A sad tale..

This morning walking round Foulon Cemetery in St Peter Port (am I the only one who finds that a fascinating pastime?) I came across a fenced off piece of ground with the names of 18 muslim sailors who were drowned when their ship was wrecked off l'Eree on the north west coast of the island.

I ran into the gravedigger! Gravediggers are always full of information - and this one was very keen to talk about his cemetery and some of the history of it. "Over here are burried two and a half thousand bodies, reinterred from a plague cemetery in Town" That kind of thing. Yes, very interesting people - after all, who told Hamlet that the skull belonged to Yorik?

Anyway, he knew all about the wreck of the MV Prosperity on a January night in 1974. It seems she was a Cypriot cargo boat, laden with timber. She ran aground on the reef called La Conchee. According to my new friend, if they had all just sat tight aboard, they could have waded to safety in the morning, but instead they took to the lifeboats and were dashed to death on the rocks. Timber was washed up all along the Guernsey coast for weeks.

He sent me off in search of this monument which overlooks the place where the drama unfolded.

Islands are, of course, always surrounded by tales of shipwreck. I look forward to visiting the museum of shipwrecks at some point in time - if the weather deteriorates!