WALKING THE CORNWALL COAST: Part I, by Caroline Arnold at The Intrepid Tourist

Week 5: 52 Places to Go

Cornwall Coast: View of Tintagel from End of Rocky Valley

A Week of Fresh Air and Ancient History (September 1998)

The slate cliffs of the Cornwall coast stretched for miles to the north and south, while the sparkling waves of the Atlantic Ocean disappeared beyond the western horizon. As I peered over the cliff edge into the rocky cove below it was easy to imagine pirates or smugglers stowing their booty in a secluded sea cave. Long ago I had fallen in love with this rugged southwest corner of England as I watched the adventures of Poldark on television and read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Now I was here and ready to embark with a friend on my first walking holiday.

I had often thought that a walking trip sounded like the perfect combination of exercise and scenery, and Cornwall seemed like the ideal place to start. Not only is its jagged coast spectacularly beautiful, but it has a proud and ancient heritage dating from Neolithic times. From mysterious stone circles in south Cornwall to the reputed birthplace of King Arthur at Tintagel, the walk promised intriguing peeks into history as well as abundant opportunities to enjoy nature.

The Southwest Coast Path

The Southwest Coast Path is a public hiking trail that runs continuously along the coasts of Cornwall and Devon for more than 500 miles. It is well marked and we quickly learned to look for the acorn signposts to point us in the right direction. The portions of the Coast Path that we hiked, between Newquay and Tintagel and near Penzance, were selected both because they promised good views and because there were villages at suitable intervals where we could stay each night. (We booked rooms ahead of time.) We planned our trip for September with the idea that we would miss the summer tourist crowds and still have a chance for good weather. As it turned out, we never had a drop of rain, and although I had packed warm clothes, I didn’t need them. Cornwall does have the mildest climate in all of Britain and likes to think of itself as the English Riviera.

Setting Off

Promenade in Newquay

We spent our first night in Penzance, and then took a bus to Newquay, where gracious old hotels look over a wide beach popular with surfers. As we stepped off the bus we nearly collided with a whiskered gentleman carrying a bell and wearing a tricornered hat, embroidered coat, and knee breeches. At first we thought we had somehow landed in the wrong century, but discovered that he was the official Town Crier. He struck up a conversation and when we told him that we planned to walk nine miles that day, he seemed dubious that we would make it at all. I suppose that we did look like an unlikely pair—two middle-aged women weighed down with heavy packs. He didn’t know that we both had been taking long walks to get in shape. When we told him our plans to walk north, he insisted that we were making a big mistake because, in his view, all the best scenery was to the south!

To Porthcothan
Just outside of Newquay we picked up the Coast Path and began our walk northward toward Porthcothan. In general, the path was level except when it dipped down to a beach and we had to walk across sand. Some of the ascents to the headlands were steep, but we just stopped frequently to admire the view, take a photo, and catch our breath.

Porthcothan

Much of the Coast Path hugs the top of the cliffs and was originally used by customs officers patrolling the beaches for smugglers. As we walked along, we looked down on seagulls, seals, and the occasional shipwreck. The Cornish coast is famous for its treacherous waters, and its rocky shores have claimed countless vessels. On the landward side of the path we looked inland over the green and gold patchwork of the Cornish countryside. Most of the landscape is open and grassy due to the more or less constant wind, but tucked against walls and in protected areas we also saw purple and yellow wildflowers, scarlet rose hips and ripening blackberries. People have been farming in Cornwall since the first settlers arrived from Europe about 5000 years ago. Today's farmers are encouraged to use traditional methods, so the farmsteads, with their sagging slate-roofed houses and enclosed fields, appear much as they have for hundreds of years. Ancient walls keep most animals in their cliff top pastures, but we passed a few sheep grazing perilously on the seaward side.

Ancient Traditions

Cottage window, Mousehole

Celtic people came to Cornwall about 700 B.C.E., bringing with them the knowledge of iron making and Celtic traditions and language. “Cornwall” may come from the Cornish word “Cornovii” meaning “cliff castles.” In our walk we passed numerous Iron Age cliff castles and burial mounds, although to our inexperienced eyes, they usually looked more like grass covered lumps than ancient ruins.

Cornish, a language which is more like Welsh than English, was spoken in Cornwall until 250 years ago. It remains in place names such as Truro, the county seat of Cornwall, Delabole, which boasts Europe’s largest open slate quarry, and Penzance, the town made famous by composers Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.

Shortcuts

Sharing the Path!

Occasionally we took alternate paths away from the cliff edge. Theoretically these were shortcuts, but were never marked as clearly as the Coast Path and usually required negotiating various stiles and crossing farmer’s fields. On one occasion we had a standoff with a herd of young steers but managed to get through with just being stared at.
We were not purists about walking every inch of the way or carrying our packs when it wasn’t necessary. After the first two days we were able to leave our packs at our hotel (or have them sent ahead by taxi) and then just used a small day pack for our raincoats (which we never needed) and our water and lunch. Even the tiniest villages had little cafes where we could stop for a cup of tea so we didn’t have to carry much food.

Cornish Pasties and Cream Teas
Exercise always guarantees a good appetite and for lunch we usually ate Cornish pasties, the hearty meat-filled pies that originated as a portable lunch for the local tin miners. Although the pasty—rhymes with “nasty”-- has become a fast-food staple in much of England, the best ones are still found in Cornwall. My hiking companion is of Cornish ancestry and told me that the thick dough enabled the pasty to be tossed down a mineshaft unharmed! The other food for which Cornwall is famous is clotted cream, a thick buttery spread that one slathers on fresh scones along with a dollop of strawberry jam.

Part II  (posted on 5/3/11) covers stops in Padstow, Port Isaac, Tintagel, and walks near Penzance.
Go to the end of Part II for information on getting to Cornwall, accommodations, and other details.

For more about traveling in Cornwall, see Gwen Dandridge's post CORNWALL, ENGLAND: Long Lost Kings, Mermaids, Pirates and Cream Teas, Guest Post by Gwen Dandridge.

All text and photos copyright Caroline Arnold.

From SAN DIEGO'S GLOBE to LONDON'S GLOBE: UK Theater Tour with Blue Badge Guides, Guest post by Hal Fuson

Stage, Globe Theater, London

I thank my friends Hal and Pam Fuson for the following post about their recent trip to the UK for a close-up look at the British theater scene, led in part by the excellent Blue Badge Guides.

Recently, long-time friends pushed us to join them on a theatre-themed tour of London, Bath and Stratford-on-Avon sponsored by The Old Globe Theatre, a San Diego company with an 80-year history of producing Shakespeare and a wide range of other plays, both new and old.  As a director of The Old Globe I knew many of the other forty members of the tour group and, of course, we shared an enthusiasm for seeing plays and looking behind the scenes at some of the world’s other great theater companies, including London’s 1990s reproduction of Shakespeare’s original theater, also known as The Globe.  

Mild October weather makes the gardens of Blenheim Palace, where Winston Churchill spent his early childhood, a welcoming stop in Oxfordshire.

If anything, the prospect of being in the hands of a tour company was more of a negative than a positive. On earlier trips we had successfully bought discount theater tickets at the Leicester Square TKTS ticket booth. And since we did more or less speak the language, we questioned the necessity of paying someone else to steer us about on a schedule not our own. Happily, as it turned out, we rather enjoyed being steered about, partly because we could always blame the tour company, instead of ourselves or our friends, for the inevitable mishaps and aggravations of travel.  If the bed was a little too soft, or the food service a tad slow, or the last sight a bit passé, well, so it goes. There was always a next restaurant or another fascinating backstage for us to look forward to without any of us having to worry about the timing or the tickets.  

Wearing signature orange National Theatre jackets, tourists go behind the scenes

A stark reminder of what can go wrong came at our first theater booking, “The Play that Goes Wrong,” a farce that is doing well in London’s Covent Garden.  What went wrong for us was that our forty seats were double-booked, apparently because of an error by the ticket agency on which our tour operator had successfully relied for more than twenty years. The tour operator compensated by finding us seats for a matinee a few days later, this time featuring David Suchet as Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” It helped that the Oscar Wilde masterpiece was directed by Adrian Noble, the former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, many of whose Shakespeare productions we had seen during his turn as the artistic director of the summer festival at San Diego’s Globe.  

Blue Badge guide describes the effect of later additions on Hampton Court's architectural integrity.

Another task the tour operator undertook for us was hiring a remarkably good crew of guides, all of whom were certified holders of Blue Badge status under the UK’s demanding system of training and testing.  Each guide had charge of groups of 15 or less when we were moving on foot, which was most of the time when we weren’t seated in theaters or restaurants.  

Visitors peer down at the Roman baths with the Bath Abbey looming in the background.

 Not only did they know where to lead us and what to say about the sights along the way, they were theatrical acts onto themselves.  They herded groups of us mostly older cats, with our different capacities for mobility, hearing and attention span, keeping us on defined time schedules across busy urban landscapes crisscrossed with traffic diversions and occasional traverses of royal or parliamentary carpools.  Not the least of their skills was in always knowing the way to the best nearby pub and, shortly thereafter, to the nearest restrooms, or, in the Queen’s English, the “loo”, a matter of considerable intensity for us older folk.

At tea in this home in Bath, Jane Austen, or a very good likeness, still reads from her work.

But managing the logistics is only the beginning.  Just as important is the guides’ stock of stories about the sights we were seeing.  For example, the origin of the terms “loo” and “Big Ben”.  It happens, as a guide in London told us, the origins of both terms are a bit hazy.  One story is that “loo” has something to do with the Waterloo train station, or even with the battle after which the station is named.  Another has it that a one-time maker of iron cisterns branded its products with the mark “Waterloo”.  Our Stratford guide steered us to a prize-winning loo next to the River Avon, but he affirmed that the origin of the name was uncertain.  

Guide Sean Kelleher in Westminster discussing how Big Ben, the bell, got its name.

Big Ben, we learned, is actually the bell within the tower now named for Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of her reign, just as the other tower on the Houses of Parliament was named for Queen Victoria when she passed the same milestone.  The bell, we were told, is inscribed with the name of Benjamin Hall, the first London Commissioner of Works, under whose leadership the towers and many important items of modern infrastructure, including perhaps a number of loos, were built.

Looking up a Hampton Court staircase toward the Chambers of Henry VIII.

I have learned in my involvement with theater that when you have a particularly knotty problem with lots of moving parts prone to failure, you should hire a first-rate member of the stage managers union. Now I know that adding a Blue Badge guide to the team sharply increases your chances of success.

A guide explains a feature of the almost 800 year-old Salisbury Cathedral

You don’t need to be a member of a tour group to hire your own guides.  The Blue Badge and London Walks web sites provide details, and web searches and guidebooks for other destinations should reveal similarly qualified guides at locations around the world.  Just be sure to check references.  Also, remember that most of the usual stops on many routes offer good and inexpensive tours of their highlights — our Blue Badge folks handed us off to local guides at locations like Blenheim Palace and the four theatres whose backstages we toured —The Royal Opera House, The National Theatre, and Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford — and their guides were uniformly excellent.  Pricing and other details are available on the web sites.  Our tour operator was the unflappable Barry Tobias of San Diego-based Break-Away Tours.

Shakespeare speaks often of swans, as in this line from Othello: ˜I will play the swan,/ and die in music".  Hundreds of the majestic birds frequent the River Avon near Stratford

Walking the Cornwall Coast: Part I

A Week of Fresh Air and Ancient History (September 1998)

View of Tintagel from End of Rocky Valley

The slate cliffs of the Cornwall coast stretched for miles to the north and south, while the sparkling waves of the Atlantic Ocean disappeared beyond the western horizon. As I peered over the cliff edge into the rocky cove below it was easy to imagine pirates or smugglers stowing their booty in a secluded sea cave. Long ago I had fallen in love with this rugged southwest corner of England as I watched the adventures of Poldark on television and read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Now I was here and ready to embark with a friend on my first walking holiday.

I had often thought that a walking trip sounded like the perfect combination of exercise and scenery, and Cornwall seemed like the ideal place to start. Not only is its jagged coast spectacularly beautiful, but it has a proud and ancient heritage dating from Neolithic times. From mysterious stone circles in south Cornwall to the reputed birthplace of King Arthur at Tintagel, the walk promised intriguing peeks into history as well as abundant opportunities to enjoy nature.

The Southwest Coast Path

The Southwest Coast Path is a public hiking trail that runs continuously along the coasts of Cornwall and Devon for more than 500 miles. It is well marked and we quickly learned to look for the acorn signposts to point us in the right direction. The portions of the Coast Path that we hiked, between Newquay and Tintagel and near Penzance, were selected both because they promised good views and because there were villages at suitable intervals where we could stay each night. (We booked rooms ahead of time.) We planned our trip for September with the idea that we would miss the summer tourist crowds and still have a chance for good weather. As it turned out, we never had a drop of rain, and although I had packed warm clothes, I didn’t need them. Cornwall does have the mildest climate in all of Britain and likes to think of itself as the English Riviera.

Setting Off

Promenade in Newquay

We spent our first night in Penzance, and then took a bus to Newquay, where gracious old hotels look over a wide beach popular with surfers. As we stepped off the bus we nearly collided with a whiskered gentleman carrying a bell and wearing a tricornered hat, embroidered coat, and knee breeches. At first we thought we had somehow landed in the wrong century, but discovered that he was the official Town Crier. He struck up a conversation and when we told him that we planned to walk nine miles that day, he seemed dubious that we would make it at all. I suppose that we did look like an unlikely pair—two middle-aged women weighed down with heavy packs. He didn’t know that we both had been taking long walks to get in shape. When we told him our plans to walk north, he insisted that we were making a big mistake because, in his view, all the best scenery was to the south!

To Porthcothan
Just outside of Newquay we picked up the Coast Path and began our walk northward toward Porthcothan. In general, the path was level except when it dipped down to a beach and we had to walk across sand. Some of the ascents to the headlands were steep, but we just stopped frequently to admire the view, take a photo, and catch our breath.

Porthcothan

Much of the Coast Path hugs the top of the cliffs and was originally used by customs officers patrolling the beaches for smugglers. As we walked along, we looked down on seagulls, seals, and the occasional shipwreck. The Cornish coast is famous for its treacherous waters, and its rocky shores have claimed countless vessels. On the landward side of the path we looked inland over the green and gold patchwork of the Cornish countryside. Most of the landscape is open and grassy due to the more or less constant wind, but tucked against walls and in protected areas we also saw purple and yellow wildflowers, scarlet rose hips and ripening blackberries. People have been farming in Cornwall since the first settlers arrived from Europe about 5000 years ago. Today's farmers are encouraged to use traditional methods, so the farmsteads, with their sagging slate-roofed houses and enclosed fields, appear much as they have for hundreds of years. Ancient walls keep most animals in their cliff top pastures, but we occasionally passed a sheep grazing perilously on the seaward side.

Ancient Traditions

Cottage window, Mousehole

Celtic people came to Cornwall about 700 B.C., bringing with them the knowledge of iron making and Celtic traditions and language. “Cornwall” may come from the Cornish word “Cornovii” meaning “cliff castles.” In our walk we passed numerous Iron Age cliff castles and burial mounds, although to our inexperienced eyes, they usually looked more like grass covered lumps than ancient ruins.

Cornish, a language which is more like Welsh than English, was spoken in Cornwall until 250 years ago. It remains in place names such as Truro, the county seat of Cornwall, Delabole, which boasts Europe’s largest open slate quarry, and Penzance, the town made famous by composers Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.

Shortcuts

Sharing the Path!

Occasionally we took alternate paths away from the cliff edge. Theoretically these were shortcuts, but were never marked as clearly as the Coast Path and usually required negotiating various stiles and crossing farmer’s fields. On one occasion we had a standoff with a herd of young steers but managed to get through with just being stared at.
We were not purists about walking every inch of the way or carrying our packs when it wasn’t necessary. After the first two days we were able to leave our packs at our hotel (or have them sent ahead by taxi) and then just used a small day pack for our raincoats (which we never needed) and our water and lunch. Even the tiniest villages had little cafes where we could stop for a cup of tea so we didn’t have to carry much food.

Cornish Pasties and Cream Teas
Exercise always guarantees a good appetite and for lunch we usually ate Cornish pasties, the hearty meat-filled pies that originated as a portable lunch for the local tin miners. Although the pasty—rhymes with “nasty”-- has become a fast-food staple in much of England, the best ones are still found in Cornwall. My hiking companion is of Cornish ancestry and told me that the thick dough enabled the pasty to be tossed down a mineshaft unharmed! The other food for which Cornwall is famous is clotted cream, a thick buttery spread that one slathers on fresh scones along with a dollop of strawberry jam.

Part II will cover stops in Padstow, Port Isaac, Tintagel, and walks near Penzance.
Go to the end of Part II for current information on getting to Cornwall, accommodations, and other details.

All text and photos copyright Caroline Arnold.