Tennyson

Today the Minis went to Freshwater for an encounter with the former poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who had a home there.

We started by climbing up the hill onto Tennyson Down, above Freshwater Bay.  It s a tough climb!

More climbing and we arrived at the Tennyson Memorial, which is a big cross on top of Tennyson Down.  Lots of people climb this far, but not so many go further.

We could get a better view, of the whole memorial, from the bottom of the hill.

We carried on, off of Tennyson Down and onto High Down, which leads to the famous Needles rocks, off the west coast of the island.  We cannot see the Needles on this walk as we are directly above them, we will visit them from a different place another day.

As you can see from the previous picture, there is gorse all over High Down.  The Minis liked the vibrant yellow.  Mini Snuffy said he felt inspired by the colour.

One thing that really surprised the Minis was how dry the island is.  People think that we get a lot of rain in England.  However, the ground everywhere is like this.  We are in the middle of a drought, we have had no proper rain for months.  It is often like this in the south of England.  The Minis thought this was a very unexpected thing in England and that they would you all know.