An account of my explorations of Penzance and its Environs, complete with plenty of photographs.
This is the second of three posts I shall be writing about my trip to Penzance yesterday, and deals with my time in Penzance.
EXPLORING
I began my explorations by walking along the sea front and past the harbour, before heading upwards into town. In this early part of my exploration I passed the post box which was painted gold to honour 2012 Olympic Gold medallist and Penzance native Helen Glover. I also renewed my acquaintance with the Egyptian House, a remarkable building in Penzance. After lunching in a pub I followed a different route back towards the station and the path that heads towards Marazion. This road was well chosen as it enabled me to see a statue of Penzance’s most famous son, 19th century science great Humphry Davy.
TOWARDS MARAZION
I walked along the path towards Marazion as far as a point at which there is a bridge over the railway to one side and a route down the beach on the other. I made use of both side routes, doing some photography from the bridge. I turned back at this point, deciding it was time to get a train back to Liskeard. I had enjoyed Penzance.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Here is the main gallery for this post…
The Glover gold painted post box (two pics) .The Egyptian House – many pics.A connection from Penzance to the legendary Robert Menzies, which extends via Lady Bradman (nee Jessie Menzies, a distant relation of Robert) to Donald Bradman.
Concluding my account of the day at St Michael’s Mount as we near the end of my series about my visit to Cornwall.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the latest installment in my series of posts about my recent visit to Cornwall. This post completes the day at St Michael’s Mount, leaving me with a post to do about the journey home and finally a page from which all the posts about this trip can be accessed. The fact that this will mean (including the page) 13 pieces relating to the trip bothers me not a jot – I have no more time for triskaidekaphobia than I do for any other ridiculous superstition.
WRAPPING UP ST MICHAEL’S MOUNT
Having finished our exploration of the mount itself it was time for lunch, which was excellent. The establishment at which we ate our lunch has a rule that alcoholic drinks can only be served if food is ordered at the same time, and according to their interpretation cream teas do not count as food, so on two occasions in the course of that meal we ordered portions of chips to go with drinks. Mention of cream teas (a speciality of the far west of England) brings me to a debate that rages unchecked: which goes on the scone first, the cream or the jam? The cream advocates argue that cream in this context is the equivalent of butter (and if it is Cornish clotted cream it is so thick that one can pretty much slice it like butter!), and that if you put the cream on first you do not get jam in it. I am not sure what the jam advocates base their case on.
Lunch consumed it was time to head back to our parking place on the edge of Penzance. The tide was just starting to turn but was still a long way out, and unlike the Mont St Michel, on which the current setup of St Michael’s Mount is modelled the tide here comes in slowly (no danger of galloping horses being swallowed by an inrushing tide, as allegedly happened at Mont St Michel on one famous occasion), so we were still able to walk back across a vast expanse of beach to rejoin the official footpath just west of Marazion. I omitted to remove my socks and shoes for this part of the journey, and they ended up thoroughly soaked, although by the end of the walk they had dried out again (without the sea breeze the heat would have been fiendish).
The first few photos here, including these mathematical pictures are from lunch
Just before recrossing the causeway to the mainland, we saw these birds – the one with the red bill used for digging would have been having a bonanza – there were huge numbers of worm casts in the sand.
Having covered Thursday, Friday and Saturday in six posts we arfe now dealing with the Sunday, my last full day in Cornwall.
THE PLAN
As all five of us (my parents, my sister and my nephew as well as me) were making the visit to St Michael’s Mount we travelled in my parents camper van instead of using the train. We wanted to be underway by eight and achieved this. We were planning to explore St Michael’s Mount in full and then have lunch at an establishment there. Things panned out pretty much as intended. The road journey is a lot less scenic than the rail equivalent, so I am going to recommend unequivocally that anyone else planning to do this use the train – the walk from Penzance (all of which is familiar to me, although we started part way along it, having located a parking place just outside Penzance) is very scenic, while there is a longer walk available from St Erth (inland for most of its duration, instead of along the sea front). Here are a couple of satellite views:
The coastal route starting from Penzance.
The longer and mainly inland route starting from St Erth. This map also features what is in alphabetic terms the last place in Britain.
THE JOURNEY IN PHOTOGRAPHS
This section ends the post, taking us across the causeway to the base of the mount:
The only shot I managed to get from the van on the way from Fort Picklecombe to Penzance.
A first glimpse of the causeway.
From Marazion the quickest way to the causeway is straight across the beach, and in the heat walking barefoot through the shallows was the way to go.
aspiblog 