All around Cornwall - an excellent day - Penzance, United Kingdom
Penzance, United Kingdom
Where I stayed
The Egyptian House
What I did
Lanyon Quoit Cornwall
Minack Theatre Penzance
Cornwall with Russ http://www.westcornwalltours.co.uk/privatetour.html
Morning in the Egyptian House – if you look at the photo our apartment is in the loft so we don't have the big front windows, but Jen’s room and the living room have Veluxes in the roof and we do have a view out the side of the living room and it was beautiful at sunrise, just on 7.15am. The watercolour is in the visitors book, I couldn’t resist taking a photo of it and from that you can see what a comfortable little corner we have. The kitchen window has a view down to the sea too.
I’d booked an all-day tour for us today and it was really well worth doing because it gave us all a chance to have a good look at a number of places we would probably never have seen on our own, it meant Pete or I could see everything instead of concentrating on driving, and we also got lots of stories and history from Russ. http://www.westcornwalltours.co.uk/priv atetour.html He picked us up at 9.30 and we got back just after 4.30 so it was a good day out for sure.
We criss-crossed the peninsula but didn’t actually go to Lands End though we were only a mile or so away – we chose not to go because we’ve heard from so many that it’s so touristy, parking is expensive and none of us was desperate to see it. Most of our travel was on little country lanes so having done that we now realise that there are a few A roads and everything else is one car-width and overgrown! It’s not so scary driving when you work that out. We started on the south coast, the countryside was farmland mostly, nice and green (never dries out apparently, they have god rainfall year-round), it’s good for dairying but the largest farm in this Zennor area only milks 150 cows and has 300 cattle in total. Most farms have Jersey or Guernsey cows which give much richer and creamier milk – good for the Cornish cream teas of course! The fields are divided by dry stone walls, many overgrown with blackberry or long grass, but the oldest walls date back 4000 years so there has been agriculture or farming here for that long.
In contrast to this lovely green farmland we also drove over moorland that in spring is covered in yellow gorse and purple heather, quite a sight Russ says but just now is quite brown and dead-looking. We’d run over a couple of cattlestops and it was a bit disconcerting to have cows wandering right beside the road (a bit bigger than the sheep in the Quantock hills the day before on our way to Cleve Abbey), they were belted Galloway cattle, attractive colouring from light brown through to almost black with a light 'belt’ around their middles. This area used to have controlled burn-offs to open up a bit of pasture and kill off the noxious plants but a couple of years ago the greenies decided it wasn’t a good idea and they wanted to save a few butterflies (according to Russ) so burning was stopped and cattle brought in to eat down the bracken etc. BUT all the cattle do is stick to the roadsides where there’s grass and never venture up the hills and so the other stuff has just run rampant. They are only two years into a ten year project, giant FAIL so far. Pete reckons they need to bring in electric fences and control where the cattle graze but it would be a never-ending job, and Russ thinks burning will have to come back in.
Our first stop was St Senara’s church at Zennor, 12th century (though there had been a church on the site since the 6th century), with a barrel vaulted ceiling made in the manner of a ship’s keel, lovely stained glass windows, hand-worked cushion covers, flowers from the weekend’s harvest festival, and a calm atmosphere. Pride of place in the church is a 500-year-old carved pew end showing a mermaid with a comb in one hand, mirror in the other and depicting an old legend. Zennor was known for its wonderful male voice choir which sang all around the area and in church every Sunday. For several weeks a young woman came to the Sunday service but left just before it ended and no-one saw her during the week. One of the young men, Matthew Trewhella, the best singer in the choir, finally plucked up enough courage to follow her out from the church one day, down the road towards the sea and was never seen again. Many years later a fishing boat dropped anchor in the bay and next thing a woman’s head and shoulders came out of the water, she said ‘your anchor has dropped on the front door of my house and I want to get in to see my husband and children’. The young woman in the church was a mermaid, she enticed the Matthew away to her watery home.
Writing this a day later, and with a minimum of notes, I can’t remember everything we saw and did, but it was a great day out. We noticed a lot of fairly isolated pubs and asked if they actually made money, they do, but not from the sale of alcohol any more because that trade has really fallen off. Now many have been turned into Gastropubs, the owners do them up, put in a great chef and they become a ‘destination’ for good, quite expensive food rather than a few beers for the farmers. Property is another thing, Russ pointed out several for sale with price tags close to NZD 1 million and they were just cottages with small garden areas, not several-acre blocks.
We stopped for a lunchtime cream tea at a little tea shop in the middle of nowhere, and in St Just for a sausage roll but aside from that there was plenty to do until we got back to Penzance just after 4.30pm. We saw little Lamorna Cove, a smugglers cove with rocks and narrow access, and a pub called the Smuggler’s Wink – pubs would have a kettle on the stove for tea and a second kettle containing rum, customers could ask for a cuppa and give the landlord a wink and the cuppa would turn into a good tot of rum. The cove had been a granite quarry, and we could see two little houses with the discarded granite behind them – definitely wouldn’t want an earthquake to happen. Also went to Pendeen with its rugged coastline and beautiful dark-coloured sea, the little cove below us was often home to seals on the rocks but none there today. Russ had seen dolphins there the day before too.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when Lanyon Quoit appeared on the skyline, we had seen a similar arrangement of rocks at the Burren in Ireland two years ago and I never expected to see another one, but Cornwall is known for very old and mysterious prehistoric stonework so we were very lucky. These sites are protected, have a name at the roadside and a stile for easy access over the fence or wall, but that’s all – no entry fee etc. This one is about 6000 years old, the proper name for it is a dolmen, one large flat slab sits on top of three smaller ones and there are a couple of smaller pieces of stone nearby, of course no-one knows what it was for but it was exciting to see it. And like in Ireland it’s in the middle of a paddock, no guard rails or anything so you can just wander up and have a look – it’s obvious that the cows do that too…….. Who made it, what was it for, was it a burial site? Or was it the Giant’s Table, as local legend has it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanyon_Quo it
The other prehistoric site we went to was the Merry Maidens, a perfect circle of standing stones in the middle of a paddock. The story goes that two young men from ‘just over there in that village’ (convenient church tower on the skyline) were playing their fiddles for a group of young village maidens. It was Saturday night and on Sunday everyone was supposed to stop every-day activity and be respectful of the holy day, but this particular Saturday night the music was good, they were all enjoying themselves and suddenly it was midnight! The dancing didn’t stop and the maidens were turned to stone. The two young men were so frightened they ran away as fast as they could but they too were turned to stone moments later. Yes, two taller stone pillars stand in a field a short distance away, Russ had pointed them out as we drove by saying ‘now see those stones, just remember them and I’ll explain shortly’.
We drove through the village that was Ireland’s own ‘Cable Bay’ (how many of them around the world?) where the transatlantic telegraph cable came ashore, it had been a busy place with a big telegraph school, maintenance people etc, but now there’s just a museum left to tell the history and ironically Russ says people living there can’t even receive a mobile phone signal. There was a surfing beach in a village that had turned from summer visitors at one end to a new and growing surfing industry at the other, it’s estimated that the area earns 64 million pounds a year from surfing so it’s a huge boost to the economy. The beaches around Cornwall seem to have lovely golden sands where they’re not just massive rocks, and there’s a cliff path walk for miles around the coast that attracts thousands every year. We also saw maybe a couple of dozen ‘twitchers’ with their expensive cameras and binoculars all intently watching goodness knows what, lots of pointing and earnest discussion so obviously something important had flown in and was doing its best to hide from them all.
Jen’s favourite place of the day was the Minack Theatre (Minack means rocky place), she and I had both heard of it though didn’t know a great deal about it but it was certainly worth the visit. It overlooks a beautiful cove which Russ said is the scene of a number of rescues each year – people walk along the lovely beach at low tide not realising how quickly the tide comes in up to the small rocky outcrops within the bay and all of a sudden they’re completely cut off and have to be taken out by boat or sometimes even the rescue helicopters based close by, very embarrassing. The theatre is right on the cliff top around a corner of the rocks and can’t be seen from the cove at all.
It was built through the efforts of one woman who’d had a privileged upbringing, Rowena Cade, who built a house there in the 1920’s, gathered up her friends in 1932 and decided to use the natural slope of the cliff as the setting for a performance of ‘The Tempest’. From this she and a couple of employees worked on building the stage area and terraced seating and they put on plays each year until the war. Then it was turned into a watching post with all the associated barbed wire and lookout posts. Rowena became the village billeting officer for children. After the war when the war stuff was taken away the hillside had almost reverted back to its natural state but she didn’t give up, she and her gardener re-created the theatre and more, improving and expanding it as much as possible, she worked tirelessly herself with her wheelbarrow and shovel until her death aged 91, an incredible woman. I couldn’t resist including this photo of her from the brochure we got.
Now plays are held throughout the summer, it’s a huge drawcard for the Minack area and the basic theatre area has been added to with a toilet block, small bar, more seating, and a visitor centre and café with the most amazing views along the coastline beyond the theatre. The tickets are sold out as soon as they come up for sale, it has to be pretty bad weather for the plays to be cancelled (so they don’t have to give refunds) and going to a play at Minack is a real family occasion with picnics, cushions, rugs etc – though you’d have to be careful that you or your kids didn’t roll down the seating onto the stage, it’s very steep. Photos will show what it’s like and you can see the view for yourselves, it’s a magical place. http://www.minack.com/
Last stop was Botallack mine, now a UNESCO World Heritage site and an example of the Cornish tin mining industry. By this time the weather had closed in, we’d been driving in fog, and while at Botallack it turned into fine misty drizzle but we had time enough to have a look round. I thought we might have walked down to the engine house (see photo) but it’s about twenty minutes so further than you think along the cliff path, and we stayed at the top. Mining has been a Cornish industry for thousands of years and these big pumping engine houses are only from the later part of the industry when steam pumps were invented that could clear the water from under-sea mining shafts and allow vertical, then horizontal shafts to be dug several hundred meters beneath the sea bed – miners dug up towards the sea bed as closely as they could (sometimes up to just a couple of meters down) and there are stories of hearing the rocks rolling around not far above their heads. There are also the remains of a series of ‘sublimator’ tunnels where (I think) steam was forced through this snaking brickwork after crushing and the end product was arsenic which was trapped on the walls and little kids had to scrape it off. What price for a young life? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botallack_ Mine
By that time the mists and drizzle had closed in, we were so lucky with the weather all day and were ready to head back to Penzance after an excellent day. Russ did a great job.