Walking Wednesday

And so we have already reached the Wednesday of our lovely holiday in the Isle of Wight.

Once again we woke to sunshine, so jumped in the car and drove off to Shanklin as I had an urge to visit Shanklin Chine having seen it on Countryfile earlier in the year.

Arriving at the entrance it didn't look tremendously impressive, however, once through the admission gate the view down the chine (or valley) was stunning.

The stream running through the entrance gate tumbled down the cliff face in a small waterfall and then flowed as a river through the chine.

We offered to take the photo of a family who were visiting and they then reciprocated, which was nice!

We ambled down to the bottom of the chine, looking at the spring flowers and watching out for red squirrels (unfortunately we didn't spot any). What did surprise me was that it was paved all the way, I was expecting it to be rough 'foresty' type underfoot.

There was a lovely stone bridge to cross over the river and considering how much rain there had been the previous week, the river wasn't that deep!

At the bottom of the chine was a lovely tea shop, where Penny had an icecream and I had a pot of peppermint tea. Hugh had a coffee, but after he had watched a video about PLUTO the pipeline under the ocean which supplied petrol from storage tanks in southern England to the advancing Allied armies in France during World War 2!


We could have then left the chine and gone onto the beach, but we had so enjoyed walking down and enjoying the scenery that we decided to walk back up again. We were glad we did as when we reached the top and looked at the waterfall again, we noticed that the pool at the bottom of the waterfall was heart shaped, which we hadn't noticed when we arrived!

We then made our way back into Old Shanklin and bought ourselves sausage and chips for lunch and ate them in a public garden.

Hugh managed to leave his walking stick in the shop and didn't realise until much later in the afternoon. We drove all the way back and fortunately they were open and he was able to retrieve it!


After lunch, as the sun was still out, we decided to go to Godshill Model Village. I hadn't been to a model village for about 24 years and it was a brilliant one.

This is an identical copy of the real entrance to the model village - I almost lay on the ground to get this photo!

Hugh was happy as there was a large model railway layout, which we spent a long time looking at.

Hugh and Penny looking at some model houses.

This was brilliant - it was  copy of Shanklin Chine, right down to the stone bridge we had crossed earlier in the day.

What I really liked was the church which was modelled on Godshill church itself and you could see the real church behind the model church.

As we left the village, Penny insisted that Hugh and I had our photo taken by her as a memento!

It was from here that we then had to do our mad dash back to Old Shanklin to retrieve Hugh's walking stick!