Mawgan Porth to Newquay, 8 miles, Monday, June 2, 2025
Note to my readers: I’ve gotten some comments on the color variation between images. These pages contain images from four generations of iPhone sensors and lenses and my little Leica crop-sensor camera; some are jpegs and some are RAW images; and they’re processed in both Apple photos and Adobe Lightroom. By the time WordPress imports them into the blog, it’s anybody’s guess as to how they’ll look!
Now on to the walking. Breakfast at Driftwood Spars deserves a comment, if only for their wonderful bacon! Our van driver from the first day, Paulo, picked us up at 9:00 AM and dropped us back in Mowgan Porth, and we launched up the very sharp climb back onto the cliffs, passing by the mouth of the bay that leads to the beach.
We were soon able to see most of today’s walk. That’s Newquay on the far right; Finstral Beach, our actual destination, is hidden behind a headland.
This stretch of cliff, called Bre Pen, is owned by the National Trust.
The view back beyond Mawgan Porth gives a sense of how many headlands we had crossed.
We were soon looking across Beacon Cove at the next headland, Griffin Point.
The path leads far back inland, rounding Beacon Cove, before walking along the cliffs to Griffin Point itself. The locals had thoughtfully provided some sheep for local color.
We then walked up, sometimes steeply, to climb the cliffs above Watergate Bay.
Watergate Bay itself is stunning. We were watching it at high tide, which hid most of the beach.
Looking down at the start of the bay from Stem Point, the surf was fierce.
The fun couldn’t last forever, though. As we walked along, we saw the first signs of the rather dense resort development near Newquay.
Hidden from view in a deep cleft in the picture above is the settlement of Watergate Bay, with several hotels, beach bars, and restaurants. The great beaches on Cornwall’s north coast come at a cost: fewer quaint fishing villages, more development.
The path rises above the bay, gradually, to the top of the cliffs again, with fine views back along Watergate Bay.
Looking south from the clifftop, we got a very good sense of what was to come. Newquay and its suburbs occupy a stunning site, with cliffs and headlands like those we had been walking on. But the sprawl came as a shock.
Which brings us to our title: Cornwall Old and New.
The cliffs began to peter out, and we were soon on a sidewalk snaking down a hill amid resort hotels to the beach at the suburb of Porth. Nice beach…teeming with people. We did note one curiosity, however.
This was either the shortest man in Cornwall or…?
The path remained tarmac as we ascended into some residential areas. There was one last beach spread out below us with the peculiar name of Lusty Glaze.
The remainder of the walk was forgettable: right down Newquay’s High Street with chain shops mixed with tourist shops. It did allow us to purchase tooth paste, though!
Our hotel lay in an area far to the west of the center. Fistral Beach is reputed to be the best surfing beach in the UK, with fifteen foot waves in the winter. The geography is interesting; Fistral Beach sits between two pincers of a peninsula. Fistral Beach runs up the “vertical” pincer toward a narrow headland. The “horizontal’ pincer is bounded on the south by the Gannel River (which we will have to ferry across in two days time). And our hotel, the Fistral Beach, occupies a position right at the end of the beach, with marvelous views of the waves and surfers.
The hotel itself is modern and rather characterless (at least compared to The Pig, which had oozed character), but extremely comfortable.
Our room is nice, but its main pleasure is the view out the window onto the beach.
We walked on a sand path above Fistral Beach toward our dinner reservation at a restaurant called RenMor, which sits inside an enormous red brick grand hotel at the end of the headland.
This is the view back down the beach toward our hotel.
The restaurant is modern and very pleasant. And the food is innovative; there is clearly an actual chef at work. I had a bracing wild garlic soup with a crispy cod cheek on the side to start; Rory had a beautiful spring vegetable salad.
Pravan had a remarkable gurnard (a meaty fish not unlike moonfish) bouillabaise, while several people had sea bass bourgignone; the one disappointment was a lack of cheese in the kitchen: they had a port and stilton “affogato” on the menu, with stilton ice cream and a shot of ruby port! But our treacle tarte made up for it!
This was the best meal on the walk so far, and we waddled home above the beach well contented.