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short breaks isle wight
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In the nineteenth century the Island was transformed by the coming of the railways. Queen Victoria took advantage of the island's new accessibility by using Osborne as her retreat. Affairs of the state soon followed her and the modestly furnished family home had to be enhanced with apartments where she could receive foreign heads of state. However, her children enjoyed many hours and a great deal of freedom at Osborne as a visit to Swiss Cottage will indicate. Queen Victoria's affection for Osborne added to the Island's attractions of climate and scenery, and Ryde, Sandown, Shanklin & Ventnor expanded from fishing villages to fashionable resorts.
Queen Victoria's youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, succeeded her husband, Prince Henry of Battenburg as Governor of the Island in 1896, and regularly used Carisbrooke Castle as her summer residence. After her death in 1944 the office was left vacant until, at the request of the Island, a new Governor was appointed in 1957 - the seventh Duke of Wellington. He was succeeded in 1965 by Admiral of the Fleet, the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, a great nephew of Princess Beatrice. When the Island gained full County status under the Local Government Act in 1972, Earl Mountbatten was appointed the Island's first Lord Lieutenant as well. Since his death in Ireland in 1979, the Island has been without a governor.
Since 1990 a programme of archaeological survey has been undertaken on the north-east coast of the Island, between Wootton Creek and Ryde pier. The project has combined hinterland, intertidal, and offshore survey with a range of environmental analyses including pollen and plant macrofossil analysis, diatom, insect, and sedimentological studies, and radiocarbon and dendrochronological dating. The main objectives of the survey were to provide an overview of the archaeological potential and the sea-level chronology of the Solent, to investigate in detail the Wootton-Quarr coastline chronology (including evidence for prehistoric and later subsistence, trading, and maritime activities), and to develop survey and recording techniques, threat assessment methodologies, and management options for intertidal archaeology. During the project, more than 150 timber structures have been surveyed. These include small groups of posts, structures composed of posts and hurdling or brushwood, and long alignments comprising several hundred posts. Forty-eight of these structures have been radiocarbon dated and have been found to range from the early Neolithic to the post-medieval period. The posts survive in remarkable condition and reveal evidence for past woodland management regimes as well as providing information about woodworking technology, the skill of the workmen, and the size of the workforce involved in cutting the posts.
Amongst the earliest structures recorded are a number of trackways which survive at extreme low water at Quarr and Binstead. Due to their position they are only rarely visible for short periods of time on very low tides. Consequently recording has been difficult. At Quarr, three trackways have been found running seaward within a stretch of about 150m. Radiocarbon dating places all three within the first half of the fourth millennium but cannot reveal whether they were contemporary or whether one replaced the other.