"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.