Isle of Wight - Day 4, Monday 9th July - Part 2: Osborne House Gardens and Swiss Cottage and Ghost Walk, Bonchurch

After leaving the house I found the rest of the family on the terrace gardens. There are three terraces - The Pavilion Terrace and Upper and Lower Terraces.

Lovely to see a flowering Yucca

Unfortunately I did not have time to explore the Lower Terraces as the family were waiting to go for lunch - so just a few photos from above and

one D took when exploring.

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We walked back to the car for a packed lunch

D and I who had lingered to take photos managed to get lost and ended up at the Walled Garden - more photos of this later in the post.

After lunch we returned to the grounds and decided to walk down to Swiss Cottage (it is about half a mile whereas the beach is around a mile)

At this stage my camera battery went flat :( (I don't carry a spare one and the Olympus camera which did have a fully charged battery was back at the cottage!) so I had to persuade D to take more photos than he would normally have done.


The Swiss Cottage and Garden were given to the Royal princes and princesses by Prince Albert as part of an educational programme - the idea was based on his own childhood experiences. The cottage is designed like a Swiss farmhouse where the children would learn to cook, entertain their parents and learn housekeeping. Each child also had a plot in the garden to grow vegetables and flowers and there was also a museum and a model fort.

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Inside the Swiss Cottage

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This recipe looks tasty. If it goes a bit cooler I think I will try making this pudding.

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The Fort

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We had an icecream before leaving - we missed the minibus back to the house by seconds so we walked back (it was getting hotter!).


I finally managed to persuade D to take a photo of Timothy.

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I have an admission to make! When packing I threw two bears one with a red jumper and one with a blue jumper in the bag thinking I had picked up Osborne and Tennyson but when I arrive I was mortified to find I had left Osborne at home (particularly unfortunate in view of the house we visited!!) but at least Compton had made a return to the island.



The Walled Garden is lovely and fairly quiet and peaceful

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In the evening we went on a Ghost Walk in Bonchurch, Ventnor although E stayed at the cottage- she is not keen on such events although we did once persuade her to attend one! I've been on three of these and they really are very good, a bit spine-chilling but interesting and lots of fun. We attended one at Ventnor Botanical Gardens and Arreton Manor (which was particularly good and very atmospheric) and B and D have also attended walks at Shanklin Old Village and St Catherine's Lighthouse Niton which included supper at The Buddle and more ghostly tales. I gather there are also coach tours which sound rather good.



I'll just show you a few photos and relate a few tales we were told from some of the places we stopped off at during the walk.

A Dakota crashed many years ago up on Boniface Down - and afterwards there were reports of strange goings on and noises at the Radar Station on the Down where it is very eerie when the sea mist rolls in. Dogs in Bonchurch used to get agitated by an unseen presence. The Dakota wreckage was buried at the site (later in the week we went up onto Boniface Down where there is a plaque marking where the plane was buried).

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There are many stories of phantom carriages and horsemen being seen on the roads in Old Bonchurch Village but some of these tales may have been spread by smugglers who wanted to keep the streets as quiet as possible and villagers indoors when they were smuggling contraband.

The pond at Bonchurch is lovely - I have looked for Water Voles here in the past but without success. Water Voles do well on the island as there are no mink.

The Old Smuggler's Cottage - the oldest house in the village - there is a hidden space in the chimney and supposedly a secret tunnel which

emerges behind the house. It was used by smugglers at one time and villagers during the Second World War to take shelter from bombing raids. Ghostly noises have been heard in the kitchen of the cottage.

There were various little acting scenes throughout the walk by smugglers and ghosts. It doesn't pay to be at the front on these walks as you never know what might jump out at you!

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The film Lady Chatterley's Lover was I believe filmed at this house

At this house a nun

was found hung in the stable block and strange noises have been heard in the kitchen.

Winterbourne where Charles Dickens stayed.

The Old Church at Bonchurch - I have visited this church in the daytime and it is charming but in the evening as dusk draws in it is undeniably spooky!

You may be able to make out a cross on this grave if you enlarge the photo. The Reverend William Adams lived at Winterbourne and wrote religious stories. He is buried in this grave with its horizontal iron cross which is a reference to his best known novel called "The Shadow of the Cross".

We walked down a steep narrow path through woods and between houses to emerge on the beach.

A coincidence but these stones bore a slight resemblance to skulls or so I thought.

Looking out to sea where HMS Eurydice sunk mysteriously in 1878 with the loss of 364 men - it is one of Britain's worst peace-time naval tragedies. The ship had been returning to Portsmouth from the West Indies and Bermuda when it rain into a heavy snowstorm just off the coast of Ventnor and capsized. Rescue ships were sent but only 5 survivors were found and only 2 of these lived.

Several ghost ship sightings have been seen of a 3 mast ship with open gun ports which slowly disappeared into the sea.



There were a few more ghostly tales in connection with the ship but I got a little side-tracked watching these Black-headed Gulls which seemed to be having great fun floating in on the waves to the shore and then fluttering back to repeat the experience!

The tour finished with a sword fight on the village green and we were shown a few photos of ghostly apparitions seen on the island.

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In the next post I will take a short break from the holiday and do a post on Packwood House Gardens which I visited briefly last week. The raised terrace walk, herbaceous beds and kitchen garden were looking stunning. Then we will return to the holiday and a walk up onto Tennyson Down and the Tennyson monument at Freshwater.

Sorry for the vast amount of photos again!


*D - Photos taken by my son with the Canon SX50 hs bridge camera

Rest of photos taken by me with the Panasonic Lumix FZ330 bridge camera