Bridgetown & the Garrison

About this pack

A 6-day premium trip to Bridgetown, Barbados, taking in Garrison Historic Area, Carlisle Bay wrecks, Harrison's Cave and St Nicholas Abbey.

Inside the Bridgetown & the Garrison trip

Bridgetown & the Garrison begins at the Garrison Historic Area, more commonly known simply as "The Garrison," a district about 3.2 kilometres south of Heroes Square in Bridgetown, dominated by the Garrison Savannah, a 12-hectare parade ground that doubles as a historic horse racetrack. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Garrison served as the base and headquarters of the British West India Regiment in Barbados, and by the mid-eighteenth century wealthy Barbadians and regiment troops together started the island's tradition of horse racing here. Among the district's historic buildings is George Washington House, in the Bush Hill section, where the future first president of the United States stayed for six weeks in 1751 while nursing his ill brother — and on 30 November 1966 the Garrison was the site of the ceremony that lowered the Union Flag and raised that of an independent Barbados.

From the Garrison the route runs down to Carlisle Bay, the small natural harbour on which Bridgetown itself sits, today turned into a marine park popular with scuba divers exploring the anchors and cannonballs scattered across its floor. The bay takes its name from James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle, Barbados' second Lord Proprietor, who claimed the island by royal grant on behalf of King Charles I in 1627, and it is also home to the historic Needham's Point Lighthouse. Carlisle Bay has twice drawn naval history to its waters: in April 1665 a Dutch fleet under Michiel de Ruyter was repelled here by defending English forces during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and during the Second World War the British ship Cornwallis was torpedoed at this location by a German U-boat.

Inland, the trail continues to Harrison's Cave, first recorded in historical documents in 1795 and rediscovered in the early 1970s by Jack Peeples before opening to the public as a tram tour in 1981. Set in Barbados' central uplands at about 210 metres above sea level, the cave was formed by water erosion through limestone, and calcium-rich water running through it over thousands of years has built the stalactite and stalagmite formations visitors pass on the tram route through chambers named the Great Hall — more than 15 metres high — the Village, the Chapel, the Rotunda and the Altar, with stops along the way allowing a closer look at the formations up close.

The route closes at St Nicholas Abbey in the parish of Saint Peter, a plantation house, museum and rum distillery built in 1658 by Colonel Benjamin Berringer and one of only three genuine Jacobean mansions surviving in the Western Hemisphere. Despite its name, the house has no church connection and has always been a sugarcane plantation property; ownership passed through several families over the centuries, including Sir John Gay Alleyne, who introduced mahogany to Barbados and planted the mahogany avenue leading to nearby Cherry Tree Hill, before the estate ceased functioning as a working plantation after 1947. Today the house operates as a museum recreating eighteenth-century plantation life, its rooms furnished with Wedgwood pottery and Chippendale furniture beneath curvilinear Dutch gables, and a rare 1930s film of life on the plantation is shown to visitors — closing out a route that has carried the traveller from a colonial garrison through a wreck-strewn bay and a limestone cave system to one of the Caribbean's oldest surviving great houses.

• Garrison Historic Area — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Carlisle Bay, Barbados — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Harrison's Cave — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• St Nicholas Abbey — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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