Think of the Isle of Wight and you automatically think of the Needles those pinnacles of rock that the lighthouse, that guides the mariners in the Solent, clings to. Now completely automated the lighthouse crew are no more.

On the High Downs is a granite column that marks the height, and it was here that Tennyson would com in all weathers to climb the downs that he loved so much and enjoying the sweeping views both over land and sea. He discovered this place when he was just a struggling poet,  long before he became famous. He had invested a little money in a railway and with that and £500 that he earned from his poetry he thought this would suffice and so he came to Farringford. He described the view from his windows as a 'miracle of beauty' and he loved to wander the countryside and to do a little farming, and above all he loved his garden and began to make a dictionary of flowers.

He would go about in a green coat and a big brimmed hat but he was thought to be aloof from the normal village folk, who used to say "once round Tennyson's hat twice round Freshwater."

During the tourist season his house is open to the public and there hangs in his drawing room a beautiful portrait of Lady Tennyson by GF Watts and in his drawing room, which is still pretty much as he had left it, is the high-backed chair and his desk in the windows with his tobacco jar and candlestick.

The playroom can be reached via a turret stair and it is now filled with some lovely intimate items, a cast of Tennyson's hand, a small manuscript book that has a poem called Armageddon written when he was  15 years old, his pipes, paper-knife, pruning knives, pens, quills, paint-box, seals and even some of his tobacco. Some of his much loved books are also here, including Don Quixote in Spanish, the Bible in Herbrew, Virgil and Goethe. and those things that were associated with his last days including Shakespeare opened at Cymbeline and his New Testament, nightcap and his medicine glass. Also there is a white pall that is embroidered with flowers, and Queen Victoria's laurel wreath and the card on which she wrote the tribute to a poet whose fame would outlast her own, "A tribute of true regard and affectionate admiration from his sovereign."

He would often stand watching the moonlight over the sea from the garden path which runs through the trees and over a small bridge. He wrote Enoch Arden in the summerhouse whose walls he himself painted with peacocks.

Not far away is the village with its church, but Tennyson died at Blackdown in Sussex and now rests in the abbey, but  Lady Tennyson's  grave is by the east wall of the churchyard. They died at the same age with just four years between them and the happiness of their life together can  be seen in the words on Lady Tennyson's grave: 'Dear, near, and true, no truer Time himself can prove you, though he make you evermore dearer and nearer.'

A stone says that the poet spent his happiest days at Farrigford and on it are two lines:

Speak, living voice, with thee death is not death;
Thy life outlives the life of dust and breath.

The church was restored at the time that Tennyson lived at Farringford, and looks almost new outside, but the arcades are around 800 years old, and , hidden between two doors in the north aisle, can be found a small Norman doorway. The font is also on a Norman base. The chancel arch is 15th century, and nearby  are two tablets in marble frames in memory of Tennyson and his son Lionel, who died while returning from India in 1886 and was buried at sea. Lionel had grown up in Farringford and had gone to the India Office and while on a visit to Lord Dufferin he contracted jungle fever and was between life and death for about three months. He died in the Red Sea and it was here that he was placed in a coffin and lowered into the sea.

Not there to bid my boy farewell,
When That within the coffin fell,
Fell and flashed into the Red Sea,
Beneath a hard Arabian moon
And alien stars,

The tablet to Lionel in the church has these four lines by the poet:

Truth, for truth is truth, he worship!, being true as he was brave,
Good, for good is good, he followed, yet he looked beyond the grave:
Truth for truth and good for good! the Good, the True, the Pure, the Just!
Take the charm for ever from them, and they crumble into dust.

There are two small chapels here, both 13th century, and in one there is a small brass portrait of a man dressed in armour with his feet on a lion; who is believed to be Adam de Compton.

At the eastern end of the south aisle are the matrices of two brasses  painted black on the white walls. When sailing to the Isle of Wight, in the evening, the traveller  must always remember that it was while crossing here that Tennyson wrote the most familiar and most moving of all his poems, the 16 lines of Crossing the Bar. They came in a moment, he said to one who described the poem as crowning his literary work, but Dr Jowett was right when he predicted that they would be immortal:

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

Robert Hooke was born at Freshwater, the son of a parson and he began his life in the summer of 1635 as the most miserable example of humanity that can be imagined! But this poor little crooked boy turned out to be the cleverest man of his age, but due to him being a little quarrelsome, history has never given him credit. He made some amazing mechanical toys in his childhood and he loved books, in fact he mastered six books of Euclid in one week!  He invented things alone without help and claimed that a hundred discoveries were due to him alone!  He performed around a hundred experiments in front of the Royal Society, but he was not a person who boasted and being from a poor background he could not afford to buy tools and made most of them himself.

He had the idea of gravitation long before Isaac Newton and had an idea of a mechanical flying machine. He discovered all he could about the function of air in regard to breathing and also combustion and made pneumatic tyres possible, he even worked out the law of gravity. By using a pendulum he proved the movement of the planet and invented a circular pendulum especially for watches and a working model to make electric clocks. He ascertained how sound was made and told Samuel Pepys how many times the  wings of a humming insect beat in a second. He also discovered how light is made up and what heat was, and the wonders of the microscope led to improvements in telescopes which led to the him laying the foundations of astronomy.

Text courtesy of: Southern Life (UK)