WHEN Charles Darwin visited Ascension Island in 1836, he wasn't very impressed. It was little more than a barren volcanic rock, and this rankled him because he felt everything in the British Empire should be productive. So he asked his botanist friend Joseph Dalton Hooker to help carpet the rock with plants. Hooker took to the task with vigour and by the 1870s there was enough vegetation that the islands's highest peak, Green Mountain, pictured here, had its own cloud forest.
But that's not how it looks now. "As you climb up the hill you notice that about a third of the side of the mountain is covered in concrete," says British photographer Jason Larkin. "It's bizarre." He visited to take shots like this because he was fascinated by the island's rich history.
In the early 20th century, British marines based on Ascension, which is 8° south of the equator in the Atlantic Ocean, covered swathes of the mountain in concrete slabs and built pits with water tanks to catch run-off rainwater. The idea was to alleviate their chronic water shortage problems. "It makes you understand the scale of their need for water," says Larkin.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Concrete mountain"
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