The Solent Way: Part 2

Hamble to Portsmouth (14 miles)

After deciding that it was too nice a weekend to waste indoors, I set out on the Solent Way again.  Continuing down the eastern side of Southampton Water, this stage will take us from where we finished last time in Hamble right into the city of Portsmouth.  Having prepared a packed lunch, I was duly down at the station at 9.45 to catch the slow train a few stops down the line to Hamble.

Hamble station (Street View) has the charming attribute of being in the middle of a field.  It's pretty basic, to be honest, just a pair of concrete platforms and a ticket machine next to the road bridge leading into the village. This will mean I have to walk about a mile to reach the quayside and pick up the Solent Way, but I don't particularly mind as there's enough of interest along the main street.  Hamble has plenty of history before new-money sailing businesses came along, and was for most of the last century an important area in the development of aviation. There were not one, but two, airfields in the town; one which just about clings on as a plant for General Electric aviation, and another which is buried under an 80's up-market housing estate.  There's plenty of evidence about though, firstly the Folland Gnat replica serving as a gate guard to the GE site, then further on some information panels with pictorial histories of the various planes and seaplanes built and tested here, and finally a silver miniature Spitfire mounted on swoopy poles as if turning a steep bank over the road.

The rest of the architecture bar the church is typical Georgian brick houses lining the steep lane down to the water (Street View).  The town of Hamble today (or, properly, Hamble-le-Rice, (Street View)) is largely concerned with the construction, maintenance and excise of boats and their accessories.  All kinds, although on the basis of the many vessels moored in the river, it's mostly private yachts that are most at home here. The Hamble River is only about half a mile from ending its modest course into the Solent, so it's fairly deep and allows a convenient base from which to launch one's forty-foot status symbol for a jaunt around the island.  Appropriately enough, I'm heading for a boat trip right now, but not one involving hoisting sails or leaning backwards over the side.  Instead I'm going to take one of the non-walking bits of the Solent Way, the ferry.

On the Hamble-Warsash ferry

I like the Hamble-Warsash ferry. It has a pleasing feeling of being a service rather than just a business enterprise.  To reach it you have to go down onto a gated jetty which looks a tiny bit not-public (with walking boots and a bag I got a funny look from four muscular waterproofed blokes leaving the pontoon), step onto the ferry via an ungated 'people scoop' opening at the front, and give the ferryman £1.50. The boat is pink (apart from the rusty bits) whereas the last time I rode on it, which must have been at least fifteen years ago, it was a more sober white. The captain, though, looks like a real proper sailor in the Captain Birdseye vein, with a white beard, an Arran sweater and a nautical cap. I am the only passenger and he sets off immediately I am aboard.  The passage across the river takes about five minutes, although this is variable depending on the number of yachts gong down the main channel rather than across it, and the number of parked boats it is necessary to weave through, including another similarly pink vessel used for dredging (according to the sign painted on the side). We seem to come alarmingly close to many of them, but the captain's been doing this since he was in short trousers and with a deft hand steers the Emily across the deep water channel and up to a jetty on the Warsash side without anything unfortunate involving anchor cables and the propeller.  There's quite a crowd gathered over here, Saturday traffic clearly being enough to justify getting out the largest vessel in the fleet, with the patronage mostly consisting of families returning from a stroll or dog-walking.  At the end of the jetty is a charming little ferry shelter (also in pink), with a confusing notice informing passengers they'd be better off not using it but instead waiting at the end of jetty, just so the ferryman can be sure they actually want the boat and aren't just resting their legs.

The Hamble River

Off the ferry, the trail goes down a shallow slope to the small quayside at Warsash (Street View). There's a nice pub here as well as a monument noting the area's involvement with D-Day in 1944 - in fact the first of several I'll pass on this walk.  A bit further on at the mouth of the Hamble River is the College of Maritime Studies, with its distinctive jetty and practice scaffold full of orange lifeboats extending out from the land. There's a salt marsh a little way inland, Hook Lake, which looks very tranquil. By contrast, the Solent is buzzing, with ferries, container ships, yachts, jet-skis and freighters punting up and down on voyages of various distances.  Fawley once again looms large across the water, although as I move on the flare stack will become a useful marker to determine how far I've come.  It's a warm day, with a breeze just strong enough to cool without being a problem.

Appropriately enough to lead on from the last paragraph, the next feature we come to is the Solent Breezes holiday park. The Solent Way used to follow the shoreline across the front of the static caravans, but that's not the case now because a lot of the shoreline isn't there any more. It's a cliff top, you see, and cliff tops have a habit of getting undercut by the waves and falling into the water, such that the trailers with the best view are now the ones most in danger of disappearing over it. The authorities realised that it was probably sensible to take walkers somewhere else than over a crumbling bit of sandstone, so there's now a detour round the back of the caravans and past a National Grid transformer station to join the rest of the cliffs which are holding up a bit better. You can still get through the bushes where the path would originally have come out, and see just how precarious it is.  Whilst the caravans are still at a safe distance, for now, there's at least one section of fence which hasn't long for this world.

Carrying on along the cliff-top, the view of the surrounding landscape becomes notably more expansive. The Isle of Wight's quite clearly outlined even in today's hazy air, a reminder that I'm reaching the point where the shoreline starts to turn to meet up with the English Channel.  Across the water the New Forest gradually recedes as the estuary widens away from the drum of Calshot castle perched at the end of its eponymous spit.  From this point onwards I start to scan the eastward horizon periodically for an important landmark indicating journey's end - the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth. No sign yet, but sooner or later the slender white spire will appear in the distance. After a mile or two, the path descends past a small beach, goes up another modest hillock and then becomes flat again at sea level and a row of small buildings appears. They're technically beach chalets, but most are half-way to being proper bungalows, with double-glazed verandas, solar panels or wind turbines for power (not in short supply here) and most with an upturned dinghy outside.  I join the various hand-holding couples, surfers, kite-flyers, paddlers and dogs flagrantly ignoring the 'private beach' notice and carry on around the curve of the bay (not missing the opportunity to use a thoughtfully-placed toilet stop) towards Hill Head.  This is another geography that's changed a lot over time, being the mouth of the River Meon. The sandbanks that gave this its original name of Hell Head have been tidied up along with the construction of a harbour and sluice gate for the river channel.  The other way, inland, everything's rather special. The river now ends in a giant reed bed, Tichfield Haven. which means that local twitchers have the chance to spot. It's quite a striking contrast between the colourful harbour behind and the serenity of the brown estuary before.

View Larger Map

All the beach huts here are green, and a few are open with their tenants inside enjoying the weather.  There's still not really a proper beach but this hasn't tempered the availability of watersports, chiefly sailing in small one-man boats and kite-surfing.  I haven't the faintest idea how to sail a dinghy but it looks highly diverting - at least nearly as good as walking. I always wonder whether anybody else is going the same way as me or as far.  It's remarkable, given the reasonable probability that somebody else may be walking a particular stretch of a particular footpath, that one never follows or engages in swapping places with another hiker, the way that you keep up with another car on a motorway.  Clearly everybody must have a sufficiently different pace or timing that no two path-followers run together. I keep stopping to take pictures too, which mixes things up a bit.

Presently there's a village and the Solent Way diverts a little round beach-front properties. The more urban section brings more people to share the footway with and I have to weave around pushchairs, dogs and wobbling teenage scooters. Horse riders hold up the traffic going the other way.  Periodically, an unidentified engine noise from the other side of the embankment is followed by the appearance overhead of a little yellow glider, which nervously turns over the sea and heads back to the landing strip before it runs out of sky. A mile or so further along the shore is the first proper town on this walk, Lee-on-the-Solent.  Lee (Street View) looks like a proper seaside town from the start, with a long straight road parallel to and slightly above the shore, neat grass and conservatively-styled apartments.  In the centre of the town are some nice quasi-Art-Deco shop fronts and a raised promenade area which add to the ambiance.  There used to a be a pier too, although that's long since vanished.  The amusement arcade on the beach front and the car park behind it used to be the terminus of the little-used Lee-on-Solent railway, which was a distinctly unprofitable entity and soldiered on as little more than a parliamentary service until 1931, with six men and a dog on the last passenger train. There's also a slipway, which is handy for the jet-skiers to launch from, although it's size seems to suggest some greater purpose. It's really very large indeed. Mysteriously large - in fact it's big enough to be used a car park. Oh...

Looking through the resulting break in the embankment I realise why. At the top of the slope, across the road, two huge propellers and a cabin with a radar assembly on top tower over a huge white superstructure. There's a sort of drawbridge-like door at the front of this massive machine, on which its name is written: hovercraft.

Several 'air-cushion vehicles' at Lee

I like hovercraft. They have an endearingly eccentric character about them; slightly cobbled-together from unlikely combinations of components like an assorted Lego set, as if nobody has quite worked out how to neaten it all up yet, a mad idea that has not yet realised quite how excessively complicated it has become. They are the only machines I know which have floppy bits as part of the design and make an amazing racket even before they move anywhere. One can only imagine the joy of test-driving  - or more accurately, test-flying - an early model and finding that not only did your bizarre invention actually work, it also went like the clappers on both land and water.  This corner of the military airfield at HMS Daedalus is the world's only Hovercraft Museum and houses seventy different 'air cushion vehicles' of diverse sizes and designs, some in working order, others still under restoration. I particularly like the craft I first spotted, the giant SR.N4 The Princess Margaret, mostly for the four massive propeller towers mounted on top that look like they were just put there to impress, like the tail fins on 1950s American cars.  This is a machine that can carry sixty cars, 170 passengers and still exceed 70mph! - which in 1969 was almost as exciting as putting a space rocket on the moon, especially when the whole project was a British endeavour.  This site is closed to the public most of the time (apart from visits by special arrangement) but there is a poster advertising open days in the forthcoming months.

Much danger lurks at Browndown.

After the crowds (and it really is crowded, everyone's outside this afternoon) of Lee the Solent Way comes up against a sturdy-looking fence and a gate with warning notices, which luckily happens to be open. Sometimes you have to divert around the next two miles, for Browndown is an irregularly-used military range, although they no longer use live fire here. The landscape is lonely and bleak in the extreme. Civilisation, houses and streets and yachts are not far away at all, yet all are hidden beyond the shingle and the scrubby, arid sandbanks behind. After an indeterminate period of time struggling across the millions of pebbles I come across the ruined remains of some small buildings, not knowing whether they were once complete or whether they were built this way to simulate the effects of bombing and shelling.  The place is entirely a desolate military landscape, parched and barren even when warfare is absent from it.  I imagine this is what it must be like in a nuclear winter; only the stones and the hardiest of grasses survive.  Actually, my pontificating on the desolation of war is some way from the truth: if you know where to look there's life here that you won't find elsewhere precisely because the area is less well-trod: birds, lizards, grasses and algae unique to the Solent coast. It you look a little further, the place offers the first sight of a landmark I'd been looking out for all day: Spinnaker Tower, where I'll end, in the centre of Portsmouth.

Nonetheless, I'm glad to leave and rejoin Stokes Bay on a tarmacked promenade with families and dogs and ice-cream. I pass an old fort which is now a museum of diving: as if to prove this, there are old iron minisubs on plinths outside, slightly rusted and with fogged glass.  A while further on, at the lifeboat station (entirely funded by the local community), the coastguard tractor sits ready to tow a lifeboat out of the water, but clearly nobody needs rescuing right now, firstly as the sea's so calm and secondly because the crew are in a staff meeting, audible through the open shutters.  After this the landscape turns back to grass (again very neat and Windows XP, must be something in this area) and reaches the southernmost point of this walk - indeed, the entire Solent Way this side of Southampton.  It's a location offering a more-than-decent view of Portsmouth, which made it an idea location for defending the city from the French/Spanish/French/Germans/Germans depending on in what period of history it was deemed necessary. To this effect the army built Fort Gilkicker, a curiously-shaped structure which formed part of the chain of brick blockhouses in this area.  In the nineteenth-century a huge earth bank was added to the front which it's possible to climb (I didn't spot the steps until after getting back down on hands and knees and picking up several thorny plants in the process) although you won't see much inside other than the modern radar installation and a lone guard, indifferent to the teenagers on the other side of his fence.

Fort Gilkicker

It's reminder of the importance of the armed forces to this area, chiefly the Navy, but all the services have a presence here and have done for the last few centuries.  The next section of shore is completely taken up with military properties, including the controversial Haslar Immigration Removal Centre and the hospital next door.  Because of this, the Solent Way has to divert and crosses a golf course with the wearily familiar 'Private land - keep on path' notices (which always translate as 'We wish we could prevent you walking right next to our exclusive lawn but legally we can't, so we'll just make you feel as unwelcome as possible'), then some suburban avenues, then a tunnel-like road closed in by the high walls of military barracks and whatever else they have here (Street View).  At the end of the road there's a slender arched bridge (Street View) over Haslar Marina and its thousands of yachts. Over the water is the one military installation you can visit - HMS Alliance, which forms the greater part of the Submarine Museum. After a career sneaking around underwater and subsequently sitting on the quayside it's in need of some restoration work, and looks it too, certainly not the shade of black it started out in.

I've very nearly at the end of my journey but as there's a ferry across the harbour every six minutes there's time for a short detour to get a picture of Holy Trinity Church.  It's an attractive building in dark brick with narrow square tower, more like German or Italian ecclesiastical architecture than the usual British block.  It's also where my trio gave a concert two weeks ago (the whiff of incense is still in the air). Arriving at Gosport waterside there's a magnificent view of Portsmouth in the late afternoon light.  I've never had a chance to ride the Gosport Ferry and am pleased to find it a very efficient way to cross the water (although I wasted half my ticket as they only issue returns). It's by far the best way to enter Portsmouth, what with a superb view of the Spinnaker Tower, HMS Warrior and all the various categories of naval ships and ferries steaming in and out of port. The green and white vessel only requires four minutes to leave Gosport and dock again at the Harbour station, which puts me neatly finishing underneath the tower I'd been using as a guidepost throughout the afternoon.

Panorama of Portsmouth from Gosport

And that's it for now. Suffice to say I returned to Southampton, after waiting 40 minutes to change trains, to find the city in jubilant mood after a 2-0 victory over Doncaster.