Beyond the beach

Jewels of the natural world entrance the eyes of Steven King, as Jamaica's music moves his feet and heart together

IF you know where to look,’ says music mogul and hotelier Chris Blackwell, ‘Jamaica can be heaven.’ Might I suggest you start by looking out from Strawberry Hill, Blackwell’s hotel 3,000ft above Kingston in the Blue Mountains?

To the south and west, across treetops and valleys, lie Kingston and the Caribbean. Submerged in the harbour, like some underwater Pompeii of the pirates, are the remains of the original Spanish settlement, Port Royal. For a while ‘the richest and wickedest city in the New World’, it was obliterated in a matter of minutes by the great earthquake of 1692. Seen from Strawberry Hill at night, the lights of present-day Kingston appear at once near enough to scoop up in handfuls and as remote as the stars. The daytime views of the Blue Mountains to the north and east are, if anything, even better, hypnotic in a different way. The jagged peaks and ridges extend into the distance, dissolving into thick, low cloud one moment only to be reconstituted in brilliant sunshine the next.

Thoughtful readers with a love of early Gothic Revival architecture and some know- ledge of British colonial history may wonder whether there is any connection between this Strawberry Hill in Jamaica and Horace Walpole’s kooky house of the same name and similar vintage near Twickenham. The short answer is ‘probably’. Chronology and the Walpole family’s known interests in Jamaica suggest that it is likely. But, as far as I am aware, there is no evidence to prove it absolutely.