Departures: England Plus Paris: Part 5

Gang Aft Aglay

??? Mar ?? (before the trip) California

Back when I was planning this trip, I wanted to see Porthcurno. I knew it was too far West for train service. I knew that Penzance and Porthcurno were on the Cornish coast. I knew that the Cornish coast was famously beautiful. So I thought I'd rent a bicycle.

I knew that Piaw had done a Scotland ride, and I thought he might have some useful advice. In fact, he had Ordnance Survey maps of all Britain, which he kindly lent me. At the same time, he encouraged me to turn my entire trip into a bike tour.

I knew I wasn't going to turn this trip into a bike tour. And when I got a close look at Piaw's map of Cornwall, I didn't even want to bike from Penzance to Porthcurno: I wanted to walk.

The map showed a path following the coastline, descriptively called The South West Coast Path. Web research implied that bikes weren't allowed everywhere along the path. (And for the segment that I walked, a bike could not have followed. Unless its rider dared risk falling off a cliff.)

In retrospect, I think it would have been okay to bike the roads, getting off for mini-hikes where the road intersected the coast. But it was a great walk.

Early Morning Penzance

Mon Apr 22 Penzance

Penzance is pretty quiet before anyone is awake. I walked West along the coast. There were tidepools by the Jubilee pool, but I didn't linger.

More Mud

Mon Apr 22 Newlyn

Newlyn, like Penzance, had large tidal variations.

Penzance flowed into Newlyn, another coastal community.

Dead End

Mon Apr 22 Between Newlyn and Mousehole

On the road from Penzance to Mousehole, I saw a stairway leading down to the beach, where there was a cement walkway. That looked more scenic than a sidewalk. And the walkway did lead to some pretty moss-covered rocks. But it dead-ended. As I looked up at the cliff separating me from the road, I thought I saw traces of a stairway that might have led down to the walkway once. Those traces did me no good. I had to backtrack.

Not a Dead End

Mon Apr 22 Mousehole

I took this photo as I ignorantly walked back up the footpath towards the signpost.

I'd passed through Mousehole. I lost track of the path at one point. A nice lady saw me, recognized me as a confused tourist, and pointed me the right way.

I came to a pair of signs. One said "Public Footpath" and pointed at a narrow dirt track. The other said "Coastal Path" and pointed at... well, either at that same dirt track, or else at a road up the hill.

I walked the path for a ways. It became steadily more overgrown. I pushed fuschia branches out of my way for a while, then I got tired of pushing fuschia branches. This couldn't possibly be the right way, could it?

So I walked back to the sign post and walked up the road, and thus wandered far from the coast. Whoops.

Figuring Things Out, Slowly

Mon Apr 22 Between Mousehole and Lamorna

I looked at the Public Footpath sign. It seemed to be pointed the wrong way. I was walking along the road, which seemed pretty natural. But the sign was pointed off at odd angles. It seemed to point me through a field. That didn't look very public. Maybe the sign had been twisted. I tried twisting it back, but it wouldn't budge.

I didn't figure it out then. I didn't walk across that field.

Instead, I continued along the road. I walked in a chasm defined by hedges. A fog rolled over. I looked through hedge-gaps into fields where horses emerged from midst. I heard the "baa"s of concealed sheep.

At a branch in the road in the middle of nowhere, a woman walked towards me, coming in the other direction. She asked me if I was lost. I knew where I was, but didn't know how to get back on the Coast Path. She told me to either head across a field, or to head towards Lamorna and take the first Public Footpath from there. She said Lamorna would be easiest.

That's when I figured out that public footpaths could cross pastures and fields. My American over-active sense of private property had clouded my vision. Here in England, you could walk across someone's field without worrying that the owner would fill you with buckshot.

Towards the Coast Path

Mon Apr 22 Between Lamorna and the coast

Over the hills...

I had a gorgeous walk over a ridge of flowery hills towards the coast.

Past farms to the coast path.

I reached the coast at Lamorna Cove, where artists watched waves breaking on rocks. They painted. I kept walking.

On the South West Coast Path

Mon Apr 22 Between Lamorna Cove and Porthcurno

The terrain was rocky, but nevertheless full of life.

It wasn't always easy to spot the trail. The occasional rock had a yellow arrow painted on it, but these were not always obvious. Would you have spotted the yellow arrow on that rock if I hadn't drawn a red circle on the photo?

The path moved along rocky cliffs and overgrown fields.

I wasn't sure whether this was poison oak. Do they have poison oak in England? I wondered if it started out in England, if some clueless people had brought it over to the Americas because it was mentioned in one of Shakespeare's plays or something.

I wonder how they decided this was a good place for a lighthouse/foghorn?

Somewhere in here, I found out that my water bottle had a leak. In the process of verifying the leak, I lost most of the water out of the bottle. Did I want to drink salt water from the English Channel? No. Did I want to drink from a creek that had run through cow pastures? Definitely not. Did I get pretty thirsty on this walk? Yes, yes I did.

And my shoes weren't comfy. I owned comfy shoes and I owned waterproof shoes. I'd brought my waterproof shoes on this trip, but they weren't comfy for this hike.

Whine, whine, whine. Really, it was wonderful.

The path moved over hills, over a patch of rocky beach, and through more hills.

Achieving Porthcurno

Mon Apr 22 Porthcurno

There was a pyramid by the side of the path, painted white.

On it, there was an explanatory plaque:

THE NATIONAL TRUST

On this spot stood the wooden hut housing the end of the submarine telegraph cable laid from Brest in 1880, by C.S. Faraday, for La Compagnie Francaise du Telegraphie de Paris a New York.

The cable linked England with the American continent via the company's transatlantic cable from Brest, laid in the previous year.

In 1919 the cable end was moved to the Eastern Telegraph Company's hut lower down the cliff near Porthcurno, where it remained in operation until 1962.

The Eastern Telegraph Company formed in 1870, played a key part in communications with India. It operated the cable laid by Brunel's steamship The Great Eastern from Bombay to Suez, and thence via Malta to join with the Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company's cable to Porthcurno.

This plaque was given by Jo Guy, and her brother and sister.

Underwater telegraph cable? Great. I was in the right place.

Years before, I'd read an interesting magazine article about undersea cabling. It described many foreign locales, most of which would be inaccessible to the common tourist: stretches of water, guarded installations, etc. But one place sounded pretty accessible; it even had a museum. So I backburnered a bit of what the article had to say about this place, Porthcurno.

And now I was here, Porthcurno, site of the Museum of Submarine Telegraphy.

Soon I had emerged from the Coast Path out onto a parking lot. Soon I had drunk my weight in water from a restroom sink. I was pretty worn out from walking: wrong turns and and rock-clambering had taken their toll. I tried to gather myself to pay attention. I somewhat succeeded.

Nothing To See Here

Mon Apr 22 Museum of Submarine Telegraphy, Porthcurno

My camera batteries were drained. This was not entirely surprising. You may have noticed that I took many photos on the way to Porthcurno. Trust me, you've only seen a fraction of them.

It was time to swap batteries.

I realized that my other set of batteries was still back at the hotel, in the charger, plugged into the wall.

So I didn't take any photos of the Museum, whose gift shop sold many wonderful things, but not batteries.

Instead of taking photos, I cussed my poor early-morning organizational abilities.

What Was There?

Mon Apr 22 Museum of Submarine Telegraphy, Porthcurno

The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy was full of treasures.

Living treasures:

• a room full of operating telegraph machines
• machines for composing messages
• machines for sending messages
• machines for repeating messages
• machines for error-checking repeated messages
• machines for receiving messages
• machines for putting adhesive onto the back of a printed message-strip so that you can affix it to a normal-size piece of paper
• more importantly: geeks who learned how to operate these machines back in the day, and will operate them and explain them to you
• even more importantly: geeks who volunteer to learn how to operate these machines, and will operate them and explain them to you (but might have to send you to the elder geeks for answers to the weird questions)

Dead treasures:

• an early Marconi triode "valve" as big as my fore-arm.
• a poster illustrating metal hoops by which the Eastern Telegraph company spied on Marconi's wireless experiments
• an exhibit about pigeons in wartime including photos of pigeons with whistles attached to their tails, a semi-mobile pigeon loft, and a photo of a WW1 pigeon with a cute little camera strapped to it.
• an electrical plug encased in a ship's biscuit
• radios from the 1920s
• models of cable-laying ships
• gutta-percha
• maps of world cable routes
• lightning guards that would send strong signals into the ground instead of onto a wire
• lots of old telegraph equipment. sometimes a museum is an X museum, because all they have is X. Sometimes a museum is an X museum because they have all X. This museum had all X.

Getting the Most Out Of Porthcurno

Mon Apr 22 Porthcurno

At the Porthcurno bus stop, I learned that it would be a while before the next bus came. So I wandered around.

I visited the Minack Theater, which was an outdoor theater built onto the side of the cliffs. As such, it was very steep. It was not wildly exciting. There was a museum about the theater's history, which might have been of interest to people who cared about the theater's history despite its lack of interesting anecdotes.

I walked down to the beach and nosed around some cement shacks which may or may not have had to do with various cables.

I waited for the bus.

Right of Way By Virtue of Superior Mass

Mon Apr 22 From Porthcurno to Penzance

It was a scary bus ride, but not scary for me. I was inside a massive double-decker bus.

Legally, the bus was traversing two-way roads. How did legislators decide that they were two-way roads? These roads were not wide enough for two cars to go past each other in opposite directions.

I think that these were two-way roads because they were the only roads to/from various places. Width-wise, they should have been one-way roads. But then certain communities would have become "sources" and "sinks" as we say in graph theory. That is, some communities would become junkyards, because vehicles would be allowed to travel to them, but one-way roads would prevent those vehicles from leaving. And other places would be isolated, as one-way roads prevented any vehicles from getting there in the first place.

That would be bad.

And so, these roads were legally two-way. The bus barreled along. Whenever a car saw us coming towards it, it would pull over into the hedges to avoid being squished.

As I write this, I recently had a conversation with someone planning on seeing Ireland. She was wondering if she'd be up for driving there. She had heard that the roads were narrow. I said that if the roads were anything like Cornwall's, then her best bet would be to rent a bus.

You Couldn't Improve on a Day Like That So Don't Even Try

Mon Apr 22 Back in Penzance

I wiped the worst of the mud off of my shoes.

Brown's was closed, because it was after 5pm.

Dandelions was closed for no good reason and would be closing forever in three days.

I didn't want to eat at Ganges for a second night in a row.

So I ate at the Turk's Head, a pub. It was good pub food, by which I mean it was pretty awful if it turns out that you hate pub food.

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