I’d hung around St. Helier to watch Middlesbrough F.C. play in the Championship final on the tv. Long story short, Middlesbrough lost the game and one thing led to another resulting in waking up the following morning feeling a little jaded.

Well stocked with liquids, I caught the bus from St. Helier to La Corbière on the south east tip of the island.

Arriving at La Corbière. The sky was cloudless and there wasn’t a whisper of a breeze. It was fairly obvious that there was to be no let-up in the heatwave.

Prior to my trip to Jersey, I’d been quite keen to visit some of the WWII concrete Atlantic wall installations. The Frederich Tamms designed structures had influenced the brutalist designs of the nineteen sixties. However, my visit to the Forced Labour memorial at La Hougue Bie had altered my perspective on these structures. Faced with the reality of how these structures were built, the term brutalist had taken on taken a different meaning.

I walked inland, following the bed of an old railway, to take a look at a large pink granite slab known as La Table des Marthes. The slab is thought to be the capstone of a Neolithic dolmen and was discovered in 1850. Originally the slab had been supported at each end by pillars of stone and earth. Pottery, burned stones and broken stone axes were also found. The structure was destroyed in 1899 during the construction of a railway.

From La Table des Marthes I followed the footpath down to Petit Port Beach and then climbed up through the dusty scrubland to look for a monument known as La Sergentè

La Sergentè is a dry stone wall lined circular chamber approximately three meters in diameter. The entrance to the chamber is via a short passage lined with upright stones and paved with granite slabs. The structure dates to the Early Neolithic making it one of the earliest monuments on the island.

The design of the chamber is unique in the Channel Islands however similar structures have been found in Northern France. When excavated, four early Neolithic pottery vessels were discovered along with a substantial amount of rubble from what is believed to be a corbeled roof. The structure was originally covered with an earth mound.

I had planned to walk along the coast to a couple of sites located in the scrubland further north. Hiking during the hottest part of the day during a heatwave is not my idea of fun. I decided to call it quits and return to St. Helier and visit the excellent Société Jersiaise museum.

During my brief visit to Jersey I was fortunate to visit a number of lovely places. Hopefully, one day I’ll return to the Channel Islands and visit a few more.

Sneaton Corner – Robin Hood’s Bay Road – Nigh Middle Sike – Middle Rigg – Far Middle Sike – Low Moor – Gray Heugh Slack – Biller Howe Dale Slack – John Cross Rigg

From when I left home to when I arrived at the at Sneaton Corner, on the edge of Flyingdales Moor, there was steady drizzling rain. Just after I arrived at the moor, the rain stopped and the sun came out from behind the clouds. The warm sunlight hitting the damp moor caused a low mist to rise and drift across the blackened ground. Graeme and I stood and watched, within a couple of minutes the mist disappeared.

We set off across the moor following the Robin Hood’s Bay Road, also known as The Old Salt Road and The Fish Road. The road is a series of deeply rutted hollow-ways that run diagonally across this part of the moor. In the past this was the route followed by carts carrying blocks of salt and baskets of fish from the coast to Saltergate and then onwards to the vale of Pickering and beyond.

As we moved onto the moor we came across a large block of a rock known locally as ganister or white flint. Ganister is a silca-rich rock that was much prized by iron and steel makers. The quarried stone was crushed and made into refractory bricks which were used to line the internal surfaces of blast furnaces.

We left the old road and walked across the moor to look for prehistoric remains in the areas where the recent fire had burned through the peat to reveal the stoney surface beneath.

Old OS maps of this area show lots of Tumuli located right across the moor but we were only able to located couple. The missing cairns are a bit of a mystery, were they removed during WWII when the area was used for military training? or were the surveyors from the OS mistaken?

We noticed what appears to be a large roughly circular enclosure quite close to the Cross Dykes, this structure does not appear on the OS maps. I’m guessing that this structure was probably buried beneath the peat and heather when the OS surveyors visited the moor.

I spotted a couple of pieces of flints sticking out of the charred peat. Graeme suggested that we should see if the two fragments fit together. They did, a lovely Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age barbed and tanged arrowhead.

This was my third visit to the moor since last years fire. The coir matting that has been used to protect one short section of the prehistoric dykes is starting to do its job. Grass has taken root beneath the coir which will hopefully stabilise the banks of the dyke and prevent further erosion.

Parts of the moor are starting to show signs of regeneration but other areas of the moor are not doing so well, the peat has gone and it appears as if there have been little if any attempts to re-seed and stabilise these areas as was done after the catastrophic fire in 2004 on the Stoup Brow Moor. I suspect that the national park and landowners may not have the resources and funding that were available in 2004. Hopefully I’ll return in a month or so to see if anything has changed.

Sike a small stream or gulley

Slack a shallow area or depression between two areas of rising ground.

Map Source