Nevis
— — the cloud the mountain keeps for itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A small round island in the Lesser Antilles, just three kilometres across the Narrows from Saint Kitts. A single volcanic peak in the middle, almost always wearing a ring of cloud. Charlestown along the leeward shore, hot springs above it, monkeys in the cane fields. The Atlantic does its work on one coast, the Caribbean on the other. The cloud stays.
Nevis, 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.
Nevis is the smaller of the two islands that make up the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, in the Leeward chain of the Lesser Antilles. It is roughly circular, about 93 square kilometres in area, separated from Saint Kitts by a three-kilometre channel known as the Narrows. The island's centre is Nevis Peak, a stratovolcano rising to about 985 metres. Christopher Columbus is credited with the name on his second voyage in 1493, from the Spanish Nuestra Señora de las Nieves — Our Lady of the Snows — for the cap of cloud that habitually rings the summit.
Nevis Peak is almost permanently collared in cloud, which is what gave the island its Spanish name. Warm trade winds running west across the Atlantic strike the windward slope, lift, cool, and condense into a stationary cap somewhere between 600 and 900 metres. The cap holds through most of the day and breaks open at sunrise and around dusk. The peak's last significant eruption is dated to roughly 100,000 years ago, but the island's hot springs — used at the Bath Hotel near Charlestown since 1778 — still vent the geothermal heat below.
The capital, Charlestown, sits on the leeward west coast and is reached by a fifteen-minute ferry from Basseterre on Saint Kitts, or by a small regional flight into Vance W. Amory International Airport on the north end. The main island road is a single ring of about 32 kilometres, easily driven in an hour. Charlestown is the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton; the small museum on Main Street is in the stone house traditionally identified as his. The dry season runs December through April; the green months follow, when the cloud cap on the peak grows heavy.