PICTURESQUE CHANNEL ISLES

Hawera Star, Volume LII, 19 November 1932, Page 14

PICTURESQUE CHANNEL ISLES

Inheritance from Dukes of Normandy

JgBECHOU, smallest’ of the Channel Islands, was recently offered for sale. The purchaser may' have a seat in the Parliament of Sark, a small British feudal State, of which the island of Brechou is a part, and a domain three-quarters of a mile long and half a mile wide.

Victor Hugo called the Channel Islands “Bits of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England.” Considering that the Channel Islands lie 011I3' a few miles off the coast of Normandy, and are separated from England by the entire width of the English Channel, Hugo was right—geographically.

But the Channel Islands have never been under French royal or French republican rule. They have been inherited continuously by the kings of England, as successors of the Dukes of Normandy, since 1204. The latter days of the nineteenth century were marked by peace and prosperity for all the islands. In Jersey, potato farming brought great wealth to Rie inhabitants; in Guernsey granite quarries and tomato houses, though marring the island’s foimer pieturesqueness and beauty, Live increased its riches. The dairymen of Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney have so increased and improved their breeds of cattle that these are in demand everywhere, and are exported to the ends of the earth.

Jersey, with its wooded valleys fits winding lanes, overarched w'ith foliage; its orchards, its miles of glistening sand, its quaint old churches and picturesque granite farmhouses, and dominated always by the magnificent ruins of Mont Orgueil Castle, gives the impression of unbounded prosperity and fertility. Its lands having been owned always by a race of peasant proprietors the country show's that it has been cultivated for its own sake by men who loved it, and not by hirelings.

Naturally enough, so much beauty has bred a race of artists, the most famous being Monamy, Lc Capelain, Jean the Miniaturist, Oulcss, Sir John Millais, and at the present day Messrs Lander, Le Maistre and Blampied. Guernsey, alas, is spoiled from a scenic standpoint by miles of greenhouses and acres of quarries. But its cliffs and bays are magnificent, and Moulin Huet is perhaps the most lovely spot in the islands. There are still to be found some wooden walks and lanes, old stone walls and arched gateways, ’which are yet unmarred by the utilitarian demands of modern agriculture and industry.

-Saint Peter Port, built on the side of a hill, retains a certain amount of its former picturesqueness; it is traversed by a curious succession .of long granite stairways, and, with its high red-roofed houses, has a foreign appearance —“Caudebec sur les epaules dc Harfleur,” as Vasquerie described it when on a visit to Victor Hugo, who was then living in the islands as an exile from France. It was during the Great Frenchman’s residence in Guernsey that he wrote much of his poetry and three of his -best-known novels “Les Miserables,” “The Man "Who Laughs,” “The Toilers of the Sea.” In commemoration of his exile the French nation brought over and erected a statue to his memory' in July', 1914. The lesser isles, Alderney, Sark, Herm, and Jethou, are comprised in the bailiwick of Guernsey. Alderney, described by Napoleon as the shield of England, was considered in the days before aircraft, submarines and long-range guns revolutionised warfare, to be the key of the Channel. Consequently, during the Napoleonic wars, forts were erected here -by the British Government at vast expense. Inhospitable as the island looks to the wayfarer, it has a savage, untamed beauty denied to the other islands. It is surrounded by' the most dangerous currents and the wildest seas in the English Channel. Seven miles west of Alderney lie the famous Casquet rocks, “where.the carcases of many a tall ship lie buried.” In spite of many' petitions and numberless tragedies, it was not until 1723 that the British Government established a beacon light on these -dangerous rocks, and then it was but a coal fire burning upon an armourer’s forge and kept alight by bellows. Naturally, the fiercer the gale the more the light was extinguished by the spray, and the toll of ships so increased that in 1779 this primitive appliance was superseded by an oil light in a copper lantern. Norvadays there is a fog-signal station and a lighthouse with a brilliant revolving light. No one can claim to have seen the Carmel Islands until’ he has seen Sark, which is an epitome of the beauty of them all. It contains- the wooded valleys of Jersey, the brilliant lielien-cov-cred cliffs of Guernsey, and its own carpet of wild flowers and sea-anemones, while the natural magic of its beauty is supplemented, to the initiate, by' the magic-working powers of some of the old inhabitants.