Cornwall and Devon Diaries Pt I - Penzance and Mousehole
Seawall gardens and cream teas
It’s been two summers since I actually took this trip to Cornwall. But, it was good stuff, and I wanted to remember some of it by writing it down. This’ll be choppy and boring to anyone but me. Nothing really happened until the hike where I almost died three times.
I was going to London for a week, and knew that I wanted to take the train to somewhere else in the UK beforehand. When I looked on the map, it seemed like the Southwest of England looked kind of abandoned. Scotland? obviously everyone wants to go there. The Southeast? That’s where Brighton and all the “sunny” beaches are.
It turns out Cornwall is a huge vacation destination in the UK, who knew?? It was pretty easy to get to. Just stepping on a train after landing in London. Five hours of slipping by coastlines to reach the end of the line, Penzance.
One of my AirBnb hosts picked me up from the Penzance station in his tiny car. I would soon find out why the cars were so tiny. Having not talked to anyone since arriving, I found myself once again jarred by the language barrier of UK, which is super real. Half of the conversation was us asking each other to repeat ourselves.
As he drove the very narrow, stone-walled streets of Penzance, he told me his story. From what I pieced together despite the language barrier, he ran a pub for decades in the town, that the fishers would all pour into after coming in from weeks at sea. The fishers would get super drunk and get into lots of fights. He drove me by the docks to point out where the boats would come in. Apparently these days, there was much less fishing, and more tourism.
I had a little room upstairs. They’d put an electric tea kettle in the room along with tea bags and boxed milk. Their house looked out on Mount’s Bay, just across the road. The road divides the last houses from the bay, but before the bay there are people’s gardens, right on the water.
This road is part of the Southwest Coast Path, a marked path that goes around the entire peninsula, if you see that arm sticking out on the left-hand side of the UK.
I ended up walking down that road to Mousehole (pronounced Mow-zul). Mousehole was also a former fishing village. I got a breakfast looking on their cute harbor. Everything about the town was as cute as its freaking name.
At this point, I’d heard a mention of “cream teas” a lot from internet research about Cornwall. I decided I didn’t need to look up what a “cream tea” meant, as it’s obviously a tea with a special cream in a special Cornwall preparation. So, I ordered a tea with cream at this breakfast place. They made sure I meant cream and not milk. I thought it was odd that they were trying to steer me away from their famous cream teas. Maybe they didn’t think I was legit enough to have a cream tea? Salty about tourism taking over the fishing perhaps.
I took the bus back, and multiple times the driver came within millimeters of a stone wall. Everyone was an absolute precision driver.
