Headlines
We Drive to Mount Edgcumbe
We Walk to Kingsand for Lunch
We Walk Back and Find Geocaches
We Drive Towards Home, Looking for Dinner
So This is Bodmin Moor!
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Stream of Consciousness
We Drive to Mount Edgcumbe
Our destination for today is Mount Edgcumbe. Park and house and gardens. And a six mile walk. A "moderate" rather than a "hard" walk.
The GPS loves to take us along narrow country lanes. I think it's set to "minimum distance"; if it were "minimum time" I would expect to follow a few major -- faster -- roads. Or... perhaps there are no major faster roads near Polperro!
The day is full of one lane roads, two metre hedges on either side, no room to pass. Occasional passing spaces, I just hope a passing space is near if a car approaches.
In between, there are vistas of Cornwall... So Deb tells me. I see some nice scenery. Mostly I see -- carefully watch! -- the road.
Edgcumbe is a mansion in 800 acres of park and farm. The front of the house faces down a grassed slope, tree lined, giving a view across Plymouth Harbour to Plymouth. Beautiful !
There are formal gardens, tended woods, fields with sheep and deer. There's an "Orangery" -- whatever that is. It's now a spectacular restaurant. The size of a massive barn but painted, decorated, pretty, on the inside and out. We park near the stables, which are ... huge. Now being used for conferences, artists studios, cafe... and lots more. Probably with room to spare.
Our walk takes us past the Greek temple. Up on the hill is the Folly, deliberately built to look like a ruined church. We pass small shelters where people could sit and admire the view. And, probably, be served tea and scones by servants :-)
We Walk to Kingsand for Lunch
I'm worried... We start walking at eleven o'clock. We have nothing to eat. It'll be three or four o'clock when we get back. Can we last the distance?! Not to worry...
We're following a walk round the park. On the edge of Plymouth Sound (is that what it is?). Just past half way is Kingsand, a "fishing and smuggling village", we read. A good place for lunch. We eat at the Devonport Inn on The Cleave. (The village also has streets called Higher Row and Lower Row.) Ploughman's lunch, cheese sandwich, all good.
Then we continue walking the loop.
We Walk Back and Find Geocaches
Luckily Deb can follow the walk instructions! I can point in the direction of our parked car. Deb can follow directions to get us there.
We start up a steep hill, past the village allotments. We wonder how you get rights to an allotment garden... We need one at home -- or, at least, a garden area which is not in semi-permanent shade due to surrounding houses.
The walk back is completely different to the walk out. We are crossing the headland, away from the coast. (The first half followed the South West Coastal Path for most of the way.) We follow lanes, and walk through fields.
There's a church, Maker Church, I think. Maker seems to be the district name. It's an interesting building. I glance at the GPS -- which we carry, for tracking where we've been -- and see that we are almost on top of a geocache!
Back at the start of this walk we had looked for a cache in the stables. There was a meaningless "hint" and no sign of the cache. I swore off caches: why spoil our day just because cache hiders don't understand the meaning of "hint"?!
This cache is at the correct spot -- and findable. It's hidden inside a large snail shell! Very clever :-)
After that, we find a couple more caches near our walk. A very successful day :-)
Towards the end of our walk -- after some great views at water level across to Plymouth -- we see the possibility of a short cut back to the car. We had parked a kilometre away from the place suggested in the walk book. By crossing a field and a fence, we can save some distance. By this stage -- we are tired enough to cut corners.
We cross the field. It's thick with grass, rough underfoot. What happened, we say, to paddocks with thin grass and smooth sand?! We have to follow the fence a while to get to a gate. The gate is locked, we climb over. Then walk up a busy road. Cross back towards the carpark. And we're finished...
Just over twelve kilometres. Enough! We have coffee and cake in the cafe in the stables. Walk to the mansion to look at the formal gardens. From outside. They are part of the "house and garden" tour which finishes in twenty minutes. We don't want to pay for a rushed tour.
Almost five o'clock. We drive for home.
We Drive Towards Home, Looking for Dinner
I have no idea where we went... There were narrow roads -- and a stretch of motorway. We passed lots of villages and a couple of towns. Just cruising, looking for a place to get dinner. I hope that I'll find out where we went, when I get home and look at the GPS trace!
More narrow roads. More little villages. At 5:30 we start looking for dinner. The Jubilee Inn doesn't cook till six. The Stag Inn doesn't cook at all -- but I'm directed to another inn. On Bodmin Moor -- which is a lot closer than I believed!
Every so often, on several of our drives, Deb has pointed to a broad bare hill and said, I wonder if that's Bodmin Moor? I say, No it's further away than that. Well, I was wrong. That broad, bare hill is, indeed, the moor. Like everthing else in Cornwall -- Bodmin Moor is close by... It just takes a lot of twisty, turny driving to get there !
The village of Minions is, Deb reads, the highest village in Cornwall. Deb wonders which name came first, this village or the Hollywood movie. This Minions is on Bodmin Moor. We eat at the Cheese Wring Hotel. As cheese wring is some sort of naturally balancing rock, found on the moor. Dinner is good and solid, more carbohydrate than we can eat. Just what I wanted! We skip dessert.
So This is Bodmin Moor!
Bodmin Moor is distinctly different. Flatter than the rest of Cornwall. Relatively bare of trees. Containing -- as I read yesterday -- five different types of granite. Plus stone circles and other ancient stone objects.
We stop at a pair of standing stone... stones... standing by the road. Walled off to protect them and identified with signs. The stones were placed in 900 AD. Wow! So old!
More twisting and turning along narrow lanes. Down Talland Hill. Parking takes even more attempts than usual.
There may have been more... I may add something later... It's been a tiring day!
A bit of a worry, since next week we have to walk... seven days in a row. Oh well. That's next week :-)
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Dr Nick Lethbridge / Agamedes Consulting
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"The greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing." — William Arthur Ward.
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