Victorian photo #49: Shanklin Chine, Isle of Wight (100 Gems of English Scenery)

From ‘One Hundred Gems of English Scenery’, 1901

Among the beauties of the “Garden of England,” Shanklin Chine is perhaps the best known and most visited of all, and though it lies within very small boundaries it nevertheless can claim a right to a place in this volume, for the channel which has been cut in the soft cliffs through ages of wear by a very small stream, presents, on a small scale, picturesque and romantic features which are quite as satisfactory to the eye as scenes of much greater proportions. It is a matter of the setting, and though, perhaps, one longs for a fuller stream it would be unfair to complain of the general effect of light and shade, tree and hillside, with sky and sea as a background.

The author of this Victorian book seems ever-so-slightly less than impressed with Shanklin Chine, but when my great great grandparents George and Mary Millman visited nine years earlier (see The Millman Letters), they were enchanted:

While walking through the Chine, no pen can describe the beauties of nature which we beheld, the chasms & heights & depths & the natural rusticity of the place was indeed calculated to make one break out into Poetry if into nothing else.