Cape Cornwall, St Ives and The Lizard

To quote the Telegraph newspaper "It’s the light. That’s what always strikes visitors who come to St Ives. Jutting out from the coastline, the town, which is surrounded by beaches, is bathed in a soft, romantic glow that makes everything look like Instagram-perfection: no filter necessary.

This is the reason why many prominent artists were drawn here and have left behind a rich heritage. As the sculptor Barbara Hepworth said of her adopted home: “The horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour… reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour, which so excites one’s sense of form.”

And it was one of our destination for this Blog. But before we get there, a visit to the beautiful Cape Cornwall.

Cape Cornwall 

Cape Cornwall is a small headland in West Cornwall, UK. It is four miles north of Land's End near the town of St Just. A cape is the point of land where two bodies of water meet. Until the first Ordnance Survey, 200 years ago, Cape Cornwall was believed to be the most westerly point in Cornwall.

Most of the headland is owned by the National Trust. National Coastwatch has a look-out on the seaward side. The two offshore rocks in the distance are called The Brisons.

And so onto St Ives - The tide is definitely out!

St Ives - view of one of the beautiful beaches from the headland.

The Tate - St Ives. 

St Ives, as a small Cornish town on the southwest coast of England, perhaps seems an unlikely site for a major art gallery. However, its artistic connections date back to Victorian times when numerous artists came to St Ives to paint, attracted by its special quality of light. Artists associated with the town include Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Alfred Wallis and Mark Rothko.

Tate had formed a close link with St Ives when it took over the management of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1980. By the middle of the decade it was decided a gallery should be built there to show works by artists who had lived or worked in St Ives, loaned from the collection.

In 1988, a building was chosen on the site of a former gasworks overlooking Porthmeor Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. The architects Eldred Evans and David Shalev were selected for designs that echoed the shapes of the former gasworks, including the rotunda that forms the heart of the gallery.

Building work began in 1991, funded by donations from the local community, the Henry Moore Foundation and the European Regional Development Fund. The Tate Gallery, St Ives opened in June 1993 and in just six months welcomed over 120,000 visitors – 50,000 more than the original target for the entire year. Since then, the gallery has been an outstanding success with an average of 240,000 visitors per year.

As a result of the large number of visitors at the gallery, it was decided to refurbish and extend Tate St Ives. The making of the new Tate St Ives completed in summer 2017.

The Lizard

The Lizard Lifeboat Station can refer to several Royal National Lifeboat Institution lifeboat stations located on The Lizard in Cornwall, United Kingdom. The first was established at the southernmost point of the peninsula in 1859. Since then successive stations have all been in operation at different locations on The Lizard. The current station is located at Kilcobben Cove 0.5 mi (0.80 km) east of the village of Lizard.

The lifeboat stations have all covered the westerly approaches to the English Channel; with up to 400 ships-a-day, it is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The lifeboat service has saved many lives over the past 150 years.

St Wynwallow Church, Landewednack

St Wynwallow's Church, Landewednack, is the parish church of Landewednack parish in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. It is the most southerly church in mainland Britain and is situated approximately ten miles (16 km) south of Helston. It was founded about 600 AD but the present structure dates to the twelfth century.

The church is dedicated to St Winwaloe and is Church of England. St Winwaloe was the third son of a Cornish couple who moved to Brittany. There he founded the monastery of Landévennec. There is no evidence that he visited Cornwall, and the church may have been founded by one of the monks from Landévennec, or perhaps by St Winwaloe elder brother, Wennoc. Nothing remains of the original building.

The oldest part of the current church building is the twelfth century Norman doorway. The substantial tower is constructed of blocks of granite and serpentine giving it a checkerboard appearance. Other notable features are the serpentine pulpit and the font, which dates to the fifteenth century.

The church was restored in the thirteenth century when the porch was added and in the fifteenth century when a new window was inserted into the tower. It is now a Grade I listed building. The last Cornish language sermon was preached here in 1674, though this claim has also been made for the churches of Towednack and Ludgvan.

Just a few images of the beautiful bays and coves all around this lovely county.

Patterns formed by shells in between the rocks

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Porthleven and the Minack Theatre

This was a holiday which revived memories of earlier times visiting the family in the area. Of note, I think this time, was our visit to the famous Minack Theatre, and Porthleven with all its memories. But of course, Cornwall is a lovely county anyway!

The beach at Porthleven. I don`t remember too much of our previous visits, but perhaps we didn't explore as much then?

At the end of the Porthleven harbour stands the BICKFORD-SMITH SCIENTIFIC & LITERARY INSTITUTE. It was opened on December 17th 1884 as a generous gift to Porthleven from Mr Bickford-Smith of Trevarno, a former Member of Parliament for the old Truro-Helston Division. 

It`s most prominent feature is the clock tower which is 70 feet high. Inside, the Reading-Room is 40 feet by 20 feet and was originally fitted with pitch pine `da-doing` and warmed by two stoves. I was so sure it was a church! 

Another view of BICKFORD-SMITH SCIENTIFIC & LITERARY INSTITUTE

The Egyptian House, Chapel Street, Penzance, Cornwall. the Egyptian House (Nos 6-7). It's perhaps one of Cornwall's most flamboyant examples of architecture with its ornate facade of lotus columns and stylized cornices. Set in amongst the Egyptian styling and sphinx like adornments is the royal coat of arms of George III/William IV maybe just to remind us we are still firmly in the British Empire.

The building dates back to 1835 and it is thought that the architect was a John Foulston from Plymouth who is credited for the design of the similar Classical and Mathematical School in Devonport, Devon. It has been said that the facade was an exact copy of a museum in Piccadilly, London built in 1812 which was inspired by the Temple of Hathor at Dendera in Egypt. This is not strictly true although it is likely the museum served as the main source of inspiration.

The original owner of the Egyptian house was John Lavin, a mineralogist from Penzance. He lived here for some time and housed his extensive mineral collection in the shop downstairs. This collection was eventually sold by Lavin's son and was later donated to the Oxford University Museum. 

The building had fallen into some disrepair by the end of the 1960s but was restored to it's original splendour in 1973 after several years work. Today the upstairs is available to rent as self-catering accommodation whilst downstairs is a shop. 

So onto the Minack Theatre of which we had heard so much.

The Minack Theatre (Cornish: Gwaryjy Minack) is an open-air theatre, constructed above a gully with a rocky granite outcrop jutting into the sea (minack from Cornish meynek means a stony or rocky place). It is at Porthcurno, 4 miles (6.4 km) from Land's End and has appeared in a listing of the world's most spectacular theatres.

The theatre was the brainchild of Rowena Cade, who moved to Cornwall after the First World War and built a house for herself and her mother on land at Minack Point for £100. Her sister was the feminist dystopian author Katharine Burdekin and her partner lived with them from the 1920s.

In 1929, a local village group of players had staged Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in a nearby meadow at Crean, repeating the production the next year. They decided that their next production would be The Tempest and Miss Cade offered the garden of her house as a suitable location, as it was beside the sea. Miss Cade and her gardener, Billy Rawlings, made a terrace and rough seating, hauling materials down from the house or up via the winding path from the beach below. In 1932, The Tempest was performed with the sea as a dramatic backdrop, to great success. Miss Cade resolved to improve the theatre, working over the course of the winter months each year throughout her life (with the help of Billy Rawlings and Charles Angove) so that others might perform each summer.

In 1944, the theatre was used as a location for the Gainsborough Studios film Love Story, starring Stewart Granger and Margaret Lockwood but inclement weather forced them to retreat to a studio mock-up. In 1955, the first dressing rooms were built. In the 1970s, the theatre was managed by Lawrence Shove. Since 1976 the theatre has been registered as a Charitable Trust and is now run by a local management team. Rowena Cade died on 26 March 1983, at the age of 89.

Minack theatre currently is used from Easter to September for a full summer season of 20 plays, produced by companies from all over the UK and visiting companies from the US. The theatre is open for visitors throughout the rest of the year. The 75th anniversary of Minack was celebrated with a production of The Tempest in August 2007, directed by Simon Taylor and performed by the Winchester College Players.

Porthcurno Bay.

Rowena Cade was born in 1893 in Derbyshire. The Cades moved to Cheltenham when Rowena’s father retired in 1906. After the First World War, Rowena’s widowed mother sold their home in Cheltenham and rented a house at Lamorna. Rowena discovered the Minack headland which she bought for £100 (!!!). She built a house there for herself and her mother using granite from St.Levan. 

Rowena Cade was already thirty eight when she began her ambitious project. Over the next seven years there were many improvements and extensions. Then, with the coming of the Second World War II, it seemed as though all the back-breaking work might have been wasted. But in 1944 the Minack was chosen as a location for "Love Story" the film starring Stewart Grainger and Margaret Lockwood. 

Over the years, Rowena Cade had developed techniques for working with cement. Using the tip of a screwdriver she decorated surfaces with lettering and Celtic designs before they hardened. She fetched the sand from Porthcurno beach and carried huge beams from the shoreline up to the theatre. Even though she looked frail, Rowena Cade continued working on her theatre in all sorts of weather each winter until she was in her mid-eighties. When she died, just before her ninetieth birthday, she left sketches suggesting how the theatre might be covered on rainy days. 

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Norwich - County town of Norfolk

A city since 1094, Norwich is the county town of Norfolk and unofficially seen as East Anglia's capital. From the Middle Ages until the Industrial Revolution, Norwich was the largest city in England after London and one of the most important.

The city is the most complete medieval city in the United Kingdom, including cobbled streets such as Elm Hill, Timber Hill and Tombland, ancient buildings such as St Andrew's Hall, half-timbered houses such as Dragon Hall, The Guildhall and Strangers' Hall, the Art Nouveau of the 1899 Royal Arcade, many medieval lanes and the winding River Wensum that flows through the city centre towards Norwich Castle.

The city has two universities, the University of East Anglia and the Norwich University of the Arts, and two cathedrals, Norwich Cathedral and St John the Baptist Cathedral.

Norwich Cathedral is dedicated to the Holy and Undivided Trinity. It is the cathedral church for the Church of England Diocese of Norwich and is one of the Norwich 12 heritage sites.

The cathedral was begun in 1096 and constructed out of flint and mortar and faced with a cream-coloured Caen limestone. An Anglo-Saxon settlement and two churches were demolished to make room for the buildings. The cathedral was completed in 1145 with the Norman tower still seen today topped with a wooden spire covered with lead. Several episodes of damage necessitated rebuilding of the east end and spire but since the final erection of the stone spire in 1480 there have been few fundamental alterations to the fabric.

The cathedral close is one of the largest in England and one of the largest in Europe and has more people living within it than any other close.

Norwich Cathedral has the second largest cloisters in England, only exceeded by those at Salisbury Cathedral. The large cloister has over 1,000 bosses including several hundred carved and ornately painted ones.

Statue of Lord Nelson

Statue of the Duke of Wellington

St Ethelbert’s gate is one of the two main gateways into cathedral close and it was built by the good citizens of Norwich as a penance for their unruly behaviour.

Tombland, from the Old English meaning ‘empty space’, was also the site of a popular annual fair. Medieval fairs could get quite rowdy and the events often led to tensions between the monks of Norwich Priory and the townsfolk.

The story began in 1272 with a growing disagreement between religious men and the citizens of Norwich over rights, duties and boundaries – a number of citizens were even killed by the monks. The monks argued that as men of God they answered to their own justice system and did not abide by city laws. The monks locked the gates to the cathedral; instructing their men to attack anyone who got too close.

Things got even more heated, however, and the help hired by the murderous monks went on a rampage of violence that swept the city. The mob revolted and not only did they burn down the gates but also St Ethelbert’s church and damaged the cathedral and the cloisters during three days of rioting.

Once the rioting had been quelled, King Henry III himself came to Norwich and blamed the citizens for the damage - charging huge fines for repairs and rebuilding.

Even the Pope himself decreed that the entire city of Norwich was to be excommunicated from the church. Which says a lot about the secular justice system at the time and the status of the church. The citizens were ordered to build a new entrance into the monastery area and hence - St Ethelbert’s Gate.

Norwich holds the largest permanent undercover market in Europe. In the background is the Guildhall with its fine chequered flintwork.

One of the lovely cobbled streets.

  

Norwich Castle was founded by William the Conqueror some time between 1066 and 1075. It originally took the form of a motte and bailey. Early in 1067, William the Conqueror embarked on a campaign to subjugate East Anglia, and according to military historian R. Allen Brown it was probably around this time that the castle was founded It was first recorded in 1075, when Ralph de Gael, Earl of Norfolk, rebelled against William the Conqueror and Norwich was held by his men. A siege was undertaken, but ended when the garrison secured promises that they would not be harmed.

The first recorded presence of Jews in Norwich is 1134.  In 1144, the Jews of Norwich were falsely accused of ritual murder after a boy (William of Norwich) was found dead with stab wounds. In February 1190, all the Jews of Norwich were massacred except for a few who found refuge in the castle. At the site of a medieval well, the bones of 17 individuals, including 11 children, were found in 2004 by workers preparing the ground for construction of a Norwich shopping centre. The remains were determined by forensic scientists to be most probably the remains of such murdered Jews, and a DNA expert determined that the victims were all related, so that they most probably came from one Ashkenazi Jewish family.

The Forum is a community building in Norwich, Norfolk in England. It stands opposite the St. Peter Mancroft Church. Built on the site of the previous Norwich Library which burnt down in 1994, the Forum was designed by Michael Hopkins and Partners, and built as a millennium project for the East of England, being finished in October 2001. The Forum is part of Norwich 12, a collection of notable buildings in Norwich spanning the Norman, medieval, Georgian, Victorian and modern eras. It is visited by more than 2.5 million people every year.

The building is home to the Norfolk & Norwich Millennium (NML) library, the local Tourist Information Centre, and the BBC East offices and studios, where the regional television news bulletin BBC Look East and local radio station BBC Radio Norfolk are based. The amphitheatre-like steps at the front have provided a venue for functions such as amateur theatrical performances, outdoor opera, musical competitions, art exhibitions, processions, and celebrations. Because the forum is funded partly by lottery grants, they hold certain events which are free of charge for people to attend. The Forum is commonly used as a meeting place, and the plaza area attracts skateboarders and free runners.

St Peter Mancroft is a parish church in the Church of England, in the centre of Norwich, Norfolk. After the two cathedrals, it is the largest church in Norwich and was built between 1430 and 1455

An update  - In May 2012, Norwich was designated England's first UNESCO City of Literature. One of the UK's most popular tourist destinations, it was voted by The Guardian in 2016 as the "happiest city to work in the UK and in 2013 as one of the best small cities in the world by The Times Good University Guide.  In 2018, Norwich was voted one of the "Best Places To Live" in the UK by The Sunday Times.

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Family holiday in Welcombe Mouth, Devon

Cornwall / Devon is a wonderful part of the UK. Amongst many others of course!. This holiday was to be with Matthew and Vicki plus their gorgeous son Adam. Welcombe was our destination - just inside Devon but right on the border with Cornwall.

Not far along the road from our holiday let was Welcombe Mouth Bay with its lovely waterfall crashing over the edge and running to the sea. Very picturesque! We had some lovely walks just from here.

Looking up the beach to the waterfall.

A good example of the rock strata further along the beach.

Another lovely spot not far away - Hartland Point .....

... this had a bigger waterfall called Wayefalls, and (below) a nearby camping spot - stunning!

If you are in this part of the world, you have to visit Clovelly. It has a harbour and is a tourist attraction notable for its steep pedestrianised cobbled main street, donkeys and views over the Bristol Channel. At the 2011 census, the parish population was 443, which was 50 fewer than ten years previously, according to Wikipedia.

Why would you leave your boat here? 

A storm appeared to be brewing as we walked along the side of the harbour. 

From the end of the sea wall, looking back to the steep incline which characterises this gorgeous village. 

He might have had difficulty walking, but he was going to get his picture. 

Looking back down the hill of Clovelly as we trudged back to the car. 

One of the last places we visited, on the Friday, was the beautiful coastline of Morwenstow.

The eccentric, and reputedly opium-smoking, Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker (or Parson Hawker as he was known to his parishioners) lived here in the mid 1800s. Besides his normal clerical duties, he is renowned for having penned various stirring hymns and for keeping a watchful eye over ships travelling through these dangerous waters from the wooden hut he fashioned from driftwood. Hawker's Hut still perches precariously at the edge of one of the tallest cliffs in the area and is now owned by the National Trust - it is in fact their smallest property. Many a drowned sailor lies in an unmarked grave here, having been dragged up from the shore and given a Christian burial. 

In September 1842 the Caledonia was homeward bound from Odessa, and called in at Falmouth to bury a crewman who had died of wounds suffered during a knife fight in Constantinople. The Caledonia then sailed for Gloucester to unload her cargo of wheat.

As she departed Falmouth a north-westerly gale was raging. At about 1 am on the morning of 8 September the ship's lookout saw waves breaking to leeward on Sharpnose Point, near Morwenstow, Cornwall.

Her captain, Stevenson Peter, shortened sail and tried to stand clear of the shore, but the ship refused to come up and soon hit the rocks at Sharpnose Point. As they hit, the captain ordered the crew to climb into the rigging, but the mast collapsed, throwing them into the sea where they all died. The sole survivor was Edward Le Dain from Jersey who managed to get ashore where a farmer discovered him at dawn. He was taken to the local Rectory where the Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker ensured that he was cared for and nursed back to health. 

The bodies of the other crewmen eventually washed up on the beach and were buried in Morwenstow Churchyard. For some 162 years the white, carved pitch-pine figurehead of the brig was preserved in the churchyard as the headstone of the ship's captain and crew. During that time it was subjected to occasional minor repairs and countless layers of white paint. In 2004 it was found that the passage of time and the often harsh Atlantic weather had taken their toll, so it was removed for a prolonged drying out process, followed by scientific paint analysis and a major restoration. To fund this work, an appeal called The Caledonia Conservation Fund was launched by Morwenstow Parochial Church Council. The decision was made to mount the restored figurehead within the Church, and to create a more weather-resilient replica as the grave marker for the shipwrecked sailors. A service of dedication for the newly installed figurehead and grave marker was held at Morwenstow Parish Church on Sunday, 7 September 2008—the 166th anniversary of the tragedy. It was preceded by a brief act of commemoration held at the top cliff overlooking the shipwreck site, with a piper leading the way across the fields to the Church. The large congregation included nine descendants of Edward Le Dain (the lone survivor), two descendants of seaman Alexander Kent (one of the victims), several Hawker descendants, enthusiasts and scholars, and many local people and holidaymakers. 

The original figurehead from the `Caledonia` is now on the wall in the church

Morwenstow church where Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker kept watch over his `flock`.

On the cliff face just below this spot is Hawker's hut where `Parson Hawker` kept a watchful eye over ships travelling through these dangerous waters

It was a bit misty when we arrived along the coast by Morwenstow. It is a beautiful coastline to walk along or to just stand and stare. 

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