Walks near St Ives

When Christopher Somerville was in St Ives he indulged in the cream of Cornish walks – a round trip to Zennor.
 

At seven o'clock on a beautiful Cornish morning we gathered in the cool basement kitchen of Penayr house - Jane and I, our son George and his partner, Katy, back from their home in Australia for an English summer holiday, our daughters Elizabeth and Mary, and Elizabeth's friend Pip - to eat George's special scrambled eggs. "Perfect," sighed Jane, looking round the table at her re-assembled family, then out across the harbour of St Ives, already splashed gold with sunshine out of the bluest of skies.

Six of us were due to set out - it was Elizabeth's turn for dinner duty, and with the creation of home-made gnocchi and tomato sauce on her mind she had elected to stay behind. "Slip, slop and slap," said Katy the sun-aware Aussie, looking up at the cloudless sky. We duly slipped on T-shirts, slopped on the sun-screen and slapped on a hat apiece.

Herring gulls are a lot more ruthless with their offspring than humans. As we went down through the narrow streets of the town to the waterfront, we passed this year's hatch sitting disconsolately on the lichen-stained roofs in shabby suits of half-fledged brown, wheezing plaintively in vain hope that their parents might start feeding them once more.

On Porthmeor Beach a line of crumpled sleeping bags yielded a row of crumpled faces - young members of our own species, just waking up after a cold and lumpy night on the sand.

Above their frowsy heads, beds of pink and blue hydrangeas blazed in the clear Cornish sunlight, and the stone walls of the lanes sprouted red and white brush-heads of valerian from the crevices between the blocks of granite.

Five hundred spectacularly beautiful miles form the South West Coast Path, and the stretch that lies just west of St Ives is an absolute peach - a succession of points or headlands crowned with extravagantly weathered grey granite tors, interspersed with rocky coves where seals swim and cormorants fish from the barnacled rocks.

Today the sea was the luminescent blue of a mussel shell, the headlands covered with drifts of purple heather in full bloom, the heather itself twined with nets of honeysuckle, madder and bindweed.

We took the path in our individual styles, the younger walkers forging ahead, Jane and I daundering behind. As a habitual tramper of the smoking-boots persuasion, I got great delight out of being made to slow down and take things in.

We watched kittiwakes sailing the air currents of the cliffs on black-tipped wings. We stuck our noses into clumps of wild thyme and pale butterwort. We stopped to look at linnets with their pink breast-patches, and listened to blackcaps warbling on the thorn bushes.

A peregrine came tumbling out of the sky and shot out of sight behind the cliffs. I found a silk purse of spider eggs tethered to a clump of heather by gossamer cables. Without Jane's observant eyes and mind alongside, I don't suppose I would have seen one tenth of all this.

We caught up with the others in the green cleft above River Cove, under a sky pale with heat. "When it's roasting in Western Australia," Katy told us, "my dad dunks his hat in the water and sticks it straight on his head." We took her advice, and walked on refreshed and gasping.

On Zennor Head we turned our backs on the Coast Path and made for Zennor, the remote granite-built village that has supplied Cornwall with some of its best tall tales.

The best-known concerns Matthew Trewhella of the golden voice, who enchanted a mermaid with his singing. She came for him after evensong one Sunday night, and lured him away to her lair beneath the waters of Pendour Cove. Wanderers there on calm summer nights report hearing the lovers singing duets below the waves.

In the transept of St Senara's Church I found the mermaid, stiff and stark after 600 years as a carved bench end, saucily displaying her belly-button above a scaly tail. In her left hand she held the comb of vanity.

In her right was a round object that joyless folk identify as the mirror of heartlessness; but I prefer its older and more generous interpretation as a quince, the fruit whose beautiful alternative name is "love-apple".

After our ploughman's lunch in the Tinner's Arms, the party divided along gender lines. The ladies opted to take the bus back into St Ives, while the gentlemen struck out along the ancient Coffin Road through the fields.

This former route for bodies to be borne to Christian burial passes through a farming landscape that remembers its Bronze Age origins in the tiny size of the fields and the immense sturdiness and thickness of their walls.

Each field is linked to its neighbour by a Cornish stile, a row of four or five well-spaced bars of granite set over a pit. It forms a grid barrier that baffles cattle and sheep - but not the local pigs, apparently.

Zennor became the focus of a bohemian arty set in the early years of the 20th century. At Tregerthen we passed below the row of cottages where DH Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, lived, loved and squabbled in poverty and misery during the First World War.

Lawrence with his straggly ginger beard, Midlands accent and reputation for writing outlandish filth proved too odd for the locals, while his wife's German nationality engendered suspicions of spying. They were ejected humiliatingly in 1917.

Above the cottages rises the ridge of Higher Tregerthen, crowned with a couple of large houses set among wild rocks.

Here lived a disreputable acquaintance of the Lawrences, the occultist Aleister Crowley, "the wickedest man in the world", much given to midnight cavortings with more or less willing maidens in the stone circles of the Cornish moors. Rupert Brooke's ex-lover Ka Cox met her death here, some say as a result of Crowley exerting his nefarious powers.

We shook off the chill of haunted Tregerthen and walked on in the afternoon sunlight. In the hamlet of Trevega a jolly lunch party sat under a tree finishing their wine. "You look very comfortable," I ventured as we went by. "Oh, we are," they chorused. "Beats walking, anyway!"

I couldn't agree - not with a couple of miles more of this delectable Cornish countryside in prospect, topped off with the promise of an evening dip in that glittering, sun-warmed sea.

Stepping out in Cornwall

Map OS 1:25,000 Explorer 102 "Land's End".

Travel Rail to St Ives station (information: 08457 484950, www.thetrainline.co.uk). Road - A30, A3074.

Walk directions From St Ives railway station (519401), ahead through car park. Before reaching A3074, right down steps (Coast Path sign); left past Pedn Olva hotel along The Warren. Keep to waterfront along harbour. Sharp left by Beach Restaurant (519408) up High Street for 50yds, then right up The Digey; at end, left along Porthmeor Beach. Follow Coast Path waymarks (acorn symbols and signposts) for 5 miles. Cut across the neck of Zennor Head to rejoin Coast Path (450390). Left here; then, where the Coast Path swings right in 100yds, keep ahead over granite stile and on into Zennor (NB - bus service 30 returns to St Ives at 1221, 1421, 1621, 1821). By St Senara's Church (455385), "Field path St Ives" notice points to path across fields. Follow yellow arrow waymarks on posts past Tremedda, Tregerthen and Wicca. Just past Boscubben (473395), bear left past "Residents Vehicles Only" sign down lane for 40yds, then right across granite stile and on past Trendrine. At Trevessa (481396), granite stile ("public footpath" sign) leads to lane; left for 25yds, then right ("public footpath" sign) and on. Beyond Trevega Wartha, keep to right of house and on for two fields to bear left into lane (486399). Right along lane for 130yds; where left verge widens, bear left down green lane, past metal gate. In 20yds, left over stile and on to Trevalgan (489402). Cross stile here at left of building; on past caravan park to Trowan (494403). Cross yard to lane; cross stone stile ("To St Ives" sign); continue for 3/4 mile to tarred lane near Venton Vision Farm (506407). Turn right for 400yds to road; left to Porthmeor Beach and St Ives.

Length 11 miles (allow 4 hours or more for St Ives to Zennor, 2-3 hours for return).

Conditions Parts of Coast Path stony and slippery; some short sections are steep. Not to be done in sandals. No shade along Coast Path.

Refreshments Tinners Arms or Old Chapel Café, Zennor.