Gilly’s 86 (our guess) and Eric, her terrier, five. ‘He’s in my will’, says Gilly, ‘I didn’t realise dogs lived so long!’ My Grandmother, says Lee, who’s come over with Tom to pat Eric (and keen to join the ‘will’ discussion), bequeathed each of her eight grandsons five hundred pounds and donated fifty thousand pounds to the Sydmouth Donkey Sanctuary (now the home of a very fat and happy herd of happy quadrupeds). Lee is a curator of Arabic art specialising in scientific instrumentation. It’s a burgeoning industry apparently, as the Arab nations, particularly Saudi, start to pump oil money into tourism and cultural preservation. Who’d have thought.
Gilly’s a Liverpuddlian originally. “So…Beatles?”, says we. “Oh yes”, says Gilly, “I went to school with John Lennon”! Wow!
We’re debriefing the day at the Thirsty Scholar, our digs for the night in Penryn, a coastal town a short distance from Falmouth, and people, like Gilly, are wandering in for their afternoon pint.
We left “Dora’s static two-room unit” (that’s nouveau travel accommodation speak for a caravan on bricks), just outside of Looe around nine, after slaloming our wheely bags through the scat of sheep, chooks, ducks, perhaps horses and alpaca, to the car, and then dropped down the valley one and a half miles to Looe village. Parking’s easy, if expensive, and we spend a couple of hours wandering about and grabbing a coffee on the edge of a rare white (grey) sand beach. Looe is a lovely, classic stone cottages clinging to steep hills dropping down to an estuary full of small fishing boats; however, the place feels like it could do with a good steam clean and paint job and touristy stuff, like racks of trinkets in front of shops or amusement piers, are just sufficiently conspicuous to detract from the town’s natural charms. Worth a visit, but perhaps just one.
It’s but a short drive to Polperro and, without cash or a facility to use a card for parking, we’re saved by the girl at the ice cream shop who says, “take this and pay me cash later, there’s a post office in the village with an ATM”. Happy days.
Polperro is stunning. The walk in from the carpark above the village takes you past quaint cottages with front door bridges over a stone channelled stream. Around the small harbour where the stream flows in, narrow lanes run between gorgeous little white-washed stone fishing cottages with slate roofs and timber windows. There are tourist shops to be sure, but their displays are discreet, leaving visitors to see and feel that they’re in the village as it might have been hundreds of years ago (less the smugglers – that’s been superseded by tourism).
There are plenty of large trees and green spaces up the sides of the valley as well, and a great effort has been made to keep the place freshly painted with flourishing flower boxes providing vibrant contrast to the clean white-washed walls.
We lunched at the Two Pilchards (fish and chips of course) where narrow stairs out the back lead up to two high terraces with one hundred and eighty degree views across the valley and down to the harbour. Beyond the small walled harbour, paths led up and onto the coastal walk track where we took in views out over the sea and up the coast. We were sad to leave the place.
It was a short drive (1 1/2 hours) from Polperro to Perryn where we’d found a room for reasonable value on line in the Polperro car park. After Gilly headed home from the Thirsty Scholar, we wandered down the hill to a place recommended by Lee and Tom, “The Famous Barrell”. It’s a delightful old pub with a wine barrel door. Whilst having a beer we heard a lady say to her friend, “she’s been much more androgynous since she left prison”. We love those little inadvertently overheard conversation snippets that leave you deeply curious about the full story! Walking back up the road to the Thirsty Scholar, a rather large lady talking to someone in her backpacker’s van parked in a narrow street said, “…well i’m probably going to jail now that that f….ing lazy fat c…t called the f…ing cops.” The volume and articulation of her comments were unlike to sway her protagonist from pursuing police assistance! Open loops. Jail then?
Tomorrow we’re off for a walk around Falmouth and out to the lighthouse.