Re: Have you walked in Mecca? (Wild Cat Island)


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Posted by Duncan Hall on May 01, 2004 at 11:42:50 from 195.93.32.7 user Duncan.

In Reply to: Have you walked in Mecca? (Wild Cat Island) posted by Cynthia_Dschankilic on April 24, 2004 at 02:00:20:


Never been on Peel Island, sadly (though have looked at it wistfully many times and looked down on it from the steep wooded hill above, where it looks very like AR's description when talking about Thorstein of the Mere.

However, I have been to MY Wild Cat Island, under sail, and walked there. It took me till I was in my late teens (having spent years taking little motor boats around the shore of Ramp Holme on Windermere). But in my late teens, with my brother and another friend (all of us keen AR fans) we sailed a dinghy from the bay by the old vicarage (a geographical favourite for Holly Howe Bay if the geography is Windermere) and sailed down to Ramp Holme (counting the car ferry as a very big seal). We actually tied up along one of it's rocky shores and didn't discover too perfectly good landing places until we were actually ashore. One was the landing place, exactly as it is in the book, which took you straight to a perfect, flat camping site, itself under the higher ground where stood a couple of tall pines (second cousins of the original I would suggest!) The other possible landing place was on the rocky end of the island - not a harbour like that on Peel, but you could easily imagine the one pasted onto its less impressive cousin for artistic effect. We saw Roger's bed-time steamer pass close by.

There's a lot wrong with Ramp Home as WCI actually, but there's a lot right with it too. Not least its proximity to Storrs Hall Hotel, where AR had sailed for a pot of tea on the day he began writing SA. It doesn't have the steep rocky sides of Peel, nor is it perfectly north-south aligned. It doesn't have the harbour. But it does have a perfect landing place and camp-site, is in more or less 'the right place' from most descriptions in the books, and was once called Roger Island.

And of course, AR once said WCI was mostly Blake Holme (just to confuse matters!)

Duncan


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