Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2011/January 2012 | Page 80
COUNTRY LIFE
Country
with Sam Biles
Old books are fascinating things if
you can find the time to turn their
yellowed musty pages, especially if
they concern the Isle of Wight. I am
lucky enough to have several in my
possession. One of the oldest dates
from 1808, it is called ‘A new Picture
of the Isle of Wight’ by William Cooke
and the frontispiece declares it was
originally owned by the very Regency:
‘Devereux Bowley Esq’ of Cirencester.
Some of the most interesting references
are to natural history and reveal that
voyagers around the Needles at that
time took pot shots at marine birds
including puffins, cornish choughs and
‘willcocks’, which I think may be an
old name for the guillemot. If beavers
and wolves can be re-introduced in
Scotland, I wonder if we will ever see
the coloured beaks of puffins again on
the cliffs of Compton Bay? As far as
I can tell the nearest breeding colony
of puffins is now
in Wales, on the
Pembroke peninsula.
I was wondering
why they died out
on the Island but if
Georgian gentlemen
were shooting them
from rowing boats,
perhaps it is no
surprise.
It was not just the
puffins that were
at risk. The cliffs
between Freshwater
Bay and the Needles - described in the
New Picture as having ‘perpendicular
sides, with the sea boldly swelling at its
base, or dashing with wild sublimity
into foam’ were once the scene of
much drama.
A multitude of sea birds are
described as nesting there between
May and August. The feathers of
these unnamed birds are described as
yielding soft ‘Eider Down’ in pursuit
of which many locals regularly risked
their lives. They drove an iron spike
into the downland summit and
descended the cliffs on a plank seat on
‘stout rope’, with no harness, hundreds
of feet above the wave-dashed rocks.
The sight of this was said to raise ‘in
the breast of the spectator, tremendous
sensations’. The birds were gathered,
each dozen yielding one pound in
soft feathers which were sold for eight
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living
pence to local merchants. Not bad
when you consider that the average
farm labourer’s wage was then only
around 10 shillings per week. Nothing
went to waste as the carcases were
bought by local fishermen to bait their
crab-pots. Sadly, the book records at
least one fatality when a young soldier
tried his luck but slipped from his
plank seat and plummeted to his death
on the rocks below.
Gull eggs are considered a delicacy
and are still served in some top
London restaurants to gourmet diners.
Small quantities are harvested these
days under licence from selected
estuary marshes rather than cliffs but I
am told that the late Lionel Osman of
Hill Farm, being of slight build, was
sent to harvest gull eggs from the cliffs
lowered on a rope in the 1940s. Many
of us have seen the archived films of
fisherman catching sea birds on St
Kilda off the outer Hebrides in the
1930s but it seems incredible that the
Island’s puffin-crowded cliffs were the
scene of similar adventures – and not
so very long ago.