The Needles
Interesting facts
- During Storm Eunice on 18 February 2022, a gust of 122 mph was provisionally recorded at the Needles, the strongest wind gust ever measured in England.
- Rocket engines tested on the cliffs of High Down powered Black Arrow, which in 1971 launched the Prospero satellite into orbit.
- The first Needles light, lit in 1786, stood about 150 metres up on the clifftop, where fog hid it so often that a tower at sea level replaced it.
- Builders had to slice away a large section of chalk to give the 1859 granite lighthouse a level footing, and dug storage tunnels into the rock behind it.
- The lighthouse was designed by the engineer James Walker for Trinity House and cost £20,000, a substantial sum in the 1850s.
- Until 1994 three keepers worked the lighthouse in month-long shifts, living on three cramped levels below the lantern; today a helipad sits on top of it.
- German aircraft badly damaged the lighthouse's lantern and lens during the Second World War, and a new British-made optic was fitted in 1948.
- The name appears in records as 'Nedlen' as early as 1333, long before the slender pillar that inspired it collapsed.
- A drawing made by the Dutch artist Lambert Doomer in 1646 shows only three stacks, puzzling historians, since a fourth was still standing then.
- Just beyond the stacks lies the Shingles, a shifting pebble bank about three miles long that has wrecked many ships, including the steamer Varvassi in 1947.
Why it is worth it
Three white blades of chalk run out from the western tip of the Isle of Wight into the open Channel, each about 30 metres high, with a red-and-white lighthouse standing at the very end of the line. The Needles are the last visible stretch of a chalk ridge that once continued unbroken towards the Dorset coast; the sea has worked along it for thousands of years and left only these sharp, separated stacks.
Their shape owes much to the earth movements of the Alpine mountain-building period, which folded the chalk beds here until they stood almost on end. That near-vertical layering is why the stacks break away as thin, upright slabs rather than rounded lumps. There used to be a fourth: a slender pillar, said to have been around 120 feet tall and known as Lot's Wife, which fell during a storm in 1764. It was that lost spire, not the blunter survivors, that gave the group its name, from the Old English word for a needle.
The lighthouse at the outer stack was completed in 1859 and has run without keepers since 1994. On the cliffs above, two gun batteries guarded the western approach to the Solent from the 1860s until they were stood down in 1954, and on nearby High Down the Black Knight and Black Arrow rockets were tested between 1956 and 1971, at times with around 240 people working on the site. The headland is cared for by the National Trust, the surrounding waters form a Marine Conservation Zone, and the cliffs belong to the Headon Warren and West High Down Site of Special Scientific Interest. A chairlift runs from the clifftop down to the beach at Alum Bay, from where the stacks are seen in profile.
Getting there
The Needles lie at the western end of the Isle of Wight, so the mainland is reached by water. New Milton, on the Hampshire coast, is about 12 km away in a straight line across the Solent; car and foot ferries cross to the island, including the route from Lymington to Yarmouth on the island's west side. The nearest airport is Bournemouth (BOH), about 22 km across the water. On the island the batteries and the clifftop above the stacks can be reached by road, on foot, by bicycle and by bus.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Old Harry Rocks 23.7 km · stack
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From the encyclopaedia
The Needles are a row of three stacks of chalk that rise about 30 metres (98 ft) out of the sea off the western extremity of the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, United Kingdom, close to Alum Bay and Scratchell's Bay, and part of Totland, the westernmost civil parish of the Isle of Wight. The Needles Lighthouse stands at the outer, western end of the formation. Built in 1859, it has been automated since 1994. The waters and adjoining seabed form part of the Needles Marine Conservation Zone and the Needles along with the shore and heath above are part of the Headon Warren and West High Down Site of Special Scientific Interest.
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