Boscastle

Friday 9 August 1996. We left Tintagel and a few miles away we came to Boscastle where we had tea.

We looked in vain for the real cottage that is the inspiration for one of Fran's models. As we were in the last shop before going back to the car I found a postcard of the cottage and we were able to ask the shop owner where it was.

Boscastle is another of those never-changing fishing villages of Cornwall. The cliffs make a natural harbour, protected from the sea by a long inlet and harbour wall.

The village winds its way down alongside the River Jordan - what? Well not the one in the Holy Land perhaps but another smaller River Jordan that flows into the River Valency, seen here. There is a Museum of Witchcraft here, apart from the gift shops, perhaps the only nod to tourism. It very bizarrely contained the skeleton of a local "witch", Joan Wytte, who died in Bodmin Jail after being jailed in 1813 for brawling. She had been known for a local healer and clairvoyant and before her death aged 38 had become quite bad tempered violent, possibly due to a tooth abscess. Her body was somehow not buried and instead her skeleton became used for pranking the locals and for use in seances and eventually spent 40 years hanging on the wall of the museum. She was eventually decently buried two years after our visit, in 1998, after poltergeist activity in the museum.

We wandered down to the harbour and its boats with the neat coils tangles of rope. They young-uns must ha' been at they scrumpy agin'...

There was an aged bridge crossing the River Valency and I sat on the river bank to do this sketch. Eight years later it was totally destroyed by the great flood of 2004 and is now an elegant, though much less pleasing steel footbridge.

There was the gentle creaking and clank of a water wheel, almost hidden in shadow. The shop on the left promises books, music, crystals, candles, arcane artifacts & pictures. I do like a good arcane artifact!

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Merry Maidens

Wednesday 7 August 1996. After dinner in a small village pub (both the village and the pub were small) we went to find the Merry Maidens stone circle near Lamorna.

Legend says the stones are the remains of dancers who broke the rule banning dancing on the Sabbath day. Since they pre-date Christianity it was probably a tale made up by early Christians to stop locals using a place of spiritual meaning to them. In a nearby field are a couple of taller standing stones called The Pipers. If they were playing their music for the maidens then the poor girls must have had very good hearing...

With all this exploring of hill tops, Mum was making sure that any low-flying helicopter pilots saw us...

I had no dowsing rods but tried to find any ley lines with a couple of blades of grass. They swivelled as they should, but Dad was a bit sceptical! "That's wind!" he scoffed. I reminded him that he used to say the same thing when I smiled...

We're quite a way away from Newquay, so it's goodbye to the ancient stones of the far south west of Cornwall and back to the car to head back to meet the others before it's time for our main meal of the day. We have just one further stop to make...

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Wendron Forge and Mine, and Porthleven

Tuesday 6 August 1996. All those adventures in Mevagissy and it was still only just after lunch! We drove to Wendron Forge, which has a tin mine open to the public.

The mine is called Poldark Mine after the books and TV series. The mine is probably the most interesting part of the visit. You can go down and explore but are not allowed to start knocking chunks from the walls...

Hard hats were a must as the roof is only 3 feet high in places - usually those places where you find yourself going down very steep steps. We all had cause to be thankful for the hats! There is only one way round so you can go at your own rate and there is a choice of routes for different abilities. We went round the hardest, having to bend lower, climb steeper, get wetter, and bang your head more than the other routes.

We had tea in a village called Porthleven where the cafe owner gave as good banter as she got from us and the only other customer in the place lingered over his meal as he was enjoying all the comments from our table!

Porthleven is the most southerly port in England, Great Britain and the UK, helped by the fact that England is the most southerly of the latter two... As such it was a place of haven in the days of sailing ships and bad storms. It was historically lumped in with Helston, the place with the Furry Dance, but became a town in its own right as it grew.

Although he was born in India, Porthleven was the home town of the World War II Dambusters Squadron Leader, Guy Gibson.

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Newquay Harbour Wildlife

Sunday 4 August 1996. It's lunchtime and it's taken all morning to get from Porth to the centre of Newquay.

We've managed to leave the shops and we've reached the beach at Towan Beach, noteable for the island which has an art galllery on it. I've only just climbed down the cliff, I'm not climbing back up it!

But the family are quite happy to sit on the beach or go splash in the sea. I go for a look at the harbour which is just the other side of the road down which we've just walked.

There are no large ships here, just fishing boats and small rowing boats used to get to the larger boats that are moored too far from a wall to jump or climb onto. There's not much in the way of pleasure trips in evidence here, you can hire a boat to go fishing, but the harbour does have some boats that go out with tourists. They must have all been out, or perhaps the owners had realised it was lunchtime and had stopped operations. There are even trips to go looking for marine life. Newquay is visited by the odd dolphin or even huge basking sharks or sunfish at times.

You may even find the odd bit of wildlife following the fishing boats back into the harbour, hoping for a few escapees! A seal was swimming about in the hope of one of the returning fishing boats dropping something overboard! One or two people were paddling or swimming (in the oily waters of the harbour when there are beautiful beaches literally 50 yards away!) and there were several screams as the seal surfaced near to them.

A sign was warning that seals are wild animals and shouldn't be approached, though why anyone would want to paddle or swim in the oily waters of a fishing harbour is beyond me anyway. The harbour has much significance for Newquay - in fact the town was called Towan Blystra until the new quay was built in the 15th century. It's a little uncertain that the name changed as early as that. Newquay doesn't appear in written records as a place name until the 17th century.

A fishing boat returns and the chap aboard proceeds to chop up mackarel onboard with a machete. He tossed the fish tails into the water, but the seal was obviously of the more discerning type!

The afternoon wore on, tea time approached but inexplicably the rest of the family decided to head back to the B+B, away from all the cafes and restaurants, meaning we had to take to the cars and drive round looking for somewhere to eat. No pubs seemed to open for food until later and it was with relief that we found a pub around 7:00pm and some 30 miles away that wasn't fully booked already.

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In Search of Merlin

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...

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First and Last

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...

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Down The Mousehole

Wednesday 7 August 1996. After the stones we stopped in Mousehole, which the locals pronounce "Mowzil".

A bit like Polperro this is a small fishing village. It's one of those places where you can sit and relax and just drink in the unhurried atmosphere. The harbour is extremely pretty but nowhere near as busy as Polperro. There's a small beach that faces the harbour with sand at one end with pebbles making up the rest.

Chains snake down from their anchoring point on the wall behind the beach to individual boats that either bob on the water or, at low tide, tilt attractively on the harbour bed.

Unlike Polperro or Mevagissy, the streets here are fairly quiet. Not that this picturesque quiet place has always led a sheltered life.

A placque on a wall reminds us that the Spanish landed here and ransacked the place, killing inhabitants left and right. This was, admittedly, a few hundred years earlier than 1996 so we felt safe enough... You can't help but think that the Spanish were somewhat lacking in boldness, choosing to invade at such a quiet spot where they were unlikely to (a) face much opposition, or (b) find much in the way of plunder...

We had a look round the tiny village then made our way back to the harbour.

I sat on a bench next to a sleeping black cat and did a sketch of the some of the buildings facing the harbour. On the next bench a man was painting designs on round stones in water colours, presumably to sell as paper weights. I got sunburnt a bit on the back of my neck!

A very agreeable place!

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A Deathly Game of Quoits

Wednesday 7 August 1996. Dad and Fran left me at Chun Castle and I walked a couple of hundred yards to Chun Quoit, pronounced "choon", a megalithic burial chamber. This was older than the nearby hill fort by two or three thousand years.

It was originally built to house the bones of one or more of our earliest farmers who had learned how to grow their own crops and maybe raise domesticated cattle rather than be perpetually on the move as hunter gatherers.

It's one of around eight such surviving quoits (also known as dolmens or cromlechs). The name quoit came about due to early local superstition that the capstones (often the only feature showing above ground) may have been thrown there by giants, playing a game of quoits. They may either originally or at some point in their past have been covered by a mound of earth, a kerbstone suggests at least some form of surrounding structure.

I walked all the way around it a couple of times, enjoying the atmsphere that comes with places that you know were once of some great importance to those who built them, but that some of the purpose may have been forgotten or even misinterpreted by modern scholars. It could easily have been a place where on propitious days / nights / seasonal changes, the holy men of the community may have come here to talk to the spirits of their loved ones or guardians, perhaps inhaling smoke to put them in a trance, perhaps sitting in a circle with their equivalent of a bag of chips, singing Gin Gan Goolie, Goolie, Goolie, Goolie... It must have come from somewhere...

I set the camera on the ground and used the self-timer to take my own photo for posterity.

Turning away from the quoit for a moment this was the magnificent view from the site. Then I braved the gorse spines again (Gin Gan - OUCH! Stop yer warblin', mind yer...) and returned to the car and we drove about half a mile to another quoit, Lanyon Quoit.

Easily found in a field just at the side of the road this quoit was originally tall enough for a man on horseback to ride underneath the capstone without bending his head. My sense of humour would like to say that this is because the horse's head would have crashed into it first, but in truth it was indeed possible to ride beneath the capstone! A violent thunderstorm in 1826 caused the quoit's collapse and it was re-erected, but with the supporting stones sunk deep into the earth. The people of 1826 were taking no chances... "I'm not lifting yon bloody stone again and that's for sure!"

The cromlechs or quoits of Cornwall are as mysterious and atmospheric as you can make them. Lanyon is a bit too close to the roadway to have an atmosphere. At Chun Quoit you can be quite alone with this mysterious chamber of the dead. Would you dare go at night to see if any spirits remain?

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Chun Castle

Wednesday 7 August 1996. The Cornwall holiday continues... We split up for the day, Mum and Dad coming with Fran and myself round some stone circles and hill forts whilst the rest went to a theme park. We drove round the coast past Zennor where a legend says, a mermaid was so enchanted by the sound of a chorister's voice from the church that she enticed him into the sea and he lived with her wrinkly ever after from then on.

This is Chun Castle, (it's pronounced "Choon"), an Iron Age hillfort. At one point you could walk from the east of Britain to the Netherlands, or Germany but Britain was cut off from the rest of Europe when the last ice age melted and formed the North Sea. Whilst the first cities were being built in the middle east the British were still living in stick and mud huts in fortified circles on the tops of hills. The fort dates from around 300-200 BCE and has two rings of walls and a ditch surrounding it.

The gorse was in abundance - the farmer on whose land we parked told me the weather "...has been very good for the shrubs this year. You'll have to mind it!" The gorse looks lovely from a distance. Close up it has small two inch branches covered in spine like leaves which just then were pricking through trousers and skirts and up to shirts and tops as the bushes were anything up to 3 feet tall! Mum gave up in the face of the gorse (well it came farther up on her than anyone else as she's a bit smaller than the rest of us!) and she went back to sit in the car whilst we explored. The photo shows a clearing in the centre of the fort with the remains of what I first took to be someone's hearth, but which has been described as an iron or tin smelting furnace. Slag heaps of both metals were found within the fort.

Chun Castle boasts the foundations of much of its surrounding defensive wall, now reduced to what looks like a pile of rubble in the shape of a huge ring. It's still around five feet in height although originally it would have been around four times that size. It has a couple of gateposts still standing. The hillfort is in a superb position on the Lands End peninsula and you can see both the south and west coasts from its wall which afforded its residents some amount of warning should an enemy appear.

In a clearing in the gorse which now covers most of the interior, the castle's well, choked with fallen stone can be seen. A set of stone stairs led down to the water which still finds its way into the well even now. It was still used by locals upto c1940. Some sources suggest that locals thought it would give them perpetual youth. If so there must have been some sort of mass exodus from the area as there are definately not two and a half to three thousand years worth of youths living nearby... Also clearly visible from the fort are the remains of a couple of the distinctive engine houses of Cornish tin mines.

A couple of gate posts or markers stood along the path into the fort. A further post from the outer wall stands behind my viewpoint.

It can be seen in this view, just behind the only other person we saw that morning at Chun. At some point the layout of the entrance was changed to create a dog's leg turn between the two gates in the outer and inner walls, and the fort has been described as being far more advanced in its military design than other forts of the same period.

The gatepost from the outer wall. Fran and Dad decided to go back and keep Mum company as we had been mooching around for quite a while and she may have been wondering if we'd fallen down the well and just run off like the children we may have become... Meanwhile I have one more thing to see which will take me back in time a further two to three thousand years from the hillfort. But that, as a quizmaster would say just before a TV break, is why you will come back tomorrow - won't you?

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