The old slides are still going through the scanner at Burke Towers. A 1989 holiday in Newquay is currently being done. I've mentioned Porth and Trevelgue Island before, but every time we go there I take photos that are variations on a theme! I'll try to cover places I didn't cover before though - or at least show photos from a different angle! It doesn't help that I'm working backwards through time...
Anyway, the day in question for this article is Saturday 5 August 1989. We were camping on Porth Beach Camping Site. There were much the same teams of combatants - Miss Frannny, myself and daughter Gill, Mum, Dad, brother Frank and his son John. We were in two rather battered old Fords. Mine is the quite nice looking Cortina, but the new paint job it had been given was covering a multitude of sins... Mum and Dad, Frank and "Young" John (what does that make me???) were in Dad's Granada that had just had a new (used) bonnet fitted to replace the sheet of rust that previously tried its best to keep rain off the engine. It had yet to be sprayed to match the rest of the car!
It was fairly early on in our camping days and we hadn't yet bought the large 3-bedroomed tent we were to eventually buy so the three of us were making do in this small tent on loan from Fran's brother, Bob. (Thank you Bob!)
It was a stonker of a day, gloriously sunny and very hot - were we really in England? We couldn't help noticing a slight whiff of petrol... No... wait... there was a horrible stench of petrol! I had filled the car up just before we got there. The garage had it stored well underground - perhaps in a refridgeration plant - and since being squirted into the car it was warming up nicely, expanding, and forcing its way out of the petrol cap in a potentially disastrous torrent. "I'm going to have to go for a drive to use enough petrol to stop it leaking!" So, as Miss Franny was unpacking stuff into the tent and not wanting to go for a ride in a waiting time bomb, off I went on my own.
I found an old Iron Age fort on the map and headed to Castle-an-Dinas to have a look. The car had to be left at the bottom of the hill and I walked up to the fort. There was a bungalow halfway up belonging to an English Heritage chap. A huge alsation and a goose both came at me, the goose being far more aggressive than the dog and I was pleased to get up to the top leaving the wildlife behind.
At some point I had to come down again... Having heard the commotion for a second time, a nice chap came out as the dog and goose went into furious overload and he grabbed hold of the dog, saying, "It's ok he doesn't bite..." whilst the goose broke both my legs with its wings and took a chunk of what I like to think of as my most precious part in its beak... Thank you! I called in high falsetto, hobbling down the hill as fast as I could, until the goose eventually gave up and stopped dangling from between my legs to drop to the ground and stalk back up the hill with a parting hiss that I took to mean "Let that be a lesson to you!"
Back at Porth I discover the rest of the family and families from the tents near us lying around unconscious from petrol fumes and wake the family to go for a coffee at a small cafe along the path towards Newquay. Here we are looking across to Trevelgue Island, which we have always called Porth Island, not knowing any better.
As always for our first evening in Newquay we'll be off to explore Trevelgue Island. Only an island at high tide it has earthwork defences that denote an Iron Age past and, well you know me... I love anything like that.
The sides of the island are not particularly high, but they are cliffs none-the-less and access onto the island is via a wooden bridge. At high tide the water flows energetically from one side to the other underneath and it gives the walk onto the island a little bit of added wonder and satisfaction. At either side of the bridge are earthwork banks, still impressively large. In fact on the island side the defensive wall has been cut to take a stepped path and you walk through with the top of the wall above your head. I never fail to be excited by it, whilst the rest of the family wait impatiently saying things like "It's just a hill!"
Anyway this holiday will include a few more stone circles and weird stuff! (Hooray!) And I'll finish this first article with another view of Porth Beach which is a long beach with a shallow fall off to the sea which makes for easy bathing although you should bear in mind always that this is the Atlantic and some large waves can come in. The flags on the beach show where it is safe to go into the sea.
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