HISTORY LIVES: A seagull flies over the harbour in St Ives in Cornwall.
I don't come to Cornwall as a tourist. One of my grandmothers was born in Padstow, and my 91-year-old auntie, Meg, lives on her own in a village just outside Falmouth, and wields her zimmer frame with considerable aplomb. So Cornwall is something of a second home for me, and I feel comfortable as the London train sweeps through the misty and evocative Cornish countryside.
True, there are things I don't like about modern Cornwall. The Land's End theme park is a gruesome way to commercialise the most westerly point of England.
Tiny St Ives and the cobbled streets of Falmouth scream with day-trippers in summer. The holiday park overlooking the beautiful Penhale Sands is a vast Legoland of bungalows. Motorways have sliced right down the backbone of Cornwall.
Yet despite the assault of a million tourists a year, Cornwall keeps a sense of itself. It's a place that sees itself differently from the rest of England.
The stratas of history are deep here. Megalithic tombs, fogous (cave dwellings), standing stones and stone circles from the neolithic era; strange sacred wells worshipped by the Celts; and minuscule Christian churches are buried so deep into the landscape they almost sink underground (one or two actually have been buried by sands).
Everywhere on the moorland hills and cliffs are the ruined engine houses, the stark remains of a 3000-year-old copper and tin mining industry that exported tin to the Romans as early as 500BC.
Cornwall has a superb coastline of sandy coves and fishermen's hamlets that surround it like a second skin. Lush gardens abound, and are claimed to be sub-tropical, although the Cornish climate is no more sub-tropic than Christchurch.
And therein lies the rub. As my Uncle Ken used to say from his lounge chair, "Mark, Cornwall has everything; all it needs is one decent bloody summer!" The weather is grim when we visit in last year's northern summer, the wettest in England for 40 years. But while the stoic albino Brits huddle on the beaches, we go walking and exploring Cornwall.
Coastal path
The coastline is gorgeous and mythic. You can walk anywhere and be immersed immediately in history and wildlife. The entire coastal path includes Devon and a lot of Dorset and Somerset, and is 630 miles long (more than 1000 kilometres), the longest in Britain. It takes two months to walk and involves 100,000 feet (30,000 metres) of climbing, three Everests, in fact, as the coastal path bowls over headlands and plunges down to bays.
One stretch I walk is from Perrancoombe up to the dramatic Cligga Head, a massive cliff striated with mineral colours. The "caves" in the cliff are actually mine shafts. The coastal path wanders past a disused RAF aerodrome into Trevellas Porth, a delightful bay owned by the National Trust.
A steep up-and-down track to Trevaunance Cove (close to pretty St Agnes) and a genuine low-beamed ye old pub greets you. This is the real thing, and you deserve a "jar" after that walk. One thing you can count on in Britain is that in any beauty spot there will always be a tearooms, a toilet and a pub.
The Eden Project
It's a botanical and environmental marvel. A gigantic collection of geodesic domes bubbling out of an old china clay pit. The tropical dome is kept as hot as Hong Kong, the Mediterranean dome is more like Spain. The tropical dome is so large it has a real waterfall inside it, and they have a tethered balloon inside the dome for maintenance purposes. You can clamber right to the top of the gantry inside the dome to view the rainforest.
Most people last only 20 minutes in the intensely hot dome (they have a cool room!) and retreat to the many cafeterias that serve great food.
The outer gardens of the Eden Project are stuffed full of ingenious sculptures, and I spot a feature of New Zealand flax. However, walking around reminds me of a line from an old Joni Mitchell song: "Take all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum, and charge all the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em".
I know the amazing Eden Project is about saving the planet, but how exactly is it achieving this?
Bodmin Moor
The highest part of Cornwall at 350m is Bodmin Moor, and the landlord of the tearoom in Minions (the highest village in Cornwall) swears you can see "for ever".
From this tiny village you can stroll back in time through an ancient landscape of tumuli and The Hurlers' stone circle. I count the ruins of eight engine houses just within cooee. At the top of Bodmin is the Cheesewring - an odd collection of granite rocks, squeezed into weird shapes. In the distance you can see (if not quite forever) the china clay spoil heaps, dubbed "the Cornish Alps", as they gleam white in the feeble sunlight. The Fal Estuary Although Truro resembles a pretty inland market town, it is actually beside tidal waters. There's a regular ferry here to Falmouth, that twists and turns along the serpentine wooded shorelines of the Fal Estuary. The estuary is exceptionally deep, and huge ships are mothballed here. I once saw the old Rangitira Picton-Wellington ferry moored here, after its stint as a troop ship in the Falklands war.
You would be wise to switch ferries at Falmouth and hop on another one to St Mawes across the wide estuary. St Mawes is a sunny, sheltered and laidback holiday village, as charming as the Cornish postcards you can buy in the cafes. We have a pleasant day mucking about on ferries and all for a very reasonable cost. The Madron Well Across the Bosullow moorland (near Land's End) are many ancient sites. The Lanyon Quoit tomb, the Ding Dong mine engine house, the Men-an-Tol (a stone with a hole in it through which people crawl - some say to aid fertility). It's a moor landscape often drenched with grey cloud and misty rain, and these objects appear out of the mist like a 3000-year-old sculpture trail.
Further along a narrow road we see a sign saying "Well". The woodland path is muddy and dank, and after a few hundred metres we arrive beside a wishing tree. It is decorated with hundreds of small tokens, ribbons and even little toys ("clouties" in Cornish dialect). Hand-written notes are attached to the tree, asking for help, usually to recover from an illness. A candle's flame flickers at the dark base like a faint fairy.
The Celts believed that spring water was sacred, and these wishing trees were always found close to a holy well. Later, the Christians built a stone chapel over the spring to overcome these pagan beliefs, but obviously with limited success. There is a girl singing in the ruined chapel, but she stops when we arrive.
The whole dark, ancient place feels surprisingly spooky, and other-worldly, as if we'd strayed from our modern time to one in the distant past. But Cornwall is like that. Its past has not vanished, and it's part of the fabric of this very ancient peninsula.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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