Family connections and Steephill Cove

I'm from one of the original island families - my great grandfather, Rufus Cotton, was a renowned lifeboat man & smuggler from Atherfield. One of the original Atherfield lifeboats was named after Catherine Swift, his wife. I know just where the chalk footpath is, that you took from the old railway station [see Undercliff photo section, ed.]. I use it myself each year when I walk along the cliff top from Niton to St. Lawrence; it comes out on Seven Sisters Road & leads you down to St. Lawrence post office, run by Doug Nettleton ("Duggletons") & his wife Janet. The "unusual building" in your view from St. Lawrence downs looks very much like the clock-tower house on Woolverton Road (although I might be mistaken, as it looks a bit too big), where lived my best friend when we attended grammar school. The "plants struggling to survive on the exposed chalk outcrops" look like gorse - an overly-prickly golden-flowered bush that edges many fields around Niton & looks like splashes of sunshine on a gloomy day. My father was barman for a while at the Buddle Inn, and my grandmother did the cooking there; the food is still good, but these days you could die of starvation while waiting for it!

One of my greatest delights when a child was to drink from the waterfall at the back, which tumbled out of the wall at thousands of gallons an hour - the water was once tested by a chemist (I think) from the mainland, & found to have virtually identical properties to the water in the Swiss alps. Buddle is an old word, said (by popular account) to be similar to "bothy" which meant a dwelling; I can't see that "buddle" is anything like "bothy" unless one has a speech impediment! Also when I was a child, my mother would take me to Steephill Cove. We would ride there on the bus, sometimes alighting at the old Royal National Hospital (for people with tuberculosis) & walking along to the footpath leading to the steps down to the beach; it was quite a trek back up to the road again on a hot day. Steephill Cove hasn't changed much since then (when all you could buy was ice cream and a cup of tea) except that lots more people go there now; sometimes when my mother and I went, there were only three or four other families. There was a tunnel under the road from the hospital to the nurses' home, so the nurses could walk safely between the two. There was also an underground tunnel from the Sandrock hotel, coming out I forget where - maybe at Rock Cottage, across the road from the bottom of the Sandrock driveway? Rock Cottage (at the top of Buddle Lane) was a telephone exchange for many years.