Day Seventeen - Jersey - 19 April

We woke to a lovely sunny day. It was still cold but we stuck to our plan of “making hay while the sun shines” and decided on outdoor activities. We were keen to revisit Mont Orgueil at Gorey Harbour which we had visited earlier in the week.

Dressed in our warm gear we took a different blue bus which went along the south east coastline and then turned north to the harbour. The views over the beaches from the bus were very good. The tide was on the way out.

Mont Orgueil (called Gorey Castle by English speakers) overlooks the harbour and original construction commenced in the early thirteenth century. It was constructed to keep out of the French. We took the opportunity to have a guided tour which was very good. Henk and I weren’t too sure if our guide, Nicky, was a woman or a man but we settled on a woman as she had pearl earrings. She would have been in her seventies, was very tall and large and looked like a female version of Greengrass from the “Heartbeat” series. With her cloth hat plonked on her head and her light blue grubby Paddington Bear coat “Our Nicky” was a very proud born and bred Jersey woman who had been taking the guided tours for fourteen years. She told us she wasn’t French; she wasn’t English; she came from the country of Jersey! She was very knowledgeable and also very funny and kept our group interested for the entire tour. The castle has had a chequered career but it was Walter Raleigh, Governor of Jersey in 1600, who saved the castle from demolition in his plea to Queen Elizabeth 1. The views over the harbour and over to France were excellent as it was such a clear day.

The wind was biting cold around the draughty old castle and we were pleased to retreat to a cosy, boutique pub for a late lunch overlooking the harbour. It seemed to be the place for the very well dressed Jersey people to meet and we were a tad underdressed in our faded jeans. Henk and I returned to St Helier’s Liberations Bus Terminus along the same route with the tide at its lowest. I returned to the hotel and Henk took the bus to L’Etacq at the far north west of the island. He walked back along the beach via La Corbiere Lighthouse to our hotel, a distance of about thirteen kilometres.

The walk was mostly flat with a combination of beach walking, sand-dune walking and joined a walking track back to St Aubin. Henk said it was a good walk. I read the papers in the comfy lounge of the hotel. The headline in one of the papers said it was going to be the coldest May in one hundred years especially along the east coast of England. We could be in for a cold walk and a cold stay in Norfolk.