Ventnor

Seafront character

The Spyglass Inn sits at the western end of the Esplanade, its walls crammed with maritime memorabilia collected over more than thirty years, much of it a nod to Ventnor Bay's smuggling past. Muddy boots and well-behaved dogs are welcome, there are real ales, and the views open out across the English Channel. The town behind it climbs steeply. Ventnor is built on steep slopes beneath St Boniface Down, tumbling to a small bay of reddish chert sand and flint pebbles. Henry James wrote that it "hangs upon the side of a steep hill... like one of the bright-faced towns that look down upon the Mediterranean."

Up in the town, on Victoria Street, the Volunteer is a two-room adults-only pub built in 1866 and commonly called the smallest on the Island. No fruit machines, no video games, no children — just up to three real ales, including a local brew, a Sunday meat draw and live music after it. It has won the local CAMRA Pub of the Year and Real Ale awards.

From the Haven to the garden

For food, the working fishery at Ventnor Haven sells locally landed shellfish and fish and chips just east of the beach. A walk west, reached only on foot down Love Lane, brings you to Steephill Cove, a car-free fishing hamlet where the Crab Shed serves homemade crab pasties, mackerel ciabattas and fresh fish tacos from Easter to September. It is run by Jim and Mandy Wheeler, and Amanda Wheeler's seascape paintings are sold nearby. Further along, the 22-acre Botanic Garden grows subtropical species in Britain's warmest garden microclimate, some five degrees above the UK average, and welcomes dogs on leads in the garden, though café rules may vary.

The making of a health resort

That microclimate helped the town develop as a health resort. Until the 1830s the site was a few fishermen's huts, a couple of inns and a farm. Then Dr James Clark's 1830 book praised the air for chest complaints — "nothing along the south coast will bear comparison with it" — and Ventnor became a health resort, reached by 1866 by a railway line, its Ryde–Ventnor express nicknamed the Invalid Express. Karl Marx wintered here twice, at 1 St Boniface Gardens, and told Engels "this island is a little paradise." The railway is long gone. There is no station now; the nearest is at Shanklin, four miles off, with Southern Vectis buses on routes 3 and 6 linking to other island towns.

Walking the downs and Undercliff

The walking is the real draw. St Boniface Down rises half a mile north to 241 metres, the highest point on the island, chalk downland grazed by feral goats and thick with butterflies. West runs the Undercliff, closed to cars since a 2014 landslip and left to walkers — the largest urban landslide complex in north-west Europe. The ground here is unstable blue slipper clay, and it periodically cracks the roads.

Ventnor's wall lizards

One of those roads has small tunnels built beneath it. Ventnor holds the largest and oldest British colony of common wall lizards.