Cornwall 2017

For the second time, I failed to visit Carn Brea while we were in Cornwall: it would have required a strenuous walk to get to the castle on the hilltop, and having already subjected Ms Formerly Aldgate to a long trek the day before I didn’t want to push my luck, so we pounded back from St Ives along the A30 with the dark mass of Carn Brea looming over Redruth’s slate-roofed houses to our right.

But we saw other exciting places. There are no castles or follies in this post, and I’ll discuss holy wells next time, but I know that some of my readers (!) outside the UK like my travelogues, so here are – well – some holiday snaps!

Home for the week was Portloe on the south coast, which still counts as a fishing village because it has no fewer than two working boats: they go out and catch crabs and lobster that then get served as dinner in the Ship Inn up the hill. Our cottage was mere yards from the tiny, tiny, rock-ringed harbour. The centre of the village is surprisingly busy thanks to the presence of The Lugger, an apparently rather nice hotel to and from which guests, staff and supply lorries made their way several times a day down the narrow and precipitous streets. It was very hard to find somewhere to park even when you’d managed to get the car in.

We spent the first day chugging across the Carrick Roads and up the Truro River by ferry from St Mawes to Falmouth and Trelissick House. This came into the occupation of the National Trust relatively recently when the last of the family that owned it moved out, with precisely no furniture, all the fittings having been flogged. So the NT has decided to tell the history of the building by commissioning a set of artworks, which struck me as an imaginative approach to the problem.

I last visited the Eden Project with my sister back in 2001 when most of the plants were about knee high, so it looks a bit different now. Tim Smit’s visionary venue has now bedded into the landscape to the extent that it affects the whole road system to the north of St Austell – 16 years ago, when the location was still very clearly an old china clay pit, Eden had the air of a set the makers of Dr Who would have dreamt of having the money to build – but it’s none the less amazing for that. We had an enormous green curry for lunch (and then later in the day in Charlestown Ms FA insisted we have a cream tea, as a result of which we felt positively queasy). We were struck by the fact that at Eden the children’s meals are not beans on toast and chips and the like, as at almost every other attraction, but smaller versions of the grown-up food, and of this we entirely approve. It's a place for artwork, now, as well as environmental education, some of which is a bit near the edge; in the Mediterranean Biome is a series of statues depicting a 'Dionysian Rite' which, a sign said, featured a skewered human head surrounded by spiked heads of rabbits. The human head was missing, but the bunnies were unsettling enough.

Charlestown – which I remember visiting with my family many years ago – has a private harbour, but you can still walk round it and gawp at the sailing boats before (or after) stuffing yourself with scones and cream.

We made up for the shameful amount of calories consumed on Tuesday with a long walk on Wednesday around the coastal path and then inland and home via Veryan. The sea was postcard-blue in a way you don’t expect of the British Isles.

Thursday took us to Truro and the Royal Cornwall Museum. Before plunging into the extensive galleries we decided we wanted coffee, and found that the café to the right of the Museum entrance leads seamlessly and confusingly into the art shop next door, rather like trying to find something at the back of a wardrobe and then coming out into Narnia. The Museum, which began as a means of educating Cornwall in the ways of industry by means of documents and geological specimens but which has long since outgrown that purpose, is full of amazing things, although strangely Cornwall itself is a muted presence in the displays. The almost inevitable exhibition hung on the TV adaptation of Poldark was actually rather good despite our misgivings. The artefact that made me stand and stare in wonder most, though, was George Sherwood Hunter’s 1897 painting, Jubilee Procession in a Cornish Village. I’d never dreamed that oil paint could be turned into fire and light. There’s an otherworldly strangeness in this image that’s absolutely haunting.

At St Ives Ms FA bought some local beer from a micro-brewer called Black Flag: we weren't sure whether that indicated it was proudly Cornish, or proudly anarchist, or perhaps both. At Portloe the harbour facilities (which, a friend told me, 25 years ago consisted of 'a tractor and a big rope') bore a sign saying they'd been refurbished with the aid of a grant from the EU, as did several major roads and other public projects we saw during the week. Of course Cornwall voted 57% to Leave.

And then we made our way home on Friday, pausing for tea at Postbridge on Dartmoor, another location from my childhood. Mercifully, we avoided the attention of the Hairy Hands ...