Within a week of first wandering down to the Pilgrim’s Trail and Portsmouth Port area of our city for the first time – despite us having lived within ten minutes’ walk of them for close to a quarter of a century – we took another little stroll around mostly the same route in order to see one of the ships we should be cruising on in a month’s time (August 2021 if you’re reading this in the future where that relative date timeframe means nothing). You can read about our first photowalk that took in sights of Saga’s Spirit of Discovery by engaging in that oh-so-world-wide-webby action of clicking the link I’ve just provided where you’ll also get a few details of the area and trail itself, and because I can’t be doing with repeating myself too much, this post is mostly just going to be some photos of Virgin Voyages‘ Scarlet Lady with little else to distract.
If you’ve read the other post then you might notice that we had better weather and a higher tide for this walk that was primarily to see Scarlet Lady in the port.
We liked the sound of the water lapping at the end of the Pilgrim’s Trail. While all this water is what we typically describe as Portsmouth Harbour, it’s formed from a series of lakes, technically, and this bit of water above Portsmouth Port, running to the shooting range at Tipner to the north and bounded by Whale Island to the west is Brick Kiln Lake.
On our previous walk we’d wandered as far up as the Tipner Firing Range then headed under the motorway and through Stamshaw. We hadn’t realised that you could walk onto the grassy area to the south side of the firing range but a chance spotting of some people on the shoreline encouraged us to see if there was a path and this turned out to be the case. There were no flags flying so no shooting taking place, and if there had then we’d probably not have explored this new part of Portsmouth for us, but there didn’t seem to be any means to prevent public access in any event. It was very pleasant, peaceful, well away from the M275 traffic, and with some long views to the chalk cliffs of Portsdown Hill and across the water to Portchester. We even saw a Marbled White butterfly, something we don’t see in the city.
Having seen the parks at Stamshaw earlier in the week and not particularly liking them we opted to retrace our steps down the Pilgrim’s Path towards the port and Scarlet Lady again, then cut under the motorway in a location closer to home. This offered up opportunities to take some video footage on my camera for the first time, photograph some subway artwork, and grab a snap of a National Cycle Network marker. We’ve only encountered these a few times around the country but like their resemblance to whale tails.
