Ferry Fishbourne - Portsmouth

Fishbourne – Portsmouth with Wightlink

This route links Fishbourne with Portsmouth, operated by Wightlink. The two ferry terminals are about 11 kilometres (6 nautical miles) apart in a straight line. Use the search engine above for current timetables and fares, or use the Direct Ferries button at the top of the page to compare the sailings.

Descended from Solent services that began in the early nineteenth century, Wightlink has traded under that name since 1990. It runs a fast catamaran from Portsmouth to Ryde (about 22 minutes) and car ferries from Portsmouth to Fishbourne (about 45 minutes) and from Lymington to Yarmouth (about 40 minutes).

Fishbourne

Fishbourne is little more than a ferry terminal and a creek, but it sits next to one of the Isle of Wight's most unusual buildings. Quarr Abbey, a short distance along the coast towards Ryde, is a working Benedictine monastery whose red-brick church was designed by one of its own monks, the architect Dom Paul Bellot, and built between 1907 and 1914. A short walk away are the ruins of the medieval Cistercian abbey founded in 1132, whose quarry supplied stone for parts of the Tower of London; after the Dissolution the abbey was largely dismantled and some of its stone went into Henry VIII's forts at Cowes and Yarmouth. The coast path from Fishbourne to the abbey runs through woodland and along the shore, and the Isle of Wight Steam Railway at Havenstreet is a short drive inland.

Portsmouth

Portsmouth is the only island city in the United Kingdom: the old town sits on Portsea Island, joined to the mainland by bridges. It produced two famous sons within six years of each other. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born in Portsea in 1806 and Charles Dickens followed in 1812 at a modest house in Landport, now a museum furnished as it would have been in his day. Over in Southsea, a young doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle ran a practice in the 1880s and wrote the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, while waiting for patients. Ferries leave from the International Port on the harbour's eastern side for Normandy, Brittany, the Channel Islands and northern Spain, so many visitors arrive here with a long drive or an overnight sailing ahead of them.