Mevagissey to Charlestown
Walked by Sally and Richard, Saturday 21st May 2011
About 8 miles, including 7.5 miles on South West Coast Path (with diversion around Duporth)
Click here for all our photos from this walk.
We slept well and Frances Thomas cooked us a lovely breakfast, whilst telling us about her children and grandchildren, who live in Wales but visit every school holiday - so we were lucky that it wasn't a school holiday when we visited (so Kernervel was open as a B&B). It had been our sort of B&B; indeed Mevagissey, which we'd expected to be horribly touristy, ticked all the right boxes for us. There are some touristy shops, but basically it is an attractive place, still very much a working fishing port, and our experience at Kernervel and Blue (the bistro where we ate last night) were both extremely positive.
We pottered around Mevagissey, buying pasties and apples for lunch and postcards and birthday cards, so it was well after 10am before we set off. It was sunny until lunchtime, then we had a shower and the afternoon and evening were cloudy. The various guidebooks all describe the short leg of the path to Charlestown as strenuous and I wouldn't disagree. It was something of a roller coaster, though the scenery was much more attractive than I'd expected, especially noteworthy given that we were so close to St Austell's industrial centre.
The first series of ups and downs brought us to Pentewan. The guidebook talks about 'massed ranks of caravans' here - actually there weren't too many caravans, though the beach is privately owned by the caravan park (oops, sorry - I mean 'holiday village') so we had to walk behind the site, though we were on a path that was initially separated from the road and then ran alongside it. Pentewan itself is a fascinating village; like Charlestown it was an artificial harbour, though the harbour at Pentewan has been silted up by sand and the china clay silt coming down the St Austell River.
After Pentewan we followed the cliffs up and down, getting closer to Black Head. We descended through the attractive wooded area of 'The Vans', which was obviously damaged by the floods in 2010 (as was Mevagissey) and in the middle of nowhere we came across some statues carved out of wood. We met and overtook another couple of walkers here. From the headland past the Vans we could see that the wooded valley extended up to Trenarren (which we would reach after circumnavigating the headland).
By the time we reached Black Head it had started to rain, so we decided that this was not a good place for lunch. Instead we stopped in a wooded area nearby. We hoped that the rain would stop whilst we were eating lunch but it didn't, so it was time for the wet weather gear. The rain didn't come to much and in any case we were meandering our way through the wooded section above Ropehaven (very pretty, though the signposting in this area wasn't great). However it made everywhere slippery. We overtook the other two walkers again on a particularly severe descent and ascent (they had come past us whilst we were eating lunch) and then reached a steep descent across a grassy slope. I was just worrying about the other walkers, who were not wearing walking boots, when I fell over - so much for the grip of my walking boots! I bruised my arm, but Richard stopped me from rolling down the slope so things could have been a lot worse.
We'd expected a diversion around Porthpean, but a small re-routing around the collapsed section of cliff had enabled the South West Coast Path to be re-opened, so we didn't have to head inland to Higher and Lower Porthpean after all. We reached the beach at Porthpean, climbed steeply at the other side, and reached the much more permanent diversion around Du Porth - inland past upmarket houses, right past St Austell Community Hospital, right down an attractive wooded road, with new houses being built, then right again and down to Charlestown Harbour. No sign of the holiday village we were expecting from the map.
Charlestown was originally the small cove of West Polmear but it was turned into a harbour to serve the china clay industry by Charles Rashleigh. It is now frequently visited by square-rigged 'tall ships' (which undergo maintenance here) but unfortunately they weren't there when we were. We decided not to visit the Shipwreck Museum (which looked rather touristy - though we could have been wrong) but we had a cup of tea in the cafe above the museum. We then pottered around the village and climbed up to the Charlestown end of the coast path closure, by Charlestown Battery, also built by Charles Rashleigh.
We were staying at Ardenconnel, half a mile or so up Charlestown Road (towards St Austell), home of Mr and Mrs Callis. We didn't have an ensuite, but we effectively had exclusive use of of the shared bathroom, which had a bath - much appreciated by my sore arm. In the evening we had a delicious (if more expensive than other places we'd been eating) meal at Wreckers, with Cornish Healey's Cyder (from the same stables as Cornish Rattler). Then we walked around the harbour again, now at high tide and so more attractive.