A world in one day

Doing a full circuit of St Helena introduces visitors to history, culture, wild spaces, and extravagant beauty.

 

There is hardly a part of St Helena that isn’t on a slope, so if you’re going to do a tour of the island, a capable, comfortable car is a must. Tour guide Aaron Legg arriving in a Toyota Fortuner 4×4 is an encouraging start to a day’s adventuring.

Heading uphill (predictably), the first stop is one that underlines the ever-present impact of Napoleon. Stopping at the side of the road above Jamestown, it’s possible to look down on Briars Pavilion where the Frenchman stayed for the first few weeks after he arrived for his imprisonment and note how well treated he was, even if he was indisputably a prisoner.

“Over 1,000 English soldiers and the South African navy were all at one point part of the military detail tasked with keeping him from escaping,” explains Legg.

On the hill behind the building, the Heart Shaped Waterfall fits its name, with symmetrical cliff faces mirroring each other and creating a ready-made background for every committed Instagrammer planning a visit.

The next stop is Flagstaff, a peak approached via a gentle gradient on the island side but with a terrifying drop to the sea on the other. Reaching it means driving across Deadwood Plain, site of one of the two Boer War prisoner-of-war camps, which must have been a nasty place to try and set up a tent, as the prevailing wind howls across the open area much of the time.

Now farmland, there are no obvious remains of the POW camp, with two far more positive markers of the present and future taking centre stage: a healthy population of the rare wirebird, endemic to St Helena, and a number of large wind turbines, which generate around a quarter of the island’s energy.

Houses and history

Driving back through the Leadwood area, there is a nondescript house that, in its original form – you can see one of the old walls, but much of the structure has been updated – housed Charles Darwin (during a stopover on the voyage of The Beagle) and Edmund Halley, among other influential visitors fascinated by the island’s unique offerings from a scientific point of view. Visible from there across a valley is a larger house that was the residence of the explorer Captain James Cook when he stopped over during one of his epic voyages.

What is now Longwood village is situated on what was once an estate around the main, large house – Napoleon’s main residence and the place where he died, and now a fascinating museum in the Emperor’s memory – with the main road passing through the estate’s old gateposts.

Out towards the airport, the Millennium Forest features a number of young trees planted to replace vegetation disrupted by the runway’s construction. The heavily eroded slope below reveals layers of soil that, oxidised by exposure to the air, create a gorgeous rainbow of colour.

Around the corner from that, history re-enters the picture with the imposing Turk’s Cap rock formation marking Turk’s Cap Bay and, on the other side of the headland, Prosperous Bay, named for the British ship that moored there during the attack on the island to take it back from the Dutch in 1673. Pity the poor soldiers who had to scale this brutal slope in full gear…

From this vantage point, it’s possible to see the full extent of the airport runway and the eight million cubic metres of soil filled in on the far side so that the landing area could extend far enough for the aircraft needed to service the destination. It’s an astonishing feat of engineering, quite literally supporting the potential of the airport to bring in new trade and tourism.

Wild variety

Up in the island’s southern hills, the Bellstone is a curious little attraction, a boulder – not particularly large – that rings like a bell when struck with a smaller rock. It’s a charming phenomenon, but a quirky reason to trek across the whole island.

The next stop is rather more dramatic. Sandy Bay (Cape Town residents who’ve visited the nude beach of the same name might chortle), reached via a thrilling, hairpin-bend-riddled descent, feels like it could be on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, with craggy cliffs on either side, a mostly pebble beach (despite the location’s name) and, Legg warns, a dangerous rip tide. It’s not a great place to take a dip, but fortifications built to stave off invasions, black sand, and looping, dipping brown-headed boobies (a gannet-like species of bird; again, Capetonians, stay focused, please) make it a striking place to picnic or ponder an existential crisis.

The western side of the island is very different again. The area around Blue Hill is, ironically, incredibly green and a number of local families are sitting and eating together while enjoying magnificent sunset views over an unruffled Atlantic. High Hill is more accurately (and literally) named, and down below that is an area where the locals camp over the Easter weekend called Thompson’s Valley. Legg relates that the name does not refer to a person who achieved something in the area but is rather a mangling of the old name – Tombstone Valley – so-called because of the shape of the rocks protruding from the ground.

Show ’em your guns

Heading back towards Jamestown, Alarm House, where, until 1692, two cannons were fired when unknown ships entered the harbour far below, was part of a more complicated communication system involving cannons elsewhere on the island that Legg wryly observes “generally only dealt with two topics: either it was tea time or there was an invasion.”

There are four more major buildings to stop at before the circuit of St Helena is completed. St Paul’s Cathedral, while nowhere near as large as that St Paul’s Cathedral, is nevertheless imposing – and poignant – with its Commonwealth war graves.

Just more than a stone’s throw away is Plantation House, home of St Helena governors present and past, as well as 191-year-old giant tortoise Jonathan. And there is no question as to who is the greater celebrity…

Lastly, there are two defensive strongholds. Impressive citadel High Knoll Fort is still mostly in good condition, and you can simply arrive and walk around. It’s a hulking presence on the hilltop above the capital city and the harbour, but not a single shot was fired in anger from its scores of gun slots. Arguably its greatest contemporary value, after all the investment involved in building such a behemoth in such a location before there were roads leading to it, is as a site for a number of radio aerials that are hugely important for regional communication.

Ladder Hill Fort, at the head of the stomach-turningly steep 699 steps of Jacob’s Ladder, has a more aggressive personality, though its massive ship’s guns, pointing out to sea, remain silent and hopefully always will.

Text and photography | Bruce Dennill

For more information or to book a tour, visit: sthelenatourism.com

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