I’m getting to be a veteran of bus travel; my old wrinkly’s bus pass has never worked so hard. This time it was taking me the short 12-minute or so ride from Marazion into Penzance. Again, we were dropped at the local bus station so we knew where to board our return bus. At least Penzance bus station actually looked like a bus station, unlike the one at St. Ives which was more like a turning area with a bus stop.

We walked up the curiously named Market Jew Street from the bus station heading into the middle of town. Heading up hill, the footpath to the right is raised above the roadway with the two levels connected by several sets of very historic looking steps. We were in search of coffee and chose to call into Wren & Raven, which turned out to be a good choice.

Francine’s first attraction in Penzance was an art gallery called Cornwall Contemporary featuring an exhibition of abstract artworks by David Mankin. His larger canvases have some eye-wateringly high prices. Most “interesting” in this observer’s eyes was a board, entitled “Odyssey 2016-2026” which is the backboard against which he worked on many of his canvases. Even the backboard is priced at £6250. Now if that’s not having a laugh, I don’t know what is. Fortunately, Francine bought just a catalogue book.

Our main attraction in Penzance was a gin tasting which Francine had thoughtfully booked after we had arrived in Marazion. The distillery is called “Pocketful of Stones”, apparently ‘cos that’s all the proprietor had before he set up the business. Taking their advice, we prepared for our tasting by having a Cornish pasty to help soak up the alcohol. They were all ready for us at midday with four measures of different gins sitting on a table ready for us. We did get a welcoming gin & tonic first, though, just to warm up.

We didn’t realize it but we were already familiar with one product of this distillers: Dr Squid Gin which is allegedly their most popular product. We had bought some as a curiosity in the early days of Covid-19 from a farm shop local to us back at home, the first curiosity being that it s recipe does include squid ink. There’s a second curiosity in that it comes in attractive tins, many of which were displayed on the surrounding bookshelves.

Our tasting lasted about 90 minutes and was certainly interesting covering the distilling process and some of gin’s history. As evidenced by the addition of squid ink to gin, the proprietor is clearly very adventurous about his flavourings. The only botanical requirement for something to be called gin is juniper, we were told. After that, everything seems to be fair game. One of our four gins to taste was called Marmalade Old Tom and, yes, it does have marmalade in the recipe. Their more mainstream gin is CASPYN, which as well as being a spelling mistake, was quite strongly flavoured with more traditional botanicals and was very enjoyable.

Pocketful of Stones also produces some other spirits, one being a Whisky but my personal favourite was a Cyder Brandy, essentially a Calvados apple brandy. It was quite light compared to most Calvados I have tasted but it was very good.

Our tour took us through some of gin’s history with the 17th century government suggesting that the water in London was too unsafe and that people should drink gin instead. That’s a scary recommendation given that the gin was considerably stronger in those days. The government then backtracked and decided recommending beer might be safer bet. Prints were drawn of “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street”, designed to be displayed beside each other to sway people away from the evils of gin.

Another slice of history explained the Old Tom connection: illicit gin houses used to have a cat effigy into whose open mouth customers would put coins in order to receive quantities of gin through a pipe. Hence, cats became symbolic of gin. It was called the “Puss and Mew Dispenser”. The first vending machines were for gin. Great!

New month, new campsite. Today we moved to Marazion on the south coast of Cornwall. This move is one that we had to be careful of regarding timing. We were supposed to leave our Godrevy campsite by midday but we were unable to check-in at the new campsite before 14:00. It is a mere 30-minute journey.

Sainsburys to the rescue. On the outskirts of Penzance Sainsburys have a “superstore” which appeared to have parking that should enable a motorhome to find a double length parking spot depending, of course, on other customers’ vehicles. I had pulled into one possibility when a car driver moved off leaving a much more appropriate spot.

Happily, this Sainsburys was a much more appealing store with considerably more choice than that offered by the rather poor Asda effort at Hayle. We restocked Frodo’s fridge with dinner options for the duration. We were intending to be at Marazion for four nights.

One of the main attractions for a stay at Marazion is being within walking distance of St. Michael’s Mount in Mount’s Bay. Possibly the most intriguing feature of the mount is the cobbled causeway joining it to the mainland which gets flooded by the tide making it impassable for about half of the tide cycle. It could make for an interesting photographic subject. Having got Frodo settled, we wandered down to have a look.

The tide was pretty low when we got there and the entire causeway was exposed with a constant stream of people walking back and forth along it. From an elevated viewpoint, the causeway describes an elegant S-curve across the bay to the island – photographers love S-curves. A long exposure manged to lose most of the people but it was never going to be a clean shot. Interesting, though. The viewpoint was also too far away from the water to make much of the Big Stopper smoothing out the water. Still at least it lost most of the hoards.

There’s another problem with St. Michael’s Mount in that you are always looking south towards it – it’s too contre-jour; the sun is always largely behind it so the island looks dark/dull. Curiously, it has a sibling sitting off the opposite French coast, Mont St. Michel, which is north of the sun and which is, therefore, better illuminated.

I find the existence of these two very similar geographical features very intriguing.

I’m beginning to get used to this bus travel lark. Once again we decided to catch the excellent bus service from right outside our Godrevy campsite and ride the 35 minutes or so into St. Ives, just for something to do. The weather forecast was a little less than perfect so we went prepared. Francine was on a mission to find me a replacement tri-fold wallet, my current one beginning to show signs of use. Well, that was the excuse, anyway.

We made it to the bus station overlooking St. Ives harbour and started sauntering down into town with Francine keeping her beady eye open for a shop that might have the kind of wallet I favoured. After a few failures, we finally found some candidates in an establishment called Off The Beaten Track – a bit surfy for my taste but what the hell, it had tri-fold wallets.

There was a little chapel standing proudly on a hilltop overlooking St. Ives so we went to investigate, This was the Chapel of St. Nicholas and had been restored to its former glory. The war office began to pull it down in 1904 but there was public outcry. The desecration was arrested and in 1911 Sir Edward Hain restored the building. It was restored again in 1971, this time through the generosity of Mr. J. F. Hoffman.

‘T was lunch time and we descended towards the harbourside. We briefly flirted with the idea of eating somewhere different but eventually sense prevailed and we returned to the Cintra Seafood Bar where we had splashed out on a seafood tapas lunch before. This time we stuck with a simple plate of tempura cod which frankly was like a perfectly sized fish ‘n’ chip lunch, served with a few chips, crushed garden peas and a very good home made tartare sauce. There was, of course, a bottle of white wine involved, as we once again sat watching the harbourside as we ate and drank.

Back at the so-called bus station, a team of guys were planting some beds around the seating area. We’d say there was considerable expense being invested in the area. Bravo.

Very little to report about today except that the weather was pants. We spent most of the day sheltering in Frodo while he rocked and rolled on his suspension.

The campsite was due a visit from a fish ‘n’ chip van in the early evening and, given the conditions, we wondered if the poor man would actually bother to come. Though the advertised timing was better than that of other campsites – up to about 19:30 – we didn’t fancy standing out in rain waiting for our fish to be cooked. So, given that and the uncertainty, we decided to self cater as usual.

The rain eased off in the late afternoon and we went out to the sand dunes above Three Mile Beach to get some air, of which there was plenty. We struggled back getting battered by a fierce headwind that was even worse than that of our recent return along the Northumberland coast from Craster. It took our breath away.

The fish ‘n’ chip van did turn up. Over at the washing up sinks after our self-catered dinner, one chap pronounced it the best fish ‘n’ chips he had ever had.

Oh well. we missed out.

A glorious day was in the offing. Francine was keen to exercise her artistic gene by visiting Tate St. Ives and, if you’re going to end up wandering about a town in the open, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

There is a very good bus service running, about once every hour, right by the entrance to our campsite at Godrevy. The bus takes you through Hayle and on into St. Ives. We’d already used the bus to get to Hayle and back so now it seemed less scary – to me, that is – Francine was quite used to buses. The buses seem to run on time and you can track them. Excellent! We caught the 10:20. After 35 minutes we were deposited at what St. Ives refers to as a bus station. At least we now knew where to get the return bus.

After an excellent coffee overlooking the harbour, we wandered down into the town itself, naturally looking in nearly every shop window [not me, you understand] making our way to said harbour. Francine and Google teamed up to get us to the Tate St. Ives building.

Francine is already a member of the Tate so her entry was free but she had to pay for her accompanying artistic numbskull. The lady on the desk seemed pleased to have a numbskull showing some interest.

I had seen pictures of a display that I did think I’d find photographically interesting, It was an installation by Aleksandra Kasuba consisting of a series of 6 stretched fabric, tall conical shapes illuminated by coloured neon lights. You can walk through the fabric shapes.

From my point of view, the remaining mostly more conventional artistic exhibits were less interesting, certainly less understandable, and many of their explanations by the artists were the usual intellectual babble clarifying very little.

On our way to the Tate we had spotted what looked like an interesting harbourside seafood restaurant offering tapas style dishes, the Cintra Seafood Bar. Sunny St. Ives was very busy so Francine had popped in to reserve a table for lunch. Leaving the Tate, we headed to the Cintra to claim our table inside, looking out at the harbour view.

The bar’s “small plates” section is essentially a collection of tapas items. There are some meat dishes but the seafood looked irresistibly interesting. Less interesting were the prices but, hey, you only live once. The menu item that had initially attracted us was Cajun spiced monkish. To that we added pan-fried scallops, Cornish mackerel fillet and salt & pepper squid. To our selection, the restaurant added a complementary amuse-bouche of cods roe crostini [essentially taramasalata, though not dye pink]. We washed it down with a Portuguese vinho verde. We were going to finish with espressos but they also had affogato on the menu. Well, rude not to. We thought it was all excellent, which softened the financial blow a bit.

Mr Artistic-Numbskull’s fun wasn’t over yet. Oh no. St. Ives is also home to the Barbara Hepworth Museum & Sculpture Garden. Entrance to this museum is covered by the Tate membership.

Mr. A-N was, of course, completely unfamiliar with Barbara Hepworth’s work but I think he quickly got the hang of it. First of all, grab a large lump of rock. Second, punch a large hole through the lump of rock.

If making a hole in the rock proves to be too difficult, just stop trying to go all the way through and leave a nice round, saucer-shaped dish in the surface.

Sometimes your resultant rock with a hole in it might look a little bland by itself. If this proves to be the case, stretch a few crisscrossing strings across the hole, supported around the edges of the hole, for added interest.

Job done.

As we approached the St. Ives bus station our number 14 was in and waiting – perfect timing.

Morning today was pants with rain and a variably strong wind making Frodo shake, rattle and roll on his levelling ramps. We remained inside sheltering.

The afternoon was forecast to brighten up and so it did, though the wind remained blowing quite strongly. In order to stop getting too stir crazy, we took a walk out of the campsite’s back gate, down a short track to cross the road into the sand dunes above Three Mile Beach. I took along my camera bag and tripod hoping to get half-way decent picture of Godrevy Lighthouse.

As soon as we were in position to focus on the lighthouse, we spotted several kite surfers having fun playing in the surf along the surf line, mostly in front of the lighthouse and its rocky island. Long time exposures from this viewpoint would be hopeless with multi-coloured kites blowing up and down in the field of view. I was not after bright orange streaks across my image.

Our photographic club has a challenge coming up with “motion” as a subject. Surfers on surfboards would be OK, windsurfers would be OK but kite surfers, where the kite is too far distant from the actual surfer, I suspect would be less than a brilliant subject.

We walked further down the beach, closer to Godrevy Lighthouse and found a vantage point close to the island where I could avoid the kite surfers given some judicious timing. I took several long exposure shots. There’s a second problem here, though, which is that the strong wind was making the tripod less stable – there is a certain amount of vegetation on the dunes making for a rather spongy surface rather than a rock solid surface. I did get just one shot which was sharp enough, though. The rest will be assigned to the bin.

I’d been watching the lighthouse while we were at our previous campsite at St. Agnes Beacon. It eventually dawned on me that I’d never actually seen a light emanating from it. [Holiday makers can be so slow.] Sadly, Godrevy Lighthouse was decommissioned in 2012 and replaced by a modern marine LED light, supposedly on an adjacent steel structure, though I haven’t seen that, either. It certainly doesn’t sound as if it has the charm of a traditional lighthouse. Now, Godrevy Lighthouse functions only as a daymark.

Whilst leaving Frodo overnight at Mr. Lola’s house near Stroud on our way down, we left the fridge running overnight on gas, something we very rarely do. Unfortunately, in the morning Frodo’s fridge was not on – the gas had run out. It wasn’t a disaster, the fridge was not too warm in the morning. We continued to the St. Agnes campsite running on the 12V driving system, followed by mains electricity once we checked in.

Whilst at St. Agnes, thinking of a potential off-grid stop en route home, I decided to change to our second gas cylinder. What I couldn’t do, try as I might, was get a gas-tight seal between the connector and the new gas cylinder. Calor gas connections are archaic and a complete pain-in-the-arse. I phoned a couple of caravan/motorhome engineers and one suggested that I may have a faulty gas cylinder, not something I would have considered. As an experiment, I exchanged my empty cylinder for a new one on site. Sure enough, I just about managed to get a decent seal on the replacement, so my second cylinder did, indeed, look a bit iffy. We could now, at least, stop off grid if we needed to.

All this hassle made us think about a fixed refillable LPG solution. It would certainly make camping off grid in Spain and/or France easier, where you cannot exchange Calor Gas cylinders. I thought I’d like someone’s opinion who had experience of such systems.

I remembered that a fellow dragonfly enthusiast, who I had never actually met, had a motorhome with such a system. I sent an enquiring note explaining that we were currently in Cornwall, had had gas connection difficulties, and seeking his opinion on refillable systems. He was now on his second motorhome, having just bought a new one, with two different but similar refillable systems. He thought both were excellent.

“Where are you?”, he asked.

“At Godrevy at the moment but moving to Marazion in a few days. We were at St. Agnes Beacon last week. We arrived on Sunday 20th.”

“We were at St.Agnes Beacon last week, too. We also arrived on 20th. We’re at Gwithian Farm, now“, he said, “fancy a beer at the Red River Inn this afternoon?”

I couldn’t believe it, we’d been on the same campsite last week and now were a mere 15-minute walk away from each other.

“Great idea”, I said. They were planning to walk a bit of the Cornish coastal path today first so we settled on 17:00 to meet.

“We have a whippet”, he added.

Wait just a goddamn minute. Whilst at St. Agnes Beacon, we had talked to a couple with a relatively large whippet in tow, twice on the campsite and once in the middle of St. Agnes itself. They had told us that the handsome whippet was called Stanley.

“Not as large whippet?”, I asked, “Stanley by any chance?”

“Good God …”, came his response.

Unbelievable! Here was a fellow dragonfly enthusiast who I’d been communicating with electronically for several years but never actually met, and our paths had crossed in Cornwall with neither of us realising. We were both gobsmacked.

Still reeling from the astonishing coincidence, Francine and I decided we’d catch the bus [scary spiders] into Hayle for some entertainment.

One of the attractions in Hayle was the King George V Memorial Walk featuring 2977 handcrafted poppies made of donated scallop shells. These honour every victim of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack. Whilst most of the poppies are painted red, there are 70 blue poppies for police officers, 344 with black/red ribbons for firefighters, 8 with green/yellow ribbons for emergency medical personnel and 1 purple poppy for the port authority K9 police dog, Sirius, who died in the collapse.

It may seem like an unusual location for such a memorial but the connection with Cornwall is Rick Rescorla, born in Hayle, who became the head of security for Morgan Stanley and who saved thousands of lives before losing his own life in the collapse of the South Tower.

It is all very poignant.

When we’d disembarked the bus, we’d spotted the Philps Bakery proclaiming its “famous pasties”. Well, lunch was calling and it would be rude not to try a famous pasty. They were certainly popular; I had to join a queue with half a dozen hungry folks in front of me. We sat at a wooden table outside to demolish ours. These were good, especially the steak in the filling, but we both thought those form the St. Agnes Bakery a little superior, especially the pastry, in my opinion.

We managed a lightning shop in Lidl before catching a return bus to the campsite.

At 16:45 we started our 15-minute walk down to the Red River Inn to meet again my odo-nutter friend, this time knowing who we both were.

I’m still gobsmacked at the coincidence.

We awoke to another decent morning. With another trip into St. Agnes on the cards, we decided to take a different route, this time heading up St. Agnes Beacon itself. Francine had done this little ascent on the afternoon of our arrival but it was new to me. In truth the ascent, especially the last stage to the top, is gentle though, as unused to ascents as I am, the slightly steeper lower section made me take a few breathers. The view from the top is impressive.

From the summit of the beacon, we headed down an unknown (to us) path into the town. Our new path took us into St. Agnes at the eastern end of town where there is a very good little coffee shop called Rooted. Here, we sat outside topping up our caffeine levels. The double espresso was just about the strongest espresso I have yet tasted; it definitely hit the spot.

Opposite the coffee shop I noticed the “Bearded Brewery”. I thought I should snap it to send on to my cousin, being an artisan beer fan. This place seemed to make more of its cider, though. There’s a bit of a biker connection with the proprietors, one of their ciders being called Tank Slapper at 8% ABV. I assume you’d slap the tank as you fell off your bike. More staggering though was a “small batch” cider called Super Cyder, weighing in at a mind-numbing 12.7% ABV. Strewth! Maybe luckily, the establishment didn’t open until 16:30 so I was safe.

We have had a couple of indifferent lunches out during our stay, first the largely tasteless calamari – apart from the salt & pepper coating – at the St. Agnes Hotel and then the rather oily whitebait with indifferent chips at the Driftwood Spars in Trevaunance Cove. We would both have preferred to sit on a bench munching a Cornish pastie. Today, that’s exactly what we did and very excellent pasties they were, too, from the St. Agnes bakery – good, crisp pastry filled with a handsome amount of decent steak.

Following our al fresco lunch, we did repair to the St. Agnes Hotel with its sunny outside tables and chairs to wash our food down with some more Rattler cider. It’s a grand place to watch the St. Agnes world go by. With me being largely reticent to attempt to drive a modest motorhome through St. Agnes, I watched in awe as a double decker bus made its way through. Some of the obstacles to be negotiated include cars parked on double yellows at the bend opposite the St. Agnes Hotel. I think double yellows mean “no parking unless you’re visiting the St. Agnes Bakery”, which is also nearby.

Back chez Frodo, our evening meal featured the interesting joint of meat we had purchased from the excellent Gloucester Services on our way down: the venison backstrap. This had us most intrigued because the only places we’ve come across the backstrap term regarding meat is in Australia and New Zealand. It is not a butchery term that, I think, many Brits are familiar with. We began to wonder if the farm shop had an antipodean butcher. Knowing no better, I treated this like a thick cut steak and did it for five minutes on each side in our universal skillet. It turned out a little rarer than I thought it might but it was succulent and excellent. A chicory salad went very well with it.

I have lost count of the number of times we have arrived at a campsite in brilliant weather only to have it collapse on subsequent days. Such was the case here at St. Agnes Beacon campsite – our first afternoon was fabulous and the next two mornings dawned with fog/thick mist. The first of these murky days was predicted not to brighten up but it did, happily. The second day was predicted to brighten up but it failed to do so. Such is the miracle of British weather forecasting.

This morning, however, was a breath of fresh air and something of a relief. We were treated to blue skies with scattered clouds and a good amount of sunshine. We just had to go and see Wheal Coates again, this time in favourable morning light. Visibility was such that we could see the buildings of St. Ives in the background.

For lunch, Chapel Porth beckoned. Once finished with our relatively early morning photography, we set off back over the intervening road heading for Wheal Coates once again, this time missing it to the left and heading down the rock-strewn paths into Chapel Porth. This time, to help (particularly me) back up the cliff paths, we were armed with our trekking poles.

Reaching the surfing beach’s car park, Francine went to the café to order lunch sandwiches. Francine fancied a crab sarnie but sadly there is an ongoing problem with the crab supply this year so she had to settle for prawns – very messy prawns, I might add. The crab supply issue is said to be due to octopus moving north and invading the crab pots. My porky sausage sandwich was a bit easier to deal with but I still got messy. [No change there, then.]

We sat surrounded by half the world’s dogs. Eventually a couple arrived with what appeared to be long-haired racehorses on leads. I thought they must be Irish Wolfhounds but I was wrong; they were apparently Scottish Deer Hounds, which are said to be more slender. They were still damn big, though.

With lunch still digesting, we began mounting the cliff paths back up towards Wheal Coates, aided by the trekking poles. Having puffed and panted my way back up from Trevaunance Cove yesterday, this time my ascent felt considerably less trouble, so much so that we continued beyond Wheal Coates, eventually doubling back on a higher path.

I’ve never been a great fan of either walking uphill or cycling uphill. I was very glad that this afternoon’s effort felt a bit better.

When we were in Moffat, Scotland, we stayed there largely to visit Francine’s niece. Now it was Franco’s turn. My cousin lives near Fowey on the south coast of Cornwall and we had arranged to meet. Being in a solo car, my cousin’s travel was much more flexible so we chose a pub in Trevaunance Cove within walking distance for us. With an iffy forecast, Francine had managed to book a table inside for 13:00.

Before that we had another misty/foggy morning – the gloom was quite dense. Later in the morning it began to drizzle, which had been forecast but we’d been hoping. The drizzle did abate in time for our 35-minute walk to Trevaunance Cove and the Driftwood Spars pub. Given the lack of visibility, we avoided the coastal path as being pointless and took the more direct route along the road.

When we arrived, well before time, the barman told us that he had “accidentally given our table away”. Very curious – how exactly do you accidentally give away a booked table? The oversight was irritating rather than a great problem since other tables were available though they were in a family friendly room which was a little noisier. We waited at the table with glasses of Rattler and eventually Cuz appeared complete with dog, which actually sat and remained calm.

We ordered food and some more Rattler, though I discovered that the ABV has been reduced to 5.5% from 6%. It still tastes good, though. Cuz was also happy ‘cos the pub brews its own beer. Our companions declared their fish ‘n’ chips excellent but we thought our whitebait was a bit below par – a tad greasy. The chips weren’t as good as those served with the fish, either. So, all in all, with “accidentally” giving away a booked table before time and with questionable whitebait, we weren’t over-impressed.

We bade farewell to my relies having declined a lift back to the campsite. The walk back was 90% uphill, the initial ascent out of Trevaunance Cove being v. steep and a complete pain in the lungs. I thought the uphill incline was never going to finish. Strangely, I didn’t remember the outbound journey being 90% downhill, though I certainly remembered the fierce knee-twinging descent down into Trevaunance Cove.

Why did I decline the lift? I know, I need the exercise.