The island where a queen hid and Hendrix played for the last time: 113 kilometres of coastal path and dinosaur bones on the beach

There is an island still served by the only scheduled commercial hovercraft route in the world. Not as a tourist attraction, but as transport - people take it to work. This is Wight, the island off England's south coast, separated from the mainland by the Solent strait.

The northern shore is sheltered and calm. The southern one is the wild side - exposed to the winds funnelling through the Channel, with dramatic cliffs and beaches where almost nothing has been built. From the mainland you get there by ferry from Portsmouth, Lymington or Southampton, or by hovercraft from Southsea to Ryde.

The dinosaur island

Long before the festivals, palaeontologists called it Dinosaur Island. Around 125 million years ago this coast was mud and lagoons, and the remains the animals left behind were preserved. When the soft rock at Compton Bay erodes, the bones simply drop onto the beach. Over twenty different species have been identified so far, some of them known only from here. In 2024 Nick Chase found the most complete dinosaur skeleton discovered in the United Kingdom this century - a large herbivore, named Comptonatus chasei after him.

The queen who called it her paradise

Victoria and Prince Albert bought the Osborne estate in 1845 for 28,000 pounds. Albert conceived the new residence himself as an Italian Renaissance palace, inspired by his memories of the Bay of Naples. The build was led by architect Thomas Cubitt, the same man who built the main facade of Buckingham Palace. Victoria called it „this little paradise by the sea” and used it for over fifty years. She died there, on 22 January 1901. Edward VII gave it to the state, the rooms opened to the public in 1956, and today the estate is run by English Heritage - with her apartments left exactly as they were.

113 kilometres on foot around the whole thing

The entire island is circled by a waymarked coastal path of 113 kilometres. Most people finish it in four to seven days, but it can be walked section by section. The best-known stretch is the Tennyson Trail - 23 kilometres from Carisbrooke to Alum Bay, over several hills, past a granite monument to the poet, to the coloured cliffs above the Needles.

The Needles are three white chalk stacks rising around thirty metres above the sea, with a red lighthouse at the end. There was once a fourth, called Lot's Wife - it collapsed in a storm in 1764, and the crash was heard for kilometres around. That same chalk once connected the island to the Old Harry Rocks in Dorset, some thirty kilometres away.

The king stuck in his own window

Above Newport stands Carisbrooke Castle, with over a thousand years of history. During the civil war Charles I was imprisoned here - fourteen months before he was executed. He tried to escape twice, and one attempt failed because he got stuck between the bars of his own window. Both the room and the window are still there. So are the donkeys that turn a sixteenth-century wheel every day to draw water from a well 49 metres deep.

The microclimate that changes the botany

Ventnor, on the south coast, is stacked in terraces up the cliff, with houses piled along the slope. The ground beneath the cliffs creates a microclimate where the temperature runs around five degrees higher than the rest of Britain, with almost no frost. That is why Ventnor Botanic Garden survives there - twenty-two hectares of subtropical plants that grow nowhere else in England, including olive trees and giant Amazonian water lilies.

Three days in 1970 the island still remembers

The first festival was organised by the Foulk brothers to raise money for a town swimming pool. In 1969 Dylan played there - his first public appearance after a serious accident - and Lennon, Ringo Starr, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts came to the island. The 1970 edition gathered The Doors, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, The Who, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, among more than fifty performers. For Hendrix it was the last full performance in England - he died on 18 September that same year. The crowd was so large that the government introduced a limit: over five thousand people requires a special licence. The festival returned in 2002 and now takes place every June in Newport.

The island has gathered Victoria, Tennyson, Dickens, Keats and - in 1874 - Karl Marx, who described it as „a little paradise”. It is hard to find a place with a tighter link between the royal household and the counterculture. And you get to all of it by ferry from the English coast.