‘This is one of the strangest places on the face of the earth,’ wrote a Victorian naval officer. Another early visitor called it ‘the abomination of desolation’ — and to this day, on the 200th anniversary of the British occupation, Ascension remains decidedly odd.
The summit of an extinct volcano, it pokes up out of the Atlantic eight degrees south of the Equator, and although the latest eruption is thought to have taken place 70,000 years ago, most of it still looks raw. Vegetation cloaks the summit and shoulders of the 2,800-foot Green Mountain, but steep ravines and petrified lava-flows — jet-black, grey, brown and white — plunge away towards the coast. From this desert rise brick-red cinder cones, several topped with the gleaming domes and dishes of space-watching installations.
