Photos

Most of the aerial photos you see of this small island are from the other side, possibly to downplay the man-made breakwater (not that the locals are ashamed of it by any means - see below).

The picture is stitched together from 3 different shots. As the plane I was in was moving, they don't perfectly align, but other than the stitching, only curves, unsharpen and colour correction were used to get the final version.

A little history...

The break-water itself is huge, the longest in the UK at nearly 900m long, but the original one built in 1864 was 1,430m! The admiralty then decided that would be too expensive to maintain, so let the last 500m erode, leaving a nice long obstruction to shipping about 4 meters under the surface. In the middle of summer on a calm day it doesn't look like it's really needed, but this channel island lies in some of the most treacherous seas in the world, and in winter storms the spray from the waves still rises tens of feet above the top of it.

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Re-post - wanted to post a large version of this, but the original ratio was 1 to 2.48, the minimum for a panoramic being 1 to 2.5, so I cropped off 4 pixels. Yes, a very dramatic repost!