Cornwall & Southwold

After the excitement of the balloon fiesta I drove the 200 miles from Bristol down to Cornwall to join (most of) my family in a somewhat isolated farmhouse near St Just in Penwith. My parents are slowly working their way round the South West Coast Path and were taking the opportunity to do a bit more.
Still being hampered by the rubbishness of the borrowed camera I didn't take that many photos, but I managed a few!

On the nicest day we went to the beach at Porthgworra. It's in a little cove and the beach is split in two by a sort of outcrop which has tunnels through it. One side is made of lumpy rocks and the other is a steep slope down which boats would be launched (if there were any). It's a decently pretty place and wasn't horrendously busy, although there was a fair queue to get pasties when they arrived at the tiny shop.
My sister and I tried swimming but we got in up to our middles and decided that it was far too cold; it also smelled disgusting, probably because of a sewage outlet pipe, and it got worse as the tide went out. Oh well.
Mum, Dad and I scrambled over rocks along the beach a bit and got to the end of the cove before being forced to stop by an impassable sort of gulley in the rocks. We did spot some cormorants though!


Not the beach but never mind.

On Grandma's birthday we went to Falmouth as it was raining lots where we were. We had lunch in a sort of church tea room and had a look at some art and some charity shops (one of which had a massive collection of 35mm compact film cameras).
Before heading home we went out near the castle and had a look at the view. I spotted St Anthony Head, which Niall and I visited when we were in Cornwall (blog post here)

It was strange seeing it from the other side, and with my family.

There were *loads* of boats.
That evening we took Grandma to The Gurnard's Head which is a pub in the middle of nowhere. It's only really a pub in that it looks like one from the outside and has a bar. Otherwise it's a really really good restaurant. I didn't take any photos of the food as that would've felt a bit rude but it was *so* good. There was wonderful warm homemade soda bread and butter to start with, then I had:
- pea & goats cheese risotto with crispy pancetta, toasted almond flakes and pea shoots
- Plaice with homemade gnocci, cherry tomatoes and samphire
- Some kind of chocolate pudding I can't remember the name of

One day I shall try and recreate that risotto. I'm not a huge fan of almonds but it really worked; there was just the right amount of cheese in the risotto, enough to be tasty but not so much that it was overpowering; the pea shoots were lovely and delicate but had a surprising amount of flavour. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Anyway! The rest of the week was largely rainy and Mum & Dad went walking a bit while I revised for my retake, K researched tigers for her fancy project qualification thing, and Grandma snoozed in an armchair.

On the Friday we set out for home, theoretically around a three hour journey by car. Mum & K were going via Rosemoor to see the William Morris exhibition we'd missed previously, and I was going with Dad & Grandma. I was intending to go straight on up to Bristol for sometime after 4pm so I was happy when we left without mishap at 10.45. Then it all went wrong.
The traffic was absolutely horrendous. After maybe an hour Mum & K broke down and we had to go back to help them (the car was overheating from sitting in traffic jams). Luckily they'd broken down at a former Little Chef which was now a Starbucks so there were at least toilets and coffee. There wasn't much wrong with the car so we gave it a drink adn a chance to cool down and went on our way. However the roads were still completely jammed up and we didn't reach Bodmin until around 2pm.
After getting badly lost in Bodmin and an unsatisfactory lunch of pie crust and chips we pushed on to Exeter, where I decided to take a train, arriving at St Davids Station around half past three. I must have just missed a train to Bristol as there wasn't another going for around an hour. I had a fairly open ticket so I jumped on the first one to Taunton for the sake of keeping moving, and after changing at Taunton, I arrived at Bristol around half past five. So that wasn't a fun day of travelling.

Anyway, well done if you've read all of that. The point of me going to Bristol was so that Niall could take the two of us to Orford Ness the next day. We had dinner at his house before driving to his parents in Bedfordshire to stay overnight. We got up at 6am and completed the journey, arriving at Orford just in time to be miscounted out of the first ferry of the day.
Once we got across we spent a lovely day exploring the island, much of which is still off-limits due to unexploded ordnance. It's a really fascinating place and well worth a visit. I've got plenty of film photos coming and Niall wrote about it rather nicely on his Tumblr, but until then this is the sum of my digital photographic efforts there:

Impressive, eh? Think of it as a teaser.

Having walked many kilometres and caught the sun, we went up the coast to Southwold where we had supper at The Red Lion. Then Niall went off homewards and I stayed the week with my Granny, being joined by (3/5 of) my family the next day. Again, not many photos were taken, and those that were were mostly family.

After Southwold I returned to Bristol to go into revision exile for the week and a bit before my exam. I left the house infrequently, and mostly to go to Sainsbury's.

Spotting some inventive parking on the way.
I also made it to a Photosoc pub meet, which was a very pleasant relief from the Mathses.


Enough! Next up: Double Exposures, finally!

Cornwall on film - Part III

The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Mevagissey & St Just, all on Fuji Superia Reala 100 with my Pentax ME Super.


Cornflowers & cosmos in the kitchen garden at Heligan

The Italian garden

Boats in Mevagissey harbour

Shells on the beach at St Just.

Rockpool

See older blog posts for digital photos and more details.
All my Cornwall photos are together here.

Cornwall on film - Part II

I found some pretty.


Lovely yellow & blue.

Housel Bay

Some nice grass.

Rocky coast.

A bench with a view.

Some sparkly seakeh.

And some boats and lichen-y rocks.

More Cornwall! (The film photos are at the end of the set.)

Cornwall on film - Part I

Yes, there are *more* photos!

Niall's idea, experimenting with his wide-angly lens on the journey down.

The pretty field above Polkerris, on our way to Gribbin Head.

The daymarker.

Some camera faff.

Some seakeh.

Wildflowers on the clifftops.

Pretty grass in the cottage garden.

Moored boats in Coverack.

The view at Cadgwith.

A very pretty stretch of coast path.

And a typical bit of the wall/hedge hybrids they have 'round those parts.

St Anthony Head

After St Just we decided to go out to St Anthony Head and have a little look around, then go on to St Mawes.
What we actually did was park at the wrong car park and walk for about three miles along the road and coast. Google map showing the road we walked back along.
At least walking's good for us... And maybe burnt off the ice cream?

Of course the time to look at the map is once you're in the tea garden, having walked a mile and a half ish...

It was pretty though. (no photos of the walk out, too busy walking!)

There's a lighthouse on the end of St Anthony's head. It works but you can holiday in it!

The views are probably akin to this.

Which is the view from this, an observation post built years ago. That and the rest of the battery are looked after by the National Trust.

These days it's somewhat grassy. There's still plenty of heavy shipping going in and out of Falmouth, across the water.

I don't think the telescope is original though...

After having a good look around the end of the headland, we walked back along the road.

And bothered the flowers.
Then we went home and roasted the lump of meat (beef I think) which we'd bought at the butchers in Twywardreath that morning. It was GOOD.

And that's the end of our Cornish adventures. I didn't really cover the first bit, but that just leaves me more photos to post when I'm short of ideas! There're notes in lots of the descriptions on Flickr.

All my Cornwall photos can be found together here, including the film ones.

St Just in Roseland

After a somewhat relaxed morning we drove out to St Just in Roseland to see what it was like. We parked at the top of the hill and walked down to the beach, passing another car park on the way. It all looked a bit like this:

We sat down and ate our lunch, then had a little wander around on the beach.
You could see lots of small boats near Mylor, and bigger ones at Falmouth, on the other side of the water.
There was lots of seaweed


and sea anemones in rock pools

and pretty shells


It looked like low tide

Then we walked back up through the churchyard

which was rather pretty and on a slope.
Niall has probably got better photos of it than me.

Mevagissey

Mevagissey is pretty popular to visit & you can see why. It's pretty, with little narrow streets and a nice working harbour full of boats. We went there after Heligan to find somewhere for a sit and a drink. Bizarrely there were no pubs with outdoor seating by the harbour. There was a sort of restaurant with a not-particularly-polite waitress, and a place with a bench but no drinks to be taken outside. We ended up inland by a street, in the bar of a pub populated by middle aged men, with slightly inappropriate-seeming music. Oh well. We got a drink and had a nice walk around after to get our money's worth on the parking!
We walked up the South/West side of the bay/road/hill/cliff(?) to get a view across.


On our way up we helped a lady herd a baby gull off the road and onto a flight of steps so that it wouldn't get run over. It was quite amusing seeing it discover how to deal with steps. For the first couple it fell tipped forward on its beak, but then it learned to use its wings for balance. Didn't get any photos of it though, just this one down by the harbour.



The harbour was full of nice little boats like this. While we were on the harbour wall, near the little lighthouse-type thing above, a couple of slightly larger fishing boats came in, followed by a load of seagulls, and unloaded their catch. (Anna will tut at my use of commas, I know)

Back at the big car park on the edge of Mevagissey there was a hut which was covered in admission stickers from The Lost Gardens of Heligan and The Eden Project, clearly showing we weren't the first to make up a day trip like this.