Penzance to Falmouth
20th-26th April 2010
This leg of the South West Coast Path circumnavigates the Lizard Peninsula. It was the first time I'd been to the Lizard, and I loved it. It was far less touristy than I'd expected, with a good variety of walking and scenery, passing St Michael's Mount, gorse-covered moorland, spectacular cliffs and coves (e.g. Kynance Cove), pretty harbours and finally the wooded inlets of Gillan Creek and the Helford River.
The rock underlying most of the Lizard is serpentine, a unique dark green metamorphic rock that is used in local buildings (e.g. St Winwallow's Church near Church Cove) and polished to form ornaments. The unusual geology supports a distinctive flora and there were pretty wildflowers everywhere: unusual species such as squill and 'three cornered leek' and more common species such as primroses, bluebells and thrift as well as the yellow of gorse and the white of hawthorn blossom.
Although tourism is the principle industry of the area now (tourism came with the Victorians and there are several prominent hotels of that era), we stayed at one B&B on a working farm, and at least one belonging to fisherman - and we watched the catch being brought in at Cadgwith. There are remains of mining and quarrying, and some quarrying still takes place. The area is also famous for communication - Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message from the Lizard, in 1901. The final attraction for us was seeing very many locations that we recognised from the TV detective series 'Wycliffe' including the clock tower building at Porthleven, the Old Lifeboat Station at Lizard and in Falmouth, where we remembered a street scene that had obviously been filmed just outside the restaurant where we had our evening meal.
We booked the holiday with Contours Walking Holidays and all the arrangements were excellent. All the B&Bs were good and the distances between them were comfortable. Luggage Transfers moved our luggage - this company, also known as 'Luggage Transfers South West' were only set up last year, but they seem to be going from strength to strength and provide an excellent service. The weather was ideal for walking - the only rain was on our final day of walking, when we got our waterproofs on in time for it to stop raining. Other than that it was dry and mostly sunny - because it was only April it was not too hot, but we'd gone without sunhats and Richard came home with a distinctly sunburnt head.
We travelled to Cornwall by way of London Paddington and then took the train all the way to Penzance. We ignored the advice in the Contours literacture and walked the mile or so through the town centre to The Tremont, just down the road from the B&B where we stayed in 2007 - but this one is better. In the evening, unusually for us, we returned to the same place that we ate when we were here before - Sophia's Cafe on the promenade - where we had another very enjoyable meal. (Note from 2018 when en route to the Scilly Isles: Sophia's Cafe is no longer there, though there is a Sophia's B&B in the same place.)
Our final stop was at The Grove Hotel in Falmouth. It wasn't clear whether this was closer to Falmouth Town or Falmouth Docks railway station, but we chose to go to Falmouth Docks Station (which has an attractive mural on the wall) from whence we caught the branch line to Truro and then the mainline train back to London Paddington.
