Travelling Light!

Roanoke Island is protected from the Atlantic by a long thin strip of barrier Islands called the Outer Banks OBX. To arrive in Manteo, we needed to drive the Croatan Highway from Kitty Hawk, through Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head. The buildings here are often built raised up on stilts for protection against flooding. Historically these sandbank islands were often breached by the ocean after big seas from storms and hurricanes. Now that there are roads and bridges it is most inconvenient when nature chooses to have her own way! Even Manteo on Roanoke Island, sheltered in the relative briney water of Pamlico Sound, it’s often flooded and houses that were originally built from the ground up by now routinely raised, in their entirety, onto stilts. This is clearly a very expensive process but there is government funding to help raise buildings that have already been flooded and are at risk again.

The fishing industry is big here based in Wanchese, the town at the southern end of Roanoke Island, where we luncheoned on clam chowder! Both of the towns were named after the Island’s two Native American leaders who, in 1584, were brought back to England and presented to Queen Elizabeth, helping with the job of deciphering and learning the Carolina Algonquian language.

The beach at OBX is 200 miles long! Like Saunton or Westward Ho! it is backed by dunes. It is known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, the same phrase given to North Devon‘s Coast; but this sea is treacherous because of its sand banks. You would have to travel 50 miles inland to find rock or stone because the interior is forested swamp. This makes beach combing an interesting hobby, where whole conch shells and fulgurite can be found on the yellow sand.

The shore was full of seagulls and waders, and we often saw pelicans and cormorants flying over the sea. Another similarity to North Devon is its sanderlings, which race along the sea’s edge, the dynamic few feet where the surf is continually advancing and retreating.

Well, what a whirlwind of a weekend! We arrived in Bideford’s twin town Manteo on Roanoke Island on Friday around 4 o’clock and we have had such fun catching up with buddies.

We drove down here in our rental car that we picked up in Richmond on Friday morning – we had wanted to make our way by public transportation but this was not possible as there is simply no connection of any sort by train or by bus. 

We came because it’s been 12 years since we last visited and that was a follow-up on the back of Sadie’s Winston Churchill Memorial Trust travel fellowship in 2010.  Sadie spent six weeks in Virginia and North Carolina to visit collections of ElizabethanNorth Devon pottery, but also to make first contact with the Community of Manteo.

 We haven’t flown at all since 2019 in a conscious decision to keep our carbon footprint as low as we can when we travel. We know quite a few folks down here and have kept in virtual contact all that time so we decided to visit for a few days at the start of the trip as it has been too long, we had a lot of catching up to do!!

The weekend has been a heady mix of socialising, eating and drinking in local bars, at peoples houses for dinner and visiting coffee shops and sandwich shops. 

We left the island on Monday morning to drive to Colonial Williamsburg.