Alum Bay Sands
A traditional product of Alum Bay, and a fixture of Isle of Wight tourist shops, is the creation of ornaments using the coloured sands layered in vials and jars. The sands also were used for pictures, a popular craft in Victorian times known as marmotinto. Visitors are no longer allowed to dig out their own sands, and signs on the beach warn tourists not to climb the cliffs because of the danger of landslides. The Needles Park, however, has a facility for visitors to fill their own sand souvenirs with sand collected and preserved from natural cliff falls throughout the year. In the past it was possible to buy Alum Bay coloured sand by mail order and make ones own sand pictures and bottles at home.
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Famous quotes containing the words bay and/or sands:
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)