Porth Beach and Trevelgue Island

Tuesday 18 August 1992. We stayed away from the cars for the day and although the weather was not overly warm, we spent time on the beach at Porth and exploring the island. There was a little bit of sunshine!

Porth is a small village just to the north of Newquay and has a large camping site behind the bay. It was a regular stopping place for us around this time. There was a cafe just out of the campsite entrance and on occasion we would buy food locally and cook it ourselves over a camping stove.

To the southern side of the bay the ground rose quickly to cliffs with a paved walk leading to Newquay itself. There was another small cafe here and Miss Franny is more or less outside it - we must have been for a morning brew!

The eastern side of the bay was a long headland, the end of which was an iron-age promontory fort. When the tide came in it rushed through a gap between the end of the fort and the cliffs and thus the fort became an island. It is known either as Trevelgue or Porth Island, both names being happily recognised and accepted by the locals. There are some pretty large ramparts protecting either side of the gap, which is bridges with a wooden bridge allowing access to the fort. There isn't much to see apart from the ramparts these days but there were roundhouses and a couple of barrows there.

We spent the morning playing on the beach, cricket, catch, wondering where Mum had got to...

My photos make a rapid jump to the evening. I suspect that not a lot happened in the afternoon to take photos of. We may have stayed on the beach. We may have gone back to the tents to sit and read. We may have gone for a walk somewhere... The last sentence brought to you from my soon to be published book: How to make a boring afternoon sound full of excitement. I'm not expecting great sales to be honest...

Finally for this article and for your great relief, I stand between the ramparts on the far side of the wooden bridge to the island. It goes dark a bit.

Index to come

Perranporth, Cornwall

Sunday 13 September 2015. We enjoyed a great breakfast at the Blue Haven B&B and then looked at the weather which was not very promising. It was supposed to be a very rainy day. Indeed Cornwall as a whole had a yellow warning for floods and bad weather.

We decided to walk over to nearby Porth and onto Trevelgue Island. Usually this was a first night in Cornwall must for us. But after walking up the hill from Newquay we weren't keen to do the considerable climb down the cliffs and up onto the island and then back again.

It was very windy and there was a bit of drizzle in the air so I left the camera behind. The two photos here of Porth are from 2001, when my digital camera was a very early one and not up to delivering photos of anything more than 640x480 pixels. Even so, these weren't of great quality and at the time I shrank them to 320x240 in order to get a reasonable image quality. Bear in mind that 640x480 a year or two earlier had been pretty much the maximum screen resolution on computers.

We used to stay at the camp site at Porth and it is still there, but the large cafe is now a Tapas Bar and - yikes - the public toilets near the island have disappeared!

The island provides the location for much of chapter two in my book, King And King To Be. It was an Iron Age promontory fort and three massive earthwork walls still present a formidable barrier on either side of the bridge from the mainland to the island.

It is only a true island at high tide, but the cliffs are treacherous and not easily climbed. The island was not quite the same shape as the last time I saw it either... The sea has carved a few chunks out of the cliffs since 2001 and at one point the path has had to be re-routed to save people from walking over the edge! Having crossed the bridge and soaked up a bit of the atmosphere of those wonderful earthworks we returned, walking over the beach and up the cliffs on the other side back to the B&B where we retrieved the camera and set off for Perranporth.

At Perranporth it had brightened up considerably, but a stiff breeze kept the temperature down. Even I was wearing a rain jacket over the top of my fleece and I still wasn't over warm! We parked in the car park on the very edge of the beach and went for a morning coffee. Then a walk up the shopping street and then whilst Miss Franny had a more leisurely stroll involving actual entry to some of the shops, I opted to go and see if I could sketch the dramatic rocks against the southern side of the beach.

This shot was taken in 1970 on our first visit to Cornwall. That's my Mum and Dad on the beach looking at the towering rocks with the arches cut through by the sea. I wasn't sure whether after so long they would still exist or whether the sea would have caused the arches to fall. But they were still there. Some of the holes in the rock face are adits - entrances to tin mines.

A short distance away at Penhale Sands in the 19th century the ancient and long-lost oratory of one of Cornwall's patron saints, St Piran was found buried under the sands. "One of" because both St Michael and St Petroc have claims at the patron saint franchise, though it is Piran's flag - a white cross on a black background - that is today's Flag of Cornwall. He lived during the 4th and 5th centuries and amongst the legends attributed to him are that the Irish tied him to a mill stone and rolled him over a cliff into a stormy sea that immediately became calm and bore him to Cornwall. Also that his first disciples were a fox, a badger and a bear. All in all, he was lucky they didn't decide he was a witch...

I sat on a bench on the opposite side of the beach and produced this over the duration of about an hour. I was just finishing when Fran came back, having enjoyed her shopping much better without a bored husband tagging along. We walked round to the short Promenade at the rear of the beach and sat on a bench, watching the antics of dogs and children and feeling thankful that we weren't the couple on the next bench who were being regaled with the most boring and banal conversation of two men with pronounced Birmingham accents. There was no getting rid of them and eventually the couple grabbed their things and said polite things like "Well we really must be going...". Rather than risk being their replacements, we quickly got up ourselves and headed for the nearest available cup of tea!

This was found in the Dolphin Cafe - the blue part of the cream coloured building towards the left of this photo. We shared a Cornish Cream Tea between us and ordered a separate cup of coffee for Fran. Cornish Cream Teas - two scones, strawberry jam and a huge blob of clotted cream. Yummy stuff! Certainly too much to have one each these days!

We stopped on the way back to Newquay at the Braefel Inn, a pub on the edge of the Perran Quay camping site. It was fairly quiet, but for a family enjoying a game of pool and we were drawn into their conversation and it was a fun hour before we went into the restaurant for our evening meal.

In the end, the weather was nowhere near as bad as the weather forecasters had been saying. We saw rain, some of it very heavy, but managed to be in the car for most of it. Tomorrow is supposed to be bad again though. We need to find somewhere that has some indoor shelter available!

Cornwall Holiday Index

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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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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Cornwall, Here We ... Came!

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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Trevelgue Island Defences

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.

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