Bi-Weekly Topic for Sept. 15, 2003
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060115151410/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?IslandsAndPlace
Nobbys Island
By Mulubinba Moments
This is an essay for the ecotone Wiki on “Islands and Place”.
It is tempting to write on Australia, the island continent, but where do I begin? There are the coral islands in the Great Barrier Reef, there is Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island (where the Bounty mutineers finally settled). I must also not omit Tasmania, the Apple Isle. I am however not going to write about any of these - rather I am going to continue with my series on “Places of the Spirit”. Our journey to spiritual places will take us to my current home - Newcastle.
My favourite walk takes me from Newcastle beach to Nobbys breakwater. To get to the breakwater we walk along an isthmus towards a flat cliff formation with a lighthouse on top of it. The breakwater extends from this head out to sea and guards the mouth of the Hunter River. Careful observation will ascertain that the isthmus we walk along is manmade; in fact it was made by convicts. It leads out to what once was Nobbys Island.
Nobbys island was first sighted by Captain James Cook in 1770 and described as “a small clump of an island lying close to shore”. Since then, Nobbys has played a vital role in the history of the port city. An early problem facing captains of sailing ships entering Newcastle was the loss of wind in the ship's sails as they passed the towering Nobbys outcrop at the port's entrance. To alleviate this, the top was taken off Nobbys, reducing it to half its original height, with the resulting rock used in the construction of the breakwater. A lighthouse was erected on Nobbys and was brought into service on the 1st of January, 1858. (Hunter Port Authority)
But what of the story of Nobbys head prior to British settlement? Nobbys island in fact has a legend that has been passed on for generations before the white settlers laid eyes on it. The Awabakal people, original owners of the land, believed that Nobbys was the home of an immense kangaroo “ú Why-bay Gamba”. When he shook himself, the island trembled and rocks fell which accounted for the stratification of the cliff face.
A giant kangaroo assailed a female wallaby. Such an act conflicted with the laws governing the kinship pattern of survival based on purity of blood lines thereby destroying the totemic structure so strongly emphasised in the Bora teaching. After the deed became known, flocks of wallabies gave chase to the perpetrator, who fled over the hills and through the bush. although he kept ahead by superior leaping, he knew that the capture and death were inevitable because the sea offered no escape. But as he neared the sea a mist intervened and he was lost to the sight of his pursuers. He took advantage of this respite by swimming to Nobbys Island which he entered and shut himself away from sight. The wallabies gave up the chase believing the sea had claimed the kangaroo. But, according to tradition, the kangaroo was never certain of his safety. Now and then he would jump up and down in his island and cause the cliff to tremble and break away as a warning to any wallabies and other animals not to come too close to his island refuge. (from "Nobbys Coal River Historic Precinct Workshop Prelude to a Heritage Masterplan")
This story of the giant kangaroo is part of the Newcastle tribal story.
Nobbys is the place of the spirit of “ú Why-bay Gamba”. Perhaps no longer an island as seen below in this painting from the 1830's, but still a place of the spirit.
Comments:
Comments I have no islands to write about. Thanks for providing me one to imagine knowing... a former island, at least.
Posted by: fredf | September 16, 2003 at 08:59 PM
Are you sure there isn't a little island that you've been to that has moved you? The US must have hundreds of islands! Not having been to North America, I'm interested in anything you can describe for me - from Manhattan to tiny islands in the middle of lakes or streams. Everything is new for me - so tell me about the birds, the animals, the plants, the Native American legends..anything you can think of.
Posted by: Jenny
Source URL:http://mulubinba.typepad.com/mulubinba_moments/2003/09/nobbys_island.html
Islands of the Interior
By Notes from an Eclectic Mind
This entry is my contribution to the Sept. 15th Ecotone topic "Islands and Place."
On my third trip to England in the summer of 1990 my companions and I rented a car in northern Scotland and drove out to the Isle of Skye. Getting there on narrow roads where sheep had the right of way proved a challenge to our questionable driving skills. To save money our organizing member chose a vehicle with a standard transmission, not thinking that the reversed seating position meant we Americans would, technically, be shifting gears with the wrong hand. For my part, I hadn't counted on the ferry. I supposed there would be a bridge of some sort, but instead, with me at the helm, we tentatively navigated up a ramp and pulled into our place on the deck full of cars.
It was a short voyage and a thoroughly pleasant one in spite of my jittery nerves. My friends got out and walked around a bit on deck but I'm given to motion sickness and thought it best to stay put and not to press my luck. I distinctly remember thinking I was about to set foot on an island for the first time. A West Texas childhood affords few opportunities for island hopping unless you count gravel bars in the middle of the river.
Papa and I often fished at his friend B.H.'s place and sometimes Papa would drive the pickup across a shallow place in the river and out onto a gravel bar that afforded us easier casting into the deep water. I got into a bit of trouble on that gravel bar the first and last time I tried going out there alone. The pickup wheels ground down in the slippery rocks, spun, smoked, but gained no traction and this was long before everyone had a cell phone handy. I was stuck.
How well I remember standing there looking over at the bank and telling myself the water couldn't be more than tire high. I'd just driven though it two hours before. I walked over and stood by the truck, measuring myself against the wheels to reassure myself that the water would not even reach my waist. The moment when I finally stepped into the current may have been one of the hardest of my life. My mind shut down into a small, frightened space that processed nothing more than my next footstep. When I finally reached the other side my legs were trembling and my breath came in ragged, terrified gasps. Should anyone ever want to imprison me, they would not need anywhere near the amount of water that surrounds Alcatraz.
Later after B.H. took his tractor down to the river and pulled the pickup out and I made it home, wet and shaken, Papa asked why I hadn't just waited there for someone to come. I guess I must have looked at him dumbly because he continued. "We knew where you were," he said. "B.H. knew you were down there. We'd have come looking for you when it started getting dark. Why didn't you just sit there?" I couldn't answer him. It had never occurred to me not to try to get myself out of a fix that was no one's fault but my own. I never considered just sitting down and waiting even when I was most scared.
So until I found myself on the Isle of Skye that afternoon in 1990, the gravel bar was as close as I'd ever been to an island or to confronting the special demands such a land feature presents. That evening in Scotland, before supper, we took a walk on the hotel's grounds and down to the edge of the fog shrouded water. The air was cold and damp and the sounds of the waves lapping on the rocks seemed to echo against the mist. Small crabs scuttled around in tide pools, a few sheep ambled about, but other than that we were alone.
The oldest member of our group, a recent widow, walked as far out on the rocks as she could go. For long moments she stood staring into the fog and we did not bother her, did not presume to break her reverie. I learned later that of all her family members she was the one who always went down to the water in answer to its call. As I watched her that day I wondered how many women down through the years stood on those rocks and watched the sea perhaps waiting for a man who would not come home again. That image of L.B. standing on the shore comes back to me now as a reminder that not all islands are patches of land surrounded by water.
The day when I walked off the gravel bar I became, in my terrified resolve, an island unto myself. There was no more to the world than my next footstep, the tug of the current on my jeans, the cold water pouring into the tops of my boots and spreading up my trembling legs. Within that limited reality I accomplished something I could not otherwise have done and later, when asked why, I had no answer. I could not explain that in those moments my world seemed to narrow down to no other choice.
So although I have now, in my catalog of experiences, spent time on an actual island, this writing topic set me thinking that for many of us land lubbers, an island is a place we carry within. It may be a small moment of bravery like wading into the water when you cant swim or a bubble of grief that settles around us as we stare out at the waves. It can be a private insight, an individual joy, or a mental retreat to which we flee when we need to put space between the mainland of our lives and our own hearts. An island lies set apart, alone but not always lonely, offering barriers desired, needed, resented, or unavoidable. We all know one fragment of John Donne. No man is an island entire of himself. But Mr. Donne failed to mention that our interior ocean lies dotted with islands of our own making.
Posted by Rana at September 15, 2003 09:42 AM
Comments:
Good story.
I couldn't help but notice that you didn't consider Great Britain itself to be an island.
Posted by: bill at September 15, 2003 06:23 PMYes, I know. It makes no sense. Intellectually I knew at the time I was there and the twice I've returned that Britain is an island nation, but it's big enough not to feel like an island to me.
Posted by: Rana at September 16, 2003 10:13 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060131125130/www.ranablog.com/archives/000466.php
tiny bubbles
By alembic
This post is my response to ecotone's biweekly topic: islands and place
In the topography of my world, islands are the fabulous realms of elsewhere. Some islands beckon with mild breezes, promising to stop time in its tracks and embalm all the trappings of your own private paradise. Others, the more northerly ones, disdaining the guile of their tropical sisters, threaten to lay your soul as bare as is the bleak watery horizon beyond their stony shores. The lure of islands, the way I see it, is a promise of containment, be it of your happiness or your misery.
You could reinvent yourself on island, or so goes the siren call from the waves, and I tried that once, many years ago on Oahu, in Hawaii. Freshly out of one university, I flew to Honolulu to join my cousin who had been staying at The Ilikai for some time, herself having tried many other islands from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic to the Pacific before she alit on Oahu in her quest for a suitable, and endurable, identity.
We were remittance girls back then -- my cousins well-off mother sending us a small monthly allowance to keep us away so that she could drink unhindered by our presence and soak her sorrows at my uncles passing. Looked at it from another perspective, that of the islanders, we were rich beach bums, and we would have been easy marks for local schemers, were it not for our youth, which gave us a certain prideful beauty we wore like a halo of innocence. This was our currency -- and we used it, I realize now, as best as we could, without giving away any of the capital.
The local young men who were always lurking nearby -- at the beach, the Charter House bar, in the lobby of the hotel -- soon figured out that we were much like them, though we were after different things. Still, we joined forces, all of us. The young men, some of them, borrowed space in our fridge in our respectable lodging to stash those premium bottles of booze they stole from various nearby stores. They stashed their cartons of cigarettes, also stolen, in plain view on our coffee table. Others borrowed us as icebreakers at best and as pimps at worst -- on the beach, in bars or in restaurants to score with lonely tourists with means. My cousin got to play out yet another act in her long-running show of rebellion, and I got to act out my idea of an existentialism stripped of Sartres nausea in mild weather.
With a little money and a return ticket in my pocket, in my then-stylish mini dresses, my hair bleached and curled, my eyes adorned with liberal dabs of blue Chanel eye shadow, I somehow still managed to convince myself that I was in full possession of an experience as naked, as raw, as elemental, and as exposed to the searing light of the sun as the one Camus mapped under the sun in Oran.
Never mind that I watched the sun do its mild thing from the cool shelter of an umbrella; never mind that the smells in the air were always sweet and heavily perfumed by coconut oil, sliced papayas, or the cloying fruitiness of pool-sized drinks; never mind that the occasional nausea I had to fight off was induced by tequila and not dread at the failure of reason ... Oahu, for a few months at any rate, was my moment: the here and now, the alpha and omega of all meaning, which, of course, had no meaning beyond the line where sand an sea met -- right there on the well groomed strip of beach reserved for the guests of The Ilikai....
I would very much like to say that after five months or so, staring at that line where sand sea met made me stir crazy and ready to belt out something along the lines of is that all there is? I would very much like to conclude this piece by writing that one day, sitting on the beach it hit me: if this is the end of meaning, it is also the end of possibility. Without possibility, there is no life -- and there is no art ... and so, with the right rhetorical flourish, I would have concluded that the island that opened up my senses also closed my mind.
But this is not what happened. I realized nothing back then, except to register a vague sense of unease and a creeping boredom with it all. I was as tanned as I ever was going to be. My excursions into the shady side of island life were wearing thin, like my cash reserves. Still, I wasnt ready to pack it in for any big stretch of land, that realm of possibility. As far as I was concerned, possibility was a mirage -- and as cold as the distant northern lights. I was still a fan of the stupefying sun of Oahu.
Then, one day, my aunt, somewhat sobered up, decided to stop the remittances. Being Canadian citizens, my cousin and I could not work in Hawaii-- at least not legally. So I went home, which back then was rain-sodden Vancouver, a city on the coast, a place from which, as I used to marvel, one could walk all the way to the North Pole and, depending on the route, one would never meet another soul along the way.
Posted by maria at September 15, 2003 08:34 AM | TrackBack
Comments
Oooh. I think I got a whiff of Coppertone there for a sec. And sea gulls. And lapping waves. And the decadence of youth we somehow survive.
Posted by: fredf on September 16, 2003 04:16 AMIt's a funny and touching story. What's a remittance girl?
Posted by: Coup de Vent on September 16, 2003 03:43 PMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20031008071802/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000214.html
Clusters As Islands
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
This post is part of the Ecotone Wiki's joint topic, Islands And Place.
What does where we live say about who we are? A very great deal, according to Michael Weiss, author of The Clustering of America and The Clustered World. His point is that people generally tend to live near people like them. He calls these groupings clusters, and he has divided them into 62 discrete types. They function, for all practical purposes, like islands.
Weiss's research has been a boon to marketers, who are able to target, say, Kellog's Pop-Tarts and Domino's pizza to the cluster "Greenbelt Families," who are also most likely to drive Mercury Capris. Greenbelt Families are young, upper-middle-class town dwellers, predominantly white, whose ideology is moderate independent. They are found in high concentrations in places like Parkville, Missouri and Hyde Park, New York.
Unlike the members of the "Sunset City Blues," mostly retired, married white folks who live in places like Battle Creek, Michigan or Merrillville, Indiana, and who buy cigars, lottery tickets, and pain relievers in high quantities.
You can enter your zip code at the Claritas site to find out what clusters are found in high concentrations in your area. For non-US residents, there are similar efforts in the UK, Spain, and Canada.
For the record, Numenius and I fall under the "New Eco-topia" cluster, people described as most likely to have a computer on the kitchen table, eat organic foods, and support recycling. By the wisdom of the clusterers, we should be living in Westminster, Vermont. An island of people like us.
Posted by Pica at September 15, 2003 08:24 PM
Comments
Whereas I am surrounded by people who own bread machines and chainsaws, and watch the Travel Channel .
Posted by: DocRock at September 16, 2003 07:56 AMVery entertaining and no doubt will make someone a packet. Theories have become really important and profitable - no matter how crappy they are. I suppose it is another way of breaking such a large island down into manageable bite sized portions!
Posted by: Coup de Vent at September 16, 2003 04:20 PM Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/09/15/clusters_as_isla.html
Islands and Place
By London and the North
I guess we all live on islands. Some of them are just called continents.
I live about twenty miles as the crow flies from Menwith Hill - the USA’s listening station in northern Europe. British Telecom lines apparently pass through the site. Emails, phone calls and so on can all be intercepted here. A few miles away the US military is establishing the most high tech early warning station in Europe, Fylingdales.
Some people here wonder aloud if the UK isn't the 51st state of America.
Somehow, not randomly I’m sure, the island I live on has been formed and reformed into smaller nations under the dominance of one. These days “Great” Britain feels as if it should have a more humble name. The “United” Kingdom is a misnomer. It is, and some say, should be, disunited. It is hardly a kingdom and should, I feel, be rid of any royal connections. Can you suggest another name for the UK or GB? Please use the tag board on the right.
(Particpating in Ecotone: a wiki for writing about place)
Posted by Coup de Vent at 08:26 PM | Comments (3)Comments
I have been pondering the language we speak, if not necessarily share ... considering all the bits and pieces and ideas it accommodates, the island deserves a "great" for having evolved something so diverse and useful.
Posted by P at September 17, 2003 02:12 AMLike the UK many people here think we are the 51st state of America. Last time I visited the UK we drove across England in under four hours using the motorways - we couldn't believe how close everything is. The UK has more of an island "feel" about it then Oz!
Posted by Jenny at September 17, 2003 08:26 AMI agree, the Greatness of Empire has worn thin. ng Arthur has long gone from that green and pleasant land. Etcetera. I used to live there and called the place the UK. That name worked for me, like the chain of grocery stores ( dont know if its still there) called "The Co-op". In both cases, I guess youre encouraged not to necessarily associate with the name the acronym stands for. Like IHOP - the acronym and new name for the international house of pancakes (not just pancakes)
Like the "country" called the UK, the Co-Op store had no collectivist connotation for me, as a kid, its stores were like other supermarkets; it had a jingle that was just as silly and self serving as any other commerical enterprise's = " It's all at the co-op...now!"
As I remember England Scotland & Wales are definitely not united, at least nothing like the "United" States, where there is a real rallying around the same flag. But if your name is changed, there's the risk of popuring old wine in a new bottles, as they say.
I've got it.. how about renaming your island "The Co-op?"
Posted by John at September 17, 2003 06:16 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20031023192232/www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2003_09.html
Island/connections
By P
We are all islands, so it may be that we love them because we identify with them. (John Donne had it wrong, but he was trying to make a different point. Decide for yourself when you put yourself to sleep tonight.)
I loved a Canadian island my family visited on vacation for 16 years when was young. I can close my eyes and call up a recollection of everything from the sparse grass in my grandfather's yard to the awful chunk-chunk-chunk the primitive electric pump made in its cupboard in the bathroom (I purely hated to flush the toilet there when I was little). To the junior survivalist in me, one of the coolest things about the place was that everything, from the exotic cereals with labels in two languages to the sand on the tiny beach, had been hauled in by boat from the mainland almost a mile away. It felt really independent.
I loved looking at a tiny island about a hundred feet from my grandfather's dock, too. About the size of a suburban corner lot, it had sparse grass, a single cottage and a few pine trees. My adult judgment says that what it didn't have is storage space, but as a child, I had an answer for that -- I dreamt that the island was just the top of a deep-tunneled complex of laboratories and living spaces for -- for what I don't remember. I was reading too much of Tom Swift. It seemed like the ultimate in independence then.
We had probably the best view on our island, with the well-groomed little satellite on one side and the mainland way beyond. I was fascinated by the people who owned the other island -- just as it's human nature to be island-like, it's human nature to want to connect, but I never saw them that I can remember.
Being a 15-minute boat ride from shore made us and our neighbors a tight little community. I played with the neighbor girls every year, and I remember them as tall and exotic, coming from Quebec as they did and speaking *two* languages. I was was a bright, awkward gosling slowly metamorphosing into a prize turkey by time I saw them last -- I guess that's why I remember the rocks and trees better; I was more comfortable with them at the end.
I am no expert on islands. I've seen a few more. Long Island has too much of connection and too little of isolation, and there's little to see from its shores. Islands I admired in Alaska had too much of isolation: Thick with spruce and dark in the rain and mist, they were forbidding. A tiny, untenanted island in the Adirondacks made a wonderful memory for me and my wife. Block Island made a sad one as the scene of our last trip with my mother, then on the edge of her slow tumble into Alzheimer's.
Maybe we love islands because they're not plentiful. I'm still looking for more. -- P.
Source: http://my.core.com/%7Epzicari/text/Islands.html
The Isle Of Fabled Beasts
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
This is for the set of posts on Islands and Place for the Ecotone wiki.
Almost every day during my eight-year sojourn in Santa Barbara, I would glance seaward at Santa Cruz Island, about twenty miles off the coast. From our perch at about 1200' elevation in the Santa Ynez mountains behind the town, the view reminded me of looking west across San Francisco Bay to the ridges of Marin and the Peninsula, especially when the fog was in. The island is mountainous with a 2600' high ridge, similar to the ridges on the western side of the Bay where I grew up.
Despite its proximity I only visited the island several times. I think in all cases the occasion was a birding trip to look for the Island Scrub Jay, an endemic species found only on Santa Cruz Island. Biogeographers delight in islands for their evolutionary treasures, and the Channel Islands off California provide much material. There are many species and subspecies of plants and animals endemic to the Channel Islands. The scrub jay, the Catalina ironwood, the island kit fox, and lots of others.
In the Pleistocene, when sea level was lower and the Northern Channel Islands were connected to each other, there were even pygmy mammoths there, horse-sized creatures four to eight feet tall. It is believed they could swim between the island and the mainland.
Who's to say magical islands don't still exist?.
Posted by Numenius at September 16, 2003 10:37 PM | TrackBack
Comments
Thanks for this Numenius. As a non resident of the US I've been looking forward to hearing a bit more about your country and its landscape. I was hoping more of you could talk about actual islands in your country so that we "foreigners" could picture your places a little easier. I will look up Santa Cruz Island today!
Posted by: Jenny at September 17, 2003 12:41 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/09/16/the_isle_of_fabl.html
Glastonbury Tor
By Mulubinba Moments
I first saw GlastonburyTor in 1997. It rises from the Somerset Levels and can be seen from miles away as if beckoning to the traveller to “come hither”. The Tor, also known as the Isle of Avalon (It appears that I am continuing on with the Ecotone Wiki topic of Islands and Place), is a magical place and one I keep returning to whenever I visit England. Centuries of legend and folklore have gathered around the Tor. It is believed that the “veil between the worlds is thin” here. The Tor has a powerful spirit of place - it attracts and fosters all kinds of ideas on nature, mythology, paganism, and Christian legends. For a very good tour of the Tor, visit The Magical Tor.
On December 31st 1999 I returned to Glastonbury to see in the New Year and the new Millenium. There was a choice of activities offered for us from the ecumenical candlelight service in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey to taking part in a ceremony which involved surrounding the Tor’s terraces with flares and lighting the Phoenix beacon at midnight on the summit Midnight on the Tor. It was freezing with a light misty rain falling, but mystical - I would not have spent this time any other way.
The Tor is a place that has the power to move me even though I live at the other side of the world - it is a place where I feel connected with the spirit of mother earth and celtic spirituality. It is a place where Goddess worshippers and Christians can comfortably co-exist. It is indeed a holy eclectic place - my kind of place.
Comments
Jenny--what a great post! I have somehow never managed to get to Glastonbury; all those years I lived not too far away. Oh well. Seems like a must-visit next time I'm in England.
Islands in the Sky
By Laughing~Knees
Clouds scudding over the Sudbury countryside, England, 1995
( This is the 7th installment of the ongoing Ecotone: Writing About Place bi-weekly discussions. Please see the other essays contributed: Islands and Place )
From a jet plane the Earth sits under the hard mirror of the sky. The Sun glares down, its one unblinking eye pitiless with power, seeing all, the vast film of water, air and rock. Indifference beats upon any harborer of precious fluids, hissing admonishments to turn tail and burrow into the nearest cleft. To a watcher in space the blue marble of the planet might at first seem stillborn, but if it watches carefully the swirling surface would give away the secret: like milk roiling in a cup of coffee clouds belie both a smoldering heart and a mind fanning the idea of regeneration. The clouds themselves would give birth, like whales in an ocean of air.
The land that clouds inhabit lies forever just out of reach. I might brush the clouds during brief passages along the crests of mountains, and when gazing out of plane windows they whip by like shreds of cloth or spread out below like slow herds of buffalo, but forever they remain denizens of the troposphere and I only a guest, fit only for momentary appearance or required to press my face to a porthole, sealed like an astronaut.
Clouds possess the insubstantiality of ghosts and as such offer proof of the existence of dreams and imaginary kingdoms. You can see them and yet pass your hand through them. Castles and pots of gold vanish with the first shift of the wind. The mind instinctively seeks out corporeal definition, seeing familiar faces and rabbits and dragons, but blink your eyes and the forms have billowed out into abstractions, confounding your potter's hand.
And yet I have witnessed the towering mountains and valleys of the cloud realm. The planes I have perched in passed among the walls like slivers of glass, crawling amidst halls of divinity that humbled the voice whispering within as I peeked out. Bergs of vapor rolled across sheets of metallic sea, trawling their nets while some god harpooned the void with spears of lightning. Clouds have uttered the most titanic sounds I have ever heard, the vibrato in their bassoon vocal chords plucking the very air of its emptiness. And clouds have given me dantean visions of perdition, such as the memory of a night time New York City glittering at the bottom of a well of circling thunderheads crackling with electricity and flashing with gunpowder.
They move in the tier above me, casting their huge shadows on the windswept hills, and softly reminding me of my mayfly existence. Like islands in the water ocean gaps define their hierarchy, and for tithe they only require that I close my eyes and take that leap of faith. All islands require faith in navigation, clouds require unremitting belief, or you end up falling. As if nothing were there.
Posted by butuki at 01:16 AM in Nature and Place | PermalinkSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20041206235012/www.butuki.com/archives/2003_09.html#000065
Discussion
Just a little request to all of you - particularly those bloggers in North America. Please please don't take for granted that your readers all come from your part of the world. Speaking for myself, I am really interested in ANY island you can tell me about whether it is that tiny island in the middle of the river or lake to Manhattan. I'm interested in hearing about the landscape, the animals, the birds and the plants, the bookshops, the coffee shops (if it is a city island) - We might speak the same language but we all live in very different places and I want to be inspired to visit them. I've enjoyed reading the posts so far - looking forward to reading some more (with pics if possible!). Jenny.