Pirates, Pixies and Pasties

Turner
Cornwall is beautiful – well worth a visit. As you know we went in search of pirates, but the good old swash-buckling, raping and pillaging, mayhem-producing pirates of old seem to have been replaced by eco-hippy pirates. Freshly squeezed organic vegetable juice has replaced rum as the grog of choice, and bicycles and bio-diesel are the favored transportation options.

We took the train from London Paddington to Penzance – a journey of six hours, which is quite far. We could get to Paris or Sardinia more quickly, although there is something quite soothing about traveling on a train. I have always disliked the fact that it is so hard to drive and read at the same time, but on a train you can read furiously, and look up occasionally to see something new and possibly beautiful. And then of course there is the sound of the wheels on the track and the fresh air.

We hoped to rent a car for the weekend, but the car rental places were all closed when we arrived, and would remain closed for the rest of the long weekend other than a brief four hour period on Saturday morning, with no possibility of after-hours drop off. (Note to Cornwall Tourist Board – this is quite silly). There is a fairly decent local bus service, if by decent one understands that the bus one needs is usually only every two hours …. After we took the bus a few times though, I was really glad that we hadn’t rented a car. The lanes in Cornwall are very narrow, bordered on either side by 6 foot tall hedgerows, which are dense, prickly banks of shrubs. The average car is too small to let you see over the tops of these hedgerows, whereas the #300 open-top doubledecker tourist bus gives you wonderful views over the fields. It is a nerve-racking roller-coaster bus too, and because the lanes are so narrow, if the bus meets a car coming the other way, the car must back up to allow the bus past. This can result in very long lines of cars trying to reverse, while the bus accelerates by, usually missing the cars by a hair’s breadth.

We stayed at the Commercial Hotel in St Just and our room was clean, big and relatively quiet. We had dinner there one night, and while the cook’s mastery of the deep fat fryer was superb, overall the meal did very little to combat the international stereotype of British food ie grey peas cooked almost to pulp, sad bits of lettuce masquerading as ’salad’, overcooked fish and gristly steak. Not recommended. Fortunately there was a great little cafe across the square that served delicious organic egg and farm bacon sandwiches with fresh cracked pepper and decent espresso. It wasn’t always open, but when it was it was definitely the best place to eat in St Just.

St Just is near the coast, and is the main center of the cornish tin and copper mining industry (which is now defunct). It is an unpretentious little villiage that hasn’t really hit the top of the tourist charts yet, unlike St Ives, which is worth a visit but is very crowded and commercial. Penzance is more of a working town than St Ives, but again I wouldn’t recommend spending much time there. Perhaps my opinion of Penzance is largely shaped by the fact that we spent a number of hours in the bus stop waiting for various buses, but I think that there are much better places to go.

Our favorite place was Mousehole (pronounced Mowzel – does this mean that one should say ‘arzel’?), which is an hour walk or a short bus ride from Penzance – a tumble of fishing cottages and twisty alleys overlooking a harbor. We had an excellent dinner at The old coastguard hotel, which apparently used to be a bohemian hippy hangout up until the 80’s, but which is now quite minimalist and up-market. On our last day we went back to Mousehole to have lunch at The Cornish Range, a reclaimed pilchard processing factory, which was so good that we almost missed the train back to London!

The other fantastic highlight of our weekend was hiking 10 kms along the cliff path from St Just to Sennen. It was a long walk, and we wandered through various fields with bulls before we found the path, but the scenery was breathtaking and the main path is well maintained. The purple heather and yellow prickly flowering gorse was in bloom on the cliffs, and the Atlantic ocean swirled and crashed below. The sun was shining and we felt far away from urban sprawl and crowds. We finally made it to Sennen beach, which is a lovely gold sand beach with waves big enough for surfing.

By then we were truly ravenous and devoured our first authentic cornish pasty – which is like a little folded over pie, filled with meat, potatoes or cheese.  They are quite good, but very heavy, and can tend to sit like a lead weight in the stomach.  Perhaps they make hearty sustaining ballast for fisher-miner-walker-pirate types, although I am amazed that people don’t drop dead from all the lard.  We also tried mead, which i was quite excited about, having imagined that it tasted like honey in some way, but it mostly tasted like the bad kind of cough syrup.  Yet another celtic myth lies in the dust.  More successful was the Cornish rattler cider, named after the well-known cornish rattle snake.  Now that is good grog.