Day 69: Ilfracombe to St.Just via Clovelly and Tintagel

It’s sadly noticeable that where the roads are now getting very busy, there is a lot of road kill. I saw very little throughout my travels around the coast until this last week and particularly since leaving West Wales. Lots of badgers killed for some reason. This also means I have spotted more birds of prey than I have ever seen before too.

It’s 9.05am on a July morning and unbelievably I left Ilfracombe in fog! It’s quite eerie to see the stalks of wind turbines in the fields and not to be able to see the tops turning.

Gradually the sun burnt off the mist and I could see the flowers in the hedges and the views of North Devon in front of me.

Soon the narrow single track lanes ran out and became something pretentiously called ‘The Atlantic Highway.’ What does that conjure up for you? Wide palm tree lined, four lane roads in America?

This is nothing like it.

It may run parallel to the Atlantic, but far enough away that you cannot see the sea at all.

As a simple A-road in North Devon (A39) it is hardly a highway by any stretch of the imagination except that it does go quite high up in parts. It is certainly not straight either, but full of curves, bends and hidden dips, however on the bright side, it seems fast. There are no traffic lights to contend with and only a few roundabouts to slow the traffic down. The coastal towns are well marked off to the right and villages with wonderfully improbable sounding names off to the left.

I was heading for Clovelly a place my mother loved. On the way I came to a roundabout just outside Barnstable with the most hideous slate slab installation on it. What on earth were they thinking? Surely Barnstable was not trying to fool the American Outlander fans by pretending that this stone circle on their roundabout  was THE stone circle?

Clovelly is a small village in North Devon that regularly appears in calendars depicting picturesque Britain. It has steep cobbled streets that tumble 400 feet down to the harbour at the bottom of the hill.

Unusually the village is privately owned and has been since the middle of the 13^th century and by just three families in all that time. Every building in the village has been listed as being of architectural interest. 50 of them are directly on the main street.

You cannot take a car into Clovelly. The main road is too narrow, too steep and stepped. There is only one road accessed by land-rover but generally everything going in or out of the village goes via donkey or sledges.

To visit, you park at the top and go through a visitor centre. It costs £7. The visitor centre sadly stocks all the usual kitsch tourist souvenirs that one sees in every large  garden centre anywhere.

Yet, immediately through the centre there are several studios on the left where maker artists work and sell their wares that are not carried by the village centre. How very odd.

This is Ann Jarvis who was once head of the Liberty of London design studio

She has a studio at Clovelly and was running a workshop for people wanting to make a devoree silk scarf from scratch! Her shop stocks fabulous silks and her own prints and designs. www.clovellysilk.com

There was also a pottery and a soap maker.

The village had been knit bombed to raise money for the local air ambulance

And the results were in evidence everywhere.

Her majesty was even sitting in a window before a knitted plate of fish chips and mushy peas.

 

My next port of call was Boscastle in Cornwall.

On August 16^th in 2004 five hours of rain fell on the village swelling the two rivers, Valency and Jordon and flooding the village. The water took cars, the bridge, the visitor centre and the shops. The estimate is that two billion litres of water surged through Boscastle that day. Seven helicopters were deployed to rescue villages caught on their rooves. Today there are very few signs of the flood. The National Trust cafe has a sign pointing to the roof where the highest water mark was, there is a new bridge and a new visitors centre. The shops look as good as new.

My friend Ruth had suggested I go there to visit their very unusual museum - The Museum of Witch craft www.museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk

 

Its not just about witches, it’s also about folk magic, free masonry and magic regalia. I loved it but I wouldn’t take a child to see it. It was also interesting that all the visitors, and there were lots, were all speaking in whispers...it had that sort of effect.

They had quite an interesting ehibition on Halloween.

Tintagel was another place on my itinerary. It’s a village on the coast of North Cornwall which has the ruins of what the World thinks of as King Arthur’s legendary castle.

This is not it. This is an awful looking hotel. It had the vestiges of a turf labyrinth in front of it but it was overgrown and not made a feature and I suspect it will vanish without trace by Christmas.

Tintagel is horrid.  Lots of pay and display car parks, lots of fudge and pasty shops and lots of new age crystal cracking shops. Not that I am judgemental of course. But there were just too many coach parties for the place to feel romantic or atmospheric. There was even a suited crooner with a microphone in the street entertaining the tourists with Sinatra favourites  - “I did it my way.”

There are remains of the castle in the valley run by English Heritage

and a medieval building called The Old Post Office in the high Street managed by National Trust.

Every pasty shop in Cornwall claims to have the best ever or award winning or the World’s most famous. This one had the baker actually making them as you watched so I took a chance and had one of his.

Not cheap but delicious with masses of steak and turnip, carrot and potato.

I started today in the fog and by 4pm the cloud was again coming down and so I drove to St. Just barely able to see anything.

It’s been a long drive today. By Tintagel I have now done 5006 miles and I am tired.

A Welsh friend was a little disappointed and commented that I didn’t spend much time in North Wales but the reality is that I am self funding and those funds are rapidly running out. Also I had set myself the task when I started this trip to scatter my mother’s ashes in the most beautiful places in Britain and to do it in 80 days. Today is day 69.

I need to get a bit of a move on as I go through some of my mother’s favourite places in Cornwall.

And that’s where I start tomorrow.