Cape Cornwall to Zennor - nearly hit my limits today

Really, how hard can it be to follow a map? Self delusion certainly gets in the way (see earlier blogs) but being tired and thirsty don't help either. All factors in today's cock-up that added 2 miles to the journey. Silly mistakes, I'm still embarrassed at my own stupidity, but it's important to learn from them. You'll see later but you can also clearly see it on the Komoot summary map here.

The day started OK, my hosts were gracious about my kettle handling failures. I paid them £40 which means overall I might as well have stayed in a proper B&B and had someone else operate the kettle. The day was forecast to be a scorcher but stayed cloudy for most of it and that made the walking cooler. Not so good for the photos though, this is from Cape Cornwall looking back to Land's End

In Cornish: Kilgoodh Ust, meaning "goose back of St Just. A cape is the point of land where two bodies of water meet and this is where the Irish Sea officially starts. Until the first Ordnance Survey, 200 years ago, Cape Cornwall was believed to be the most westerly point in Cornwall. The locals still think so. One mile from the Cape is the westernmost school on the British mainland, Cape Cornwall School. Cornwall's only school that specialises in art, photography and music

Cape Cornwall mine was operated intermittently between 1838 and 1883. The mine's 1864 chimney near the peak of the cape was retained as an aid to navigation and in 1987 the site was bought by H J Heinz and donated to the nation.

The beach just below here is Porth Nanven, referred to as 'Dinosaur Egg Beach' because of a remarkable deposit of ovoid boulders covering the beach and foreshore. These boulders come in all sizes, from hen's egg to a metre or more in length. 

From there it's a relatively short hike to Pendeen Watch, a lighthouse. (Pendeen was the subject of the book 'Life in a Cornish Village' by the Rev. F. J. Horsefield in 1893.)

Along the way I had an interesting talk with a specialist bird watcher, part of a group monitoring the chough population. This is the 'national' bird of Cornwall (which likes to think of itself as a nation, not unreasonably at least from genetic studies) but I've never seen any. He taught me about its flight and habits and a hundred other things - I had to 'make my excuses and leave' or I'd still be there. A great enthusiast and keen to share his knowledge, irrespective of the desire to receive it - a case of the biter bit, I'm afraid.

Beyond Pendeen I started to see evidence of all the mine workings along this coast (remember Wheal Sea?) which made me realise that yesterday's 'round thing' must have been a mine shaft rather than a well.

As we all know from Poldark, there was a lot of mining here. A bit further on is Geevor, now a museum and part of a Unesco world heritage landscape, but in its day a very significant operation which dates back to the late 18th century and only ceased mining in 1991 after the collapse of tin prices in the late 80s.

This is the Levant mine on the north edge of the Geevor site. It still has a working beam engine and runs tours of the site although I didn't stop. There are more pictures and explanations on the Komoot photos of today's trip.

From here on the going got pretty tough with few waymarks, boggy ground and no villages (they're all set back from the coast). There is a succession of beautiful coves and beaches and it gets hard to tell where you are without some care.

There's Portheras Cove

and Porthmeor Cove

and perhaps the prettiest, Treen Cove:

It's a real effort to get here and then some more just to get down to the beach so I can't imagine they're actually crawling with 'Grockles' even at the height of the season. A RIB would be ideal for impromptu visits - now where could I get one of those?

This is an attempt at a panoramic view from near Gurnard's Head:

My aim had been to get to Zennor and call a cab back to the car I'd left at Land's End so I was looking for (a) when I got to Zennor Head and (b) the path there going inland off the SWCP to the village. By this time I was pretty tired, had had few stops (no nice cafes along the way) and was running short of water. So I did what I've been blogging about again and persuaded myself I was at Zennor Head. Of course I wasn't and on the Komoot map you can see the extent of the improptu diversion of about 2 miles. I had an Ordnance Survey map in my pack for heaven's sake but didn't think to use it until I'd reached the road and found Zennor wasn't there (!). What a wally. 

There was nothing for it but to retrace my steps and get back on the SWCP. I did think about hitching into Zennor and forgetting the missing part of the path - as you know I'm not purist about that - but it felt like a fudge too far. So I got a water bottle refill from some random house (where a jet-lagged and somewhat bemused Australian visitor had just arrived) and carried on. I'm sure had Nic or Crispin been there they'd have caught the error in time - it's always useful to have a second view. In the end it just underscored the need for care, particularly when tired. That, and I'm not as good as I thought.

Still, only bruised pride and arrived finally in Zennor, at the Tinners Arms:

Just in case you'd forgotten what they did a lot of round here. 
One packet of crisps and a pint of lime and soda later (isotonic recovery diet) and all well, though my dogs are barking, as they still say.

I'm now in St Ives and will go back to Zennor tomorrow to pick up the trail and walk back here. Since the section from Pendeen to St Ives is rated severe I'm glad I opted to do it in two sections and I couldn't have done that without getting ahead of schedule in the early days, so thanks again to Nic. This will have implications for future plans, too as there's one more section rated severe and I'll have to see how I can split it up. It looks harder than this section. Yikes!

Peter