Paddles Around Britain

First, imagine travelling through the town that time forgot. It didn’t forget it during the time of the dinosaurs though. Nor even during the Middle Ages or Victorian times. It forgot it in the 70s when, Ian and Julia suspect, most of the current residents were in their 70s themselves.

(This might not be true. It’s just how it looks.)

Then you reach a car park which is quite a way from the beach. That’s okay when it’s a nice walk. It’s not okay when the walk is through a building site. It’s even less okay when, at the end of the walk through a building site, you reach what is basically a building site on a beach.

The bay is beautiful but utterly spoilt by the development and Ian and Julia weren’t at all optimistic that it would be much better once the development is finished. It’s too much. A great shame.

See the photos here.

See Carlyon Bay on a map.

It turns out St Austell isn’t on the coast and therefore doesn’t have a beach. It also has a confusing road system. So our journey to what finally turned out to be Porthpean was a little convoluted and probably didn’t put Ian and Julia the best frame of mind to appreciate this little beach on the “Cornish Riviera”. Ian and Julia have never been to the actual Riviera but they can safely say that, when they do, if it’s like this they shall be very disappointed. Porthpean beach isn’t horrible but there isn’t all that much to recommend it.

See the photos here.

See Porthpean on a map.

Watergate Bay is a lovely big beach in North Cornwall. Apparently it’s famous! Ian and Julia didn’t know that though. If we had known, we might have pretended we didn’t like it, just to be different. But we didn’t know and we did like it, a lot. Firstly, you can buy bacon butties there, from the great Venus Cafe. The bacon is lovely although there wasn’t quite enough of it. Can there ever be enough? Ian thinks not. Secondly, the beach was big but simultaneously snug and the sea and surf was beautiful.

Thirdly, ice-cream! Bacon, sea and ice-cream! Crumbs. Ian had a lovely honeycomb one.

See the photos here.

See Watergate Bay on a map.

Porth means port in Cornish, hence its near universal appearance in place names around here. This Porth may have been a port once but is now mostly a caravan site within sight of Newquay. There’s a nice enough beach, some new apartments, a pub and a tapas bar too. You’ll need to take a picnic and some overnight things if you plan on going to the sea when the tide’s out as it’s a quite a trek.

See the photos here.

See Porth on a map.

In what is quite probably every paddler’s dream, Ian and Julia stayed in a beach hut at Tolcarne Beach, on the edge of Newquay. The accommodation was basic but when you’ve got the beach quite literally on your doorstep what do you really need? Somewhere to sleep and somewhere to sit, that’s all! (Also somewhere to have a wee, it’s true, and fortunately you didn’t have to go far for that.)

Tolcarne beach is pretty and the waves are incredible, roaring as the narrowing bay squeezes them together. The weather during our stay was incredible (for Britain during a school holiday) and the beach was quite busy, but in a nice way. And when you stay in a beach hut, you get to see the day-cycle of the beach. You wake up and it’s just you and the sand and the water and the sun. Then some keen people arrive to grab their spots for the day and the beach gradually fills up. You do, if you’re that way inclined (and Ian certainly was), get to feel a little smug that you have a special little part of the beach that is (temporarily) your own. Through the day you get to watch how girls line their towels up neatly and boys kind of drop them and then as evening approaches people drift off to have their tea and slowly you get the sand and the water and the setting sun to yourselves again.

Ian and Julia did rather like it.

Ian and Julia didn’t, however, like Newquay itself very much. Quite possibly they are several decades too old to fully appreciate its charms. But no matter how hard a town might try, it can’t undo the beauty of the coast.

See the photos here. (There are lots and they’re great.)

See Newquay on a map.

Mawgan Porth is similar to Porthcothan in that it is a small cove with a deep beach and lovely views. However, whereas Porthcothan seems to be fighting the relentless tide (excuse the pun) of tourism Mawgan Porth has embraced it. The village seems to be mostly: car park, pubs, holiday park. Also, the beach is somehow not quite as pretty as the one at Porthcothan.

See the photos here.

See Mawgan Porth on a map.

Ian and Julia are back with their paddling feet on after a bit of a break, with a trip to Cornwall. First stop, Porthcothan, which is a pretty little bay on the north coast. The beach is very deep (when the tide’s out) with lots of interesting rocks, nooks and crannies. There is lots of space and a lot of exploring opportunities. It’s the kind of place the Famous Five would have had a splendid adventure at. The waves are big and surfy. There is a tiny village with not a lot in the way of tourist facilities, which makes Porthcothan a lovely place.

This was Ian and Julia’s first Atlantic paddle. The Atlantic Ocean is very cold.

Ian had 2 scoops of Kelly’s Cornish ice-cream (butterscotch and honeycomb) and it was very tasty.

See the photos here.

See Porthcothan on a map.

Beer is a very pretty little fishing village (taken over more by tourism now, as usual) on the south Devon coast. Disappointingly the name comes from an old English word for woodland and not from a rather enjoyable beverage but don’t let that stop you visiting. Part of Beer has even been into orbit. In 2007 some of the rocks from the cliffs were taken to the International Space Station and stuck to the outside of it to see how long the bacteria in them would survive. It turns out they lived for 553 days, which is a record.

We’d tried to paddle at Beer during the summer but it’s such a popular spot we couldn’t find anywhere to park. Funnily enough this wasn’t such an issue on a freezing cold December day: New Year’s Eve, in fact. You can see from the photos that we were not blessed with a crisply sunny winter’s day. However we are determined (if a little slow) in our cause and quite literally took our lives not to say our dignity in our hands to paddle here. The slope into the water was very steep and the waves were coming up high with the result that the depth went from toe dipping to drowning in about a metre. We managed but didn’t hang around long before retiring to a nice little cafe for coffee and scones.

See the photos here.

See Beer on a map.

Ilfracombe is apparently North Devon’s ‘premier resort‘. Despite that, it was surprisingly nice there, helped in no small way by a lovely cafe called Dolly’s. The service was completely lovely as was the place itself and the coffee. It’s on the seafront and if you go to Ilfracombe you should go there.

In common with many places we’ve been to on our not-very-speedy paddle around Britain, Ilfracombe was a small fishing town (plus market) until the railway arrived with lots of Victorians. The Victorians being what they were (i.e. Victorian) they decided to make some beaches, the Tunnels Beaches, by hewing away the cliffs. Not sure why.

See the photos here.

See Ilfracombe on a map.

Hele Bay is a tiny little cove near to Ilfracombe; in fact it looks like a suburb of Ilfracombe, separated from it by a hill called Hillsborough. However it turns out it has a long history of its own that has been written up in great detail here. People were first living in caves here almost 40 thousand years ago. In more recent times the area was involved in the traditional North Devon trades of smuggling, lime burning and, in modern times, tourism.

The bay is rocky and pretty, one of those places that you feel only you have discovered (even though you’ve parked in a big car park and are surrounded by holiday homes).

See the photos here.

See Hele Bay on a map.