Ascension Island
— — an island the Navy and the green turtles share.
Not only on a wall.
“A volcanic island, ninety-odd square kilometres of clinker and cinder, with one improbable cloud forest at the top of Green Mountain. The British have held it since 1815, when the Royal Navy garrisoned the place to keep Napoleon company on Saint Helena, 1,300 kilometres south. The runway at Wideawake still operates, the antennas still listen, and every year the largest population of green turtles in the Atlantic comes back to the long beach at Long Beach to nest. Not many places are this far from everywhere.
Ascension Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ascension Island is a volcanic island in the South Atlantic, about 1,600 kilometres from the coast of West Africa and 2,250 kilometres from Brazil. It rises to 859 metres at the summit of Green Mountain and covers around 88 square kilometres of mostly basaltic terrain. The Portuguese navigator João da Nova sighted it in 1501; Afonso de Albuquerque named it on Ascension Day, 1503. Britain has administered Ascension as a permanent garrison since 1815, and it is today one of three constituent parts of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.
The summit of Green Mountain is a deliberate cloud forest. From the 1840s, Joseph Hooker of Kew Gardens, on a recommendation Charles Darwin had brought back from his 1836 visit, supervised the planting of bamboo, ginger, banana, eucalyptus and Norfolk Island pine on the bare basalt cap. The vegetation thickened until the peak began to harvest its own water from the trade winds. Today Green Mountain National Park, established in 2005, protects the result. The walk up the Elliot's Path to the Dew Pond takes about an hour from the Garrison.
Between roughly December and May, green turtles come ashore at Long Beach and the smaller beaches around Georgetown to lay eggs. The nesting population at Ascension is the largest in the South Atlantic, on the order of 6,000 to 25,000 females in a strong year. The Ascension Island Government Conservation Department runs a tagging programme and rules access to the beaches at night. Visitors arrive by RAF flight via Brize Norton or by ship from Saint Helena; there is no commercial tourist airline.