A walk to Lot’s Wife Ponds in the Atlantic Ocean.

A walk to Lot’s Wife Ponds

The looming parasitic volcanoes of Lot and Lot’s Wife dominate the views. These natural monuments tower out of Sandy Bay National Park on St Helena Island. St Helena was forged out of the igneous factories of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 14 million years ago. Since that time it has become fixed on a collision course with South-West Africa.

They say St Helena is an emerald set in bronze. The bronze being a sad reminder of what 500 years of human intervention can do. This landscape would once have been clothed in endemic woodlands, from the Green Heartland down to the Coastal Zone. Despite this walking from Sandy Bay, over the steep ridges and ravines, to Lot’s Wife’s Ponds is a wonderful experience.

The landscape has cultivated a cultural significance that has stretched through the generations to the modern day. On the sharp ridges beneath Lot’s Wife masked boobies nest on hastily gathered stones. Around the nest site streaks of faeces radiate out appearing to be the white hot flames escaping from a sun. From here the island rises steeply to the Peaks National Park where the world’s rarest trees cling on to existence in the same way they cling to the vertigo inducing slopes.

The path to the ponds is one of the 21 Post Box Walks that capture the wonderful scenery and unique biota of this little isolated island. On the way you can see tiny French grass, yellow-flowered boneseed and the succulent babies’ toes. The Post Box walks are the manageable trails of the island, the ones that take more courage have become known as Death Walks giving walkers a constant reminder of their fate should they lose their footing.

After an hours walk you reach the Post Box containing a comment book and stamp for the keen collector. Beyond the Post Box a steep, and crumbling, descent is aided by a rope tied to a large boulder. This is the final section that takes you to the ponds themselves. Lot’s Wife Ponds have been created on the lee side of Black Rocks, thin sills of stone that break some of the energy from the sea. These natural sea ponds glisten like Blue Topaz.

In calm weather these ponds are good for swimming and snorkelling. When the southerly swells sweep in waves crash over the rocks with alarming ferocity turning the ponds into a rush of turbulence. Sitting here on such days and watching crashes of sea rise a hundred foot into the air is humbling. Especially so when you consider that Napoleon and Darwin may have sat on the same rock, and watched the same seas crash in and out.

Beyond the ponds Speery Island rises like a breaching albino whale, frozen still. The grey-white façade of this island is years of bird guano built up from tropic birds, petrels, boobies, noddies and terns. Johnny Hern once told me, ‘we used to climb Speery Island to collect guano for fertiliser and we’d take the eggs for food. Then we’d jump in from the ledge.’ The ledge is nearly fifty foot high.

I can sit here all day and not see another person, the oscillations of the sea touching the shores from Manati Bay to South West Point. And Humpback whales calve here. They arrive in late winter and remain till spring. They gather on the southern shores of the island. I’ve seen them from here twice. Leeroy, one of the fishermen, has even seen them give birth, ‘the sea turned red and you could hear her.’ He described the sound as a deep moan, perhaps a longing for the pain to wane and motherhood to begin.

On the way back, again without another person in sight, I stop at the fossil bird bones. These are reminders of the now extinct birds that were once endemic here; the ground hoopoe, the two species of petrel and a cuckoo. The walk back follows the same route but this time the views draw towards Sandy Barn, a huge lump of layered volcanic deposits. In the late sun it takes on the colour of icing and the layers make it appear as a monstrous cake straight from Gullivers Travels.

About the Author: David Higgins is a conservationist on St Helena Island. His job is to write the plans for 14 National Conservation Areas including National Parks, Nature Reserves and Important Wirebird Areas. He plans to stay on St Helena as long as the St Helenian people will have him.

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