Porthcurno to Penzance, 21 km, 642 metres of climbing

‘I took a walk in the forest and came out bigger than the trees’. Thomas Henry Thoreau

 Last night we stayed in Porthcurno which is a tiny village covering a small valley and a beach. It is unusually well known for its size because of its history as a major international underwater communications cable station. In 1870 the first cable was laid linking Porthcurno to India (then a British colony). Between the two world wars there were fourteen separate cables coming ashore at Porthcurno and it was the largest underwater cable station in the world. The old cable station is now an excellent museum but unfortunately we didn’t get to visit it. We arrived here at 5.00pm last night and left at 9.00 am this morning and the museum hours are 10.00 am to 5.00 pm. It was a toss up between the Minack Theatre and the Cable Museum and the theatre won. The oldest and largest building in Porthcuno is The Barracks, accommodation for the Cable & Wireless Engineering College. A little university by the sea.

The first section today was quiet, remote and a very scenic section of cliffs and headlands, punctuated by some picturesque coves and a lighthouse. Penberth was entirely free of tourists (because they don’t allow dogs?) and passing through it seemed almost an intrusion on the people who make their living from the sea there. Lamorna Cove had a café so we could stop for some lunch of toasted sandwiches and apple juice.

Since we turned the corner at Land’s End and are now heading east the landscape has changed and this part of the coastline is described as sub-tropical. The undergrowth is denser, in some places growing overhead to make a shady, cool tunnel. The wild flowers are back and in two places we walked through woodland of stunted oak and near the end of the day a pine forest. For most of the day progress was still slow over a stony, often muddy path. At one point we had to dance our way over large boulders on the beach.

At the end of the day we passed through two contrasting fishing villages. The first was Mousehole – pronounced ‘mowzell’. This is a former pilchard-fishing village and is like a film-set. A romantic notion of what a Cornish village should look like and one of the most appealing we will see on the Coast Path. The tide was out and so it looked even better with all the boats lying stranded on the sand. We approached Mousehole from over a hill and then wound our way down to it through narrow streets, so it was all quite dramatic.

Between Mousehole and Penzance is the working fishing port of Newlyn. It steadfastly refuses to be turned into a nostalgic trip for the benefit of tourists. It has all the good, bad and ugly of a port just wanting to get on with business. For someone like me who likes to lean on the rail and watch boats, Newlyn is full of interest. At this point I would like to apologise for all the photos of boats.

We had our first instance today of getting a bit lost. This morning we were happily walking along when we realised the usual narrow path had become a wide gravelled farm road and we hadn’t seen any acorn signs for a while. It didn’t feel right. We decided to back track to find the last sign. After about half a km we met an elderly Dutch couple we were on nodding terms with, and they convinced us we had been on the right track and so we turned around and the four of us proceeded again. After about a km it was pretty obvious the farm road was going inland away from the coast. We all stopped and were consulting books, notes and maps, when a young Dutch couple came along behind us.  They had a map and confirmed this wasn’t the coast path, but it didn’t matter, this often happened to them. They never back tracked just kept going ahead until they found another road that went back to the coast. So the six of us joined up and soon enough we found a road to a camping ground that had access to the coast path. We probably did an extra three km which doesn’t matter for the young ones, but for us oldies every km tells at the end of the day.

Tonight we are in the attic of a three story Victorian villa and the owners seem to have a thing for red. We have two red leather chairs, red striped carpet, red striped wall paper on one wall and screaming red paint on the other. We have to spend two nights here!!

We didn’t enjoy today as much as previous days. It was hot and humid and we were often walking in narrow hedgerows with two metre high vegetation pressing in on us. The last five kms we walked on a sealed cycleway/footpath close beside the sea. A nice change.