Blue Point

It is Sunday. Jamestown, over three miles away by road, and the rest of St Helena is mostly shut and so we are taking the opportunity to do a walk. Various trails cover areas of interest or take you through areas of natural beauty and they seem to be a topic of conversation here: the ones done and not done, their difficulty and suitability for dogs, children or the less adventurous. Today Emma and I planned to head to Blue Point, a location with good sea views at the end of a broad ridge and near the most southerly point of the island. Between the walk and the journey there I should be able to get a feel of what this island has to offer in the way of natural beauty. 

St Helena may be small but she makes you work to move around; to cross its contours requires undulation and switchbacks of its narrow lanes, the crowning of high points and the clinging to edges of small, sharp valleys. And there is a lot of green. The sort of rich green you find in rain forests, the green of massive sprawling foliage and an abundance of water. At least that seems the case in the centre of the island. After a twenty minute journey we parked on a muddy track, surrounded by gorse and grass and sheep, overhead a sky of speeding cloud. A lone tree, bent horizontal by the elements evidence, if it had been needed (it wasn’t), that it gets windy here.

We walked. Mud gave way to gritty rock - shades of rust with streaks of grey-green freed by erosion - and the grass and bushes were replaced by succulents, dry grasses and bushes more suited to the harsher landscape. A mile on even most of that disappeared as we walked an undulating broad ridge of light rock about two thousand feet above the sea to the trail end. Ahead, to the horizon, an ocean of deep blue. To the right the same sea broke against rocks and the dark plunging cliffs of volcanic rock that formed the coastline to our north. To the left the ground dropped away, becoming a wide expanse of rugged, sandy rock. In the distance white lines crossed the ground - guano stained low ridges in the landscape upon which nested local Boobies - and the ground sloped down to the sea and a sandy cove, just visible some three miles away. The whole mixed up area is the remnant of one of two volcanoes that created St Helena. And beyond this more dark cliffs, St Helena's southern coastline. 

We enjoyed the views before retracing our tracks back to the car and home. A high point en route gave views of the volcano's  remains from a different aspect and then it was back to an afternoon of domesticity: feeding  the chickens, checking for eggs and harvesting from the allotment, all important in a place so isolated it receives fresh produce rarely. Oh, and we also fed the giant tortoises that live in the gardens of Plantation house. 

 

Ancient Volcano Bowl