A taste of Cornwall

I wrote pieces of this post throughout my week in Cornwall, while sitting on my bed our National Trust cottage overlooking Gerrans Bay. From my room I could hear the surf and watch the play of sun through the clouds across the water.

I think that it will take at least two posts to cover Cornwall - one on castles and the other on everything else! Maybe I’ll start with the latter, which is more impressions than history lesson. 

First impressions:  Towns starting with “Tre”, cornish pasties and cream teas - the usual specialties of seaside resorts, including fudge, ice cream and sugar packets with pictures of local landmarks (I remember collecting those as a kid when we visited Cape Cod and the sugar packets had different light houses) - the points in England farthest west and farthest south and farthest from John O’Groats - towns with names like Mousehole, Catchall, Come-to-good and Gweek - crazy double and even triple roundabouts on the roads - the black Cornish flag with a white cross, pirates and smugglers, shipwrecks and wreckers...

So where to start? Perhaps with a literary association encountered on our drive from Bristol: Jamaica Inn. Location of a book of the same name by Daphne Du Maurier... now an inn and tourist destination, but its location is properly isolated. I bought a copy of the book to reread during the week - a good gothic novel that capitalizes on the shipwreck and smuggling history of the Cornwall coast, which apparently occasionally went hand-in-hand: one way to get goods to smuggle was to lure ships onto the numerous rocks that surround the coast... people who did this were known rather descriptively as “wreckers”.
 

Jamaica Inn lies just west of Dartmoor, in northeastern Cornwall, which tends to be more windswept and open than the rolling cultivated hills and bays to the south. The north coast is characterized by rugged cliffs, which I saw only when we visited Tintagel, which will feature in the castle blog! But I did learn a wonderful new north coast landscape term that is apparently unique to Cornwall: zawns are fissures in the cliff that are incised along joints in the rock.



We did visit important points along the west and south coasts. The westernmost point in England is Lands End... the last point of land seen by departing emigrants, the first point seen on return. Rocky reefs offshore, only some identified by lights. We walked to Land’s End from the small coastal town of Sennan Cove, charming in its own right, particularly as we were treated to a roof thatching operation... first time I've seen thatchers at work!

It was difficult not to look at the geology on our walk, as the path was over the very coarsely porphyritic granite that dominates this part of Cornwall and therefore constitutes all paths and building stones as well as the rugged jointed cliffs. These granite plutons also host the famous Cornish tin mines that were operating even before the Romans arrived (as described in the account of the voyages of Pytheus the Greek). 

From Lands End we retreated from the threat of rain  to one of the many beautiful National Trust gardens in Cornwall. The gardens are associated with large and still private inhabited estates... clearly the gardens are too expensive to maintain, which is why they have been handed over to the National Trust. Cornwall seems to be a “banana belt” (I didn’t realize that this was a North American term, but Alison and I had to explain it to Mark), so that gardens associated with older estates feature tree ferns and ginger and palm trees and other unexpectedly tropical exotics. Another benefit to visiting National Trust gardens, we discovered, is that they (1) have tea rooms with excellent cream teas and (2) they have nice gift shops with surprisingly inexpensive books - I bought books on preserving, foraging in hedgerows (more on that later) and one of nice knitting patterns. All antidotes to work!

Northeast of Land’s End, along the south coast, lies the town of Penzance (as in “Pirates of...”) and south of Penzance is the charmingly named town of Mousehole. For real (except that it’s pronounced Mowzel). But it is just as cute as the name would imply, so we wandered around for a bit, enjoying not only the boats and the water view, but also all of the carefully carved slate and bronze plaques in town, with tributes to the oldest house, the last native Cornish speaker (who died in 1777) and the Fitzroy barometer (now mounted outside the Ship Inn), which was given to the town in 1854 by Admiral Fitzroy, for the purpose of providing data to the Met Office for improved storm forecasting. Across the bay from Mousehole lies the town of Marazion and St. Michael’s Mount, which will also feature in the next blog.

The next important point as we work our way east along the south coast is The Lizard (the name for the entire peninsula), or Lizard Point, the southernmost point in mainland England. Lizard Point is known to geologists as the type locality of lizardite, a variety of serpentine (lizard-skin rock). For the geologists - these ultramafic rocks are apparently unique in England ... although there are outcrops of ultramafic rocks in Scotland. The rocks brought Victorian tourists (another common theme) - there is still a thriving industry of rock carving and polishing. As the southernmost mainland extent of the UK, the Lizard has also been important in trade, smuggling and technological advances. It was close to this site that Marconi set up an antenna for transatlantic radio transmissions. Additionally, the rugged offshore rock reefs have caused numerous shipwrecks over the years, so that the Lizard lighthouse now hosts a museum of both lighthouses and rescue missions (although we arrived too late to go in).

The largest estuary on the south coast is the Fal estuary, hence the location of Falmouth where the estuary enters the sea between two castled headlands (yes, more later). The estuary is also known as the Carrick Roads, which I found quite fascinating, particularly as I am reading a book (called The Old Ways) that retraces ancient walking and sea paths in the British Isles... hence the concept of a sea road. Falmouth is a thriving town that is, not surprisingly, full of boats of all descriptions. It is also home to a wonderful maritime museum, where we saw not only one of the first Firefly class boats (that’s the boat that Rupert sails - built for the 1956 Olympics and the first sailing dinghy to have trapezes for hiking out) but also the Finn that Ben Ainslie sailed to a gold in the recent Olympics.

To complete the Cape Cod associations (for all of the New Englanders reading), at the head of the Fal estuary (where the river Fal meets the ocean) lies the town of Truro... there’s also a Barnstaple on the northeast coast, and the major port of Plymouth to the east, in Devon. It’s pretty clear where the early New England settlers set sail from! And this brings us around to Gerrans Bay and the nearby village of Veryan, with its round houses, village pub (the New Inn) and Open Show, an annual event that we happened to coincide with and that Mark insisted we visit... we checked out all of the winning vegetables, flowers and baked goods (including numerous Victoria Sponges) before partaking of tea and scones served by the ladies of the village. I felt rather like I was taking part in a set piece for Masterpiece theater!

And so back to Gerrans Bay, where we spent the last day reading and walking on the beach an foraging along the ever-present hedgerows - a favorite British past time. Hedgerows definitely have their pluses and minuses ... they line ALL the country roads, thus blocking the view and serving as rather intimidating obstacles on narrow one-lane roads. But they are replete with blackberries, sloes (from the blackthorn tree) and haws (from hawthornes), all of which can be turned into something edible. I concentrated on blackberries and sloes, and yesterday made blackberry and sloe jelly. Sloes are more famous as the essential ingredient for sloe gin, which I may or may not try making (I do have leftover sloes but have heard varying accounts of the gin!).