Cornwall ticks the boxes
What we enjoy doing most in the UK is being in the more-rural
and remote areas, stopping off in the smaller villages and towns, visiting gardens,
exploring the coast, and walking.
Cornwall ticks all our boxes, with a constant background of stunning
scenery and picturesque sights.
Rural and remote?
Although a very popular region for holidaying and tourism, it’s not as busy as ‘heartland’ England, so does feel more like being in the country and away from the heavy traffic etc. that gets really tiring. The roads are, commensurately, small and remote: we drove many miles on ones like in the photo below, heart-in-mouth and hoping like heck not to meet anything coming the other way especially tractors or trucks! Amazingly, they do work pretty well, people who drive them regularly are very skilful and we didn’t have any real problems, other than its slow-going, like 15-20 mph average for any journey. So, just allow extra time.
A Cornish road. To be fair, these are just connections between the small villages, but Mrs Google Maps does like to use them!
Villages and towns
I raved about Fowey in a previous blog, so won’t bore you
with more on that super little town – a favourite of ours.
Across the river from Fowey is Polruan, served by a
passenger ferry and an easy amble around the narrow streets to find good views
back across to Fowey and the river. It’s a fishing and boat-building town that
doesn’t have the range of unique little artisan shops that can be found in
Fowey and hence nowhere near as many visitors/tourists. It does have some
genuinely old ruins and history, like the blockhouse on the eastern side of the
Fowey river entrance. Back in the day (1700’s?), a chain was slung across from
this structure to a similar blockhouse on the Fowey side (now gone completely) to
block raiders coming in from the English Channel.
Polruan
It’s about 6 miles walking east via a spectacular (and at times steep) coastal path from Polruan to Polperro. Polperro is a cracker: built around a narrow, deep inlet, with an inner and outer harbour wall, it also still a working fishing town. I had a bit of a leg injury at this stage, which meant our walking aspirations were somewhat curtailed. So we drove to Polperro. Like most of the coastal towns in these parts, you need to park quite a way up above the town centre and walk in. Polperro has a huge parking area for coaches so obviously gets hordes of visitors in peak season. We visited late on a Friday and there we no coaches thankfully. It was serene. Being a Friday afternoon, we had to have a beer: plenty of pubs to choose from, we opted for the Three Pilchards which turned out to have beer garden with a fab view as the sun shone onto the houses on the hill opposite.
Polperro
The Three Pilchards: pub with a view, Polperro
There are also many small villages in the Fowey/St Austell region
sitting nicely on the banks of the various tidal inlets that feed out into the
main river estuaries, like Lerryn and Pont on the Fowey river, below. These are
charming places, ideal for families and picnics etc and for joining up with the
many walks that follow the coastal margins.
Pont, in the rain – we sheltered in an old bridge archway
for as long as we could but eventually had to take our medicine. Pont Quay
cottage, the house with the white frontage to the right, was where we stayed for a week in 1989.
Lerryn
Another coastal town we enjoyed was Mevagissey, which is
similar to Polperro in many ways, but not as busy. Also still a working fishing
town. You can take a ferry from Fowey to Megavissey, which had planned to do
but the high winds we had for 2-3 days meant the sea was too rough. So, like
Polperro, we drove.
Mevagissey, with rainbow just visible off shore
Gardens
Near Mevagissey are the Lost Gardens of Heligan, which are very
intriguing. The gardens were
created by members of the Cornish Tremayne family from the mid-18th century to
the beginning of the 20th century, and still form part of the family's estate. Prior
to WW1, there were 22 gardeners employed maintaining and developing the
property, but almost all of them were enlisted in the armed services during WW1
in which 16 of them were killed. Given other privations caused by the war, the
gardens fell into some disrepair but were maintained as-best-as-possible until,
in WW2, the US Army requisitioned the estate and covered large tracts of the gardens in
concrete for stockpiling armoured tanks and other heavy artillery.
After the war the house was sold, but not the gardens which were left to
nature’s devices until 1990 when a Tremayne family member inherited it the property and,
instead of selling, decided to see if there was anything worth restoring. It
took about two years to hack through the overgrowth to rediscover all the
original garden structure, which was then opened to the public in 1992 and has
been gradually built back up again to something close to the original. Even to
the point of employing 22 gardeners again today! Neat story, huh?
Rhododendrons grown wild at the Lost Gardens: a bit like Borderlands (Romayne and Nigel's garden)!
There are a few quirky
bits of nature art to keep an eye out for in the gardens, like the Giants Head,
below, created using an enormous tree root resulting from wind damage in 1992.
The giant's head
Probably the most
famous ‘garden’ in Cornwall is Eden, more-correctly the Eden Project, which is
basically a nature and sustainability educational project focused on plants,
and featuring two ‘biomes’ one tropical and one Mediterranean, each created
under huge transparent domes.
Inside the Mediterranean biome: the story
of the grape plant, its legends and deities.
Stairway to the viewing platform in the tropical biome
Looking down from the viewing platform. Look closely for the people down below near the top left of photo.
Eden Project is a huge
business really. It’s excellent, though some of the outside displays are still
a work in progress, like the one featuring Cornish native vegetation communities
which was basically just bracken and blackberry and assorted other weeds – true
enough, but not what was intended, surely! There has been talk of setting up a
similar site in Christchurch post-quake and this was even mentioned in the list
of a 8 or so other ‘Eden’ sites around the world but as far as we’re aware it’s
been shelved, if not abandoned altogether, in ChCh.
Eden Project is a
must-see, but note you have to book your visiting slot ahead of time and it is £35
per adult. Well worth it though, and for UK residents, that gets you an annual
pass so even more value for money.
Since leaving Cornwall
we’ve been re-grouping in Worthing and planning ahead for our trip to Europe beginning
on Sunday 18th. This planning is somewhat challenging: we have
pre-purchased a 22-day Eurail Pass, which covers travel on most train services in
about 20 countries in Europe. You can use a planning app from Eurail, but it is
only that - a planner. You can’t book any specific train journeys on it. Basically
it looks like you have to front up at the rail station for the journey you want
and use the e-pass on the phone as your ‘ticket’. Except you can't do this for journeys that
require a prior seat reservation, like the Eurostar trip from London to Paris
and any of the fast TGV trains in France.
Trouble is, the Eurail
app only tells you that seat reservations are required on any specific journey
you plan to make but doesn’t link to any web sites where you can do this. And you
can’t contact Eurail– no phone help service, no email address, no physical
addresses. ‘Sort it out yourself’ is the message. Which, in the case of our
first journey from London-Paris, meant we had to go up to St. Pancras station
in London, where Eurostar have a customer service centre, and do it in person
there (for an extra fee of course, plus the return train fare from Worthing). It remains to
be seen how we’re going to negotiate this little obstacle when we’re in France,
Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands!
Hopefully we can
report success in the next blog ….
Comments
Post a Comment