It has to be said that it was really quite wet yesterday - although it started out as only mildly drizzly. We had bacon and eggs on crumpets for breakfast, followed by another crumpet with local raspberry jam. Thus fortified we set out for Beyond Penzance, in search of an iron age village, Chysauster, which I had found in my English Heritage handbook.
The traffic on the A30 heading east, back to the rest of England was at a complete standstill for most of the way. We were enormously glad that we weren’t heading home yesterday! Although, if we had been we would have left at around 7 to avoid the A30 bank holiday traffic jam!!!
Eventually, we found ourselves at the iron age village. It was raining. With intent. We decided to go in anyway, though we were slightly deterred when we encountered s group of soggy people coming back down the hill that leads up to the village.
The man in the EH hut seemed a bit surprised to see us. I think he was anticipating a day largely devoid of visitors - and we were the second lot in not very much time!
It was very, erm, atmospheric amongst the stone round houses, in the icy rain, the wind and the mist. You can see that the houses would have been quite cosy when they had their thatched roofs on. But I must say that I am very glad we live in a house with a tiled roof and central heating!
We decided to go back down to the car when we realised that we could hardly see the EH hut any more. It was being eaten up by the mist!
Where too now? The Builder expressed an interest in Land’s End, which he has never been to. I have. And it is a huge, rather nasty theme park which was expensive to park at and probably wouldn’t be much fun in the icy rain. Or at all! So we drove to Sennen Cove which is just around a headland from Land’s End, and which has a working harbour, a nice pub which did nice fish (but rubbish chips - why do pubs think it’s all right when they advertise that they serve fresh, local produce and do serve fresh local fish, to put frozen, mass produced and not very well cooked chips with it?!?!?!?!? So many of them do and it really lets them down - at last I reckon so. I refused to eat the chips, though The Builder ate his), a lovely round building which is now a gallery, and very little rain. The pub was also nice and warm, which meant that our very soggy jeans had a chance to dry out!
We had a potter around and reached the car again just as the rain rolled back in.
We decided to abandon exploring for the day and to head home, but to go up along the coast road, through St Ives and St Agnes, and along lots of narrow, winding country roads and through some extraordinarily pretty little villages. We called into a far shop for some provisions, and into a handily placed Co-op for some wine and tootled home.
We had pork chops for dinner, which we bought in the farm shop attached to Heligan. They were extremely nice. The farm shop sells half pigs and whole lambs. This is very tempting. All the more so because they also have an internet shop and will deliver all over mainland UK. Tupton is part of mainland UK!!
Time to get dressed and ready for the day. It is not actually raining. Perhaps we’ll try again to do something outside. But breakfast first. Mushrooms and tomatoes on toast today.
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