October 24 A fascinating but nail biting day!

 

A snapshot of Cornwall - we are camped a couple of Km from Lizard

I've felt quite excited to be exploring Cornwall - a place where pasties tickle the taste buds and stories of mining, pirates and smugglers stir the imagination. So many of our mining towns in Australia were populated with people from this very region. Here pasty shops abound and mines, or rather the remnants of both coal and tin mines, perch high above the Atlantic in some incredible locations on this stretch of coast known as the ‘Tin Coast’. And the region is also home to the world's largest collection of undersea tin mines, including Botallack the ruins of which were used as filming locations for the BBC series Poldark (didn’t we all read Poldark in the 70s?) and the massive tin mine at St Just which we drove through later in the  morning.  More than 20 years after the closure of the last tin mine in Cornwall, they are still devouring the area but for other precious metals - the earth has no choice but to relinquish its treasured minerals to satisfy our demands. Today they are extracting battery-grade lithium carbonate. The history is interesting and the rugged moorland raw and heartbreakingly beautiful - to my eyes.
But first to Penzance! As we drove away from Lizard, I was humming in my head “A policeman’s lots is not a happy one ….. “. Many of us, me included, grew up with Gilbert and Sullivan and the Pirates of Penzance was very popular. That is all to say I felt we simply had to visit Penzance. We didn’t encounter any pirates but saw a couple of sunken boats! We drove from there along the sea front to Newlyn - very pretty but with a very narrow road …  and then on to Mousehole (pronounced mouzel!). We continued along the cliff road until it simply got too narrow for our campervan - by this time we were, rather than becoming accustomed to, becoming a bit edgy with ‘roads’ barely inches wider than our campervan but more was to come ……  my fave MapsMe app has fallen from favour as I have  tried to use it to navigate England’s incy-wincy so called ‘roadways’. However …. 

A sunken ship!

I’m a great navigator?? but we did get back on track

We lost count of the Red Lion hotels we passed by

We drove away from this seaside tourist ‘track’ - or is that trap?! into the moorlands and found the ruins of the Carn Galver tin mine. We had this little place to ourselves so inspected every angle. 

The moors were russet with Autumn bracken - so lovely

We started seeing the ruins of mines

The tall stack of the steam-pumping engine house.
The other is the engine house which raised ore to the surface

The Count House in the distance

The Count House located near the mine is where the mine manager lived, kept the accounts and entertained shareholders to lavish dinners. It is now where the Climbers Club store their gear but before then it is reported that around the time of WWI D H Lawrence was a tenant (some interesting history there).

The crag of Carn Galver 

Keeping watch over us at a distance was the crag of Carn Galver (or Galva) which takes its name from the old Cornish carn guillea - ‘rock pile lookout’. This tumbled monolith has been watching over these lands from prehistory through the ‘Industrial Age’ of man carving up the bowels of the earth and ever since. It is a silent but rather awe-inspiring guardian and home to rare lichens, ferns and mosses and a number of endangered fauna species. Some of the stone walls enclosing fields nearby are believed to have been built in the Bronze Age. Other structures date back to the Iron Age. We didn’t climb the crag but I understand there is a ring of stones around the Carn dating back to Neolithic times so perhaps it was also a sacred site.  The entire region has neolithic remnants - wish that we had time (and a guide) to explore.  And so it goes on and on and on … 

Himalayan honeysuckle

With a little reluctance we hopped back into the van as we were heading for St Ives but stopped for a picnic in Nancherrow or perhaps it was Tregeseal. Either way it was on the road to St Ives near St Just where we pulled into a little spot off the road and discovered these pretty flowers. We got some frowns from the locals but I guess they get sick of tourists. Incidentally St Just is the western-most town in mainland England

Ahh St Ives - will live on our memory of a ‘harbour too far’!

And who doesn’t know the riddle - “On my way to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives …” yeah well we went over and over that dammed riddle until we got to St Ives further north. Pretty as a postcard but evil!!! It lured us to its quaint harbour and on to lovely harbour-hugging roads and then said “whoops these are now one-way and there’s no going back, no way out - sooorry AND the roads are going to get narrower”. And they did every metre. To cut a long story short, as you can see we escaped but not without some deep scars, no fingernails left to speak of and frayed and shattered nerves. We provided lots of onlookers with some ‘light entertainment’ - only one offered any help. Can you believe it?! (much shaking of heads and gnashing of teeth from within our trapped vehicle). But yes we escaped and headed for a pub as far away as possible for a stiff drink. So much for the man and his bl… 7 wives! You know answer course ……. 

We eventually came home to Mr George who supervised our showers. What a day! You’ve got to laugh or get blind drunk, which we didn't - quite!