ALDERNEY, SARK, AND THE LESSER ISLANDS
Hitherto, in dealing with the two larger of the Channel Islands, we
have found their claims to natural beauty in their coasts. The
interior of Jersey is no doubt pleasant, with its lush-green valleys
running north and south, with its quiet little villages, and with its
never-ending potato-fields. The interior of Guernsey, on the other
hand, is frankly hideous, save here and there a cottage, or a
picturesque old farm, hidden in the folding of some safely secluded
dell. But in both cases alike the real distinction of the island is
limited to cliffs that for warmth of colour and strangeness of
contortion can surely be paralleled in Cornwall alone. Sark, on the
contrary, is almost wholly coast; the interior in comparison is a
negligible quantity! And almost as much may be said of Alderney. Both
these islands are exceedingly small--Sark being only a trifle more
than three miles in length, and about one and three-quarters of a mile
in breadth (measuring, not precisely from east to west, but at right
angles to the axis); and Alderney being about three and a half miles
in length, from north-east to south-west, and one and a quarter miles
in breadth. Alderney is undoubtedly the less beautiful of the two, and
is probably by far the least frequently visited of all the different
members of the Norman archipelago. The voyage from St. Peter Port, in
a very small boat, and made only two or three times in a week, is
dreaded, and not without reason, by those for whom rough seas have no
welcome. Alderney, again, is the least foreign of the Channel Islands
in local colour, though nearest France in situation; and here the old
Norman patois has been entirely replaced by English. It possesses in
its capital, St. Anne, a small, old-fashioned country town that is
wholly without parallel anywhere else in the islands. The harbour is
at Braye, a short mile north from the centre of the town; and the
visitor, in strong contrast with what happens at Sark, is landed in
the least romantic corner of the island. Of the old church nothing now
remains but a picturesque tower, and even this does not seem to be
mediæval. The new church was erected from designs by Sir Gilbert
Scott, and is, perhaps, the most striking modern building in the
Channel Islands. The interior of Alderney, or Aurigny, to use the
French form--
Her crew hath seen Castile's black fleet, beyond Aurigny's isle--
is strongly individualized, and rather wild and remote. One feels at
once that this little island has a flavour of its own--a state of
things no longer felt among the villadom and glass-houses of Guernsey.
The strength of Alderney, however, lies chiefly in its west and south
coasts; no one would visit the island except to visit these, or unless
one happened to be an enthusiast for the world's neglected and
inaccessible spots. I do not know how far the barbarous quarrying that
was projected some six or seven years ago on the south side of the
island has since been carried out, or how far it has injured the
amenities of the coast. Anyhow, the Two Sisters, towards the
south-west corner of the island, are hardly to be rivalled in their
splintered grandeur, even in Jersey or Sark.
To Sark we come at last in our long exploration of the Channel
Islands, and for Sark we may well be content to have waited patiently,
and to have wandered far. For this, by universal acclamation, is
certainly the gem of the whole group. Already we have often seen it in
the distance--a long, level line of cliff (save where broken by the
Coupée)--from the north coast of Jersey, or from the piers at St.
Peter Port. Now, as we approach it more closely, threading the narrow
strait between Herm and Jethou, and doubling the cliffs of Little Sark,
at the south corner of the island, this hitherto unbroken, monotonous
wall begins to resolve itself into an infinity of broken cliffs and
promontories, isolating and half concealing a thousand fairy-like
bays. Surely nowhere else is another coast like this--everywhere so
irregular in its general trend and outline--everywhere so deeply
bitten into by the mordant unrest of the sea. Sark, we have said
already, is little else than coast; and certainly it is the coast
which first arrests and charms us, and the coast which lingers last
and most clearly in our memory, when other impressions begin to be
obliterated, or vanish altogether in the steady lapse of years. Not a
yard of this gracious girdle of cliff is monotonous, or repeats
itself, or is even grim (as parts of the coast of Alderney are grim),
or is relatively less interesting, or less beautiful, or dull;
everywhere and always it is singularly lovely, and everywhere and
always at the same high pitch. There is really very little to be said
about Sark, except that the whole island is beautiful throughout:
there is nothing to be gained by giving a long catalogue of successive
promontories, caves, and bays. It was thus that Olivia made a schedule
of her beauty--"_item_, two lips indifferent red; _item_, two grey
eyes, with lids to them; _item_, one neck, one chin, and so
forth"--and at the end of the inventory we have no better picture of
the real Olivia than before she was thus appraised in detail.
[Illustration: THE SISTER ROCKS, ALDERNEY.
This island is generally ignored by visitors to the group, but the
quaint little town of St. Anne and the fine rocks at the southern end
are quite worth seeing.]
The history of Sark, for so small an island, is unusually interesting,
and in some respects instructive. It is set out by Miss Carey in an
interesting chapter, and some of its episodes may be summarized here.
Sark, like its sister islands, must have been occupied by neolithic
man, for the remains of two poor dolmens still exist in the island,
and formerly, no doubt, there were very many more. St. Magloire, in
the sixth century, built a chapel and founded a small monastery in
the island, but apparently he found it unpopulated when first he
arrived. In the middle of the fourteenth century the island was
inhabited by a crew of lawless wreckers, who were a menace to the
navigation of the whole Manche. The merchants of Rye and Winchelsea
then put their heads together, and agreed to do by subtlety what they
could not effect by force. Landing on Sark with an armed force must
well-nigh have been impossible, till Helier de Carteret cut his tunnel
through the rocks, when he colonized the island in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth. The merchants, accordingly, constructed a piece of strategy
that may well have been borrowed from the Trojan horse, but in that
case was certainly invested with much ingenious detail of its own. The
story is told by Sir Walter Raleigh in his _History of the World_,
though, as Miss Carey points out, he postdates the incident by some
200 years, and describes it as having occurred to the crew of a
Flemish ship. "Yet by the industry of a gentleman of the _Netherlands_
[the island] was in this sort regained. He anchored in the Road with
one Ship, and, pretending the death of his Merchant, he besought the
_French_ that they might bury their Merchant in hallowed Ground, and
in the Chapel of that Isle.... Whereto (with Condition that they
should not come ashore with any Weapon, not so much as with a Knife),
the _French_ yielded. Then did the _Flemings_ put a coffin into their
Boat, not filled with a Dead Carcass, but with Swords, Targets, and
Harquebuzes. The French received them at their Landing, and, searching
everyone of them so narrowly as they could not hide a Penknife, gave
them leave to draw their Coffin up the Rocks with great difficulty....
The Flemings on the Land, when they had carried their Coffin into the
Chapel, shut the Door to them, and, taking their Weapons out of the
Coffin, set upon the French."
The final settlement of Sark--which the French call Serq--dates only
from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when Helier de Carteret established
himself on the then deserted island, and planted there forty families,
whom he brought from his native Jersey. He also built a church, and
instituted a Presbyterian Vicar, Cosmé Brevint--being himself a
Presbyterian--who continued to hold office till his death in 1576,
being one who spared, or flattered, no one, "great or small, in his
reprehensions." It is rightly said that the constitution of Sark is
still largely feudal in character. The land is parcelled out into the
original forty holdings, and some of these are said still to be held
by descendants of the original holders. The lord of the island is
still the Seigneur, though the lordship has passed from the hands of
the de Carterets--it is said that they were compelled to part with it
by reason of their lavish expenditure on the thankless Stuart cause.
In the so-called "Battery" at the back of the Manor-House is one of
the old guns that were given by Elizabeth to Helier de Carteret. It is
inscribed, "Don de Sa Majesté la Royne Elizabeth, au Seigneur de Serq,
A.D. 1572."
Of the smaller islands of the Norman archipelago only a word or two
need be added here. Roughly halfway between Sark and Guernsey, and
separated from each other by a narrow passage that is difficult to
navigate by reason of its hidden rocks and surging tides, are the
small twin islands of Jethou and Herm. The latter is now occupied by a
German Prince, the great-grandson of the famous Prussian leader, the
exact place of whose meeting with Wellington after the field of
Waterloo--whether at Belle Alliance, or farther along the road towards
Genappe--has often been made the topic of historical discussion, and
is anyhow the subject of a well-known picture. Jethou is considerably
the smaller of the two, and is principally devoted to the purpose of a
rabbit-warren. In Herm are some remains of the old Chapel of St.
Tugual, incorporated with the outbuildings of the present manor-house.
Previous to 1770 Herm was inhabited by deer; and Mr. Bicknell tells us
that they "used to take advantage of the tide to swim over to the Vale
in Guernsey to feed, returning on the next tide." Certainly it is
lucky that there are now no deer in Herm, since they would not find
much pasture now at Vale.
Jethou and Herm belong to Guernsey, and once, no doubt, were
physically parts of it. As seen from St. Peter Port, with Sark dimly
descried on the distant horizon, they still contribute largely to
Guernsey's most charming seascape. Alderney and Sark, again, have each
their attendant isle. Jersey alone, though the biggest of them all, is
a planet without a satellite. The islet peculiar to Sark is Brecqhou,
or the Ile des Marchants, which lies off its west coast, and is
separated from it by the narrow Gouliot Strait, only a few hundred
yards wide. Though measuring more than seventy acres, and possessed of
a small landing-place, it is at present as innocent of human
habitation as was Sark itself immediately before the coming of Helier
de Carteret. Burhou is situated at a considerably greater distance to
the north-west of Alderney, from which it is separated by the
never-resting Swinge. This is, perhaps, the least visited among all
the lesser islands, as is Alderney itself among the major four.
INDEX
_The principal reference is given first after names_
Alderney, 54, 32, 46, 53, 57, 61, 62
Architecture, 8
Amy, Dean, 42
Bailiff Helier Gosselin, 42
Bandinel, David, Dean, 13-16
Bandinel, James, 16
Bandinels and Carterets, quarrel of, 121
Beaumont, 24
Blücher, Prince, 60
Bordeaux Harbour, 44
Braye, Alderney, 54
Brecqhou, 61
Burhou, 62
Cabbage-stalks, giant, 19
Carteret, 5, 9
Carteret, Helier de, 58, 59, 60, 62
Carteret, Lady, 13, 14
Carteret, Sir George, 15
Carteret, Sir Philip de, 12, 13, 14
Castle Cornet, 36, 37, 42
Cattle, Guernsey, 33
Chantrey chapels, 26
Charles II., 22, 23, 24, 39
Christina, Queen of Sweden, 39
Civil War, the, 13
"Clameur de Haro," 7
Cloche, James de la, eldest illegitimate son of Charles II., 22
Cobo Bay, 49
Corbet, Major Moses, 22
Corbière Point, 25, 27
Coupée, the, Sark, 56
Coutances, 5, 7
Creux des Fées, 52, 45
Creux-du-Vis, or Devil's Hole, 29
Creux Mahie, 48
Cromlechs, see Dolmens
Dolmens, 27, 44, 45, 47, 52, 57
Du Guesclin, Bertrand, 17
Elizabeth Castle, 24, 13, 26, 36
Font at Prince's Tower, Jersey, 19
French language and patois, 6-7
Gaultier de la Salle, Bailiff, 40, 42
Gaultier, Ranulph, 42
Gorey, 10
Gouffre, the, 30, 48
Gouliot Strait, 61
Granite quarries, 44
Grève de Lecq, 28, 29
Grouville, 26
Grouville, churches of, 20
Guernsey, 30-61
Guernsey, south coast of, 47
Guillemine, Gilbert, 42
Hauteville House, 39
Henrietta Maria, Queen, 11
Heretic-burning in Guernsey, 42
Herm, 60, 61, 39
Hugo, Victor, 38, 39, 40
Icart Bay, 47
Icart Point, 47
Ile de Guerdain, 25
Ile des Marchants, 61
Intensive cultivation, 33
"Iron Mask, Man with the," 23
Ivy Castle, 43, 44
Janvrin's Tower, 25
Jersey, 5-31
Jersey churches, 18
Jersey, coast of, 28
Jersey cows, 33
Jethou, 61, 39, 60
Kirkby Malham, 46
Kit's Coty House, 45
L'Ancresse Common, 44
La Houle, 30
La Moye Point, 25, 47, 48
L'Erée, 51, 52
Le Fret Point, 25
Lihou, 51
Louis XIV., 23
Lukis Museum at St. Peter Port, 46
Mabon, Richard, Dean of Jersey, 18
Massey, Perotine, 42
Millbrook, 24
Minquiers, 17
Mont Orgueil Castle, 5, 9-19, 27
Mont St. Michel, 5, 24, 44, 50, 51
Morris, Colonel, 13
Moulin Huet, Guernsey, 47
Mouriers Waterfall, 30
Navigation of the Jersey Seas, 17
Noirmont Point and Bay, 25
Norman speech, relics of, 6, 54
Old Government House Hotel, 39
Old Priaulx Library, 39
Perelle Bay, 49
Petit Bot Bay, 48
Pierson, Major, 22
Pleinmont, 47, 48, 49
Pompadour, Mme., 39
Pontefract Castle, 13, 24
Portelet Bay (Guernsey), 48
Portelet Bay (Jersey), 25
Primroses in Guernsey and Sark, 34, 35
Prince's Tower, Jersey, 18, 27, 35
Priory of Notre Dame de la Roche, 51
Prynne, William, 11, 13, 15
Raleigh, Sir W., 58
Robert, Duke of Normandy, 44
Roche à la Fée, 45
Rocquaine Bay, 49
Rozel, Jersey, 28, 30
Rullecourt, 20, 22
Sacrament, refusal of, 14
St. Anne, Alderney, 54
St. Apolline Chapel, 49, 50
St. Aubin Bay, 24
St. Aubin's, 24
St. Brelade's Bay, 25
St. Brelade's Chapel, 26, 51
St. Brelade's Hotel, cross at, 27
St. Helier, 21, 9, 22, 24, 45
Ste. Marie du Chastel, 21
St. Ouen's Bay, 17
St. Ouen's Church, 14
St. Ouen's Manor, 27
St. Peter Port, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 43, 54, 61
St. Peter's Church, Guernsey, 52
St. Sampson's, Guernsey, 25, 43
St. Tugual, Chapel of, Herm, 61
Saints' Bay, 47
Sark, 31, 53-60
Sark, the Creux Derrible, 29
Sark, the Manor House, 60
Scott, Sir Gilbert, 55
Serpent legend, a, 18
Snakes, absence of, 33
Sorel Point, 30
Star Chamber, the, 11
_Stella_, loss of the, 18
Sunday in Jersey, 9
Swinge, the, 62
Torteval, 40, 48, 49
Vale Castle, 43, 44
Vale Church, 44, 46
Vazon Bay, 49
Wall-paintings at St. Brelade's, 26
West Park, Jersey, 24
Wordsworth, Wm., 6
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