Yarmouth, Isle of Wight

Yarmouth is a port in the western part of the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. The town is named for its location at the mouth of the small Western Yar river (there is also an Eastern Yar on the island). Yarmouth is a crossing point for the river, originally with a ferry, replaced with a road bridge in 1863.

Yarmouth pier

Yarmouth has been a settlement for over a thousand years, and is one of the very earliest on the Isle of Wight. The first record of a settlement here was in King Ethelred the Unready's record of the Danegeld tax of 991. It was originally called Eremue, meaning "muddy estuary". The Normans laid out the streets of Yarmouth on the grid system, a plan which can still be seen in the layout today. It grew rapidly, being given its first Charter as a town in 1135. The town became a parliamentary borough in the middle ages, and the Yarmouth constituency was represented by two members of Parliament until 1832.

Until the building of the Castle regular raids on the Island by the French continued and in 1544 the town of Yarmouth was reputed to have been burned down. Legend has it that the church bells were carried off to Cherbourg or Boulogne.

Yarmouth Castle, was built in 1547. It survives, and is now in the care of English Heritage. It is a effectively a gun platform built by Henry VIII to strengthen the Solent and protect the Isle of Wight, historically an important strategical foothold for any attempted invasion of England.

Yarmouth Harbour

There is a monument to the seventeenth-century admiral Sir Robert Holmes. In a raid on a French ship, he seized an unfinished statue of Louis XIV of France and forced the sculptor to finish it with his own head rather than the king's. It can now be seen in St. James's Church.

Yarmouth Pier was built in 1876 and is the longest timber pier in England which is still open to the public.

The Wightlink ferry sails from Yarmouth to Lymington in Hampshire.