Gonamena and Caradon Hill Walk

Isn't that the way it goes? The hottest February since records have been kept and we choose to walk on the day the weather broke. But were we daunted? Of course not. A hardy band of us donned our waterproofs and did a 5 miler on the fringe of Bodmin Moor.

The route we followed is one that we've done a few times before and enjoyed. It starts and ends in the car park of the Crow's Nest Inn in the old mining settlement of Crow's Nest on the southern fringes of Bodmin Moor. We walked up the Gonamena Valley to Minions (at around 1000 ft, the highest village in Cornwall) and then circumperambulated Caradon Hill back to our starting point. It really is a very pleasant jaunt with lots to see - if you like mining history.

The first 1/2 mile or so was pretty steep and a good cardio-vascular work out. It was along a track that miners would have used to get to their places of work. Lots of granite steps to negotiate.

These mines in the Gonamena Valley enjoyed a boom and bust existence. Lodes of copper were discovered in 1837 but by the end of the century most had ceased operations. At one time, this area was the third largest producer of copper in Cornwall. All that are left now are the abandoned mine buildings and the spoilheaps. But these are only the most visible remnants, look closely and you can make out much, much more. There are tramways, reservoirs, leats cobbled dressing floors, buddles……………..

Looking eastwards with Jope's Shaft in the foreground and the engine house of Rule's Shaft on the horizon.

Looking southwards with the sea in the distance. Sharp eyes should be able to make out Rame Head where sky and sea meet.

Granite sleepers on the Gonamena Incline, a counterweight system constructed in the 1840s.

Just passed Minions and looking towards Kit Hill. Home, sweet home. But we can never make our place out from up here.

Mining took place all around Caradon Hill and these are the crumbling remains of the engine house and stack of Wheal Jenkin in Minions.

The tail end of a rainbow. It looks as if it is ending by the farm that makes Cornish Blue Cheese - a very tasty crock of gold.

The ivy-clad engine house and chimney stack of Jope's Shaft. It was sunk in 1864 and was later equipped with a man-engine, think vertical conveyor-belt, to carry miners up and down the shaft. 

It's a good year for Hazel catkins. You can see both the male catkins and the female flowers here.

A naked tree that took my eye.

And it did rain in quite heavy, but short, bursts.

The colourful buds of a willow of some variety.

A weekend at Housel Bay: Part 2 of 2

The second walk on our weekend and this one meant that we had completed our circumnavigation of the Lizard. We started this one in the Square at St Keverne. Despite a very misty start, the weather cleared up and we had good views all the way around.

The route, at 5 miles or thereabouts, was a mixture of very pleasant footpaths, three coves that we were not familiar with and a stretch of coast. It had its moments but was not overly strenuous.

About 15 minutes into the walk and looking back to St Akeveranus, the parish church in St Keverne. Unusually for Cornwall, it has a spire on the top of its tower. The haze soon cleared.

Rather perversely, although there were lots of daffodils everywhere, these narcissi caught my eye. many of the fields we crossed were once put down to daffodils and the remnants were all around to see in the hedgerows and field edges.

I suppose it is because of the relative scarcity of wood in the west of Cornwall, and the relative abundance of granite, that Cornish stiles tend to be made of the latter. The modern cattle grid is, of course, the direct descendant of these structures. Inflated in size but deflated in romance.

And yet another one. The pit between the horizontal slabs comes in various depths and are good ankles traps to avoid.

I particularly like this view back into the tunnelled path we came from. It's like a portal into another world.

I liked this mix of Spring flowers - camellias, magnolias and white periwinkle (Vinca major Alba).

A dumper dumped. Given the terrain, it must have been quite an effort to get it to where it rested.

We came to the coast at Porthallow. Once upon this beach was sandy but, as a result of many years of quarrying nearby, the beach is now one of pebbles and grey shingle. It is, however, used for watersports and diving.

A mile or so along the coast and we came to another cove, Porthkerris. Access was restricted until fairly recently because it was used as a loading point for a nearby quarry. The now-abandoned crushing plant is that ugly building in the background. The cove itself now has the reputation of being one of the best diving spots in the UK. The Manacles and other reefs are just off-shore and they attract a lot of enthusiasts.

Talking of ugly buildings, the next cove along, Porthoustock, had this beauty. Another stone crushing plant and one that would be eminently suitable for a themed boutique hotel. The beach here was another of pebbles and shingle but is used for watersports. There is still a small fleet of fishing boats, which go out for carbs and lobsters mainly.

This row of thatched ex-quarry workers cottages was rather a surprise to come across. Not something that was expected and looking very attractive in the sun.

We finished coming back into the very large and densely packed graveyard at St Akeveranus. From a leaflet: "Sometime between 500 and 600 A.D., a man came to St. Keverne, who eventually gave his name to the place. KIERAN or KEV RAN came from Cape Clear in the district of Kerry, Ireland, and was probably the first Christian to live in this parish.On the site of our Parish Church, he built himself a hut to live in and another close by to serve as a Church, at the entrance of which he would have placed a wooden Cross. It is not known whether he died here, but if he did, he would have been buried near his two huts, later when other Christians died, they would have been buried near him. Thus the Church and Churchyard had begun in St.Keverne".

This finely carved font dates from the 15th Century.

Church interior with impressive barrel roof and large rood. The church is very large for a village church and in its present form is predominantly 15th-century, with few traces of any earlier building. The remodelling zeal of the Victorians seems to have bypassed this church.

A weekend at Housel Bay: Part 1 of 2

And we are still walking the Cornish Coastal Footpath and we are still saying "we'll finish it this year". I think we both feel that 2019 will be that year. We've just spent a weekend 'down west' on the Lizard with the aim of completing two of the three remaining stretches we have to do along the southern coastline of the County. It was a case of two down and one to go.

We were staying at the Housel Bay Hotel just outside of The Lizard village. Before checking in, we went to Porthleven for a drink and a snack. As ever, the seas were impressive.

Can you ever get enough of looking at the waves? I can't. We can't.

Our route on our first walk of the weekend. We parked just outside of Helford Passage, caught a bus into Falmouth and then another (actually the same bus but travelling under a different number) to Swanpool on the western outskirts of Falmouth. From there we headed down the Fal estuary and up the Helford River. Around 6.5 miles in total, with a few ups and downs.

From the beach at Swanpool looking up the Fal. The outline of Pendennis Castle can be seen in the mid-ground with the lighthouse at St Anthony Head on the Roseland Peninsular in the distance.

We came from the right and went to the left.

The beach at Maenporth. A nice little family beach with a café that serves rather excellent real sausage hot dogs.

The coast along the south of the county is quite different from that in the north. It was relatively easy walking but not without the occasional strenuous stretch. This is Parsons Beach, by the way, just past Mawgan Glebe.

A rather obliging Robin posed for me. They quite often seem to be pretty defensive about their territory and appear to 'escort' you until you move out of it. Or is that my imagination?

On the water's edge, looking down through the trees.

Looking up the Helford River. Not an estuary but a ria. And a ria is formed by the submergence of the lower portion of the river valley and not by the action of the river itself. Typically a ria has many tributaries and this one certainly has a few.

Not a snowdrop, although there were plenty around, but Leucojum vernum - Spring Snowflake. We'll have to get some for our garden.

It's Movie Time with the Insignificant Seven and the Hapless Amigos

Steve Bell. The Guardian. 20th February 2019.

Well it's finally happened. There have been rumours of impending splits for weeks, the only uncertainty was whether it was Labour or the Conservatives who would break first. Now we know, Labour broke itself. Politics is broken, said the new Independent Group, and so was their website when I looked at it just now. It’s not incompetence, it’s a metaphor.

For the rest of us, this week events are confirmation that not even the Labour party thinks that the Labour party can save us from a Tory Brexit. Seven, oops, eight, Blairite MPs have flounced off from the Labour party in order to perform a tribute act to the unlamented 1980s one hit wonders the SDP. They will succeed in precisely bugger all, except to make Labour even less electable than it already was.

Surprise surprise, the not remotely magnificent seven spent most of their press conference slagging off the rest of the Labour party, and not attacking the Tories, that hate group which is actually the root cause of the Brexit problems who are screwing over the UK in the first place. On they trotted, each of them laying out their issues with Labour, every one of them greeted with “Who’s that?” from the assembled audience, followed by “weren't they once in Coronation Street?"  Whoever it was who was caught by the BBC microphone greeting the announcement with an “It’s mad. Between this and Brexit we’re absolutely f***ed,” had it spot on.

The Independent Group isn’t social, it’s not democratic, and it’s not a party, but apart from that it’s exactly like the SDP. When the Gang of Four (I remember them well - I'm that old) broke away from Labour in the 1980s in protest against Michael Foot daring to take a party that was supposed to be socialist in a vaguely left wing direction, the flouncers were at least big beasts within the party. All of them had been cabinet ministers in previous Labour governments and two of them had held one of the great offices of state. David Owen was a former Foreign Secretary, Roy Jenkins had previously served as Home Secretary. The others were almost as illustrious, Shirley Williams had been Education Secretary, and Bill Rodgers had served as Defence Secretary and Secretary of State for Transport. Yet even though any one of them possessed greater political experience and ability than today’s sorrowful seven combined, they still failed to make any serious electoral impact with their new party and only succeeded in splitting the opposition and ensuring a decade and a half of Conservative rule. 
 
There are, it has to be said, serious issues with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party. He is the mirror image of Theresa May, incapable of reaching out beyond his own support base, narrowly tribalist, and ideologically inflexible. He came to power promising to be different, that he’d listen to the membership and prioritise what ordinary Labour members wanted. Once in power he’s done the opposite. He’s turned into exactly the kind of Labour leader that he himself serially rebelled against, and he is doing his utmost to ensure that Brexit happens. He just wants the Conservatives to take the blame for it and then hopes that he can coast to power in the ensuing chaos. It’s a breathtakingly cynical form of politics from a man who promised honesty and moral fibre.
Yet this split is self-serving and will ultimately prove futile. It pretty much guarantees that if the Conservative party can hold itself together, that it will remain in power for the foreseeable future even though it is the most incompetent, inept, clueless and randomly vindictive government that the UK has ever seen. 

None of the splitters has the slightest intention of submitting themselves to the electorate even though they claim to have split on the question of allowing the electorate to have its say. The kindest thing you can say about The Independent Group is that it’s all an elaborate exercise in trolling the Corbynite wing of the Labour party, who are now demanding that if you’re not giving the voters what they thought they were getting then you need to resign and allow the electorate to vote on it, and thereby logically force them into supporting a second referendum. If that’s the tactic, it’s doomed already.

And don't me started on the self-styled Three Amigos. I prefer to call them the Hapless Three. Maybe I'll get around to them but, for now, let's just say that they are as opportunistic as the less- than-Magnificent Seven. Yul Brynner must be spinning in his grave at the comparison with the best Western of all times. And I'll have a gunfight with anyone who says 'nay' to that.

No doubt someone somewhere is photoshopping in the faces of the Hapless Three but I can't be bothered. It's a wonderful film though.

Gavin Williamson. Good grief.

A week to convince us all that the loonies really have taken over the asylum - if ever we needed proof. We've had the idiocies of Chris 'Failing'  Grayling, the Transport Secretary who decided to commission a ferry service from a company which had zero experience in ferries. You might think that this represented peak stupid from the Tories, and that’s a hard thing to achieve considering the competition. But no. We have Chris, and we have Andrea Leadsom, whose sole contribution to politics has been to allow us all to ponder the philosophical question of whether it’s sexist to point out that a deeply stupid woman is, in fact, stupid. We have the Northern Ireland Secretary, Karen Bradley, who didn’t realise that sectarianism is a thing in Northern Ireland. We have Dominic Raab and his belated realisation that Britain is an island. And then along comes Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, making his bid for the most stupid Tory on the planet.

Gavin, who always wanted to be Defence Secretary because when he was a boy he demonstrated his military prowess by pulling the wings off flies for fun, has announced that all is well in Brexitland. Leaving the EU, he boasted, will “enhance the UK’s lethality”. And this is true. After Brexit the UK will be a lot more lethal if you’re dependent on benefits, you’re disabled or you have a chronic health condition. Conservatives have always been considerably more successful at killing off British citizens than they have been at terminating terrorists. Although if you’re a Tory then you do consider poor people to be enemies of the state, so by that token they’re a huge success.

Gavin’s macho pose would be somewhat more convincing if he didn’t bear a startling resemblance to Frank Spencer of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (Oooer, Betty, that dates me). Like Frank, Gavin is best known for his hapless incompetence, his self belief and his high pitched squeaky voice. All we need to complete the comparison is for the Defence Secretary to turn up for his next big announcement about how Great Britain, and by extension Gavin, is on roller skates and being towed by a Routemaster bus.  The roller skating behind a bus would at least have the merit of being worth watching, which is a quality that Gavin has always sadly lacked.

His posturing would be more convincing if the Conservatives hadn’t run down the armed services in the same way that they’ve run down all other public services. Or if the defence budget wasn’t £7 billion short of where it needs to be in order to fulfil the Ministry of Defence’s 10 year equipment plan. Although perhaps when Gavin spoke about unleashing swarms of drones he was referring to Conservative MPs. They are also, on all the available evidence, unthinking and robotic.

“We should be the nation that people turn to when the world needs leadership,” said Gavin. With a straight face. This UK. The one that’s currently shooting itself in the foot and the face and is the laughing stock of Europe – and the only reason it’s not the laughing stock of the entire world is because of Donald Trump. Sure, people around the globe will look to the UK for leadership when they want to know how to turn a successful democracy into a low rent tax haven with bad weather and food. They’ll look to the UK for lessons in maintaining the veneer of democracy while stripping it of meaningful content. But most of all, they’ll look to the UK when they want to understand how it is that people of the calibre of Gavin can get to the highest levels of government. If nothing else, he’s an inspirational role model for delusional idiots. This is, let us not forget, the Defence Secretary whose strategy for dealing with Russia consisted of telling Putin to go away.

Now he wants to send an aircraft carrier that won’t be operational for another two years, and which doesn’t have any planes. off to the South China Sea where it has no business being, so it can be a sitting target for the Chinese. And this at a time when it’s vital for the UK to make trade deals so that it retains some semblance of a functioning economy after Brexit. The only positive thing that you can say about Gavin’s leadership of the Ministry of Defence is that the man is a weapon.

Gavin’s embarrassing jingoism is, however, precisely what Brexit is all about for the Brexiteers. It’s about harking back to the days when Britannia ruled the waves and could waive the rules with impugnity. It’s the fantasy of little boys who lost themselves in Commando comics and dreamt about getting one over the Bosch. We have a Defence Secretary who has wet dreams about gunboat diplomacy. We have a Trade Secretary who said he’d bestride the world making favourable trade deals, but who’s only ever managed to trade on his favours in the Conservative party. We have a Prime Minister who says she’s listening but who only ever listens to herself.

Brexit was always an exercise in fantasy and wishful thinking. It’s a dream of a Britain that never was. The dreams of the Brexiteers are dangerous. They’re going to sleepwalk us off a cliff and into a nightmare where the British state will prove its lethality by depriving the poor, the weak, the disabled and the marginalised of the means of a dignified living. It will prove its lethality by stripping the NHS to the bones and privatising what’s left. It will prove its lethality by getting rid of employment rights and consumer protections.
Is it too late for Britain to wake up from its Brexit nightmare?

Brexit isn't all doom and gloom.

This has been lurking in my 'draft' folder for ages. I just can't remember where I got it from, so apologies are due to the source for not acknowledging it. If nothing else, Brexit has shown how inventive some people can be.