Introduction
This is the second half of the photos from a holiday in Cornwall in summer 2017. (I posted the first half previously.)
Wednesday
We took a rather long train and bus ride to a tiny place on the south coast called Porthcurno, which somehow manages to have two visitor attractions. See if you can guess which was chosen by each of us!
The first is a telegraph museum; many submarine cables used to arrive here (some still do), and they’ve turned the old telegraph operator training school into a museum. The museum was really interesting, although we did slightly run out of time towards the end. The last part of it is some tunnels that were built during the war, when the government realised most of their communications came through one place in Cornwall and it might help to have some of the equipment a little bit less bombable.
The rainy weather cleared up and we moved onto the second attraction - the Minack Theatre, an outdoor theatre cut into the cliff edge by a crazy rich woman. That week’s show looked poor, so rather than actually seeing it, we had decided just to visit the place during the daytime. And to be fair, it is impressive.
Thursday
We took the bus to Penzance and walked to St Michael’s Mount.
At low tide you can walk out to it across a causeway.
The castle-like building on the top of the Mount is rather disappointing; it used to be an abbey but was then turned into a not particularly interesting stately home (which we had to queue a long time to get in). However, you do get nice views.
Near the exit there’s a corridor which looks like it should be a scene from a Resident Evil video game.
We also visited the gardens, which were really quite nice.
We crossed the causeway and managed barely to find a tea shop that was still open in Marazion - the Copper Spoon. The staff were exceedingly nice and the cake delicious. Fortified by that, we walked back most of the way into Penzance; we picked up the bus by a supermarket on the outskirts.
We got back to St Ives before dark.
Friday
The forecast on Friday was for rain all day and the actual weather did not disappoint. We started with a visit to the Tate St Ives, where the art was frankly dull; much less interesting than the rather random exhibition we’d seen at Milton Keynes Gallery, for free, a few weeks before.
We hadn’t been planning this but as an afterthought, because they sold combined tickets, we also paid to see the Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden. It’s a good thing we did because that was infinitely better. Definitely worth a visit; the rain might even have improved it. R was only disappointed that they didn’t have a sign with the name of the resident cat.
After that we took a short walk, through weather that was still not entirely delightful, to see the rocks beside one of the beaches at Carrick Du.
I clambered over the rocks a bit while R waited in a rain shelter.
Saturday
Given the long journey, we basically just had to get the train back. We were sad to go; it was a really nice holiday.
