Letter from St Austell

6 June 2013

Jones is making our usual salad supper here in our little rented studio apartment. I am doing the obvious. Outside the birds are singing their sunset songs. Tomorrow we return to London and on Sunday it’s home.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since we left the Thomson Spirit in Newcastle last Sunday. From there we flew to London and took the Heathrow Connect train to Ealing Broadway where Llewellyn and Lucia met us.

Let me skip over their gracious hospitality and pick up the story at Paddington Station on Tuesday morning. It’s four hours by train from there to St Austell, a sleepy Cornwall town where the main activity appears to be making babies. Everywhere we looked, young women were pushing buggies. We had chosen the town as a base for visits to the nearby Eden Project and the Gardens of Heligan.

The Google map that I’d printed off, showing our route from St Austell station to our studio apartment seemed to bear little relation to the town’s road system. Still, we made it with just a few questions to passers-by, as we puzzled our way along, wheeling my suitcase along the pavements. The studio is situated conveniently close to the local pub and supermarket. We have found it as well equipped as the (absent) owners promised but tiny. I can barely squeeze into the minute shower-room.


Tuesday afternoon we jumped on to a bus to take us the few miles to Charlestown, the adjacent village that once served St Austell as a port. These days its small harbour offers a choppy sanctuary to a few fishing boats and provides a murky swimming pool for the local kids.

The village’s main claim to fame is as a marine heritage centre. We decided not to visit the centre, preferring to inspect the sailing ships at anchor, their crew high in the rigging adjusting the furled sails.


Wednesday we took another bus, this time to the Eden Project. In fact we took a dozen buses during our stay. Once I’d downloaded the local timetable from the internet, we were able to plan our comings and goings precisely.


The Eden Project, sited in an old quarry, turned out to be as extraordinary as its pictures had led us to expect. It’s dominated by the two vast biomes that sit either side of a low-rise restaurant and services building. Just to trace our way through the bigger Rainforest biome took us the better part of an hour.


At one point in the extensive gardens, I lost contact with Barbara and it took us a long half-hour to find each other. (For some reason, her phone had lost its signal.) As fascinating and educational as the whole project is, it is very busy and noisy. There are lots of kids and young mums pushing buggies.


At the same time, there has been a worrying fall-off in the number of visitors over the past year. A member of staff said they used to get some 15,000 a day. The numbers have fallen; she didn’t say by how much. Dozens of the several hundred staff have been made redundant.

On Wednesday evening we walked the few hundred metres into town to see The Great Gatsby at the cinema. We thought it very well done. Impressively, the relatively young audience hardly issued a peep during the show.

Thursday morning we headed to the Lost Gardens of Heligan, so called because the former gardens and extensive estate were abandoned and totally overgrown for most of the 20th century. It’s been a huge task to restore them to something like their former glory, using old maps, plans and aerial surveys to trace the original layout.

We loved Heligan. Unlike Eden, it is filled with birdsong rather than the bustle of crowds and yells of children. It takes a brisk hour to follow the restored perimeter path around the estate, past exotic sculptures and ancient ponds.

At least another hour is required to tour the orchards, flower gardens and vegetable gardens, enclosed by high brick walls. Everywhere, green-clad gardeners are hard at work.

Numerous signs warn older or handicapped visitors of potential hazards ahead, however minor, a sign of the times I guess. But there’s space enough to lose yourself in the woods and we did, coming away with uplifted souls, as well as a few nick-knacks from the gift store.

SQUEEZING THROUGH
The lunchtime bus ran us a few miles into the little holiday town of Mevagissey, from where we planned to take a small ferry across the bay to Fowey. The bus somehow squeezes its way down the narrow winding street to the seafront with barely six inches to spare on either side. I exaggerate not. Pedestrians have to find a doorway to take shelter.

Mevagissey has a sizeable working harbour, encircled with long piers.

The inevitable gulls were sunning themselves while keeping a sharp eye out for a meal.


There was a high swell running and we watched in mild alarm as the approaching ferry bobbed and ducked through the water in showers of spray.

With some hesitation, we decided to go for it, joining half a dozen other passengers in the rear of the boat. What a ride! There was no wind to speak of but the swell had us corkscrewing around as if in a crazy fairground ride, with the skipper gunning and idling the engine by turns.

Spray came whipping over the gunwales until the crewman helpfully lowered the plastic blind.


My little Jones clung on for dear life, fearful of joining Davy Jones in his locker, and she wasn’t the only one. It took a long 50 minutes rather than the scheduled 35 to plough our way across to the calmer waters of Fowey harbour, where we alighted with a mixed sense of relief and achievement.

Fowey is an upmarket holiday and sailing town, its narrow streets choc-a-bloc with antique shoppes, Cornish tea shops, pubs and everything else for the visitor. It’s very pretty and clearly an expensive place to settle. Its history is laid bare in the small museum – entry £1 please.

A tiny tearoom, clearly part of the owner’s house, served us a fine Cornish cream tea; and the bus – we’d come to recognise the drivers – took us the 50 minutes back to St Austell. Our holiday is virtually done. The weather has done us proud. Our thoughts turn to home.