The shingle at Keyhaven seems designed to discourage you from going in for a swim. All its edges are sharp. The water though is inviting; lazy wavelets from the calm strait between Hurst Castle and the Isle of Wight. Hurst Castle is the impressive guardian of the narrow western entrance of the Solent, a mere mile wide but a swim not advised when the Solent’s tricky tide is flooding by. But there is nothing like the traffic here that keeps the eastern approach by Portsmouth so busy.
Keyhaven remains a little fishing port, with seven or eight boats going out round the Needles, often, I’m told, to harvest cockles, of all things. The market for tons of cockles? Apparently Korea can’t get enough. The village has a good pub, The Gun Inn, and a huge car park. Hawker’s Cottage, near the pub, is where the extraordinary diarist, wildfowler and inventor Colonel Peter Hawker lived.
Hawker limped from a wound in the Crimean War, but before dawn in January he and his man would go out with their guns, wading through deep mud to slaughter incredible numbers of birds. He also regularly taught piano in Paris at the opera house by a new method of his own, travelling from Southampton to Cherbourg and by train via Rouen to Paris. He took his latest design of a breach-loading rifle to the Great Exhibition, standing in the opening queue every morning to demonstrate it; Prince Albert showed it to the War Office, which adopted it. Do read his diaries.
