A Visit to Cornwall

By Rachel Kruft Welton

We arrived at the Cornish Bed & Breakfast late on Thursday evening. It was the Easter weekend and we had come to St Just in Penwith - about as far west as you can get in the West Country. We were staying in the obscurely named Coachhouse Suite, which consisted of a spacious room on the top floor of a converted barn made of the cool grey stone so often used in Cornwall. We could see the sea from the window.
 

St Just is a small town about a mile and a half's walk across fields from the B & B. It has a couple of shops, cafes, pubs, a chippie and some souvenir and craft shops. A narrow road leads down to the coast and to Britain's only Cape - Cape Cornwall. It has a small monument on it that the National Trust unaccountably decided to put there. The breeze was fresh and salty and the walk back up the hill was a little taxing to us computer blimp escapees, as our most tiring job usually is pressing the 'return' key.

Seaweed at Penzance

Discarding walking for the motorised comfort of Ember, the trusty red Fiesta, we drove around the spectacular coastline, past derelict tin mines. There are many prehistoric sites in Cornwall, but one of the most famous is the Men-an-Tol. This consists of a circular stone with a hole in the middle, flanked by two upright stones. Legend has it that crawling through the hole cures everything from infertility to rickets. As we have been waiting for a child for four years already, we have heard many suggestions for fertility charms. We crawled through the Men-an-Tol, giggling like schoolchildren.

 

Close by is the 9 Maidens stone circle, somewhat overgrown with heather and moss. Then back to Ember and round the coast to St Ives. If you ever have the chance to visit St Ives' wonderful steep and narrow streets, do remember not to park at the top of the hill. It's a long way up. We wandered round St Ives, enjoying ice-cream and sea views, streets of pretty whitewashed cottages and a meal at a vegetarian restaurant. We didn't, however, manage to find the pub advertising itself as sporting a "large collection of Toby Jogs". Shame.
 

The coastal road home must have been as delightfully precipitous as it had been on the way to St Ives. However, in the dark, we couldn't see, so we didn't care. We sped back towards the B & B, pausing only briefly to pick up two teenage boys who were hitckhiking. They enlivened our journey by giving us helpful tips and expounding their theory that long bus journeys are considerably shortened if you smoke a good joint beforehand.
 

The following morning started foggy, but cleared later. Our first stop was Modran's well and the ruins of a Benedictine chapel. The area is wet woodland - green trees, smothered in feathery lichen and dripping with moisture. In the mist, the air was still and quiet. The precise location of the well proved impossible to find without wellies and a love of mud. The approximate location, however, was clearly marked by hundreds of differently coloured wishing knots, ribbons, rags, ropes and strings, tied to every available branch, twig and stem, each representing someone's wish. This is a wishing well of the old style.
 

Piper Stone, Lanoma Cove

On to Penzance, a pretty city, friendly and busy, but lacking the magic of our previous stop. We bought postcards, avoiding the ever-present ones of eclipses, and a couple of books and had lunch in the Dandelion Cafe. I took some neat photos of the seaweed-encrusted hawser lines in the harbour and we went on to Mousehole, which has streets as narrow as the name suggests. The highlights here include some scrummy gooseberry ice-cream, finding a foot-long ex-shark and outwitting a barnacle fast enough to dislodge it from the rock.
 

Lanoma Cove, a few miles further on, is famous for its smugglers and wreckers and for being pretty. I think the parking attendant was a direct descendant of the wreckers mostly from his ingenious policy of blocking nearly everyone in, using a van full of scuba divers. We left without parking. A little further along the coast road, we stopped and climbed over a gate to visit the 2 piper stones. These are magnificent - 14 feet tall, they dwarf all else. They are connected with a stone circle in an adjacent field called the Merry Maidens. The circle is fairly large and the stones are about waist high. There were a few merry hippies about, absorbing the atmosphere. I guess they must have been going on a long bus journey later.
 

Last stop on our coastal tour appropriately was Land's End. We objected strenuously to forking out £3 to park and so we parked in the pub car park for nothing and walked. We did have to climb a few dry stone walls and brave a scratching of brambles, but we got to see Land's End and the striking rugged cliff sides around that part of the coastline. We walked back the easy way, along the road, and had a meal in the pub before going back to St Just.
 

Easter Sunday: and not even a huge chocolate egg for breakfast could quite clear my hangover, or the fog. We drove down to the Miracle Theatre, hoping the fog would burn off. It didn't. The Miracle Theatre is an amazing amphitheatre, carved into the steep cliff face, overlooking the sea. They perform plays there outdoors and the stage includes a stone throne, gateways and balconies. It is truly spectacular, even in fog.
 

We decided to try the other coast to shake off the damp mist. We went to Hoyle and visited Paradise Park, a delightful bird sanctuary. I loved the sleepy owls and the fish-feeding frenzy of the Humboldt's penguins. Nick fell in love with the incredibly ugly ibises, with their long beaks and wrinkled faces.

 

We walked down into Hoyle centre, which was totally uninspiring. The highlight there was a little egret wading through the estuary poking for food in the sand. For non-ornithologists, little egrets tend to live in Spain and Morocco, so this chap was a smidgin off course - must have been the fog.

 

On the way back to the B & B, we stopped at a ruined village called Crysanster, dating back to 3AD or so. Despite being overgrown with grass and heather, it was still quite clear where the walls and doorways were. The hearth stone and grinding stones were still there, too. All of it was still covered in drifting, unnecessarily atmospheric mist, but it drew me just the same.
 

Easter Monday: time to go home to Worcestershire. We bribed Ember with a full tank of diesel and left about 10 am. It quickly became clear that so had everyone else. After queueing on the A30, we opted for the scenic route through Devon. It was worth it for the scrumptious scones in the calorific cream tea we had. We stopped at Cheddar Gorge and saw the caves (and about 700 tourists). The caves were great and the tourists were everywhere. With hindsight, leaving Cheddar at 5 pm on Bank Holiday Monday might be seen as a bad idea. Every road heading north towards Bristol was stationary with traffic going nowhere fast (as it were).

 

Eventually, we decided to go to Bath for an evening meal in a great restaurant call the Bath Tub. Enough food and a surfeit of wine and I was all for breaking into the Roman Baths in the town centre for a skinny dip. Fortunately, our plans were foiled because the windows were unaccountably locked and anyway, we would have disturbed the infamous nesting duck that was holding up Bath city council's restoration plans. We hit the M5 north of Gloucester and, by the time, we got home at midnight, I think Ember was as tired as we were.
 

First published in VISA issue 33 (summer 1999).