St. Agnes to Portreath, 10.6 miles, Thursday, June 5, 2025
After an excellent breakfast at the Driftwood Spars, we posed for our usual launch photo.
We then set out up a narrow lane toward the clifftops. This is the view looking out over Trevaunance Cove.
We were soon off the lane and ascending steeply to the clifftop.
Once up on the cliffs, the first head in view is Newdown, a National Trust property.
We were walking toward the long piece of coastline littered with abandoned tin and copper mines. These are mine shafts with protective covers.
We were now walking toward the much more formidable St. Agnes Head.
This is the coastline looking back past Trevaunance Cove. As you can see, we started under gray skies, with the occasional squall.
And now we’re looking southwest from St. Agnes Head itself.
As we rounded the rather tiny Tubby’s Head, the first full mining site, Wheal Coates, came into view.
These ghostly sites are deeply impressive.Wheal Coates was primarily a tin mine; it opened in 1802 and was closed in 1889 when the price of tin fell. The shafts ran deep under sea, making mining difficult until the introduction of steam equipment. If you’d like to know more about Cornish mining, there is a fuller account in a blog post from 2018.
Soon after leaving the mine site, we encountered our first challenge of the day: a long, steep, rocky scramble down into a cove known as Chapel Porth. There was no clear path down, and the crew chose several different routes.
At the beach, I took a photo of a potential lifeguard. One of the actual lifeguards from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution suggested Sue might need just a bit more training before joining. The Institution is, as a lifeboat service, more than 200 years old; they absorbed the national lifeguard service about forty years ago.
The path out of the cove is much more civilized than the descent: you walk fairly freely up the cove before turning back for a gradual ascent to the clifftops. Here is Gary nearing the top with Wheal Coates in the background.
Once we’d hauled ourselves up the cliff, we had a short walk to our first port of call, Porthtowan.
The path is extraordinarily inventive in finding ways to irritate the walker, and the descent into Porthtowan complied: the path was essentially a deep trench with vegetation on both sides. And in these parts, vegetation includes nettles and gorse.
Our reward waited down below: the Unicorn on the Beach was an excellent beach cafe.
I can recommend their grilled cheese; and you can ask Rory about the Cornish tacos. Like so many that we had seen, this was a broad, deep, lovely beach.
The mines were now coming thick and fast. We stopped briefly to explore yet another complex at Wheal Tye. Here are a few of the monuments.
Our cliffwalking was soon constrained by a large wife fence to our left, the boundary of a large military installation.
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This mysterious orb on the military reservation is visible for miles up and down the coast. No one we asked knew its purpose.
The fence didn’t detract too much from the marvelous coastal views.
And even the countryside abutting the reservation had some lovely moments.
Our rapid pace on the clifftop was rudely interrupted however, by this cove at Gullyn Rock. It had steps on both sides…and boy, do we hate steps!
As we approached Portreath, our goal for the day, we thought there was clear sailing ahead. Then the ground dropped away abruptly. When I saw this I muttered “Christ!” Rory’s expletive was much more colorful and inappropriate for a family blog.
The descent into Portreath involved a bit of road walking; we were soon along the harbor…which smelled absolutely pestilent.
We had been unable to find lodging in Portreath, so we were heading back to St. Agnes for a second night at the Driftwood Spars. We had been told that there was a bus. And so there was: it ran every two hours and took almost two hours to cover the eight miles we had just walked.
So we called a cab. While we were waiting, a few of the team went into a nearby cafe. And Rory had a cup of “loaded” hot chocolate with a year’s supply of cream and marshmallows.
Our cabbie was an exceptionally nice young woman who had grown up nearby.
When we returned to the Spars, we were joined in the bar by our good friends from Princeton Sandy T. and Hal F. Their group of five had been walking fir two days and then, after our rest day, one day behind us; I had profited in planning our trip from the itinerary they had gotten from a trip planner. It was wonderful to see them and exchange some tales from the path. And as an added bonus, I met their friend Thatcher, after whom one of their sons is named.
Dinner was at a really lovely joint in St. Agnes, The Petersville Inn. The food was terrific; many of us rated it among the best of the trip. And it had a lot of old-time character.
