Stuck in Cornwall on a bad weather day? You could do far worse than visit the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, located in Falmouth Docks. This is the spot where Sean Morley started and finished his epic paddle around the British Isles. What is amazing, is how many kayaks are on display in the museum. Just [...]
Archive for the ‘South Cornwall’ Category
Mad Dogs, and Englishmen
Epiphany
e·piph·a·ny [i-pif-uh-nee] –noun a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
What happened next?
Poet Laureate Leave a comment
As a boy, John Betjeman holidayed with his family each year beside the River Camel estuary. Here Petroc landed, here I stand today The same Atlantic surges roll for me North Coast Recollections, John Betjeman
Service Not Self 2 comments
The small memorial garden shown above is located outside the now disused Penlee lifeboat station, on the outskirts of Mousehole in south Cornwall. 19th December 1981 saw the final launch down the lifeboat station’s ramp. The Penlee lifeboat Solomon Browne and her volunteer crew of eight Mousehole men headed out into 100mph winds and 16m breaking seas to rescue [...]
Indian Summer Leave a comment
The above scene more or less sums up our frustration a fortnight ago, when we had splendid sunny weather down in Cornwall, but couldn’t paddle due to relentless howling winds, day after day after day. The irony is that high pressure and settled weather is now well and truly entrenched, classic Indian summer conditions. However [...]
Serpentine 3 comments
Serpentine is a stone found on Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula in reddish or greenish varieties. The stone looks quite mundane, until you wet its surface. Only then, do you see the colourful veins in the stone which – resembling snake’s skin – give the stone its name. During the nineteenth century, this wonderful stone was popularly utilised for fireplaces [...]
Lost Quays 5 comments
The Garlandstone is currently berthed at Morwellham Quay on the River Tamar estuary. She was built in 1909 a little further downstream on the now silted-up quays of Calstock, to ship ore down to the open sea and abroad. Cornwall’s mines have long since closed, and only pleasure craft venture upstream now. The contrast between the [...]
Due South 3 comments
Heather and I are currently semi-permanent residents of a disused serpentine factory on the coast of the Lizard, Britain’s most southerly peninsula. Our prolonged stay is closely connected to the dire weather, but there are certainly worse places to be holed up in a tent. Long live the National Trust, and their lenient attitude to [...]
…increasing 6 to gale 8 1 comment
Unfortunately another round of atrocious weather has arrived to mess up our plans. Oh well, Fowey isn’t a bad place to be stuck, even if your tent is being blown apart. ‘Fowey’ is pronounced ‘Foy’, to confuse foreigners. It’s a narrow inlet to a steep-sided drowned river valley that is simply beautiful (we know, [...]
Platform 9 and Three-Quarters Leave a comment
The Roseland Peninsula is in Cornwall, east of Falmouth and west of Fowey. Nobody at all comes here, because nobody knows about it, it isn’t close to or on the way to anywhere, and in any case, there isn’t any particular way to get here. It is the last place in England where small boys [...]
Asleep at the Wheel Leave a comment
The RMS Mulheim currently resides between Sennen Cove and Land’s End, being progressively disintegrated by successive Atlantic gales. It ran aground beneath the granite cliffs on 22nd March 2003, rudely curtailing its voyage to carry waste to a toxic landfill site in Germany. The Mulheim was sailing under a ‘flag of convenience’ and the competency of [...]
