The Quaisne way

Aug 10

Ah summer. I can't remember such a long, and well quite frankly summery summer for decades. And we have certainly been making the most of it. One of the nicest bays to enjoy the end of the day is Quaisne (pronounced way-neigh), out in the west of the island in the parish of St Brelade. Far too hot for Sunday roast we decided to come here last week instead to have a picnic/barbecue. We arrived early evening once the majority of day trippers had departed, and shared the huge expanse of sand with a few pockets of like-minded people.When I say like minded, we weren't quite so organised as the lovely group beside us who managed to produce an amazing array of goods from their collective bags, complete with candelabra, ice buckets and a glorious fruit de mer.

The right hand side of the bay sweeps around to meet the ever popular St Brelade's Bay, but I prefer the rocky headland to the left. I have a keen interest in prehistory and archaeology and this area of beach and headland is the home to La Cotte de St Brelade, a Neanderthal cave and its surrounding hunting grounds in use over the last 250,000 years and once home to woolly mammoth.

The tide was slowly coming in, and we wandered down to the edge of the sea and it was so surprisingly refreshing on hot skin that we managed to take the first proper sea swim of the year.

The beach here is very beautiful, rocky at the edges but with a huge expanse of golden sand at low tide, backed by a granite pebbles beach berm at the top end, flanked by the German occupying forces built sea wall and guarded over by a Conway round tower sitting on Quaisne Common.

Often described as a Martello tower, the Conway round towers were built earlier and this one, La Tour du Hoinet or the Quaisne Tower, was built in 1787.

Behind the sea wall the tower sits in a 10 hectare nature reserve called Quaisne Common, a diverse habitat of sand dune, heathland and bog and is one of the breeding grounds of the rare Agile Frog

Back on the beach, walking over the granite beach berm, I am amused by the fact that there are granite outcrops either side, which produce these beautifully tumbled pebbles, but the expanse of sand in front is surprisingly bare of stones.

I did take the time to sit down and relax and enjoy the view, the sounds of the sea side and the when i lay down and looked up over the sea wall all I could see was amazingly clear blue skies.