Monday, September 10, 2018
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?