Cornish Baywatch, Padstow to Newquay

On the South West Coast path in Cornwall....

Padstow is teeming. It is a pretty place and there's no reason why it shouldn't attract visitors, but the car park is about as big as the harbour, and there is some evidence (restaurants, delis, etc) that someone called Rick Stein may be at least in part responsible for the boom.....

And me I like it quiet, for the most part, so I head of along the coast.  From Padstow to Newquay, or to put it another way, from the Camel to the Gannel (as the rivers these two towns are on are called) is about twenty-five miles along the coast path, with a mere 4,238 feet to climb involved.....  

This is but a fraction of the whole South West Coast path which runs from Minehead to Poole (or from Poole to Minehead if you prefer), a designated National Trail of 630 miles of stunning coastal scenery.  One day, maybe, I'll do the whole thing, but for now I have to content myself with manageable bits, and in the past, have indeed coped wth bits in Devon and Dorset, but I have not spent so long in Cornwall before.  

And it is worth the wait. A very smart pied wagtail eyes me up as I cross yet another stream....  which means descending from vertiginous heights of beetling cliffs to stony rills and then up again to the edges of rock faces where gulls perch and sheep nibble, with the customary disdain expressed for those without heads for heights or hoofs for cliffs.....

Like this.....

Or this.....

I would swim - at least it would be on the level - but there are bits which seem less inviting than others, and the recent deaths of three adults in rip currents off Mawgan Porth beach is a reminder that the sea can be extremely dangerous.

But then there are the tranquil coves.....  though sometimes Lisa, Steve, Bob or Ellen may have beaten you to it, and scored their monicas on your idea of haven.

I would say there's not mush room (sic) for the peaceful minded, but that would be unfair.  The air is distinctly fresh and should you need a parasol, there's often one to hand.....

And there's no bunting, like a snow bunting, when you hope for a little cheer....

Don't look back, someone once said (Lot?  D.A. Pennebaker?) as it just seems like more of the same, but whichever way you gaze here it's a glimpse into the ongoing erosion of time..... the elements bashing away at each other, shaping our world in a patient licking away at the rocks of ages....

And then, every so often, from the precipitous path, there are enticing views of untouched bays, with the tide out, and, if time were not the master, we would slip down and dally......

Then, of a sudden, someone tells me they saw a peregrine on the cliff, and just in time I snap, blurry and fleeting, but enough to praise the majesty and power of this supreme bird.....

Superfluous fact, but I read in J A Baker's The Peregrine, that if a peregrine were scaled up to be human sized, each of its eyes would weigh three pounds.....  (so how does that affect our interpretation of the expression hawk-eye?)

We move on, to pass by my daughter's residence.  A highly prized bijou installation that, under different circumstances might have won the Turner Prize and earned her a place in the Tate. 

But no time to stand and stare. Instead we stop by her place of work, The Scarlet, where Both the interior and exterior design ... embraces the building’s stunning cliff top location and reflects its natural environment through the sensuous use of materials and design. The hotel offers you all kinds of relaxing diversions including outdoor cliff top hot tubs, a natural reed-filtered swimming pool and an Ayurvedic-inspired spa – all with far-reaching views over the beach and sea beyond.....

From the terrace by day....

And from the terrace in the evening.....

A little to the south west and we rest on the sands at Watergate:

Which bear evidence of life forms strange to us land lubbers:

Then we climb again again to follow the coast path, once the trail used by coastguards in their attempts to foil the efforts of wreckers and smugglers who made this part of the world notorious.  Here the air is full of tweeting and twittering, and flocks of passing passerines fleck the sky:

While a meadow pipit watches me from a fence post:

And stone chats, male and female, busy themselves among the grasses and the gorse, flitting down to pick up insects in the scrub, before perching again on some viewpoint, flicking tails and chatting in their flinty ways.

Looking back from here, the bay seems small now, and the busy people just tiny dots in the surf.  The cliffs here are Carboniferous rocks, known as Devonian, sometimes locally called killas, and they are 360-400 million years old. These are hard rocks, resistant to erosion, creating dramatic sea cliffs and frequently flat cliff tops. 

Our waters may look inviting, but even in the height of summer they are not warm.  When I swam here last August, I was about the only person without a wet suit.... Now, out of season, you probably won't find anyone mad enough to be without one.....

And from the undulations of the coastal path, I am more than content to spend my time on land, dividing my attention between the birds that comb the cliff tops and the scenes at the edge of the sea below.  Baywatching!

Next stop Newquay!

Cornish Nasties

The Wind Cries Mary

A broom is drearily sweeping

up the broken pieces of yesterday's life.

Somewhere a Queen is weeping,

somewhere a King has no wife.

And the wind it cries Mary.

There be some odd goings on down there.  Her is far away, and when you get there, if you get there, given the bottle necks on the A30, there's no going back, nor's there any where else to go.  The cul-de-sac that is Cornwall (Kernow) is a strange and different world.  Deceptively delightful, with sun, and sand, and sea, and close-huddled villages, deep green vales and high, light hills, but at the same time contorted and steep, unapproachable and unforgiving.

In The Ballad of Charlotte Dymond[1], Charles Causley, a Launceston man, commemorated the lives and deaths of an eighteen year old girl and her twenty-two year old admirer, Matthew Weeks, who was hanged on August 12th, 1844, in Bodmin Jail:

They took him off to Bodmin,

They pulled the prison bell,

They sent him smartly up to heaven

And dropped him down to hell.

In April of that year Matthew, who was not blessed with good looks, took Charlotte, who also worked on Lower Penhale Farm, near Bodmin, for a walk up the slopes of Rough Tor, on the way to Camelford:

Out beyond the marshes

Where the cattle stand,

With her crippled lover

Limping at her hand.

Upset by her flirtatious chatter about other young men he slashed her throat, twice, with his knife:

Charlotte she was gentle

But they found her in the flood

Her Sunday beads among the reeds

Beaming with her blood.

Jealousy, and murder are not the preserves of Cornwall alone, but the story fits the landscape well, and Causley's words pick out the tale with a rusty needle's thread:

All through the granite kingdom

And on its travelling airs

Ask which of these two lovers

The most deserves your prayers.

And your steel heart search, Stranger,

That you may pause and pray

For lovers who come not to bed

Upon their wedding day,

But lie upon the moorland

Where stands the sacred snow

Above the breathing river,

And the salt sea-winds go.

The straightforward geophysical words and their emotive qualifiers take us well away, as D H Lawrence said when settling near Padstow, outside the England of London.  With about half a million people in some 1.3 thousand square miles (a population density of about 373 per square mile - compared with the London Metropolitan Region at 3,900 per square mile, or 11,760 per square mile in Greater London).  

The traffic lights they turn blue tomorrow

And shine their emptiness down on my bed,

The tiny island sags downstream

'Cos the life that they lived is dead.

And the wind screams Mary.

With the sea on three sides (and 422 miles of coastline) and rugged hills and the Tamar valley slicing it from Devon, Cornwall makes a contained Kingdom.  Small wonder that Arthur made his fortress here (at Tintagel) and that Excalibur was returned to the Lady of the Lake at Dozmary Pool, one of the sources of the river Fowey.

Portrait of a Landlord - there'll always be a welcome.....

A story that is roughly contemporary with that of Charlotte Dymond's, is that of Mary Yellan, the niece by marriage of Joss Merlyn, the landlord of one of the most spectacularly uninviting inns on these islands. 

A stunningly life-like recreation of what might have been witnessed by a traveller in 1820

Daphne du Maurier, daughter of fashionable actor manager Gerald (for whom the cigarettes were named), was a well-connected and imaginative woman who found fame through her stories, and Alfred Hitchcock (among others)'s films.  

She wrote Jamaica Inn in 1935, following a riding excursion which brought her to the hopelessly ill-managed Inn[2] high on Bodmin Moor (exactly as it is today.....)  

Her story is a well-crafted page-turner, containing traces of the Brontes and R L Stevenson, but spiced with sex and violence in good measure for the day.  Films don't do it justice, 

as so often with creative prose, as the linear drive of the cinema rarely allows either for three-dimensional thought or for characters who doubt or falter.

Mary shook her head.  'I've only seen the evil,' she said.

In a way Mary Yellan is a modern heroine (or should that be hero?), though she is surrounded by melodramatic villains (he was a great husk of a man, nearly seven feet high, with a creased brow.....) and wreathed in weak dialogue (He's a bully and a brute, and many worse things besides.  He's turned my aunt from a laughing, happy woman into a miserable drudge, and I'll never forgive him for that as long as I live.....)  

Mary and Uncle Joss blissfully unaware that Francis Davey is at the window....

There is a certain fascination in the grotesque violence described (She cried out to me to help her, Mary, and I smashed her face in with a stone) but the real strength is that Jamaica Inn is as terrible a place now as it was then, 

Museum of Smuggling and du Maurier

so the fascinated visitor can really be horrified by the ghosts of smugglers and murderers, while waiting to be served in fusty and lifeless surroundings, unnerved by bizarrely unconvincing waxworks and barely living bearers of tattoos no self-respecting pirate would be seen dead wearing.....

I digress.  My umbilical ring just rang.

The carriage had been abandoned in a narrow gully-way with high banks on either side, and the horse had been taken from the traces.....

From the toy village of Altarnun, and the current vicar (if she exists) to Jamaica Inn, where bags of ganja

Smugglers' Joy

could be piled with the frozen pasties in the back room for all the current staff would seem to care, is but a traffic jam these days, but no one rises to Brown Willy (at 420 metres the highest point in Cornwall) and the moors are silent.  The throngs fight their way to the rocky bays where Joss drowned other people's sorrows.  

They fell one by one into the white tongues of the sea, little black dots without life or substance....

Now, despite rusting notices warning of evil currents, the carefree and the careless chance with watery devils, trusting in suntanned immortality and the superiority of homo erectus (deficiens).  Wreckers stand by the nibbling tidal edge, where Joss gagged his niece, and the rocks aggravate the waves just as they did two hundred years ago.  

They waited, all of them, standing upon the shingle with the waves breaking beyond their feet, spread out in a thin line they were, like crows, their black forms outlined against the white beach....

It's a grand, stark landscape, and even now the crowds make little impression.  Horse thieves and disillusioned prelates probably still roam the uplands, while sharks thrash the shallows.....

Nat Hocken, because of a war-time disability, had a pension and did not work full-time at the farm..... at midday, he would pause and eat the pasty that his wife had baked for him, and sitting on the cliff's edge would watch the birds.....  Alfred Hitchcock took The Birds and relocated it in California, but Daphne du Maurier's imagination grew in the Cornwall, where great flocks of [birds] came to the peninsula, restless, uneasy, spending themselves in motion.....

And just outside the tiny village of Dando Monachorum, George Magruder, an American academic, struggled, in the 1969 novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon Williams, with his definitive study of Branksheer (the late eighteenth century diarist.....)  A couple of years later, under the title Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah ventured into the darkness of a small rural community.  As Harry Ware, landlord of the Dando Inn, muses on his regular clients, if you came from anywhere else in England, these thick-necked, round-faced West Countrymen were regarded almost as clowns.....  Yet beneath this stolid, almost bovine exterior, he knew there were dark twists in their minds....

After all the jacks are in their boxes,

and the clowns have all gone to bed,

you can hear happiness staggering on down the street,

footprints dress in red.

And the wind whispers Mary.

Sam Peckinpah, like Alfred Hitchcock before him, used the text only as a starting point, and with subtle invention (sic) allowed for Susan George to steal the show, but that notwithstanding this book, like Jamaica Inn, and The Ballad of Charlotte Dymond, describes a world where the unlikely becomes possible.  It is remarkable, also, how Jamaica Inn, The Birds and The Siege of Trencher's Farm portray a menacing claustrophobia, with doors and windows battened down, breaking glass and a mounting sense of fear of intrusion. .....he cursed aloud, and, reaching forward, smashed the pane of glass with his fist, careless of the splitting sound of the glass and the blood that spouted immediately from his hand.... (JI). The tapping began at the windows, at the door. The rustling, the jostling, the pushing for positions on the sills. The first thud of the suicide gulls upon the step.... (TB) The breaking glass they'd heard was the man clearing the jagged pieces from the framework.... (TSoTF). 

There was an old magic in these moors that made them inaccessible, spacing them to eternity.....

Cornwall is different.  You leave the cosy behind when you cross the Tamar.  Bodmin Moor erases the comfort zone.  And this is, perversely perhaps, a major attraction.

Will the wind ever remember

The names it has blown in the past,

And with this crutch, its old age and its wisdom

It whispers, "No, this will be the last."

And The Wind Cries Mary.

Jimi Hendrix, 1967

Patience:  Knock, knock!

Joss:  Who's there?

Patience:  My niece is coming to stay with us at the Inn!

Joss:  Jamaica?

Patience:  No, dear.  It was my sister's dying wish......

Boom!  Boom!

---

[1] August 12th

12/8/1844

Matthew Weekes – Bodmin 

Charlotte Dymond was the belle of Bodmin. Buxom and pretty, the 18-year-old milkmaid at Lower Penhale Farm flirted outrageously with all the young men of the village, and they all fell in love with her. One of them, Matthew Weekes, 22, who was a labourer on the same farm, had dreamed of marrying her for six years, but his chances were next to nothing. He had few teeth, a pronounced limp, and his face was hideously pockmarked.

Charlotte’s playful antics with the other village men incensed Weekes. On Sunday, April 14th, 1844, he plucked up courage to ask her to go for a walk with him, and somewhat to his surprise she accepted. They took the path to Lanlavery Rock, on the far slopes of Rough Tor, and then along the road to Camelford. As they walked, Charlotte talked coquettishly about all the young men she liked, and the wretched Weekes felt the fires of jealousy searing his flesh.

They came to a gate leading into a field. Weekes later described what happened next.

“I told her I had seen her in a situation with some young men that was disgraceful to her. She then said, ‘I shall do as I like. I shall have nothing more to do with you.’

“I took out my knife and then replaced it. But on her repeating the phrase, I made a cut at her throat from behind. She immediately fell backwards, the blood gushing out in a large stream, and exclaimed while falling, ‘Lord have mercy on me!’

“While she was on the ground I made a second but much larger cut, although she was almost dead at that time. After standing over her body for about four or five minutes, I lifted up one of her arms and it fell to the ground as if she were dead. I pushed her body a little further down a bank. I took her bonnet, shawl and shoes and covered them up in a turf pit. I put her gloves and bag in my pocket and threw away the knife.”

Charlotte’s body was found two weeks later. Weekes was tried for her murder and hanged on Monday, August 12th, 1844, outside Bodmin Prison.

Later, the villagers paid for a monument to be erected on the spot where Charlotte died. Legend has it that she haunts the murder scene, and that her ghost is often seen, too, at Lower Penhale Farm.

[2] The Inn is now under the new ownership of Allen Jackson, who is already making improvements to Jamaica Inn including providing Sky Sports in a side bar and from Easter Wi-Fi and Sky television including sports and movie channels in all rooms.