Kitty Millman’s Victorian book: Island Scenery (Brading, Isle of Wight)

Extract from Island Scenery: The Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, and the British Islands, given to Kitty Millman as a school prize. Kitty visited Brading with her family in 1892 (see The Millman Letters).

On the eastern side of Ryde is the pleasant village of Brading. The expansive harbour of Brading at high water, presents a very imposing appearance; at low tide it is a miserable and forbidding extent of mud, through which a brooklet meanders to the sea. All attempts at reclamation and enclosure of the harbour have hitherto proved futile. On one side of the adjacent ridges is a lofty obelisk, well-known to sailors as ‘Ashey seamark.’

Brading is the largest parish in the island, and although a village, it was formerly incorporated and returned members to Parliament. There is a small Town Hall in front of which are the village stocks wherein law breakers were formerly publicly punished to the amusement of the peasantry. The church is of ancient date, the style of architecture being a combination of early English and transitional Roman. Its origin is traced by archaeologists to Wilfrid, Archbishop of York, who was the first Gospel preacher in the neighbourhood.

Within the church are several ancient monuments belonging to the Oglander family, whose ancestral estate at Nunwell Court has been retained in a direct line from the Norman Conquest. For some years Leigh Richmond was curate of Brading. The churchyard contains the grave of ‘Little Jane’, who died in 1799, and who formed the heroine of one of his small books, called the ‘Annals of the Poor.’ The headstone bears the following inscription:

‘Jane, the young cottager, lies buried here.’