A series of articles about a rather optimistic week's holiday along England's south coast in February!!! 1996. Our itinerary will take in Southsea, Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, Bognor Regis, Brighton, The Isle of Wight, Bournemouth, Poole, Corfe Castle, Weymouth, Maiden Castle, Wookey Hole and Cheddar. And a fair bit of snow and ice...
Clicking or tapping the photos below will take you to the articles for each day. A link on each page will bring you back here.
A series of articles about our holiday in Cornwall 3-10 August 1996. Centred in a small B+B between Newquay and Porth, we visit all the places listed below. One of the last holidays we took with the extended family.
Clicking or tapping the photos below will take you to the articles for each day. A link on each page will bring you back here.
It's Friday 9 August 1996 and the last day of our Cornwall holiday. We walked into Newquay for the final shopathon. Not too bad as we set out early so we were on our own. My nephew had a sore throat and his parents have decided to find a doctor. I asked him if he felt ill or had a headache or anything and he said "No," and certainly didn't look ill. I would have just bought some lozenges or something and rather thought the doctor, if they managed to find one that could see him that day, would turn them round swiftly... Gill and Steve had arranged to go tenpin bowling with John that afternoon so Fran and I drove on to Tintagel for the afternoon alone.
We drove north to Tintagel. This is the Old Post Office. It dates from the 1300s and was the post office of the village of Trevena, the old name of the village. Tintagel is a name first seen in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae written in 1136 which gives a fanciful history of Britain, starting with its colonisation by the Trojans after their defeat at Troy and then bringing in King Arthur and Merlin and setting the castle here where Uther Pendragon was disguised as Queen Igraine's husband and was thus able to lie with her, conceiving the baby Arthur. The castle incidentally would have been less than a hundred years old when Geoffrey was writing. The legends of Arthur are set some 600 years earlier...
Anyway, the post office started to call itself Tintagel Post Office sometime in the 1800s, a name that previously only referred to the headland and castle ruin. The name stuck... All the shops there sell swords called Excalibur and I even saw some morning stars in one shop - an absolutely horrible weapon from medieval times. It's a spiked metal ball on the end of a chain which is attached to a handle. They were used to either brain somebody (armour made little difference if a blow from one of these landed) or the chain would allow a strike at a shield and the chain would then whip the spiked ball behind the shield's rim to smash the hand of the person carrying it. Can't understand how they are allowed to sell them.
The town is a half mile from the cliffs and beach, which are reached either by a walk down (and back up) a reasonably steep and not exactly smooth dirt track or by bumping up and down the same track in the back of a Land Rover shuttle. Legend has it that this is where King Arthur was born, being handed over to Merlin the wizard for raising in secret. The castle on top of the hill looks every bit the part - but was built a good few centuries after Arthur would have lived. An early Christian settlement or trading post was there before it. I wrote my own (even more fanciful) book about King Arthur, still available here for Kindle books, and stuck to the early monastery idea with the caves beneath the cliffs being Merlin's home.
The caves at low tide can be reached easily and explored. We walked down, but if I was hoping to take photos from inside the caves - and I most certainly was - then I was to be disappointed. The tide was in and you definitely would be risking your life trying to wade into a cave that was flooded. The sea rushes into the small cove with quite a force.
I took this photograph in 1987 and ever since had been hoping to reproduce it in colour. This cave went all the way through from the cove, under the castle and the sea had broken through from a cave on the next cove so that you could walk through from one side to another. I'm not sure whether in the years since then, the cave had collapsed at one point. It was spectacular as you can easily see in this photograph. In my book (mentioned above and very reasonably priced for discerning readers...) I had a series of tunnels under the rock where Merlin lived.
Certainly damage had been done recently. In the foreground a worker is repairing damage where the stream that runs down the gorge throws itself off the cliff face and falls to the beach below.
I think that locally it is one of these caves on the northern side of the bay that is known as Merlin's Cave. So in order to get around this in the book I imagined the whole cove as being cliffs which at some point are collapsed and destroyed by the sea (or by enemy magical spells) But AHEM! no (more) spoilers! We had a ride back up the very steep hill in the back of the Land Rover shuttle. I was crushed next to a very pretty girl in very short shorts. Miss Franny was crushed next to me on the other side - sometimes you just have to make sacrifices...
Thursday 8 August 1996. We drove to Lands End. On the way we saw a column of smoke and a few yards farther on found a car on fire. A fire engine was approaching on the other side of the dual carriageway and I stopped to let the firement run across to fight the fire. Frank was driving behind me and pulled into the other lane to stop traffic getting past us in case they hadn't seen the firemen. The owner of the car was sitting on the grass at the side of the road. He didn't look too pleased...
By the time the firemen let us carry on, his car was a wreck, all the paint had cooked brown and blistered round the bonnet and the inside of the car had filled with smoke. On the positive side it was very entertaining for us...!
The rest of the journey was fairly non-descript after that. From the north of Newquay down to Lands End is around 43 or 44 miles straight down the A30 until you end up at the end of the peninsula where the only way to go is back the way you came. Everything here is described as the first and last in England - first and last inn, first and last shop etc. Steve was pointing the video at complete strangers and asking what they thought of the first and last public toilets...
The current Longships lighthouse first shone in 1873. 117 feet high (36m) it was installed with an 8-wick oil lamp and only electrified in 1967. On a clear night in 1898 with the lighthouse working perfectly, a ship - S.S. Bluejacket - managed to wreck itself on nearby rocks, almost wrecking the lighthouse as it did so.
An earlier lighthouse was built in 1795 by Lieutenant Henry Smith, who was granted the lease provided he built a lighthouse. In return he could charge a levy on passing ships. The levy would only become due once the lighthouse was working and unfortunately Lieutenant Smith underestimated both the time and costs required to build it and, having had to take out some hefty loans, eventually found himself in the Debtors' Prison.
There is a signpost there that you can have the mileage to your home town put up and you have your photo taken. There is a similar one at John O'Groats up in Scotland but that's probably not a viable day trip from Newquay... We gathered round the post and had a group photo taken.
We went into The Last Labyrynth an exhibition of Man and the Sea and an audio visual display of the Disneyland type. It took an hour to go round the exhibition which was quite good and when we came out it started to rain heavily. Gill had been to a shop and picked an oyster shell from a pool and there was a pearl in it that she had made into a necklace.
After that we had more or less exhausted the delights of Lands End, apart from drinking in the pub. The rain had set in so we made our way back to Newquay and walked into town with Gill and Steve, who took me into the arcades to play on some simulations of skiing and motor bike racing. Never mind the real thing, you have to be fit for these machines! Steering was done by body movements, I felt like an old crock by the time we had finished! Joints screaming for mercy, I crashed my Ducatti into a wall and gave a sigh of relief as the screen went black...
Saturday 3 August 1996. We had a meal in the little cafe opposite the beach at Porth and then set off to walk onto the island as we always do on the first night in Newquay. This is a Burke tradition going back over many years.
It is a true island only at high tide when the sea surrounds it completely. From this viewpoint we are still on the mainland promontary where it forms the northern side of the bay at Porth. Behind us from this point the Iron Age defences begin, guarding the gap between mainland and the island, formed by a rent in the rock that goes all the way down to beach level.
The mainland and island have been joined by a bridge and on either side of the bridge are high earthwork defences. High now, but they have had two or three thousand years of erosion, that not only reduces the height of the walls, but that also fills up the ditches between them.
My nephew, standing on the top of one of the walls. They would be seriously off-putting to any but the most determined attacking force.
Looking along the rent in the cliffs that makes the tip of the promontary an island at high tide. It is high tide and I am standing on a narrow timber bridge linking the two bits of land.
The view from the island side, looking back owards the bridge and mainland. How long must it have taken with no machines to help them make these immense earthworks? Trevelgue isn't a true hillfort with earthworks surrounding it. The bulk of the fort is defended instead by sheer cliffs, not easy to climb, but possible perhaps. In any case defending the length of the perimeter of the island would be a daunting task, requiring a huge defending force. There probably wasn't a great deal of plunder or even natural resources to be gained from any attack, but the defences are probably sufficient to not make the attempt worthwhile for the sake of a handful of slaves and a few domestic farm animals.
It's no surpirse to find thistles on the island. Innocuous as they may seem, a single spark into the white seed head filaments are a sure way of causing a flame. However it only lasts a second or two so you need something else to catch the fire from the burning seed head.
I find sites like these fascinating. Many people laugh at me when I get excited at stuff like this. Even Fran tends to say things like "It's just a hill..." It's not though. Someone had to decide that there was going to be a "hill" there and then they had to build it, forming foundations, packing material into a dense self-supporting mound and then many times, digging a ditch at its foot to make the slope even higher.
