Penzance is a lovely town of 15,000 people and 13,000 pasty shops clinging to the coast of west Cornwall. As a tourist, you can only regard its cobbled streets and stone buildings with approval. Banners strung up above each road gives its name and distinctions, and most are further bedecked with slightly sun-faded pennants. As a base, the town has a lot going for it: it has good bus connections and access to the coastal trail, its seal is a severed head on a platter, and the musical pirates have, the tourist board assures us, been all but stamped out.
In the morning, the gulls, fresh from a restful night of flapping and screaming, scream and flap to greet the dawn. The first car doors clump in the street and rush hour in Penzance breaks like a storm as yawning pasty bakers unlock their doors and tourists in backpacks stroll down towards the harbour.
The coastal trail to the west leads to long and pleasant promenade, beaches of polished pink and blue stones, a bracing wind carrying news of rotting seaweed, a backyard bird sanctuary, and a garden plot full of signs asking passerby to, among other things, stop raising sea levels. Newlyn, the settlement next door, seems to be a real fishing village; its little lighthouse is inaccessible to frolicking tourists, and there's a real wholesale fish market, which tiny fishing boats trailing tiny wakes race to replenish.
Practically adjoining Newlyn is the town of Mousehole. Mousehole fishes, but tourism is more important, because Mousehole is a beautiful place, famously endorsed by both Dylan Thomas and myself. There's a craft show and sale today, which I have no time for, because my scheme is to find some of the local standing stones and, ideally, locate a new tin deposit. I had sort of counted on the latter, but will record here that it did not happen. I might as well not have packed my pickaxe and full-body red flannel underwear.
The best option for standing stones looked to be an overland branch of the trail. If you are in the habit of advising personal enemies on travel, encourage them to take this path. The farmer here has chosen to raise corn, so the only route is around the edge of the fields, where you squeeze between full-grown corn and massive thorn bushes of the particularly filthy type that sneaks out branches at shin level to catch you while you're gingerly moving others that have flopped down at eye level. GPS says I got very close to a stone, but didn't much want to wade into a crop to grope for it. GPS also said I was off-route, which is always mildly stressful. It's hard not to imagine there's a person at the other end who tears off his headset and announces that I've gone rogue.
Anyway, there's a certain amount of debate about whether these standing stones are Bronze Age, modern stones set up for cows to scratch themselves against, or stones set up by the cows for purposes of their own. All three schools have persuasive arguments. On the way back, as an admission of failure, I went to the craft sale and bought a tea towel. The tea towel will stay in my kitchen to remind me of my failure to find a standing stone, to adjure me not to fail again, and to dry dishes.
As a further boost to the local economy, I bought some crab meat in Newlyn, partly to displace some of the chocolate granola from my diet. It's also supposed to contain hazelnuts, but I think this means that, once a year, a single hazelnut is solemnly carried through the factory on a velvet pillow to diffuse its sacred essence.
Back in Penzance, the famous Jubilee Pool is empty at low tide, and lying in the middle of it is a single sunbather in red shorts showing the world what insouciance really is.
Day 2
The coastal trail immediately east of Penzance is deservedly less popular; it offers train tracks, chain-link fences, concrete, flies, and alcohol-restriction areas, which are nowhere near scenic enough to justify all the signs. You then walk along an incredibly long beach. A little tidal stream lined with feeding birds, people with dogs far out along the edge of the water, and a couple walking along studying the beach bent almost double with their hands behind their backs.
Beyond the beach lies Marazion and the tidal causeway to St. Michael's Mount, which has been home to various castles and monasteries, all now renovated into a stately home. The causeway is busy and progress uneven. Two people ahead have stopped to stare into a tidal pool because they saw a fish, and some behind them have begun to dawdle with the idea that they, too, might see fish. Also, a small truck runs back and forth, scattering everyone to the sides.
I had decided not to bother with the "castle", which restricted me, as a non-castle-ticket-holder, to the lower slopes of the Mount, which hold the ice cream shops and cafes. After that, two weedy youths in uniform deny further progress. There were murmurs of discontent from people who "just wanted to climb a little higher", but the social order holds. It's hard to launch a revolution when you're holding an ice cream cone. Anyway, the real entertainment is the sight of the causeway when the tide comes in and dozens of tourists are swept up and drift out to sea. The local council meetings afterwards are also good value. "On the one hand, it's clearly time to erect a sign. On the other, it never gets less funny." (I am told that, in reality, this hardly ever happens.)
After your visit to the Mount, Marazion hopes you will visit it, and you have to, if only to pick up the coastal trail. After the town, the trail detours around unstable clifftops by making squares around fields of cauliflower -- a splendid crop for showing off standing stones, of which there are none. The detour goes on until the beauty of cauliflower is almost ruined for you, but then you get a bit of lonely and rocky coast. Offshore, cormorants huddle on what they have decided is the best rock, and those that wouldn't fit stand alone on other ones trying to look like they don't mind.
In a curious little green space just off the trail there's an anchor, a cannon trained on St. Michael's Mount, and an exciting warning sign about a mine shaft -- but the shaft is fenced off and invisible under a thicket. There was another later on when I scrambled up a little headland to a lookout, but this one, too, was well fenced-off. Very disappointing. Why are people so uptight about mine shafts? Is it just because of the high risk of agonizing death?
After this, trail traffic suddenly spikes, a sign that a beach with a parking lot is near, which it is, and the sense grows that getting back to Penzance would be a good thing. I ultimately leave from somewhere called Goldslithney. The bus is late, but when you ride it, you have to admire it for getting anywhere at all. The driver is a surgeon with the double-decker bus. In the tiny streets of the towns he seems to clear everything by inches, and the passage of a car is an intricate little manoeuvre, like a couple of rhinos dancing a minuet.
Day 3
I did an unusual amount of planning (i.e., more than none at all) to hike the coastal trail from Botallack to Sennen Cove. Botallack boasts the ruins of a tin, copper, and arsenic mine: furnace stacks, cramped and mysterious tunnels, and, at the bottom of the sea cliff, engine buildings that housed the pumps needed to operate mine shafts that had chased the tin far out under the ocean floor. Europe's Bronze Age was sustained partly by Cornwall's tin and copper, and Britain's Golden Age of detective fiction by its arsenic. Scotland Yard inspectors could not have puzzled so enthrallingly over whether the victim died of gastritis or being shoved out of a window.
Mining left melancholy stone ruins and uncountable mine shafts to intrigue and menace tourists. The Cornish have forsworn tin-mining since around 1910, except for the occasional rebellious teen who sneaks home with a smudged face and a pasty shell gray with rock dust. "Ye've been mining tin again, haven't you? I've told you, we don't do that anymore!" The industry timed its collapse rather well; if they had carried on any longer, the ruins would be all metal sheds, asphalt, and cafeterias.
Next comes Cape Cornwall, where an inland mansion looks down on the ruined "St Helen's Oratory" (actually reportedly a farm building), which itself looks up to the majestic furnace stack that crowns the headland itself. A tiny cafe sells coffee in faded mugs and is probably a former tin mine. On the far side, twenty or thirty people in safety vests are standing staring up at a cliff -- a class, an especially dismal but highly visible party, or some secret surveyors' sabbath. An interesting fact about the climb up from the cape to the next height is that it never ends. I'm still climbing it, and am building a life with a supportive community of people in the same situation. We're planning a telethon to raise awareness of pathological complaining. You call us, and we explain how it all makes sense.
In the following valley (or was it the preceding one? In a valley, at any rate) are donkeys in a small field, one of them being hugged by a young woman on the path. Two other hikers hesitate just beyond, clearly in line for donkey hugs of their own. The donkey has a long day ahead of it. Next, there's a bronze age barrow somewhat mangled (the placard says) by its 19th-century discoverer, and some other structures, which I can confidently date to between 3500BCE and 2010CE based on their masonry and lack of USB charging points. If forced to guess, I will say that they had some connection to tin mining.
The path here is mown through slopes of brown bracken. In the next flat place there are two dry-stone collars around mine shafts and then the trail runs along a cliff with half a dozen more -- black slits and sinister angled pits, some signed and roped off and others blocked only by spider webs. Mine shafts abruptly lose most of their appeal when you actually see one. They are wet and painfully cramped, and there is nothing cool inside except possibly tin ore, and there's no guarantee of that. And there are always balrogs to consider. Also, some of the spiders in the entrances are quite large.
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| Inviting, isn't it? |
Around Sennen Cove, areas are roped off as an adder breeding ground, and a tiny snake I choose to believe is an adder slithers across the path in front of me. There's another glorious beach here, and there are surfers in the water and fighting their way out of wetsuits in the parking lot. Up at the bus stop, an agitated young man with a thick beard is trying to fix a flat on his bicycle. When I commiserate with him, he describes his predicament and dangles a badly-patched inner tube in front of me like the adder that slew his family.
The last ride back to Penzance is another run through the beautiful countryside, this time behind a local woman who points out things to her husband. It's from her that I learn the crops I saw earlier were cauliflower and that the crowd standing on three tractor-drawn carts comprise a bullock auction (a number of bullocks show off their moves in the field before them). She also points out a standing stone I would otherwise have missed.
