’s quite a hike and walking through shingle is hard work. There’s a cafe and a kiosk down at the Castle – but they’re not open during that grey miserable waste of days between Christmas and New Year. We took some photos around the Castle and around the lighthouse, looked for some more stones on the bit of beach at the end, marvelled at how close the Isle of Wight was and then headed back. The Castle is very historic and very interesting but it’s not open at this time of this time of year either, and it’s not particularly pretty to look at.
We took the highway back – the smooth top of the Spit where you don’t sink in on every step. That made it a lot faster but also a lot less hard work. Lunch was due and after the coffee at the cafe, Tom was disinclined to trust it, so we opted for The Lighthouse restaurant, right at the start of the Spit. I had a cheese roll which was adequate and Tom had a burger that was very good but overpriced – to be fair, when you live in Liverpool and you visit Hampshire and Dorset, most things are going to seem overpriced. I have no idea how much a burger is supposed to be but even I could look at this Art Deco thing in this nice genteel seaside town and know immediately that this is not the cheap option. I say it every year, but it might be fun next year to take my tiny camping stove and to make lunch on the beach. As it happens, I have just the cookbook for the job – had it for Christmas last year and it’s the Fell Foodie’s outdoor cookbook, Cook Out (that’s an affiliate link to bookshop.org so if you buy anything from that link, I might get a few pennies – and better them and me than Jeff Bezos, right?) – so look out for our little Christmas feast next year!
Of course, with lunch done, it was time for wine. Milford on Sea is a small place but having rejected the Smugglers Inn pub next to the car park, we walked down to the Wash House, which describes itself as a “micro ale pub”. It’s small, it’s set in a mock Tudor house right in the middle of town and as you might guess, it has a good selection of local ales, as well as all the more commercial stuff. We sat there until it was getting dark, debating whether to stay for another or to find somewhere else on the way home and so we set off on something of an unscheduled pub crawl. The satnav had led us to Milford along a fairly urban route through the Bournemouth-Christchurch conurbation before noodling down towards Barton on Sea but we went back a slightly more rural route to stop at the Amberwood Inn, which looked like a nice enough place and required something of an emergency stop and a turn around because we didn’t spot it quite quickly enough. It had clearly been hosting an event because they were packing up the remainder of sandwiches and laying them out on the bar. I was quite taken by the big open fireplace but you don’t have to sit next to a fire that big for long before it starts to get too hot. Then we stopped at the smaller and quieter Woolpack Inn at Sopley, which sat awkwardly right in the middle of a very narrow one-way system on the edge of the Avon wetlands. By then, even Tom had had enough liquid – I drink plenty throughout the day but that many (non-alcoholic; I’m the driver!) drinks in such a short space of time is a little bit much for me. I start to need to go home and eat some bread to mop it all up, otherwise I start to slosh.
And so we were done for another year! Seaside, tick! Wine, tick! Hagstones to celebrate 10 years of Christmas adventures, tick! Unplanned pub crawl on the way home, tick!
I Am A Polar Bear 