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Fish. Beautiful, white, fresh glistening slabs of the stuff protruded
from the ice in Newlyn fish market and the sight of it alone was enough
to warm the cockles of a modern food lover's heart. TV celebrity chefs
go on about the stuff, but never yet has a London studio seen fish
flesh as fresh and wonderful as this.
Newlyn
ranks very high indeed in the roll call of Westcountry's best places.
It's not the prettiest port on the peninsula, and certainly isn't the
quaintest. It's not the cleanest, nor the tidiest. Plenty are far more
historic while others have all sorts of claims to fame. Some have
wonderful parks and esplanades while Newlyn doesn't even have much of a
beach.
But what it does have is more character in its clutter of
streets than a calendar-full of other homely havens. Why? Because it
must be one of the only seaside communities in the South West not to
have sold out to the tourist industry.
Newlyn is also rich in
pleasing architecture, as a walk of five minutes around town will
prove. Particularly enchanting are the myriad cobbled streets in an
area just inland from the harbour.
Chapel Street, Orchard Place
and Foundry Lane, to name but a few - each is a delight to the eye;
lined by tiny terraced stone houses, many adorned by tubs and flower
boxes that clutter the sides of the narrow cobbled alleys.
It
makes you wonder what the town would have looked like had the planners
won the day in the 1930s when there was a scheme to flatten and
modernise this charming area. Thankfully the people of Newlyn were
having none of it, and a campaign to save the old town came to a head
when a crew of fishermen sailed all the way to Westminster Pier in the
trawler Rosebud, to lobby Parliament.
The publicity helped save
one of the most traditional street areas left in Cornwall, and Rosebud
is remembered by a memorial garden named after her.
Step out of
the alleys towards the harbour and you are immediately confronted by
buildings of an uglier nature. But so what? The fish market is not in
the business of looking pretty.
You are now in a world of fish.
You can smell it, you can hear the seagulls smelling it and you can
hear the auctioneers selling it, if you get there early enough. You can
see fish being hauled ashore, and you can see it packed and entombed in
the chipped ice of a thousand plastic boxes.
Penzance, next
door, is altogether different. You get the feeling that the town is
unsure of its relationship with its huge blue neighbour, the ocean. One
or two bits of seaside Penzance seem to shrug an unfriendly shoulder at
the sea.
The visitor is confronted with this aspect as soon as
he or she arrives. Get off the train and you'd expect to find the place
demonstrably in love with its finest feature, the harbour. But no, the
local powers have bowed to the ever-invasive car and filled in a third
of the main basin as a car park. Nearby they've allowed a large, ugly
shopping emporium to turn its backside on the wonderful old port.
However,
it is a port, and a wonderful one at that. Watch the Scillonian return
from her daily crossing to the islands she's named after, and somehow
she brings a whiff of that great ocean with her. Other ports have
ferries, but Penzance is the only one with a daily service that
disappears out of site into the Atlantic horizon.
Basically the
port can be divided into three sections. There's a large outer basin
which, for the most part, dries out at low tide, and here there are
some 250 moorings. Then there's an inner harbour - a floating dock with
a sill and a gate which allows a three-hour window of access and egress
at the top of each tide - where visiting yachts, Penzance attracts over
2,000 a year, and ships usually tie up.
The port's third area is
the inner harbour and dry dock, built in 1880 behind Wharf Road.
Getting a ship in and out not only requires a tight squeeze but the
opening of the Ross Swing Bridge, which causes all sorts of traffic
problems on the rare occasions when it occurs.
Now we begin our
journey east around Mounts Bay - past St Michael's Mount, which is so
well known and has had so much written about it before that we won't
spend too much time on it here.
Suffice it to say that members
of the St Aubyn family still occupy the castle on St Michael's Mount,
although the place is now in the hands of the National Trust.
James St Aubyn takes an integral role in all on-going work to maintain the island for future generations of visitors to enjoy.
He works hand in hand with the trust to preserve the history, architecture and natural beauty of the islet.
Past
Marazion, which I always think of as a one-street kind of town, we
enter a little visited stretch of the shore. Pretty little Perranuthnoe
is the principal place along this lowly littoral - as untypical a
shoreline as you'll find among the shores of Cornwall.
Indeed,
it looks more like Devon than anything else west of the Tamar - and I
find that my favourite Cornish walks writer, J R A Hockin, thought the
same: "Perranuthnoe, clumped on the hillside at the end of this stretch
of Cudden Point, has a thoroughly Devonian flavour with its cob and
whitewash and its solid little cottages and farms."
I think the
link is to do with the geology of the place - no mighty granite
bastions here, but a low-slung mud and wattle cliff that is constantly
being eroded by the pounding sea.
Past popular Praa Sands we
come to slightly less popular Porthleven. This is the place where
photographers turn up in a storm because the Westerlies hit the sea
wall by the Bickford-Smith Institute and there are loads of shots of
its gaunt clock tower surrounded by wild seas.
Nearby,
Porthleven Harbour is protected from the mayhem by the Baulk - massive
beams of timber are lowered across the narrow mouth of the inner
harbour to take the punch out of the waves that come hurtling past the
pier, past the Institute and into the outer basin.
The pieces of timber employed to create the Baulk are between 28 and 32 feet long and two feet thick.
Each one weighs two tons, but I have talked to local men who have seen the beams plucked from their settings like bits of cork.
"It
takes a special sort of wave from a particular direction," I was once
told by a man called John Russell. "And it has to be big..."
The
waves are often big along this stretch of coast because it is now
heading south, which means it's the first thing the ocean hits in
thousands of miles.
This wildness was very much in evidence
exactly 200 years ago, when the frigate Anson came to grief just off
Loe Bar, a couple of miles south of Porthleven.
A local man,
Henry Trengrouse, saw 100 people die trying to escape the shipwreck,
and devoted the rest of his life to inventing and developing a rocket
system that could propel a rope and, eventually, a breeches buoy to a
stricken ship.
No one knows exactly what caused Loe Bar to occur
across the mouth of Loe Pool - Cornwall's largest stretch of fresh
water - but it occur it did, with the added riddle that 86 per cent of
the fine shingle is flint. The nearest known source of this stuff is in
East Devon, some 120 miles away.
You have to take your hat off
to the old pilchard fishermen who set up in business in Gunwalloe, just
down the coast, around about the same time the Anson went down.
Launching boats on this exposed coast must have taken nerve and skill.
The fishery was known, for some reason, as the Alert Seine.
A
stone store was built up on the cliffs just north of the actual cove,
and its ruinous form still haunts the coast to this day. Nearby four
rusting winches remind the passer-by of the years when they hauled
their boats in from the clifftop.
Travelling south we come to St
Winwaloe's, which is probably closer to the sea than any other church
in the Westcountry. When the tide is up and there's a blow from the
west, spray must beat against its ancient door, which is just a few
feet above and beyond the sandy acres of Church Cove.
Past
Poldhu Cove we come to Mullion, where little seems to have changed in
centuries. This, however, is more illusion than truth. The little
fishing harbour is not some ancient haven stretching back to
swashbuckling days of smuggling and piracy, but a relatively modern
contrivance not much more than a century old. It was built between 1893
and 1895 in the height of the Cornish pilchard "rush".
Today,
there are people who wonder if it was a good idea - the accountants at
the National Trust, to name but a few. "Nearly £1 million (of trust
funds, grants and insurance monies) has been spent over the past ten
years in repeatedly repairing and strengthening the harbour walls,"
states the organisation's leaflet on the area. "A cost which some might
argue is increasingly difficult to justify."
The clifftop region
between Mullion and the tip of the Lizard is one of the most
wind-beaten and bleak stretches of countryside to be found anywhere in
the region, but has a unique charm for all that, especially at the
Second World War Predannack airfield where you can see the "graveyard
for helicopters".
Kynance Cove somehow belies all this
bleakness. It is one of the real jewels in the Cornish crown, being one
of the loveliest beaches to be found anywhere.
Now we come to
Lizard, Britain's Most Southerly Point - as a sign calls it. Here you
will see the old lifeboat house casting its launch jetty into the blue
waters of Polpeor Cove where seals bob about looking at the visitors.
Lifeboats
went on missions of mercy from this hazardous place for more than 100
years, and countless lives were saved. In 1961 the RNLI sensibly
relocated the local boat in the lee of Bass Point around the corner.
For
some reason I find the Lizard every bit as enigmatic as Land's End.
Nowhere else seems to protrude quite so valiantly into the ocean. I
like the wind-battered look of Lizard Town and even the collection of
untidy shacks that sell the knick-knacks made of the local rock,
serpentine, to the tourists who come all the way to this most southerly
place.
Next week we head east in earnest, sampling the delights
of Falmouth Bay to reach the next great headland - the grim but
beautiful Dodman.
article copyright WESTERN MORNING NEWS
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