Chris Morvan meets the president of the L’Ancresse Commons Council, George Domaille, and joins him on two walks around the area and its grounds
L’Ancresse Commons Council looks after the common and surrounding area. Formed in 1898, it is currently headed by George Domaille, who has been involved for 30 years.
It operates on a small and recently reduced budget from the States, with which it has to manage the invasive and combustible gorse, take care of the car parks, keep an eye on the drainage and generally maintain a large area in which nature is very much in control.
To walk around the common with Mr Domaille is to see it through the eyes of someone who knows it inside out, who has seen it in all seasons and all weathers.
We walked it in two sections: from Pembroke past La Jaonneuse, Creve Coeur and Chouet to Les Amarreurs on a blustery, squally day that soaked us by the halfway point and had dried us by the end and then on a sunny day at the very beginning of spring from the coastal car park below the Doyle and Longree (best described in Perry’s Guide, page 7, E2) around Fort Le Marchant and La Fontenelle Bay to Fort Doyle.
The first part, westwards from Pembroke, took us past the former tea rooms, now an attractive apartment development, but originally built as a badminton hall. Anyone who remembers the big, barn-like tearoom and is aware of its sporting origin can surely imagine the place echoing to the sound of feet clad in thin-soled pumps screeching around as the shuttlecock roamed the space beneath the high ceiling.
Next to the building is pre-Martello Tower No. 9, now a scruffy, rather sorry sight with a slight lean. Across the road is the headland containing Fort Pembroke, now owned by Lady Frossard and used simply as a pleasant place to go on a nice day. Sir Charles Frossard described it as ‘a walled enclosure with a little house inside, probably built in Napoleonic times’, the building having originally been used for storing gunpowder, presumably all traces of which had been removed before the Germans started using it for target practice during the Occupation.
Before we reached Fort Pembroke, though, we passed the steep embankments so popular with children. These are the remnants of the star fort, so called because of its shape and originally designed to provide shelter and cover for the troops. It was manned as was every island vantage point centuries ago, when the lack of sophisticated, high-speed communications meant that an enemy boat full of invading ruffians could appear without warning at any time.
Around the headland past La Jaonneuse, the beachscape has changed in appearance from how it was before the Second World War when a mine had been washed up and exploded, taking some of the rocks with it, we found ourselves behind the rubbish tip at Mont Cuet, where Mr Domaille pointed out La Chaise au Pretre (the priest’s chair), a smooth half-moon-shaped seat in the rock, part of which has now been knocked off, either by the elements or by human hand, and lies at the foot of the rest.
This is Ebenezer Le Page country, as readers of GB Edwards’ rambling book about the fictional Guernseyman will know. Ebenezer lived in a house called Les Moulins near what he called ‘Le Chouey’, with a gully at the bottom of the garden, but although many of the places referred to in the book are real, it seems his home is not.
From Mont Cuet we followed the coastline around past the quarry now used for dumping garden waste and one that is now a pistol shooting range. German bunkers are everywhere, pressed into service as storerooms, and the roofs here provide the flat, grassy surface used by model aeroplane enthusiasts as they fly their tiny aircraft around, out of harm’s way.
Then we’re past the quarry in which still lurks some of the oil from the 1967 Torrey Canyon wreck and into the car park by Chouet tea rooms, Mr Domaille muttering about the holes that have appeared in a surface not long ago replaced.
With tarmac too expensive to use, the only option is loose material impacted to become as hard as possible.
However, the steady flow of vehicles, whose drivers simply want to sit and watch the sea, all wrenching their wheels around in unwittingly destructive circles as they turn - along with the natural ravages of a wet winter - have resulted in a pock-marked effect that will have to be tackled sooner rather than later.
We finish this first leg by skirting the golf course above Chouet and Ladies’ Bay to return to Les Amarreurs, next to the newly relaid playground, which began with just a couple of high swings from Cambridge Park and now has enough slides, climbing frames etc. to entertain and drain the excess energy from young children, while their parents watch and dream of an uninterrupted night’s sleep.
Over in the middle of the common stands the Millennium Stone, dragged with considerable difficulty from the beach at L’Ancresse where it had lain for who knows how long and erected as part of the 2000 celebrations. While reflecting the ancient standing stones that can be seen in other parts of the island, it is set in a concrete foundation for 21st century stability.
The second leg of the tour with Mr Domaille, from the eastern side of L’Ancresse Bay, was a very different story. We started in a car park where stands a big slab of German concrete, the remains of a stone crusher. On the way around to Fort Le Marchant there is a hill strewn with unusually sharp, flat stones, the result of another quarrying operation, specialising in chippings, rather than blocks. As we came down the hill on the other side towards yet another car park and another pre-Martello tower, we were in rifle range territory. The original range, Mr Domaille informed me, was behind the recently redeveloped bunker-style Mirage restaurant, the earth bank having been made there for that reason.
Back at Fort Le Marchant, all that remains is the old stone building, the more recent brown-clad exterior having been demolished in the 1970s to the delight of certain specialists but to the chagrin of those of us who remember the fort as looking like a relative of Fort Richmond and even Elizabeth College and Castle Carey.
There is gorse here, but an unusual variety for Guernsey. While most of what we see is fairly tall - as much as 12ft high in some places - in this area it is Norwegian gorse, which crouches close to the ground.
From Fort Le Marchant we pass what looks like a seldom-open tea room and is in fact the clubhouse for those who shoot on the rifle range. The little mid-20th century stone building sits opposite La Fontenelle Bay, a rocky and rather desolate spot where small boats were once kept, a cleared approach still visible at low tide and a couple of rusty old winches lying around at the top, their days of active service in pulling boats up over the pebbles long gone.
Just off the path we found a rock bearing a small cloven hoof shape said to be the devil’s footprint as he made his way from France.
As we made our way along the path we came to a part of the coastline that is particularly vulnerable to erosion.
The soil, exposed right above the pebbles at the top of the beach, is largely peat, so soft as to be easily washed away by a rough sea. Erosion is a problem along the whole of the L’Ancresse coast. Even on the beach itself, the concrete walls are being undermined as the sea changes the sand levels and without considerable work to bolster and protect them, along with proper drainage to tackle the problem from the inland side, trouble is around the corner.
As we followed the path to Fort Doyle, the steep rocks and deep water of which make this a popular place for serious anglers, we found the white building, now private accommodation but originally owned by the General Post Office. On the steep-sloping pebble beach just beyond it, telegraph cables came ashore - in fact a disused one can still be seen. The building was also used to store batteries and other equipment for the Platte Fougere lighthouse, which sits just offshore, less well known than Les Hanois but doing an invaluable job on a dangerous part of the coast.
So dangerous was it, in fact, that a lifeboat used to be kept here and, as at La Fontenelle, you can still see a smoother channel that was cleared to launch it.
Areas such as L’Ancresse, wild and rambling, are not guaranteed to be neat and tidy and with this in mind, it is perhaps a blessing for all lovers of the common that the golf course is there. While it means that one does have to be careful about where one walks, it also results in the area having a neat appearance.
Golf has been played at L’Ancresse since at least 1890, when the Royal Guernsey Golf Club was formed, but the actual course has changed several times. Details of the first are sketchy, but the initial tee is known to have been close to the Chouet Road, while the clubhouse was quite a walk away, near the Vale Church. The reason for the distance was apparently the presence of a lot of gorse in the area, which begs the question of why the clubhouse was put there in the first place.
Perhaps it was simply a matter of finding a suitable existing and available building.
A visiting amateur champion and leading golf writer of the time, Horace Hutchinson, complained about the gorse problem, which affected him and his fellow players mainly because if a ball landed in the spiky stuff, it had to be carefully picked out and dropped clear.
Mr Hutchinson had little sympathy with the local people who had the right to cut it to fuel their furze ovens. To him the fearsome bushes were an obstacle, to them it was a free fuel that needed to be carefully looked after.
He was, however, complimentary about the course in general, comparing it with those at Sandwich in Kent and Westward Ho! He even had pleasant things to say about the first clubhouse, a small, semi-detached cottage at La Garenne, now called Old Golf Place.
An additional problem for the poor, blinkered and golf-obsessed man was that many people in the area, including both male and female caddies, spoke only Guernsey-French.
He clearly enjoyed the presence of the opposite sex, as an article he wrote in a national magazine shows: ‘Ladies - little Guernsey ladies of short frocks and tender years - carry your clubs. There are male caddies but the female caddie is preferred.’
As for the language problem, he added: ‘They can understand your English, however, and can answer in a form of the language which is within the comprehension of the simple.’
The course was soon redesigned, the second version lasting from 1896 to 1914. Keeping clear of dense patches of gorse was taken into consideration, but there were other hazards to contend with, as an article in Golf Illustrated indicated, ‘We must be careful to avoid the Martello tower which is almost in the centre of the fairway at the fourteenth.’
During the First World War very little golf was played at L’Ancresse, with the common being used for military training and many of the players having been called up, but a third incarnation of the course lasted from 1920 to 1928.
Again, the rest of the world was intruding, with houses being built at the entrance to the Fort Le Marchant peninsula, ‘in particular in the vicinity of the fifteenth green’, as the Royal Guernsey Golf Club’s comprehensive 1990 centenary history booklet tells us. ‘It was therefore found necessary to abandon the last four holes and to utilise the area west of the Mont Cuet Road.’
The expansion continued with course no. 4 (1929-40), when ‘with the decline in the use of furze there was less objection to the use of the area between the Amarreurs and L’Ancresse Roads. Four new holes were created there.
Then came the Second World War, when L’Ancresse suffered as much as any part of the island.
After the liberation, the States paid for the reinstatement of the course, which had to take into account the presence of German fortifications.
Further alterations were made in 1969, when, ‘because of increasing numbers of visitors using the common, it was necessary to abandon the second hole and make changes to the eighteenth’.
While, to the non-golfer, there is a course at L’Ancresse and that is that, requirements and circumstances change.
Only recently a view was expressed by senior golfers that another rethink was needed.
Article posted on 17th May, 2007 - 12.00am
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