Alderney

Position: 49°42’45.0″N 2°11’42.8″W

Hitching a ride on the current from St. Vaast we crossed the top of the Contentin Peninsula as far as Cherbourg. For the second time in our lives, we decided we didn’t want to explore Cherbourg. From the water it looked hot and dusty. Instead, we tossed out the anchor and bobbed behind the vast seawall that forms the outer harbour.

Doing this ‘legally’ involves contacting the harbour master on the VHF radio and asking for permission. He answered almost immediately and said in perfect English that where we were was a good place to drop. That indicated he had spotted us on AIS (the international Automatic Identification System) and knew almost exactly where we were. He, I think, appreciated that we’d done the right thing and checked in. I say that because he admonished another sailboat for breaking the rules a couple of hours later.

Actually, that entire exchange took place during our stop in Boulogne-sur-Mer three weeks earlier. I mis-remembered where it was in part because both Cherbourg and Boulogne-sur-Mer hide behind massive seawalls that the savvy, skinflint sailor can anchor behind if they ask nicely.

Cherbourg has been a French naval base since 1813. The outer seawall was constructed by Napoleon Bonaparte as part of his defensive strategy against the British. The British, as you know, won that war. Boulogne’s seawall was built in the 1870s and was primarily a commercial venture. It worked. Boulogne was France’s busiest port in the 1920s. Its operations included fishing, industrial cargo, and passenger ships. Both Cherbourg’s and Boulogne’s seawalls need some TLC these days, but the costs to repair them outstrip the benefits. If you’re worried about getting a mooring, you needn’t be. Both cities have large marinas that serve the needs of sailors from both sides of the Channel.

Racey

We timed our departure for Alderney to the micro-second, allowing us a long westerly run with the current across the Alderney Race. The Race runs at up to eight knots west or east and defeated us the first time we attempted it.

Sailing on top of a mass of moving water is a lesson in high school physics. Like tossing a ball on a moving train, your motion is additive and relative. Everything indicated we were doing a stately four of five knots, but the chartplotter calculated our speed-over-ground at eleven knots. Great wells boiled up from someplace deep in the channel and pushed the rudder to and fro with surprising gentleness. Knowing that in another three hours the tide would turn and send all that energy back east, we made sure we could hitch a ride all the way to Braye Harbour.

Tax Haven

As the northernmost of the Channel Islands, Alderney sits outside the European Union. It was our chance to reset Aleta’s VAT clock. Alderney requires you to register your presence with an official form in carbon copy triplicate. You keep the pink copy for your records and to prove you visited the island. That and a receipt from the harbour master for our mooring was all we needed.

Once officially checked-in, it was time to explore the natural beauty of this rugged island. Three miles long and a mile and a half wide makes for a good 10-mile hike around the coastal pathway. Something easily done in five hours, if you’re fit. Having spent the last week at sea, our knees suggested we take our time and cover the distance over two days, instead. That gave us plenty of time to poke our noses into every historical nook and cranny we ran across.

Preoccupations

Humans probably first moved to Alderney 12,000 years ago and never left. The Romans took advantage of Alderney’s strategic location and built a fort there. During the 18^th century privateers, scions of the governing Le Mesurier family, ran the place. Proving that then, as now, politics and crime went hand in hand. During the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) an observation station was built and movements of French warships were relayed via Sark (another nearby island) to the Royal Navy.

As the French expanded their harbour in Cherbourg in the 1840s, the British responded by constructing a massive 1,500m breakwater in Braye Bay on Alderney’s north coast. Calling it a ‘harbour of refuge’ (so as not to upset the French), logic demanded a series of fortifications be constructed to defend it. A total of 13 batteries and barracks were built with rock quarried from the island. The entire project was derided by William Gladstone (a famous British Prime Minister) as, “…a monument of human folly, useless to us … but perhaps not absolutely useless to a possible enemy, with whom we may at some period have to deal and who may possibly be able to extract some profit in the way of shelter and accommodation from the ruins.” The Victorian fortifications are still there. A couple of them were turned into private residences, the rest are in varying degrees of decay.

World War II

A hundred years later the Führer came calling and occupied the island from 1940 to 1945. The entire population of 1,400 were evacuated. Most went to England and a few stragglers spent the war on Guernsey. Given orders to fortify the island as part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the Germans brought in prisoners from eastern Europe and set about working them to death. Two ‘volunteer’ labour camps and two concentration camps housed as many as 6,000 people.

The concentration camps, Lager Norderney (Russians, Poles, and Spaniards) and Lager Sylt (Jews) housed slave labourers. Camps Borkum and Helgoland housed paid staff, whose treatment was harsh, but nothing like the other camps. At least 700 and perhaps as many as 1,200 prisoners died from starvation, overwork, and summary executions during the construction of bunkers, gun emplacements, a hospital, and other fortifications. Alderney was the only British territory occupied by Germany during WWII and the concentration camps the only ones on sovereign British soil^[1].

At the end of the war, the camps and all their records were torched. The islanders returned in late 1945 and started the long process of cleaning up their neglected homes and properties.

Unsettling

Ghosts from the German occupation remain to this day. Turning away from the handsome lighthouse with its giant foghorn on the northeastern shore we hiked west along the spine of the island. About a mile or so in both Carol and I got an unsettling feeling. Passing Russian Hill, a former graveyard for Russian labourers killed during the occupation, the feeling intensified. At the end of the war, the bodies were disinterred and moved to the German war graves in France and only ghosts remain.

A few yards further up the hill a German hospital bunker is an open museum in passably good condition. Walking around a corner just off the main road, I passed under a stand of tenebrous overhanging trees. Two rusted doors, one in and one out, beckon you into the dimly lit and very empty concrete building. Carol had no interest in exploring it, so I was on my own. An informative, self-guided tour takes you through the dank, chilly rooms. Entering the operating room a life-sized two-dimensional plywood surgeon treating his patient en tableau gave me a jump scare. Back outside, the sun felt a little warmer.

Over at the windswept southwestern side of the island, near the airport, the Lager Sylt concentration camp has vanished beneath a field of borage and nettles. Only a trio of melancholy concrete gate posts remain at the entrance to the camp. A granite plaque placed there by ex-prisoners and their families on one of the posts holds stones placed there in remembrance by walkers who made the detour off the main trail.

Time Capsule

In the middle of the island the main road crested a hill and led us down into St. Anne’s. It was like entering a time capsule of 1950s England. Gay bunting with Union Jacks and Guernsey flags lent the narrow main street a celebratory feel. A couple of pubs serve a proper English pint along with jovial, wholly politically incorrect banter to go with it. In the Coronation Inn the locals propping up the bar were mostly our age, give or take 10 years. Several had the same origin story. They had come for a short-term gig or a job on contract and stayed on for the next 30 or 40 years.

Granite plaques commemorating various Royal visits showed up in a few places around town. Several houses sported blue signs indicating a famous person had lived there. Something in dense air and sea breezes induced The Beatles’ producer George Martin to buy a house in St. Anne’s. Elisabeth Beresford, the author of the children’s book series The Wombles, also lived on Alderney. The BBC’s animated vsrsion pre-dated the Teletubbies by 20 years and were more of throwback to the 1960s kids shows I grew up with. Several carved wooden Wombles are scattered about in tribute.

Down at the docks, at the Braye Chippy, we had some of the best fish and chips we’d had in ages. A trio of young women dressed in fetchingly demur Middle Eastern attire waited on us. Alderney, it seems, continues drawing in explorers and adventurers in the way that only remote islands can.

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^[1] The Boer concentration camps run by the British Army were in British occupied territories like the South African Republic, Orange Free State, or colonies like Natal or the Cape Colony. It is a fine line, I know.

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