The Needles for tea.

Today we took the most spectacular scheduled bus ride in the UK, from Alum Bay up along the edge of the cliffs to The Alum Bay New Battery (late Victorian - 400 feet above sea-level). The underground museum there is Covid-closed. A few minutes walk away is a spectacular view down onto the Needles and Scratchell's Bay.

Behind you at that point is the High Down secret engine-testing station for the UK missile programme in the 1960s & 70s: Black Knight and Black Arrow (see here) rocket engines were blasted off on the huge concrete structures on the cliff-side, before going to Woomera to be launched.

The photo was taken down the cliff a couple of hundred feet, in the tea room at the Old Battery (early Victorian). The tea room is in the old control tower.

So why such a dowdy photo? Well, when I wuz a nipper (again - sorry), this end of the Island was completely unknown to us. It was a top secret military zone, surrounded by barbed wire throughout the rocket testing period. We only heard about the testing long after it stopped. So this photo (a bit like yesterday's) is taken from a place I could never had been when I lived on the Island, from inside a building I had never seen, let alone entered.

The whole area is now National Trust. Ordinary tea and Victoria sponge cake (shared). Too windy for my Panama.