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Getting off the beaten path
Clifton Heritage Park beckons
Although most visitors see downtown Nassau, Paradise Island and Cable Beach, not many venture farther afield. But for those who like to leave the beaten path, Clifton Heritage National Park offers many attractions, including historic ruins, a nature preserve, a scenic beach and ocean views.
Few tourists make the journey to the western tip of New Providence where this new park is located, even though it’s a national treasure and well worth the trip. Driving there in a rented car takes about 45 minutes from Cable Beach (see locator map), roughly an hour from Bay Street and 90 minutes from Paradise Island, depending on traffic.
The 208-acre park, opened in April 2009, is one of the island’s best-kept secrets. It offers a unique heritage experience that really brings the past to life. As well, it’s a peaceful and uncommercialized getaway.
For a $5 entrance fee, visitors may take a 90-minute guided tour of the site, where three distinct groups– Lucayan Indians, American Loyalists and African slaves–once lived and left their marks.
Trails wind through the park, beckoning nature lovers to explore and observe native plants such as the gum elemi, royal poinciana and jumbey trees and abundant avifauna, including the white crowned pigeon, osprey and green heron.
Twelve years ago Clifton Cay, as it was then called, made headlines when developers wanted to build a $400-million gated community on the site. The announcement triggered an aggressive “Save Clifton Cay” campaign. That effort grew in 1999, when archaeologists discovered evidence of human habitation dating back 800 years.
Between 1000 and 1500 AD, a Lucayan Indian village occupied the high ground from Clifton Point to Flipper Beach. The Lucayans, first inhabitants of The Bahamas, survived for only a few decades after Columbus’s arrival in The Bahamas, the victims of slavery and disease. Three hundred years later, American colonists arrived to set up plantations on the same land.
Steps to the New World
One curiosity at Clifton is the stone steps, also called the “Pirate’s Steps,” which predate the plantation era. No one is sure when the steps were cut into the limestone bluff, but historians are sure the staircase was an important link, allowing the transfer of people and cargo.
One legend has it that the steps were used by pirates during their heyday in the 1700s. Far from the watchful eyes of the authorities in Nassau, Clifton offered them a lookout from which to spot their prey.
Slaves probably climbed these steps to begin their life of servitude on the plantations. Folklore says they bathed in the turtle pen and were kept for a time in the carriage house. Visits to the carriage house (now a gift shop) and the turtle pen are included in the tour.
To commemorate the slaves who laboured at Clifton, two local artists created displays entitled “Genesis” and “Sacred Space”–areas where a group of carved figures representing African women gazing across the Atlantic Ocean toward Africa. Nearby, small chairs carved from casuarina trees overlook the waterfront.
British loyalists arrive
American Loyalists, so named because of their loyalty to the British Crown during and after the American Revolutionary War, settled in Clifton in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
In 1785, Loyalist planter John Wood had Clifton’s great house built. It’s a cut-stone building cemented with lime mortar and covered with plaster. The detached kitchen was built behind the house to lessen the heat and avoid the danger of fire.
When Wood left The Bahamas in 1802, William Wylly acquired his property, along with three adjacent plantations. Records indicate that as many as 67 slaves lived at the Wylly plantation, and that each married couple received a stone house. Today the remains of the slave village include seven cabins equally spaced along a pebbled path.
More than 6,000 yards of low stone walls run through the dense woodland, originally built to enclose farm fields and also to set boundaries around the great house.
According to archaeologists Dr Laurie Wilkie and Dr Paul Farnsworth, Clifton is “one of The Bahamas’ priceless historic resources and the best-preserved Loyalist plantation site on New Providence.”
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Feature_Clifton_WTDNJan10
Getting off the beaten path
Clifton Heritage Park beckons
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