From its sweeping coastal views to its steep, forested hillsides, St Thomas offers a quiet, natural beauty that unfolds at an unhurried pace. Winding roads reveal vistas of the Caribbean Sea in shifting shades of blue and green, while inland slopes are softened by tropical vegetation and cooling breezes. Small communities nestled between mountains and shoreline reflect a harmony between people and place, making St Thomas a parish where landscape, calm and character come together in enduring appeal.

Published Saturday, January 1, 1972

Jamaican Places

Grant’s Pen enjoys pleasant breezes

By Alex D. Hawkes

I am sure that most people, at least within the Corporate Area, are well acquainted with the Grant’s Pen area which lies within this sprawling, populous district and between Barbican and Constant Spring. But there is another Grant’s Pen, this one the subject of my comments for this column in the regular Jamaican Places series, a small community in the parish of St Thomas.
It lies in the district of St David, on the seacoast just above Cow Bay. One travels through the Port Royal Mountains, with all of the twisty, turny roads traversing this interesting, rough area, from Kingston and beyond Bull Bay and Eleven Mile.
For travellers along the southeastern coastal road, the sector is well known, for it is very sparsely inhabited and, on frequent occasions, offers spectacular vistas out over the variously blue, green or grey Caribbean, back towards the capital metropolis or in other directions.
On our recent visit to Grant’s Pen, as usual, Mr Campbell drove with exceptional caution, since the roadway, for a number of miles, seems to offer even more possibilities for a serious accident than most others throughout the island.
After Eleven Mile, or singular Eleven Mile, if you will, we leisurely passed through the still rather green, wooded hills, these dropping off steeply to the sea on our right at many places, and on occasion affording us handsome vistas up towards the Blue Mountains in the other direction.
Masses of orange love vine, that noxious yet singularly attractive parasite, adorned the roadside vegetation and could be seen in abundance extending up on the landward slopes at many places, showy against the varied tropical greenery.
The road winds up and around Grant’s Pen Hill, with an elevation of some 553 feet, and then suddenly comes swooping down a woodsy, lengthy grade. From those lowermost curves one is afforded handsome scenes of the sea beyond the village.
This Grant’s Pen of St Thomas seems always to enjoy pleasant breezes from the water, and, sited here at the base of the very steep hill of the same name, it is in an attractive spot. The centre boasts a postal agency, a couple of invariably busy small shops, and a number of visible houses of differing sizes and conditions.
Continuing just eastward from the community, one passes a cricket pitch which, in my experience, seems more often populated with browsing goats than with human players, and then comes out next to the extensive swampy area surrounding Albion Pond. Rushes and large buttonwoods are prominent here and, if the voyager is interested in birds, this is a very nice place to stop and stand quietly for a while to enjoy the varied species of water birds, in particular, which can be seen with ease.
Near here is the block structure of the Grant’s Pen Water Supply, and then, oddly and rather confusingly, some miles further towards the east, the Grant’s Pen Primary School, beyond the crossroads at Albion.
As I have mentioned before, I always enjoy hearing from Mr Edwin Todd, in Highgate. On September 2, in this regular series in The Daily Gleaner, I published some notes on Content, the one in Westmoreland, and Mr Todd has written as follows:
“I was so glad to see your photo in The Gleaner of the catchment and cistern near Content. Coincidentally, Mrs Todd and I had just returned from a brief but refreshing holiday at Bluefields Great House, and we had travelled the Cave Valley–Brown’s Town road which has several fascinating catchments, and I have photographed them.
“In St Thomas, Virgin Islands, there are some wonderful catchments. One is on the hill behind Bluebird’s Castle and it has huge boulders sticking out, something like your picture. I did a moonlight painting of it, with the boulders in sinisterly suggestive shapes casting long shadows. Also, if one stood on the Magens Bay road near the top and looked towards the old submarine base, there were several huge catchments, looking as if a god had spread his handkerchiefs out to dry. I still have the sketches of these.
“Speaking of submarines – while at Bluefields Great House we went over to Negril and around to the lighthouse to see those caves in the shore where German subs were supposed to have sheltered in World War II. And they were spectacular!”
Many thanks, Mr Todd, and I didn’t know that there was anyone else hereabouts intrigued by the varied displays of our countryside catchments!

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