We flew into Heathrow, took the Express to Paddington, and got right onto the Great Western train bound for Cornwall. It was an easy trip.
We spent our first night at Carbis Bay, the next town north of St. Ives. We stayed at Lamorna Lodge, really more like a small hotel than a B&B, with lots of guests. Perfectly comfortable. Once we were settled in we decided to walk to St. Ives, see the place, and have dinner. It was a longish walk even though there really wasn’t an open area between the two towns. We rounded a bend in the road, though, and St. Ives was spread out below us.
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Once in St. Ives, we wandered the streets and ended up at one of the restaurants we’d read about, the Porthminster Kitchen. We had to wait for a table, but it was well worth it. A casual place with terrific food, the restaurant sits up on the second floor with a wonderful view of the beach and the little harbor.
After dinner we wandered back to the inn and slept the sleep of the jet lagged.
We had glorious weather for the first day of the walk: sunny and warm with clear skies. The day started ominously, though: when we told the cabbie who brought us to the head of the path where we were headed (Pendeen) he said “Oh no! you can’t do that…you’ll be lucky to make it to Zennor!” He was right, in a sense. The segment of the path that we were on is often said to be the hardest of the entire 630 miles of the Southwest Coast Path.
The path brings you through absolutely spectacular coastal scenery, with bold headlands and rocky coves–each more beautiful than the last.
The hard part is that there are no flat stretches: the path is a constant rising and falling over very rocky ground, which means that many of the descents are more difficult than the ascents (at least for these knees).
What a delight to walk along with the sea always on your right!
It took us about four hours to cover the 7 1/2 miles to Zennor village. We could have walked to Pendeen as we had originally planned, but I was very low on energy, and we decided that this was enough for our first, jet-lagged day. It goes without saying that Sue could have finished the walk and then some, but I would have enjoyed the second part much less.
The people on the path are very friendly–especially for Brits!–and we had several interesting talks, and especially one with the owner of a Border Collie. Everyone we met on the path was English, and several people remarked how unusual it was to see Americans on the path (though perhaps what they meant was there were few really old yanks).
Zennor has a pub that is famous up and down the coast, The Tinner’s Arms.
We sat outside with families and dogs and enjoyed a glass of wine and a couple of half pints of the beer and ale made on premises–excellent!
We then had our introduction to public transportation in Cornwall. Walking the coastal path is completely different from walking in Scotland. On the West Highland Way, once you were on the path, there was seldom a way to bail out. In Cornwall, though, the path is seldom very far from a road. A bus stopped on the main road two minutes from the pub, and we were soon embarked on a wild ride on the preposterously narrow Cornish roads. The bus brought us to Pendeen and our The Old Manse, our B&B for the night. The house was somewhat spare, but nice enough. We walked down the main road to dinner at the North Inn, the village local. The pub grub was good enough, but the conversation was great. We were invited to join a table with two locals and two artists down from London. Talk ranged from Brexit to our embarrassment of a president, from art to walking, but soon turned to their ideas about the character of Cornwall.
The day started with a typically quirky breakfast conversation with another guest at the B&B: a lorrie driver, motorcycle messenger, expatriate, and jack of all trades. The conversation was interesting until it turned somehow to race, and then…
The first part of the day’s walk is a dream, as you pass across a series of cliff faces littered with the ghostly remains of Cornish tin and copper mining.
The industrial architecture is familiar to anyone who knows the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher: winding towers…
Smokestacks….
Ventilations structures for the shafts far underground…
This was the largest intact complex that we passed.
This is the view from the mines back to Pendeen Light.
The walking here is easy along level ground on broad paths. The abandoned mines–Levant, Crown, Botallack–dominate the entire district, destroying homes with sink holes in the garden and peppering the trails with warnings of mine shafts. Some of the shafts went out more than a mile into the ocean at a depth of 350 meters below the sea bed.
This section of the walk ended at the site of an Iron Age fort, Kenidjack Cliff Castle, with a view onto Cape Cornwall, the point at which the Atlantic meets the English Channel. This is the view from the fort to the Cape.
From the fort the path plunges down steeply into a valley that was protected from the brutal winds of winter and surprisingly verdant. By the time we climbed up to the Cape itself, I was feeling pretty low. I still didn’t know what was going on, but I had zero energy. I sat down below while Sue did a reconnaissance up to the top (what looks like a monument in the image below is actually the chimney of an abandoned tin smelter).
The walk on past the Cape was spectacular: right above the sea, with a number of scrambles over rocky outcrops.
As we scrambled over the last outcrop the view suddenly opened onto two long crescents of beach full of swimmers and surfers.
The day ended at the seaside village of Sennen Cove, a popular surfing site. I was struggling as I trudged along the beach and the little harbor and, as I reached the inn, I was sweating from every pore of my body. It was clear by now that I had some kind of nasty virus…bad timing!
Our lodging, The Old Success Inn, was lovely, our rooms rather “swish.”
Dinner wasn’t memorable: two nights of pub food in a row are beyond our capacities. And perhaps someone can explain to me, though, why provincial England is a wine wasteland; I can always have a lager or an ale, but how many glasses of Pinto Grigio and Malbec can Sue take?
We woke to a thick mist that quickly turned to pea soup fog.
We hadn’t realized how close to Land’s End–the westernmost point in England–we actually were: less than two miles. The path from Sennen Cove is broad, with asphalt or stepping stones for a good bit of the way.
It turned out that the fog didn’t matter too much at first, in fact it wasn’t bad at all, because we soon reached Lands’ End, the site of a really miserable theme park. The fog spared us from the most garish parts of the park, and the crowds that normally swarm around here.
The fog soon began to matter, however, because the seascapes to the east of Lands End are absolutely spectacular, and they were totally shrouded in the mist.
Although it wasn’t exactly raining, it wasn’t exactly not raining either, and there was a very strong headwind coming off the water.
Much of the walking here was very close to the sea; there was a precipitous drop the water at one point that didn’t make Sue particularly happy.
After about six miles we reached a hamlet in a lovely sheltered valley above a beach with golden sands called Porthgwarra. There was a little tea room and since we were a bit tired and chilled, we stopped in for a really good cream tea. Needless to say, it wasn’t quite as sunny as it is in the photo of the cafe that I found somewhere.
Another mile brought us to the little village of Porthcurno, famous for the Minack, a theater carved out of the stone on a headland overlooking the sea. There was a performance when we arrived, and we weren’t able to see anything.
My virus had proven to be a full-blown flu-like cold, and I was just about done in. We bailed out and took a cab to the next village, Lavorno, where we rejoined the coastal path. The guidebook described this section as easy, so I thought I could make it after a good rest. But the path was a roller coaster, and I was soon out of gas–with no filling station in sight. Much of this section of the trail is sheltered, and it brought us into a remarkably different kind of vegetation. Often described as sub tropical, we walked through a lush landscape with wild fuchsias, hydrangeas, campion, and fruit trees.
I was relieved when we finally reached the extraordinarily picturesque village of Mousehole (pronounced mow-zell_– don’t ask). Our lodging, The Ship Inn, is a 300-year old pub right on the little harbor: it oozes character.
We had booked a table at 2 Fore Street, a well-regarded restaurant. It beat pub food, but wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The troll through the twilit streets, though, was unbeatable.
When I awoke on the fourth day of our adventure, I was too sick to walk at all. So we undertook further exploration of the Cornish bus system, traveling first to Marazion so that we could walk up to Saint Michael’s Mount, and then from Marazion to Porthleven. We changed buses in Penzance, a place that has none of the romance of its famous name, and got off at Marazion.
We hadn’t planned to walk the stretch from Mousehole to Marazion in any case (all on roads or paved bike paths through the fishing village of Newlyn and then the busy town of Penzance). But our day off did give us the opportunity to visit Saint Michaels Mount, a rather remarkable place.
Like its namesake, Mont Saint Michel, Saint Michael’s Mount was originally a monastery built on a tidal island. It was purchased by some minor noble family in 1659 and has remained in their hands ever since.
We took a small ferry across to the island and walked back across a causeway at low tide in the afternoon. The place is beautifully preserved.
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Once back in Marazion, we boarded a bus that took us inland and then back to the coast at the lovely village of Porthleven, set around a beautiful harbor.
Our lodgings were in the largest of the inns we had visited, The Harbour Inn; the rooms were as nice as the ones in Sennen, and the public areas were unusually spacious. Not having walked, we had time to stroll. Sue found an incredible basket shop and purchased a really unusual piece, which she then lugged all the way around the Cornish coast and over the Atlantic. I took advantage of the break and took a few pictures
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We found a cozy pub on the other side of the harbor, the Ship Inn, and had a drink…that’s the inn at the left. Back in the room, I indulged in a very long siesta.
We had a table that night for our best meal of the trip, an Asian fusion restaurant called Kota. The dining room was simple, but the food was incredible. We waddled home well content.
I was feeling much better after a day off, and the weather cooperated as we headed south. We were walking along a great bay that runs all the way from Land’s End to the Lizard–from the westernmost point in England to the southernmost.
The first half of the fourteen mile walk took us through a more pastoral landscape with long beaches and longer vistas.
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And the weather at the start was glorious.
For whatever reason–perhaps because of the spotty weather, or perhaps because I was under the weather–we hadn’t had too many conversations on the path since the first day. That changed today. As we left Porthleven, we were walking along with a woman and struck up a conversation. It turned out that she was a marathoner, probably in her late 50’s, who was taking in great gulps of the path in a short time–more than 20 miles a day. She was walking alone, since her husband was no longer up to this kind of pace!
This is the approach to Loe Bar, a long beach with a berm behind it that retains a large lake, the Loe.
And here is the Loe itself.
This was the first in a number of long beaches that we crossed in the morning.
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The skies became dramatic in the late morning.
The walk in the later morning was full of interest. We passed an ancient church, St. Winwaloe, that was something of a pilgrimage site along the path.
And soon after that a monument to Marconi…the first transatlantic signal was sent via cable from these shores. As we trundled along we struck up a conversation with an older gentleman who was out for a stroll from the cottage he had rented nearby. A South African, he had worked as a photographer, covering wars, politics, sports, you name it.
We had had a big breakfast and didn’t want a full lunch, so we stopped for a cream tea at the Mullion Cove Hotel. Despite the chill breeze off the water, we sat on the terrace and soaked up the view out over Mullion Cove…more or less our halfway point for the day.
Mullion Cove marks the boundary to the Lizard National Nature Preserve, a region of grasslands along the high cliff tops; the coast here is notoriously treacherous, with rocks, shoals and vicious currents. It was some of the most spectacular country we walked through on this trip.
This is the view back to the hotel across the mouth of the cove.
As we passed through the long stretches of grasslands, we started playing hopscotch with a group of four walkers, three men and a woman. Very nice folks, and interesting to chat with. We learned that night that they were English college chums who now lived all over the world but came together every summer to walk.
The grasslands border a rugged, rocky coast; the path sometimes runs right along the cliff edge.
Although there are unusually long stretches of flat walking along the Lizard peninsula, the coast is nonetheless broken with a series of dramatic coves that take the breath away in both senses of the word–steep, rocky descents are followed by steep, rocky ascents. Kylance, the most famous of the coves, resembles the Baths on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands, with its sandy beach broken by huge rock formations. If you look closely at the photo below, you will see the shadowy outline of France across the English Channel.
It was a long day–14 miles of up and down–and I was glad to catch sight of Lizard Village at the high point of the peninsula as we walked up the path from Kylance Cove. We had to leave the path to get to the village, and it was a bit of adventure as we tried to choose the right cow track. But we were soon checking in at the Top House Inn…only to find our friends from the day’s walk. We had a very good fish and chips at the inn’s restaurant, chatting with the college group at the next table.
This was the fourth night in a row in which we had stayed in rooms above a pub owned by the St. Austell brewery and the fourth night with really lovely accommodations. Highly recommended!
We walked down to the sea along a farm lane; as soon as we reached the coastal path, we were on a roller coaster that would carry us all the way north to Coverack.
The first four miles to the Fishing village of Cadgwith were on broader, graded paths like the one you see here. Even the coves weren’t too bad.
My walking companion in uncharacteristic repose.
Cadgwith was the first Village we saw with thatched roof cottages. This side of the lizard peninsula is more sheltered: the villages on the other side tend to have slate roofs. There was a particularly inviting cafe, where we could sit in a walled courtyard..so of course we treated ourselves to a cream tea.
As the picture below shows, the cliffs after Cadgwith became lower, but the coves more frequent, and the entire path ran over rugged, rocky ground.
This of course had no effect on wonder woman.
A few miles further along we reached the beach at Kennack Sands, where we took advantage of the warm sunshine following a squall.
After the beach, the going got even rougher. This picture gives you some idea of the ground over which we were walking.
The final headland, what you see in the distance here, is called Black Point.
This part of the walk had, in addition to the beautiful views, other compensations as well, like wild ponies…
and secluded beaches in trackless coves.
This shot, taken near the end of Black Point , looks back on the entire bay that we had walked today – – the coast northward from Lizard Point.
And so, after a rather rugged 11 miles we walked down the slope into the village of Coverack..not without a real feeling of sadness at the end of an extraordinary week of walking.
The end of the story didn’t quite measure up to the rest. Coverack is a rather nice, rather touristy town in a sheltered bay at the very top of the Lizard. I had booked us into a regular hotel rather than an inn, as a kind of reward for walking 100 miles. So of course we hadn’t walked the full 100 miles because of my illness (we had skipped 5 miles between Zennor and Pendeen and another 7 between Porthcurno and Lovarno)…and perhaps the walking gods took their revenge. The rather pricy Bay Hotel put us in a tiny attic room: we couldn’t walk around the bed, I couldn’t stand up straight in the shower, and I knocked my head hard on the sloping ceiling more times than I care to remember. We longed for the luxury of a St. Austell pub room!
But that was a minor bump in a fabulous journey. We took a taxi the next day to Helston, where we boarded the train for London. Farewell, Cornwall; we’ll be back!
