The Great House at Hermitage was built sometime between 1670 and 1740. Nevis island lore calls it the oldest house on the island, and Jack Bertholet, author of the 1984 book, CARIBBEAN STYLE, declares it the oldest surviving wooden house in the Caribbean. In twenty...
The airport runway on Nevis runs directly along the beach, and halfway down the middle reaching off into the sea is an old wooden pier with a rusted crane. The pier is locked in a bay, bound by a reef, and inaccessible by car or by boat. It stands in the water, on...
We have ponds of water throughout our garden where the waterlilies grow, where the herons perch, where the wild donkeys and roaming livestock come to drink when the yard is still. They are made from raw iron; demi-spheres of various sizes, some broken, some tipped...
Beneath the sands of the beach at Gallows Bay, near the pier of our primary port Charlestown, lies the wreckage that time has buried on our shores; the iron, steel and heavy wooden timbers of the ships and the ruins that describe another age. It’s a field of debris...
We speak our own dialect in Nevis, it is a version of English that is filled with its own rhythm and cadence, and rife with its own sublimated context. We speak with vagary and ambiguity because in a community of 11,000 it is easy to follow subtle references. But our...
