A pint beside a burial mound and gibbet post

First is the Hare and Hounds, where the customers were photographed in about 1910.

Just across the road from them is a bronze age burial barrow, which was once the site of a ‘gibbet post’ used to display the dead bodies of criminals in human-shaped cages hanging from them as a warning to others.

In 1736, in woods near Burnt House Lane, Michal Morey, for reasons unknown, killed his 14-year-old grandson, James Dove, with a billhook and then cut off his head and dismembered the body.

He then went into hiding but was eventually arrested and tried for the murder at Winchester.

Justice was swift ­— he was found guilty in the morning, hanged in the afternoon, and his body was returned to the Island.

Into the cage hanging from the gibbet post went Michal Morey’s dead body, and for four months, his rotting remains swung in the breeze “for rooks and ravens to peck down”.

The lovely photograph of the grand old lady is known to have been taken in the late 1890s.

She appears to be around 80 years old, which gives her a rough birthdate of 1810.

When she was born, George III was on the throne (he was declared mad that same year), Lord Byron was writing his poetry in between bouts of gonorrhoea and syphilis and the Napoleonic War was in progress.

Happy days.

The photograph of the race meeting appeared in the County Press, April 17, 1926, the caption reading “Point to Point Races, Tapnell, Freshwater, showing the crowds in the paddock during saddling up for the Farmers’ Cup Race.”

Finally, all that can be said for sure about the Edwardian picnic is that it’s somewhere on the Island.

On the menu is fruit cake, bananas, brown buttered bread and a cup of tea.