A Mystery Stone Circle

Thursday 10 August 1989. Here's a mystery that I'm hoping someone can clear up for me - I know... I shouldn't have spilt it in the first place, but no - this mystery is of the stone circle variety.

On the previous day I had gone off exploring various stone circles, standing stones and cromlechs and had met up with a couple at the Merry Maidens stone circle near Penzance who were explaining the theories behind ley lines. I'd had a go with some dowsing rods and found that I could make them work (I would be subjected to much family scoffing whenever I tried to demonstrate).

Anyway, today we came across a stone circle I had never visited before and when I looked at my map which normally gives the name of anything like this all I read was "stone circle".

So here's the mystery and the question for my readers - if I get an answer I'll update this article: does anyone know exactly where this circle is? As far as I can remember we were travelling from Newquay to Polperro on this day, whether on our way there or during the return journey I'm not sure. But if it was during the return we may have detoured away from a straight road back. And what is the name of this circle? It's been puzzling me for 34 years now!

Anyway - I bet you can all guess where we are going for the next article, can't you?

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Perranporth and Camelford

Tuesday 8 August 1989. We wake in bright light. Alarmed we check the tent roof, but no... it's coming from outside. High in the sky is a strange glowing circle of light, we later find out that it is called the sun and it is something that we are not often troubled with in the north of England...

We have breakfast and discuss what to do for the day. It is eventually decided that we will go to Perranporth where going out onto the beach for a swim or paddle doesn't have to include a climb down a cliff to get there and a climb back up a hundred or so steps afterwards.

Besides, Perranporth is an attractive beach, bounded by cliffs to the south and a lower promontory to the north. The cliffs to the south house mine workings. There's a square adit visible in the top photograph, these were access points leading to the mine where water could be drained out or ore removed. There is also a huge arch formed by the sea in the rock.

The beach is very popular, perhaps because of the easy access and has lots of small pools filled with exciting life forms such as crabs, tiny fish and crustaceans and falling children...

Along the beach away from this bay are sand dunes and the scant remains of a tiny chapel said to have been the church of Cornwall's patron saint, Saint Piran. He was expelled from Ireland, tied to a mill stone which was rolled into a stormy sea. The sea immediately became calm, the mill stone floated (or he held his breath for a very long time whilst walking on the sea floor) and he ended up here in Perranporth where his first disciples were a fox, a badger and a bear. It's a wonder that Christianity ever became a thing really, but set against this is the fact that if you expressed doubt you were burned at a stake...

Away from the beach is a long shopping street where we found this barrrel on wheels, the delivery van of a local greengrocer.

We spent the full day at Perranporth, eating in a local cafe before heading back to the campsite.

It's not exactly on the way back, being some way in the opposite direction from Newquay and Porth, but we decided to visit Camelford. At this time I was still finishing writing my book about King Arthur (available here) and Camelford is one of the contenders for both Camelot and his final battle at Camlann. I (and most historians) don't subscribe to a Cornish connection even if he really were to have existed, but I set out in the book to try to give fictional reasons why all these local legends might have originated.

The church is the modern church of St Thomas of Canterbury and dates only from 1937/38.

The River Camel. With the benefits of hindsight, the children playing in it may have been at some risk as, the year before these photographs were taken, some 20 tons of chemicals were accidentally released into the local water supply at the water treatment works.

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Wendron Forge and Falmouth

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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The Sun Sets on Cornwall 89

Friday 11 August 1989. Well it made a comeback yesterday but today the sun sets, literally on the entries about the Cornwall 1989 holiday.

Our final day had been spent in Newquay close to where we were staying at the Porth Beach Holiday Camp. We spent it on the beach and doing a final tour of the shops. In particular the gemstone shop I seem to remember... The sun was going to stay out until it hit the sea. I started my final shots with the camera with a silhouette and we walked over the cliff footpath back to Porth.

The sky was promising great things already. We went into the cafe for our evening meal instead of cooking back at the tent. As the meal ended, the sun was low in the sky which was turning a brilliant mix of reds, purple and deep blue...

You just couldn't help but take spectacular photographs!

I dragged Fran out onto the promotory fort as the light faded. It was still incredibly warm even though the sun was now dipping below the horizon.

As the sky above turned to a dark cobalt blue the horizon glowed, giving those last few shots of the hillside. Then it was time to turn back for the campsite. Gingerly we picked our way along the path in the dark. The lights of Porth were coming on and that didn't help too much because it made the unlit path seem even darker!

And so our 1989 holiday week comes to an end. The blog report took somewhat longer than the holiday itself - from April 2009 to July 2010 and then a few articles added with the latest edit and photo additions in April 2023.

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Picturesque Polperro

Ages ago... 11 months to be precise (blush) I somehow managed to get diverted from a series of entries about our 1989 holiday in Cornwall, the south western bit of England that juts out into the Atlantic.

So for all you readers that have been waiting patiently for the next instalment - here it is.

Thursday 10 August 1989. We found ourselves in the gorgeous village of Polperro. It didn't come as much of a surprise because we had deliberately set out to go there...

Polperro, for anyone not familiar with it, is a village of ancient shops, inns and cottages clustered around the hills and cliffs surrounding the harbour and is reached down a long sloping road from the car park at the top of the hill. The only cars allowed down the hill are those of residents, whether permanent or tourists staying in accomodation in the village.

It has a tradition of smuggling in the past. In the 17th to 19th centuries this place was full of short bow-legged swarthy men in black and white striped t-shirts with barrels of illicit port and rum over one shoulder and a parrot on the other. They probably had a pipe in the corner of their mouths and only one eye. Or was that Popeye I'm thinking of...?

Fran and Gill have a look at the smallest shop in England. Didn't take long... The place is full of inns, fascinating nooks and crannies, inns, tea shops, inns, boats bobbing in the harbour, inns...

It's a wonder the inhabitants were ever able to go down to the sea to do a bit of smuggling - they must have been permanently three sheets to the wind... Well I suppose they had to do something with all that smuggled brandy...

Oh, and scrumpy of course! From Wikipedia: "Scrumpy" is a term often used for ciders made in South West England. Scrumpy can be dry or sweet, however tends to be stronger in alcohol and more tannic than most commercial ciders.

The modern equivalent of a barrel isn't anything to write home about, however the nautical nature of the village is well captured here! Buy a gallon of Dead Dick's Scrumpy! Drink a gallon and join Dead Dick...

The Old Forge no longer fires up the bellows, but instead forms the entrance to the Model Village. This isn't your ordinary collection of model houses which starts as the gentleman of the house's way of justifying his outdoor model train set, but a faithful recreation of the entire village of Polperro in miniature. Worth seeing, if only for the model of the model village... seriously...

There are two harbours at Polperro - an inner and an outer, which leads to the sea. We see the outer harbour above with boats to take tourists for a half hour cruise along the rocky coast. (Don't get on the wrong one, you'll find yourself expected to help carry brandy barrels up a winding cliff pathway...)

The inner harbour has a fish landing stage and a house which has a lifeboat hanging from davits over the harbour! Not that the house has ever had to be abandoned that way as far as I know... But if it did ever sink in a storm, the inhabitants could rest easy in the knowledge that they'd be able to get out safely!

The Pottery Shop has a novel sign above the doorway! Polperro also throngs with artists during the summer. You will find plenty of them slapping Dulux onto canvas boards. Whilst I only started my own sketching efforts the year after this trip, I have returned to do a few pencil sketches which you can find in articles from the Sketching and Artwork Index on the blog.

Did I mention there were inns? Here's one that advertised a Childrens' Room on the first floor. I nipped up to look at the sad sight of all those 5 and 6 year olds, sleeping off the effects of a half pint tankard of Dead Dick's Scrumpy...

There was a shout... Fran and Gill had climbed onto a horse-drawn bus which would take them back up the hill to the car park. I had to trot along behind them wearing my legs out (no wonder they are short!) and taking pictures to prove their laziness...

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Cornish Mysteries

Back again to 9 August 1989. In the last entry we had been to Zennor and met up with the mermaid, but this was to be a day filled with mysterious things. I drove further along towards Lands End until I reached Morvah and then turned inland - as far as you can drive inland from this point. By now I was at the narrowest part of the Cornish peninsula, between Morvah and Penzance. I stopped at a lay-by for an artist's studio and started to walk north east along a dirt path. I walked for about a quarter of an hour, passing an old stone stile and starting to wonder a few times whether I was heading the right way!

But I was! Men-an-Tol is what I had come to see. A holed stone centred between two standing stones. The associated legend says that children with diseases such as rickets were passed through the hole in the hope of a cure. Whilst this sounds like so much superstition; the base granite of Cornwall emits a high background level of radiation. Geiger counters have proved that there is a hot spot in the centre of the hole and so passing through it would give the equivalent of a mild radiotherapy. Those Bronze Age folks knew a thing or two! Apparently there is a local legend that says that if a woman passes through the holed stone seven times backwards at full moon, she will soon become pregnant. Of course this is more likely if she backs through naked and a naked man is standing behind her as she comes through the hole... Having waited for a while to see if any naked women would turn up, I gave up and walked back to the car, my next destination being no more than 5 minutes away down the same road.

This is Lanyon Quoit, once the chamber of a tomb but denuded of its earth mound. It collapsed in a storm in 1826, one of the supporting stones being shattered. Consequently the capstone is now much lower than it was. Originally a man on horseback could pass under it.

I had lunch in the King William IV inn at Madron. An ancient inn, this was an excellent choice, the one or two locals wanted to know what I was doing so far away from the tourist spots and I really felt welcomed. From there I reached the south coast and turned west to find my next mysterious place of the day.

Near to Lamorna is the Merry Maidens stone circle. No huge chunks of stone here, the stones of the Merry Maidens are small affairs indeed when compared to Stonehenge or Avebury. But the place is well worth a visit and this day perhaps more than usually. I met up with father and daughter Eddie and Esther. Eddie was an academic who had worked on the Dragon Project, mapping ley lines and so on during the 1970s. He was talking to visitors and showing them how dowsing rods worked. They worked really well for me and using them I was able to tell where ley lines entered and left the stone circle and could find the seven circles of Power from the circle of stones to the centre of the circle. Ok... easy to be sceptical of this and I did find that small movements of the hands would make the rods swivel - but I even tried, without success, to make them swivel the wrong way on crossing a line. So I'm convinced but you make your own mind up. Fairly close by to the circle are two standing stones called The Pipers who were supposed to be playing for the ring of dancing girls who were turned to stone for dancing on a Sabbath. They would have had to be playing bloody loud to be heard from where they are...

Eddie had given me a rough-drawn map of the area showing the circle, the standing stones, a tumulus and this ancient cross which I found roughly halfway from the circle to the standing stones, at the edge of a field against the hedgerow. It's name is Nûn Carey.

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The Mysteries of Zennor

Wednesday 9 August 1989. Zennor is a small village down towards the southern tip of Cornwall and it was my starting place on this particular day during which I meant to search out some of Cornwall's more legendary and mysterious places.

The water wheel, standing incongruously on its own by the side of the road is the first thing you notice in Zennor. It has water pumped up to the feed trough so it can pour over the wheel from above and turn the wheel by the weight of the water. For centuries mills ground flour by this method. Where there was no handy stream or river mills were powered by wind.

During the Industrial Revolution this method provided the power for the huge factories - and so they became known as "mills". The wheel stands outside the Wayside Museum.

By the side of the road is a slab of stone with a hole or depression in its centre. It was the village plague stone. During times of outbreak, any money coming into or out of the village was dipped in vinegar in the hole to discinfect coins to try to stop the spread of the disease.

We're not just talking about the Black Death and bubonic plagues of the distant past - the sign tells of cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1849.

The church is lovely. It is dedicated to St Senara, a rather mysterious character who was supposed to have been a mermaid before her conversion to Christianity, North Sea Gas and legs...

There is a well known legend here of a chorister called Matthew Trewella, 600 years ago, whose voice was so pure that he sang the closing hymn to services as a solo. A mermaid heard his singing and came to the church (presumably somewhat in the manner of a sea lion but without the ball balanced on her nose) to entice him back into the sea as her husband. "Crikey! You'll do for me!" he said with relish, looking at her vital statistics of 36, 24, 50p per pound... He vanished with her beneath the waves and it is said that on a still night after seventeen pints you can still hear him drowning singing from beneath the waves. Not bad for a chap over 600 years old!

The mermaid is remembered in this bench end carving from 600 years ago. She holds a mirror and comb in her hands but her features have been lost, it is said, to the hammers of the Puritans. A good start to the day! More to come...

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Shark! Shark! Shark in the Trash!

Sunday 6 August 1989 - to quote The Beatles, "it was 20 years ago today"...

We were in Cornwall camping at Porth, just to the north of Newquay and today we spent a day in Newquay having walked from our campsite in Porth over the cliffs. This is Miss Franny, me, with Mum and Dad, walking along the cliffs between Newquay and Porth.

Lusty Glaze Beach. The cliff scenery in Cornwall is stunning. I never get tired of it. In fact every time I've gone I've taken the same photos from the same spots... I could probably tell you the rate of erosion by studying them carefully. But I won't... Instead we'll just admire the view and then in a while I'll come across a different year's holiday photos and scan those in as well. So you can see the difference on a sunny day or an overcast day. A Thursday or a Sunday...

Newquay has a series of beaches divided by jutting cliffs that make a procession of small bays that provide fairly safe bathing so long as you don't get whacked against the sharp rocky bits that the cliffs are made of and you don't get eaten. Oops... moving too far ahead... We'll come to the shark later. At the time many seaside resorts had street plans with bulbs that lit when you pressed an appropriate button to find a particular attraction. They dated from the 1960s so were starting to fade or malfunction and within a few years would mostly disappear, but they were great fun. Especially if another family were trying to find somewhere and you pressed other buttons so that several lights came on...

Look at this! One pound and ninety nine pence for a pair of sunglasses - outrageous! They must think we are made of money! These pages were written twenty years after the event but I'm editing them again now in 2023 - 34 years on - and sunglasses are now so expensive that people black out their car windows instead...

This is Towan Beach with its small island. Islands are just littered all over the place around here. You keep an eye open for four kids with a big dog but the Famous Five must be out on the moors somewhere in a horse-drawn gypsy caravan, whilst Uncle Quentin is making a home-made atomic bomb in his study, Aunt Fanny is watching the cook(!) make scones and Julian, Dick and Anne's parents will have gleefully abandoned their kids to go off on a cruise on their own again...

In the midst of all these sandy bays is a harbour, set in the corner where a headland juts out further than most of the cliffs. Around the corner is the best beach for surfers - Fistral Beach. We shall see more of that towards the end of the week. The 1989 week that is - the rate I'm going we might not get to it for months... As much as I like cliffs I like harbours as well.

Boats puttering about, fishermen mending nets and laughing at holidaymakers trying to fish off the jetty on the harbour side where the water is hardly conducive to the well-being of fish. Kids with staring eyes, too busy watching elsewhere to check their ice cream for seagull poo before having another suck... "Dad it tastes funny..." "There's nothing wrong with it, let me taste it..."

Mothers, pulling kids away from the edge of the drop off the harbour wall and tying headscarves around their hair, wrinkling their noses against the fish smell that goes with a harbour. Older kids with a bucket full of crabs, picking them out and thrusting them at each other to see who gets scared first.

We spent most of the day on the beach and even I had to stop taking photos after a while... I have no records of what I was reading in those days. I kept a diary for a while around 1980-82 but it started getting very hit and miss in '83 and by 84 had stopped altogether. Only when I started creating web pages on the Internet in 1994 did records of my life start to contain words again instead of just pictures.

What? You want to hear about the shark? Are you sure? There's a gory end... but only for the shark. We made our way back to Porth as the sun was starting to set. It's a few years since we went back to Cornwall but I always still remember the sheer volume of the crickets chirruping along the hedgerows of the walk back from Newquay down onto Porth Beach and then round to the cafe. There was a bit of a pong outside the cafe, rivalling that of Newquay harbour.

One of the dustbins had a 4-foot dogfish draped over it. The small shark had been washed up by the tide and collected off the beach. Jaws it was not - but I've never seen a larger one outside of an aquarium and whilst you would have to wait patiently for a while for it to take your leg off, a toe might have made a tasty snack for it!

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