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 Email: [email protected] 80 www.visitislandlife.com 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.