after a few days in London, we were ready for a break from the hustle and bustle and the claustrophobia of the city, so we set out for the serenity of theSouthwest, finding it and more in Cornwall. the county of Cornwall occupies the farther reaches of the peninsula that protrudes, arm-like, from the British mainland. it is certainly one of the most beautiful parts of Britain, with miles and miles of rugged coastline meeting both the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel.
a sample of the Cornish coastline, this at Bedruthan Steps near the national surf capital Newquay, on the Atlantic side.
calling Cornwall one of the most beautiful parts of Britain is intended as a complement, but we have to be careful with such things, as we learned in the last post. though Britain is clearly in Europe, no self respecting Briton would ever suffer the effrontery of being called European. so it is with the Cornish; i well know that my Cornish father will not stipulate to being English (or British, really), though i've never heard any independence declarations. not that there aren't plenty of folks who wouldn't love to issue one; there is a small movement lobbying for greater Cornish autonomy, and almost half of the county's residents list Cornish as their nationality. though it hasn't officially been afforded national status, Cornwall is considered one of the six modern Celtic Nations, along with (a united, or island of) Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Brittany in France. like these others, Cornwall has its own Celtic language and a whole bunch of national pride to go with it. still, England was a good enough place for my brothers and sisters and me to be allowed to be born in, so for my purposes and those of this post, Cornwall will be considered English and thus, by extension, British. sorry Dad.
one of the many defunct-but-standing chimneys that litter the countryside and were used in the Cornish tin mining industry; this famous one is known as the Sentinel and stands atop the headland of England's (oops) only cape, Cape Cornwall.
as a boy i spent many summer holidays in Cornwall visiting my dad's parents and some of the only useful (owing to water temperatures in the South) beaches in all of the British Isles. our hosts on this trip were my dad's cousin Valerie and her husband Chris, who treated us like royalty and indulged all of my memory-driven desires despite our whirlwind schedule. after dinner the night we got there they asked us what we wanted to do over the next couple of days, and my reply was simple: we needed to eat clotted cream, hog's pudding and saffron cake. for some reason i have very strong food associations with Cornwall, and these things, along with Cornish pasties should definitely be sought out on any trip there. we did go and see a few things, too, including some places of significance to our family.
important places and people in Cornwall, clockwise from top left: Treverbyn Church, where my grandparents were married and where my great-grandfather is buried; a very important street in my youth. turning in here would often signify the end of a six hour car ride from home to my grandparents' house; that house, with a new paint job. no matter what time we would finally arrive, my grandpa would always be waiting on his stool on the porch for us; and me with my grandmother's younger brother Ron and his wife Rose, who are Valerie's parents.
my grandparents aren't around anymore, but their old house is still standing, though the neighborhood seems to me to have declined somewhat. this is where we would usually stay when visiting, and a host of fuzzy memories surround 61 Lostwood Road in St Austell. we also visited Val's parents, Ron and Rose, and one of her sisters, Dorothy and her husband Mike and daughter Donna in nearby towns. all the while i found myself talking about my memories and then being corrected as to their specifics, so i knew it had really been too long since i was there. but Val and Chris are experts and fielded all of our questions, stupid and less-so, with patience and indulgence.
and they were untiring in hauling us halfway around the county to see the many sights on offer in Cornwall. one of its most famous--even among Britain's most famous--is Land's End, which is the Westernmost point in England. there you can see the Atlantic Ocean and the Longships lighthouse out in it, and these days you can even buy yourself some Dr Who merchandise from one of the many shops that fill the recent development there. the last time i went there was virtually nothing but a sign that indicated the distance to a few other places of interest. you could take these plastic letters and spell out your hometown on it and take all the pictures you wanted with it; now it's about £11 ($22) for a single 5x7 inch photo that gets mailed to you three weeks later. we paid the fee but like sneaky Yanks had Chris take some more shots with our camera while we were in the enclosure.
Land's End, clockwise from top left: the entrance to the new development at Land's End, which is written "Penn an Wlas" in Cornish; Jill and me taking our expensive time with the always famous and only recently exclusive sign. the top says the year and the distances to New York (3147 miles), John o'Groats (Britain's most Northeastern settlement, 874 miles), and the Isles of Scilly (28 miles) and Longships Lighthouse (1½ miles). we put up Salt Lake City, which is 5355 miles from Land's End; Jill and me at the First and Last House, which is, funnily enough, the first and last house in England, depending on where you're coming from; and Jill, me, Val and Chris on the Westernmost point in all of England. below, several views of the Minack Theater, which is built on a cliffside between Land's End and Penzance.
a few miles to the East of Land's End, on the way to Penzance (yes, like the pirates), Val and Chris took us to a remarkable place that somehow i had never even heard of before, let alone seen: the Minack Theater. back in the '30s a woman who owned a house up on a high cliff overlooking the sea made her back yard available to a local theater troupe for their annual production. she made rough terraced seating and created a stage and kept refining it over the course of decades as its popularity as a venue grew. it is literally on the edge of a cliff and this lady would pour seats with concrete and haul up her building materials from the beach below the cliff, even once expropriating materials from a ship that had wrecked there. it's an incredible location for a theater, and plays are still performed there quite regularly, although plenty of folks just like us will pay just to go in and look around.
further on along the coast, we stopped just outside one of many rather inconspicuous fields, and were urged to climb the fence to get into it. having done so we quickly espied the 19 merry maidens that collectively form a complete neolithic stone circle. legend has it that these low stones were once young ladies who allowed their dancing to carry on into the Sabbath, and so were turned to stone as punishment. apparently there are at least five other stone circles in Cornwall, probably tucked away in some nondescript field just like this one.
the very interesting merry maidens stone circle, consisting of 19 stones. there are two more set some distance from this group that, according to the legend, are the petrified remains of the maidens' pipers, who tried to run home upon hearing the church bells strike midnight; below, St Michael's Mount, a tidal island just off the coast near Penzance.
following our rocky encounter we continued East to the fishing village of Mousehole, which is, naturally enough, pronounced mao-zul. Cornwall is very much a part of Britain when it comes to having names that sound nothing like they're spelled. in addition to Mousehole, it has Fowey, pronounced foy, while elsewhere in the country we have Cholmondeley, which is obviously said chumley. in any case, a little further on is Penzance, which is said just like it reads, and which did not seem to be harboring any pirates while we were passing through. just after passing through we came upon a little place called Marazion, which is home to the best views of St Michael's Mount, a small tidal island just off the coast that houses an abbey and a castle. it has historical ties with Mont Saint Michel in Normandy, France, and is generally a pretty cool sight. as home of Lord St Levan, i don't know that the island is accessible to the average tourist, and even though our group was certainly not average, we didn't try to go so i never found out.
Caerhays beach in late spring. note the windbreaks and the rocks, just what a British day at the beach is all about. still, it's in a protected cove and can make for quite a pleasant afternoon; below, the harbor and picturesque village of Mevagissey, one of my all-time favorites.
i was surprised to find that the place most strongly associated with my memories, other than Lostwood Road, was Caerhays Beach. like most of the others around it is pretty pebbly and i was never much of a beach fan anyway, preferring to stay in the parking lot and play soccer or catch with my dad. but i well remembered coming to this beach several times, including one where i neglected my assigned duty of watching my younger sister, Kim, so that my older sister, Carrie had to run all the way down to the low-tide waterline to get her, which gave Carrie an asthma attack severe enough to send her to hospital for a couple of days. needless to say, i wasn't very popular with the family for the rest of that vacation. on this vacation, i had been looking everywhere for a small plastic toy boat like the ones i had always bought as a child, but even the trusty little shop at Caerhays had moved on to bigger and better things.
the last place i had chance to look before leaving was in Mevagissey, one of my absolute favorite places from all those Cornish holidays. it's a few miles South of St Austell, and is a small fishing village built in a little valley so the houses rise up on all sides of the harbor. fishing has given way now to tourism, the many cutesy trinket shops lining tiny winding streets making this transition somewhat understandable, but even now Mevagissey is hard to beat for pure picturesqueness or nostalgic feeling. it's a postcard come to life.
even with only a couple of days there, Cornwall burst rapidly back to life for me as we were chauffeured all over by Val and Chris. i don't think they've been planning any ventures in the tourism business, but even without them as guides there's still plenty to see and explore in Cornwall, if you can manage to drag yourself away from London. we'll certainly be back, remembering that we were and remain very grateful to our wonderful hosts.
a sample of the Cornish coastline, this at Bedruthan Steps near the national surf capital Newquay, on the Atlantic side.
calling Cornwall one of the most beautiful parts of Britain is intended as a complement, but we have to be careful with such things, as we learned in the last post. though Britain is clearly in Europe, no self respecting Briton would ever suffer the effrontery of being called European. so it is with the Cornish; i well know that my Cornish father will not stipulate to being English (or British, really), though i've never heard any independence declarations. not that there aren't plenty of folks who wouldn't love to issue one; there is a small movement lobbying for greater Cornish autonomy, and almost half of the county's residents list Cornish as their nationality. though it hasn't officially been afforded national status, Cornwall is considered one of the six modern Celtic Nations, along with (a united, or island of) Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Brittany in France. like these others, Cornwall has its own Celtic language and a whole bunch of national pride to go with it. still, England was a good enough place for my brothers and sisters and me to be allowed to be born in, so for my purposes and those of this post, Cornwall will be considered English and thus, by extension, British. sorry Dad.
one of the many defunct-but-standing chimneys that litter the countryside and were used in the Cornish tin mining industry; this famous one is known as the Sentinel and stands atop the headland of England's (oops) only cape, Cape Cornwall.
as a boy i spent many summer holidays in Cornwall visiting my dad's parents and some of the only useful (owing to water temperatures in the South) beaches in all of the British Isles. our hosts on this trip were my dad's cousin Valerie and her husband Chris, who treated us like royalty and indulged all of my memory-driven desires despite our whirlwind schedule. after dinner the night we got there they asked us what we wanted to do over the next couple of days, and my reply was simple: we needed to eat clotted cream, hog's pudding and saffron cake. for some reason i have very strong food associations with Cornwall, and these things, along with Cornish pasties should definitely be sought out on any trip there. we did go and see a few things, too, including some places of significance to our family.
important places and people in Cornwall, clockwise from top left: Treverbyn Church, where my grandparents were married and where my great-grandfather is buried; a very important street in my youth. turning in here would often signify the end of a six hour car ride from home to my grandparents' house; that house, with a new paint job. no matter what time we would finally arrive, my grandpa would always be waiting on his stool on the porch for us; and me with my grandmother's younger brother Ron and his wife Rose, who are Valerie's parents.
my grandparents aren't around anymore, but their old house is still standing, though the neighborhood seems to me to have declined somewhat. this is where we would usually stay when visiting, and a host of fuzzy memories surround 61 Lostwood Road in St Austell. we also visited Val's parents, Ron and Rose, and one of her sisters, Dorothy and her husband Mike and daughter Donna in nearby towns. all the while i found myself talking about my memories and then being corrected as to their specifics, so i knew it had really been too long since i was there. but Val and Chris are experts and fielded all of our questions, stupid and less-so, with patience and indulgence.
and they were untiring in hauling us halfway around the county to see the many sights on offer in Cornwall. one of its most famous--even among Britain's most famous--is Land's End, which is the Westernmost point in England. there you can see the Atlantic Ocean and the Longships lighthouse out in it, and these days you can even buy yourself some Dr Who merchandise from one of the many shops that fill the recent development there. the last time i went there was virtually nothing but a sign that indicated the distance to a few other places of interest. you could take these plastic letters and spell out your hometown on it and take all the pictures you wanted with it; now it's about £11 ($22) for a single 5x7 inch photo that gets mailed to you three weeks later. we paid the fee but like sneaky Yanks had Chris take some more shots with our camera while we were in the enclosure.
Land's End, clockwise from top left: the entrance to the new development at Land's End, which is written "Penn an Wlas" in Cornish; Jill and me taking our expensive time with the always famous and only recently exclusive sign. the top says the year and the distances to New York (3147 miles), John o'Groats (Britain's most Northeastern settlement, 874 miles), and the Isles of Scilly (28 miles) and Longships Lighthouse (1½ miles). we put up Salt Lake City, which is 5355 miles from Land's End; Jill and me at the First and Last House, which is, funnily enough, the first and last house in England, depending on where you're coming from; and Jill, me, Val and Chris on the Westernmost point in all of England. below, several views of the Minack Theater, which is built on a cliffside between Land's End and Penzance.
a few miles to the East of Land's End, on the way to Penzance (yes, like the pirates), Val and Chris took us to a remarkable place that somehow i had never even heard of before, let alone seen: the Minack Theater. back in the '30s a woman who owned a house up on a high cliff overlooking the sea made her back yard available to a local theater troupe for their annual production. she made rough terraced seating and created a stage and kept refining it over the course of decades as its popularity as a venue grew. it is literally on the edge of a cliff and this lady would pour seats with concrete and haul up her building materials from the beach below the cliff, even once expropriating materials from a ship that had wrecked there. it's an incredible location for a theater, and plays are still performed there quite regularly, although plenty of folks just like us will pay just to go in and look around.
further on along the coast, we stopped just outside one of many rather inconspicuous fields, and were urged to climb the fence to get into it. having done so we quickly espied the 19 merry maidens that collectively form a complete neolithic stone circle. legend has it that these low stones were once young ladies who allowed their dancing to carry on into the Sabbath, and so were turned to stone as punishment. apparently there are at least five other stone circles in Cornwall, probably tucked away in some nondescript field just like this one.
the very interesting merry maidens stone circle, consisting of 19 stones. there are two more set some distance from this group that, according to the legend, are the petrified remains of the maidens' pipers, who tried to run home upon hearing the church bells strike midnight; below, St Michael's Mount, a tidal island just off the coast near Penzance.
following our rocky encounter we continued East to the fishing village of Mousehole, which is, naturally enough, pronounced mao-zul. Cornwall is very much a part of Britain when it comes to having names that sound nothing like they're spelled. in addition to Mousehole, it has Fowey, pronounced foy, while elsewhere in the country we have Cholmondeley, which is obviously said chumley. in any case, a little further on is Penzance, which is said just like it reads, and which did not seem to be harboring any pirates while we were passing through. just after passing through we came upon a little place called Marazion, which is home to the best views of St Michael's Mount, a small tidal island just off the coast that houses an abbey and a castle. it has historical ties with Mont Saint Michel in Normandy, France, and is generally a pretty cool sight. as home of Lord St Levan, i don't know that the island is accessible to the average tourist, and even though our group was certainly not average, we didn't try to go so i never found out.
Caerhays beach in late spring. note the windbreaks and the rocks, just what a British day at the beach is all about. still, it's in a protected cove and can make for quite a pleasant afternoon; below, the harbor and picturesque village of Mevagissey, one of my all-time favorites.
i was surprised to find that the place most strongly associated with my memories, other than Lostwood Road, was Caerhays Beach. like most of the others around it is pretty pebbly and i was never much of a beach fan anyway, preferring to stay in the parking lot and play soccer or catch with my dad. but i well remembered coming to this beach several times, including one where i neglected my assigned duty of watching my younger sister, Kim, so that my older sister, Carrie had to run all the way down to the low-tide waterline to get her, which gave Carrie an asthma attack severe enough to send her to hospital for a couple of days. needless to say, i wasn't very popular with the family for the rest of that vacation. on this vacation, i had been looking everywhere for a small plastic toy boat like the ones i had always bought as a child, but even the trusty little shop at Caerhays had moved on to bigger and better things.
the last place i had chance to look before leaving was in Mevagissey, one of my absolute favorite places from all those Cornish holidays. it's a few miles South of St Austell, and is a small fishing village built in a little valley so the houses rise up on all sides of the harbor. fishing has given way now to tourism, the many cutesy trinket shops lining tiny winding streets making this transition somewhat understandable, but even now Mevagissey is hard to beat for pure picturesqueness or nostalgic feeling. it's a postcard come to life.
even with only a couple of days there, Cornwall burst rapidly back to life for me as we were chauffeured all over by Val and Chris. i don't think they've been planning any ventures in the tourism business, but even without them as guides there's still plenty to see and explore in Cornwall, if you can manage to drag yourself away from London. we'll certainly be back, remembering that we were and remain very grateful to our wonderful hosts.
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