The China Clay Coast

Tuesday 13 November, 2018

Tomorrow will be a day of milestones:

• 21 days since Paula went home
• 14 days on the path
• 17 days in Cornwall

I started a spreadsheet to calculate the distances but ran out of steam a couple of nights ago, so I need to go back and update it. I’ll probably never do this sort of this again – so different from the Camino, where you developed strong friendships over a few days walking together – if only because I miss the social interaction (and Paula, too, but that goes without saying), but I’ve enjoyed the fleeting interactions with people, in pubs, coffee shops, and just along the way. “Polite and helpful” are adjectives that are inadequate to describe the goodness I’ve experienced in Cornwall, and the people I’ve come across are far from all locals. After all, over a third of all homes in Cornwall are owned by people from outside the County.

Why call this post “The China Clay Coast”? If you read the history of kaolin mining in this area, you can see how it defined the economy and demography of the whole area for over 200 years. It’s still going on (the new washing works at Par are still here, although the old works have been left to moulder), but the days of thousands of workers have shrunk to a few hundred.

I’m assuming that the Bounds family of Roche were involved in the china clay industry – there was bugger all up there in the Nineteenth Century part from that. Tomorrow will be the day to find out more, but I was surprised at how the mining industry popped out to meet me almost as soon as I left Meva.

It was lovely to walk around the harbour and see the colourful fishing boats, the tubs of unsourced fish and lobsters being brought ashore (through the narrow streets of the village), and utterly infuriating to realise that the cafe I had been hoping to breakfast at was closed on Tuesdays in November! Blast, but better news awaited at Pentewen.

The first round of today roller coaster finished there: a lovely beach and a massive and mostly unpopulated caravan park (why here?). Pentewan had not one but two open cafes, so an hour’s delay saw me tucking in to a bacon and egg roll – no room here for health food. A quick detour to the beach and historical displays revealed the mystery of the village – it had been the early port for the china clay and a tramway from St Austell. The port has silted up and it was eerie walking down what was the channel from the see to the harbour, which is still full of water (and has the remains of the lock gates); the caravan park is built on the clay dump. Above the village, the old church is an oddity – a Georgian church in a land where all the C of E’s are gothic and the Methodists are Georgian or neo-Classical.

Round two of today’s roller coaster was a real killer, but through green fields and sheltered, turquoise waters. As I wrote on FaceBook, hell may have flames, but purgatory has stairs, up and down. The autumn damp and the fallen leaves made things slippery, so it was tiring; but just when I had more than enough, things started to flatten out above Porthpean, where the monument to A.L. Rowe’s surprised me as I turned a corner – probably the first historian I ever read.

I walked past the sailing club and on the Charlestown, another china clay port. It has a museum of wrecks (!), but I had a snack and kept going, because my clothes had copped a significant part of muddy landscape and it was washing day. The harbour has been preserved and had reminders of its industrial past.

The path to Par was bliss after the early part of the path: a gentle wander along the gold course, past the older bits of the china clay works, and on to the railway station. The Royal has been here for years but its up-to-date and comfortable and the food is fine. I’ll sleep well and work out tomorrow’s itinerary: going to Roche has always been an important part of the Peculiar Pilgrimage!