Friday 15 May 2026

Day 22 of walking
Pendeen to Sennon Cove
Distance: 14.66
Total distance: 448.82
Climbing: 513m
Total climb: 14,456m

What a difference a day makes. A shorter day, only 15km, sunny, no rain, a cool wind but not nearly as strong, an easy path and a most interesting day. Breakfast this morning was an all antipodean affair –  us two kiwis, an aussie couple and an aussie guy walking on his own. We met up with the aussies yesterday and they stay and eat at the same places we do. They finish in Penzance so we will see them for a few days yet.

The first part of the day was all about Cornwall’s coastal mining heritage. From the hotel we walked through the remains of the Geevor Tin Mine. The mine closed in 1990 and is now a museum and café and has tours that go underground. The museum has a lot of the mining machinery preserved and explains the processes in extracting tin, copper, zinc and arsenic, and shows the life of the miners. They say “hard rocks breed hard men” but the miners who worked underground had a life expectancy of only 40 years. We were too early and didn’t want to wait for the museum to open so missed out on an underground tour which I think would have been so cool. The mine shafts are narrow, only wide enough for one person, twist and turn, and are unlined – just the bare rock. Very claustrophobic. The Geevor mine buildings are not very attractive being post-industrial and largely 20^th century.

A short distance further on are the remains of machine rooms, chimneys and pump houses of the Levant and Crown Mines. These are much older stone-built romantic structures. At the Levant Mine the cliff top engine house and steam-powered beam engine have been restored to their former glory. It operated from 1840 to 1940 lifting copper and tin ore to the surface and is now occasionally steamed up for the public. The Levant Mine was the scene of a tragic accident in 1919 when the lift collapsed killing 31 miners. The Crown Mine is the most romantic with two machine houses perched right on a cliff edge very close to the sea. More engine houses and chimneys dot the cliff tops for about four kilometres.

As you leave the heritage mining area the headland Cape Cornwall appears. It was once thought to be the most westerly point in mainland England but that distinction belongs to Land’s End. It is often referred to as the “connoisseur’s Land’s End. More on the character of Land’s End tomorrow. The Cape is cone shaped and at the highest point is a chimney left over from a mine. Shafts extended from here right out under the sea. A cape is defined as a headland where two oceans or channels meet: in this case the English Channel and St George’s Channel.

As you leave the cape, high on a cliff, is the Ballowall Barrow, a bronze age burial site. It is difficult to visualise the funerary monument because you are forbidden from climbing the stone walls and walking on it. The centre of the barrow was a mound surrounded by two concentric drystone walls. Within these were five small stone-lined chambers known as cysts, some with Bronze Age pottery. Two more pits forming a T shape may have been graves. We saw dozens of these burial sites in Ireland, just left undisturbed in the farm fields.

The last stretch to Sennen Cove was along the coast with curious large round stones, a scramble through rocky outcrops on headlands and finally some beach walking along Gwnver Beach. We arrived still feeling fresh and strong, unlike yesterday. Sennen Cove is a small beach-side community where fishing and tourism are the only source of employment. The winter weather is too wild for the boats to go out so from November onwards the quay is piled high with lobster pots and the fishermen spend their time maintaining their boats. Sennen Cove used to be the most important seine fishery (fishing just using one surrounding net) in Cornwall. In the 1900s as many as 12,000 fish could be caught in one catch.

We are staying in The Old Success Hotel. Originally a pair of granite cottages it became an ale house in 1671. The name was chosen to commemorate successful fishing catches, legal or otherwise. We ate in their restaurant tonight and for those still interested Barbara had Madras style curry: aromatic curry sauce, tomatoes, braised saffron basmati and wild rice, minted coconut yoghurt, roasted aubergine, courgette and chickpeas. I had Italian char-grilled chicken: grilled chicken breast, basil pesto, buffalo mozzarella, sun dried tomatoes, olive tapenade, herb salad (a token gesture!) and skin-on fries. As we arrived at the hotel this afternoon for the first time we saw the luggage transfer van that magically collects our luggage in the morning and has it waiting for us at our destination. For the second time our room had a Nespresso coffee capsule machine, and the room had a fridge with two complementary cans of beer.