There is one direct train a day from Bath to Penzance, which is the end of the line to the west. We took it, and spent a bunch of hours watching the scenery (and also, in my case, watching a documentary on the St. Louis Worlds Fair on the good old Touch). Following which we had four full days planned for Cornwall.
In the past we have mostly visited London, or burbs not far from London, when we’ve gone to England. Cornwall is about as far away as you can get from that urban atmosphere. The people absolutely talk differently and look different (although I would like to send a message to every single woman in England: Get over this black tights thing!). They’re rural, and when you’re there, you feel as if you’re in a rural place. This is certainly a tourist area in the summer (beaches and whatnot) but we had beaten that crowd in, so it was peaceful and quite new from what we’ve become accustomed to.
As I said, Penzance is where the train ends. It’s not much of a town, although it does have a nice museum displaying the Newlyn school, which is right up our alley (we’re big on the 19th century, both the academic and the non-), the homegrown art for which the area is justly famous. The area has a long fishing history (and still has plenty of fishing, which meant fish for dinner every night), and mostly what one does is walk along the shore, which ranges from beach to cliff and drama to drama, and just take in all the nature.
Our day trips included Lands End, which we walked for hours, and which is, indeed, the end of the island. I took a picture of New York off in the distance, but it’s hard to make out too many of the details. A lot of this is edge-of-the-cliff-if-I-slip-on-the-gravel-I’ll-leave-Cruz-my-Disney-album-collection scary and high, some of it was easy, some of it was getting lost and roaming through hedgerows looking for any sign of civilization other than a sheep. This was one of those sunny days that made for great picture taking, and over the whole vacation I took about 1300, so it will take a little time to sort them all out, but I will, and I’ll share them eventually (the good ones, not all 1300).
Another trip was to St. Ives (which kept resonating in my head with seven wives) which has a nifty Tate museum of modern art that, to my mind, could comprise a textbook collection starter set. It’s also got plenty of attractive town to walk around, mixed in with a lot of honkytonk resort beach town to walk around in. (I wonder what the UK equivalent of honkytonk is. Honqueytonque?) Then there was St. Austell, home to the Lost Gardens of Heligan, which is this old Victorian garden that went to ruin and has been rebuilt. To get there, in addition to a train, there was a small bus through city streets that were exactly the size of a small bus plus an inch on either side. The gardens were remarkably photogenic (I’m not much of a gardener myself except insofar as I’ll eat whatever you grow in it happily), and one was deeply tropical (the weather here is, as you know from sleeping through earth science, quite warm). And there were plenty of towns walking distance from Penzance which, well, we walked to. This was, in a word, four days of building up an appetite. Those fish dinners were truly appreciated. At one of them I had, for the first time, red mullet. Normally I wouldn’t order a fish named after a bad haircut, but, Mama Mia! This stuff takes just like lobster. Bring on the mullets! I also ate bunches of enormously excellent fish and chips and drank local ale (although, unlike many of the actual locals, I waited until after breakfast to begin my consumption).
The take on Cornwall? If you like hiking, you have come to the right place. I like hiking, so there you are.
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