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We started on Friday after an early lunch from home around 12 . Drive itself should take 5 to 6 hours but due to notorious M25 traffic it was over 7 hours with some breaks till we reach our overnight accomodation at YHA Boswinger where we stayed for 2 nights.
Day 1
Our day started fresh and early after we had our breakfast at YHA .We walked down to Hemmick beach which was completely destered at that time in the morning .Hemmick is a small and attractive sandy beach to the west of Dodman Point. The beach is accessed by a steep road from the small car park. It is relatively little-visited, my daughter spent few hours at the beach collecting pebbles and playing sand castles while I left for a walk along south west coastal path. South west coast path is 630 mile long public footpath . Today I was just planning to tackle a very tiny portion of it , about 8 miles in few hours.
So, I walked toward Portloe. On the way there are few interesting places and stunning scenery. Porthluney Castle is a private home but is open to the public for a small part of the year out of season. The nearby beach is great but sometimes busy, particularly when the tide comes in reducing its size. Then there was East Portholland beach . Further down from the distance one can see Dodman Point and the much closer rocks jutting out into the ocean are Caragloose Point.
In about 6 mile on the west one can have amazing view to Portloe and you can easily see why this small walled area of land was created. A watchman was stationed up here to spot smuggling activity, which was rife in this tiny harbour. The vantage point here would have given a very clear view of everything that was going on. Great place if you did not know it was there, you drive by it, they have been fixing the road out of Portloe its going to be great. It may be off the beaten track, but its great. There is a village car park .
We had our lunch here at Portloe and then drove to Towan beach. This beach in The Roseland Peninsula is a quiet, south-east facing sand and shingle bay near St Mawes and is just one of the many serene, secluded beaches along the beautiful unspoilt headland. Within an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, this haven at the tip of St Gerrans Bay is dog-friendly year-round, its vast shoreline backed by low grass-covered cliff .
Next we were on the way to the historic St Anthony’s Head Lighthouse at the end of the peninsula. The lighthouse was built by Trinity House in 1835 to guide vessels safely into Falmouth Harbour past the treacherous Manacles reef, but famously was also featured in the children’s TV series Fraggle Rock. From St. Anthony’s head it was a drive back to YHA . On the way we stopped at Waitrose to pick-up some groceries and Cornish pie.
Day 2
Another early start, after having breakfast we checked out from the YHA. Today we planned to take the ferry from Mevagissey to Fowey. Mevagissey has typical picture postcard style, pubs, cafes, galleries and shops cluster around the harbour walls and line the pretty streets of Mevagissey. Around the maze of narrow streets there are plenty of seafood restaurants that the village is renowned for and there is nothing more sublimely Cornish than tucking into some local scallops, crab or mackerel. Named after two Irish saints, St Meva and St Issey, the village dates back to at least the early 14th century and during the 1800s Mevagissey prospered on the back of the abundant source of pilchards caught by the fishermen.
Mevagissey has no beach (apart from a small one accessed by a very steep stairway) so most visitors head over to Porthmellon, just to the south, for a dip. Further afield, the village of Gorran Haven makes for a nice day out with a sheltered beach tucked inside the safety of a harbour wall. Behind Mevagissey, the Lost Gardens of Heligan are a must, especially in the spring when the rhododendrons and azaleas are in full bloom. It is possible to walk up to the gardens from the village, and there’s also a regular bus service. The old port of Pentewan isn’t far away either. From here one can cycle or walk on the Pentewan Trail, an easy going five mile round trip to the unusually named village of London Apprentice and back. The trail runs along the bed of an old narrow gauge railway which once took clay and tin ore to the harbour at Pentewan until it silted up and the railway ceased operation in 1916. There is also a sea aquarium which is free to visit .
Mevagissey to Fowey ferry takes about 45 min each way. Fowey is one of the most attractive small town in Cornwall and enjoys a setting and rural surroundings that it would be difficult to equal. For the day visitor, the town offers a museum, aquarium, boat hire and river trips from Town Quay, numerous pubs and eating places, a good selection of shops and galleries, great walks and a sandy beach at Readymoney Cove. In the late summer of 1644, Fowey became the setting for one of the major setbacks suffered by the parliamentarian army during the English Civil War. A force of 6,000 men and 2,000 horse, commanded by the Earl of Essex, fell back on Lostwithiel with the hope of escaping by sea from Fowey. A somewhat larger Royalist force commanded personally by Charles I (and, crucially, supported almost to a man by the Cornish populace) hemmed in the Roundheads from the north and cut off their escape by securing the blockhouse at the harbour entrance by Polruan.
From Ferry dropping point , I walked to St Catherine’s castle . This was a strategically important headland on the River Fowey, used to defend the estuary and harbour for over two thousands years. With terrific views out to sea, the walk passes the remains of the castle built by Henry VIII and modified during the Crimean War and again in the Second World War. It also visits two small and secluded coves before heading up a woodland path past Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Manderley’.
I also took a stroll at the pretty little town full of bustling tourists before heading back to the ferry point. After arriving back at Mevagissey village , we had out lunch wandered around for sometime , visited the aquarium had a Cornish icecream and then started our drive back to home. It was along drive of 7 hours with some stops before we came back.
