Monday 7 August 1989. Again, a word of explanation for any readers who are coming to these articles in order of posting rather than in the eventual sequence that will appear in the relevant index page. I'm currently re-editing this 1989 holiday's entries and this article is a new insertion - it wasn't included in 2009 when I originally created most of the articles. In those days there wasn't a limitless amount of storage space for a Blogger account. Hence I was more selective and the photographs tended to be smaller. But having got that over with... let's go!
Monday dawned overcast and a little wet. We set out in the cars for a day at Wendron Forge, also known as Poldark Mine. Poldark had been a much-loved TV series based on the books by Winston Graham, airing between 1975 and 1977.
Wendron Forge did indeed have a forge and landscaped gardens and cafeterias and some old industrial machinery.
But it also had a genuine tin mine. You could go down this. Adults had to wear a hard hat as the ceilings were quite low at certain points. Small children were exempt from wearing hats due to their size and the fact that in those days parents were not so stupid as to hoist their kids to carry them around the mine underground on their shoulders... I wouldn't put it past them these days.
There were several weird looking steam engines displayed along with the more familiar shape of a saddle tank locomotive - so called because the water tank sits over the boiler like a saddle on a horse.
We left Wendron and headed out in the car for a ride. It was quite cold for spending the entire day walking about. We ended up in Falmouth as it was starting to go dark. A welcoming sight awaited!
Shops were either closed or on the verge of closing, but Chattels had so many shopping bags and other stuff displayed outside it was going to take the staff a while to get them all taken in before locking up for the night.
We ventured onto the pier. There was not much to do on it except get on or watch the ferries arriving and departing and at this hour, they had long since stopped operations for the night.
Falmouth is the nearest large harbour to the western entrance to the English Channel and is the third deepest natural harbour in the world and the deepest in western Europe at 3-4 metres. It has been a naval base for several hundred years and the start or end point for round-the-world record-breaking voyages including Robin Knox-Johnston who made the first solo non-stop circumnavigation in 1969.
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