A Grockle’s Eye View of Cornwall 11: The End of the St Michaels Mount Day

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).

Mathematical Pic — The first few photos here, including these mathematical pictures are from lunch

Sea birds — 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.

Causeway close-up II — The causeway from close up

Farewell to St Michaels Mount — A farewell shot of the mount

A Grockle’s Eye View of Cornwall 7: Walking to St Michael’s Mount

Continuing my series about my visit to Cornwall, with the first of several posts about St Michael’s Mount.

INTRODUCTION

This series has been widely spread out – the trip it describes took place between July 12 and 16. Here is a listing of the previous posts:

Getting There
St Germans to St Ives
A Visit to a Seal Colony
The End of the St Ives Day
Crossing the Cremyll Ferry to Plymouth
Historic Plymouth

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:

Penzance - St Michael's Mount — The coastal route starting from Penzance.

St Erth to St Michael's Mount — 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:

View from the van — The only shot I managed to get from the van on the way from Fort Picklecombe to Penzance.

People crossing the causeway to the mount — A first glimpse of the causeway.

In the shallows — 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.

The causeway and the mount — The causeway.

Southwestern Publicity Materials

Some publicity materials fro,m the Southwest.

INTRODUCTION

This is the final post I shall be producing about my first visit to my parent’s new home in Cornwall. There will be photographs of all the publicity materials that I picked up while down there, captioned where appropriate with links to the posts that they relate to, except for one section where I am following the route of my journey to Penzance and flag that at the start of the entire section. Thus, this post will contain links to every other post I have produced about the visit.

THE PUBLICITY MATERIALS

We start with…

THE RAME PENINSULA OFFICIAL LEAFLET

This is the particular area in which my parents new home is located, so in one sense it relates to all of the previous posts in this series…

Rame 1 — The posts that relate most closely to this are those relating to **Thursday, Friday** and **Sunday.**

Next we have…

A DOUBLE SIDED RAILWAY MAP

This features the Great Western Railway network map on one side and the whole national railway network on the other:

GWR Map — This map particularly relates to the posts for **Wednesday**, the first of the **Saturday** posts and **Monday**.

Our next port of call is…

A SOUTH DEVON GUIDE

This is a stout little booklet, with a pictorial map as a centrepiece:

Next we come to…

A SELECTION OF RAILWAYANA

These are all unrelated to anything I blogged about, but represent things to consider for future visits…

We are now going to cover…

CORNISH TRAIN JOURNEYS

For most of this section we will be following the route of my journey to Penzance, but first a couple of pics to set the scene…

Now starting our survey of stuff that relates closely to my Saturday journey we begin with the St Germans Walk…

Our next staging post is Bodmin Parkway, for the Bodmin & Wenford Railway:

Continuing our westward journey our next diversion is at St Austell where those so minded can catch a 101 bus to The Eden Project (the officially recommended way of visiting that great attraction – they are not great admirers of the motor car).

Before arriving at the destination for our next section we give a passing wave to Camborne Town:

It is now time to move on to…

PENZANCE

Here are some maps of the Penzance area…

We have almost reached the end of this post, which we do with…

A FEW LAST PICTURES

These are the last few bits…

GWR timetable — The official mainline timetable

Devon & Cornwall Railcard — I will not be able to make use of this, but some of you might.

Penzance

An account of the time I spent in Penzance on the Saturday of my Cornish holiday.

INTRODUCTION

I have finally edited all the pictures from my recent Cornish holiday and have now at last got time to get back to blogging about it. My last post described my journey down to Penzance, and this post provides the story of the rest of the day.

GETTING MY BEARINGS

Having arrived in to Penzance pretty much bang on schedule I visited the local information office, purchased a detailed and very cheap souvenir map (I will conclude this series of Cornish posts with one featuring all the publicity materials that I collected while down there), and set out on the first part of my exploration of the town. An early necessity was finding somewhere to eat lunch (although I am not entirely inflexible on the matter I generally aim to eat lunch some time close to 1PM), and having walked past the Harbour and the Chapel I found an establishment suited to my needs. The Turk’s Head was not too extortionate (there are no cheap places in Penzance). I opted for a BBQ Chicken, Bacon and Davidstow Cheese melt, and enjoyed it, although I felt that it did not really live up to its name on two counts:
1. There was precious little evidence of bacon (though they had used good quality chicken)
2. Davidstow is supposed to be a strongly flavoured cheese and yet I barely noticed it over the other flavours – if I ask for something of which cheese is a featured ingredient I want to taste said cheese.

Here some photos taken between leaving Penzance station and having lunch:

Air pressure — The first of a number of shots of interesting items on display at The Turks Head

BN1 — There were five sets of framed banknotes starting with this one.

Devon and Cornwall — Poor lighting prevented me from doing full justice to this map.

Map — This, and the two set of framed cigarette cards the follow it were in a narrow passage that meant that I could not get them fully in shot from front on – had to photograph at an angle.

POST LUNCH EXPLORATIONS

Having consumed my lunch I headed for the Promenade, and walked along it. From the other end of the Promenade I walked back to the train station and then did some exploring on the other side of the train station, locating a path that ran between the tracks and the sea. Here are some photographs…

Jubilee Pool 1 — In November one would not expect an open-air pool in Engalnd to have much custom, and indeed the Jubilee Pool was empty.

Helen Glover post box — A number of post boxes were painted gold to honour people who were successful at the London 2012 Olympics – this one Penzance is dedicated to rower Helen Glover.

I conclude this post with two special sections, firstly…

ST MICHAEL’S MOUNT

Being grey the whole time, and misty for most of it this was not a great a day for taking long-range photographs, but St Michael’s Mount was not a target I could resist, even under those circumstances, so here are the results:

You will notice gulls in a couple of these shots, which leads to the second special section, which concludes this post…

BIRDS

There are many seabirds to be observed in Penzance and I was able to capture some of them on camera…

The journey back was uneventful, and with the train departing Penzance at 16:41 on a November afternoon it was too dark for photographing through the windows of that train.

The Journey To Penzance

An account of the journey to Penzance, setting the scene for my next post, about Penzance itself.

INTRODUCTION

This is continuing my account of my visit to Cornwall. We have reached Saturday, which for me featured a trip to England’s westernmost commercial railway station (note England not Britain – Arisaig on the Glasgow-Mallaig line in Scotland is further west), Penzance. The closest station in time terms to my parent’s new home is St Germans, and that is where my train journey started.

ST GERMANS

St Germans is completely unstaffed, and therefore, since there is no one to maintain it, has no ticket machines either. Tickets are purchased from the conductor once you are on the train. You are only allowed to do this at unstaffed stations – boarding without a ticket at a station where you can purchase one renders you liable to a penalty fare of £20 (I heard another passenger who had done this escaping with a warning not to do it again).

I had a bit of time at St Germans (given that the next train to call at St Germans was two hours later this was indubitably the sensible position to be in. Here are some photographs from the station…

www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk

The ticket issued by the onboard conductor is much bigger than a standard train ticket.

THE JOURNEY TO PENZANCE

Taking pictures through the windows of a moving train is not especially easy, although I did at least have a window seat for the entire journey, so was never shooting across people. After leaving St Germans the train called at Liskeard (change for the Looe branch line), Bodmin Parkway, Lostwithiel (although the name might suggets otherwise as far as I am aware no elves live here!), Par (trains to Newquay depart from here), St Austell, Truro (Falmouth services diverge here), Redruth, Camborne, Hayle, St Erth (branch line to St Ives from here) and Penzance. Here are the pictures from this journey…

PENZANCE STATION

These pictures were taken both on arrival at Penzance, and towards the end of my time in Penzance.

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