Nare Head to Porthscatho 15th September 2022
It is our penultimate day of walking and are looking forward to parking in that nice quiet little car park on the top of Nare Head. As we turn-off onto the narrow road to the car park it slowly begins to narrow. Betty is at the wheel of her nice shiny new car so is mindful of the closing walls. Then she notices that the vegetation is touching her polished red paintwork.
Common sense should have dictated that we reverse out of the road, which last night alas we failed to clock as being quite narrow. She is torn between reversing all the way back and going forward past the brambles. She opts for the latter, more out of hope than wisdom. It doesn’t get any better and feel committed to our fate.
It is not until we arrive at the car park that we realise it wasn’t brambles but blackthorn that was rubbing the paintwork. Betty is beside herself, to find that she has a myriad of fine scratches and is convinced she will have to go for a respray. For my part they look a little more superficial than she suggests, but the lady is not for turning.
“How are we going to get out of here this evening?” She weeps disconsolately, “we’ll be scratched to ribbons!”
“Lets see if we can find a hardware shop at Portscatho,” I suggest, perhaps a little optimistically for a village with only 1,500 inhabitants, many of whom are probably holiday-makers with no interest in hardware whilst on holiday, “perhaps we can get secateurs and I’ll walk in front of the car snipping off loose-ends.”
She does not looked convinced, but what can you do? Just get on with the day’s walking we decide.
Fortunately Nare Head offers some distraction. A large bunker appears to have been built upon the headland during the Second World War. It was one of the UK’s ‘Starfish Sites’ created to fool night-time bombers into thinking that Nare Head was Falmouth. As the enemy bombers approached, four Royal Navy crewmen would switch on lights arranged in the same pattern as Falmouth’s streets. As their bombs rained down, special effects were used to simulate explosions, all triggered by the men hidden in their bunker.
This strategy was repeated at other ‘Starfish Sites’ up and down the country, with nearly 800 attacks drawn on them rather than their real target. As a result tens of thousands of civilian lives would have been saved.
“A WW2 bunker from which the Nare Head ‘Starfish Site’ was controlled.
Alongside it a further bunker, this time buried a metre underground, was constructed in 1962 where three Royal Observer Corps officers would have been housed for several weeks monitoring the radiation levels, should a nuclear attack have taken place.
“A cold war bunker where three officers of the Royal Observer Corps would have been housed after a nuclear attack, to monitor radiation levels.”
Despite all this history of past conflict, the view into Gerrans Bay is nothing but tranquillity. The shoreline gently arcs westward and then south, although a look at the map reveals the arc to be crammed with gnashing teeth awaiting the complacent seafarer. Midway along the landmass on the far side of the bay is our destination – Portscatho and its near neighbour Gerrans. South and west of here is a 4-mile long peninsula, perhaps one of the most isolated parts of Cornwall. Few people live here and the only way out is either back through Portscatho, or by a ten-seater ferry-boat ride across St Mawes Harbour – where we hope to end up tomorrow evening. A hazy grey line beyond St Anthony’s Head marks The Lizard peninsula, beyond which awaits the open Atlantic.
“Gerrans Bay and Carne Beach offer a more tranquil landscape to enjoy.”
“The view across Gerrans Bay to Portscatho, gleaming white. Beyond is The Lizard peninsula and beyond that the open Atlantic.”
Nare Head appears to be a popular spot for walkers, although I suspect few are foolish enough to have used our car park and its paint-scratching approach road. There are several car parks at Carne Beach, with the prospect of a cafe on your return afterwards. Many walkers are older and obviously less sure of their footing than we two youngsters. Doubtless National Trust will put some steps on the steeper, more slippery climbs up to Nare Head.
The sky is cloudy, but it is bright and warm, being definitely shirt-sleeves weather. As we pass Tregagle’s Hole we come across the final stage in the recent gannet cycle of life story – a corpse picked clean by scavengers. It is good that nature recycles its own, but perhaps not so good for scavenging birds, who may well be the next victim of the bird-flu pandemic.
At Carne Beach we pause to pose for the cameras, before sending the resultant photo off to our grandchildren, who just so happen to have the same surname.
Carne Beach and neighbouring Pendower Beach are a geologists dream and are probably a place I visited as a geology undergraduate in 1976. I say probably since these field trips, though educational, are often spent in an alcoholic fog – at least until midday. So I would have had little chance of knowing where the coach might have taken us. Nonetheless, Betty and I spend more time in this one place, than any other for the whole week.
“Pleistocene head deposits sit on top of slaty Devonian rocks of the wave-cut platform, which gleam in the sunshine.
The guide books tell us that “there is a raised beach of round pebbles and sand, cemented together by iron and manganese, resting on Devonian slates and shales – eroded long before the raised beach was formed. Above are deposits of periglacial head from the last Ice Age, which ended 10,000 years ago”. Throw in limestone, chert and slaty mudstone; small-scale folds in interlaminated limestone and carbonate rich mudstone; quartzite (metamorphosed sandstone) boulders; pillow lavas formed from molten lava erupting below the sea and you can understand why a number of others are poking about with cameras.
“Folded bedrock laid down under the sea some 400 million years ago, buried by younger rocks, folded by vast earth movements and exposed by later erosion of the land surface.”
“The Devonian rocks at the base of the cliff are resistant to marine erosion, not so the softer rocks above. Rip-rap (boulders) has been placed to slow cliff retreat.
The most obvious ‘snapper’ is a gentleman in a white sun hat and very little else. He could be a naturist, a naturalist, or both – as he wanders along the bottom of the cliff-face pointing his equipment at whatever takes his fancy. Thankfully, he is little more than a few pixels on Betty’s photograph, so no censorship is required.
“Betty snapped this naturist-naturalist photographer on Carne Beach – wearing just a camera and briefs (nice equipment though!)”
Besides the geology, the sea shore is a naturalists dream, being covered in rock pools for children (and adults of course) to go poking around in between tides. Much of the inter-tidal bedrock is covered in a swath of fucoid algae, including bladder wrack and egg wrack – both of which have floatation bladders that pop like bubble-wrap.
“Fucoid algae (bladder wrack and egg wrack) holds fast to the bedrock of the wave-cut platform of Carne Beach.”
Like small children called in from the garden for their tea, we are reluctant to leave our playground. A small stream enters the top of the beach, held back by a sand bar. The resultant wetland has enough standing water for reed growth – yet another habitat for investigation. Alas Betty spots yet another gannet corpse, before coffee beckons from a pleasant little cafe at the western end of the beach.
Circumnavigating Gerrans Bay we drop down to Porthbean Beach, before returning back up the cliffs by way of wooden steps and a pleasant strip of woodland. From the top we have clear views across the bay to a number of sailing ships, one of which slips into position to give the perfect seaside postcard.
“Gerrans Bay from the South West looking back to Nare Head.”
We arrive at Portscatho with just a few minutes to spare before our bus comes. But Betty is having none of it. She wants to explore Portscatho and is in no hurry to return to the car just yet. So with the next bus just 1 hour away, that gives us plenty of time to wander the streets and see what the village has to offer. Much to my surprise we do find a sort of hardware store – Portscatho Stores to be precise. It is one of those shops that offers everything from food to post-office services and ice cream to DIY bits and pieces, but alas no secateurs. But all is not lost since they do have some tin snips which might yet solve our blackthorn problem back at Nare Head.
“One of a number of sail boats in the bay presents a truly nautical photo of Portscatho from Rosvin.
We wander through the village enjoying the fine weather and pausing for our lunch. Unlike many of the other Cornish seaside towns we have passed through, Portscatho does not have the same higgledy-piggledy old fishermen’s cottage look to it. Many of the cottages look newer, but the village has a nice ambiance to it. I am impressed by the old sea mine that has been disarmed and repurposed as a donation box for the Shipwrecked Mariners Society (it reminds me of similar old sea mines used at Robin Hoods Bay in my 60’s childhood).
“Portscatho slip-way, looking north east towards Nare Head, with Dodman Point in the far distance.
Happy that we have seen all Portscatho has to offer I go in search of a public toilet. I am well impressed by the one I find, not least because it has a signed, limited-print photograph on the wall by Hilary Stock. I’ve never seen that before on any public lavatory wall.
“Signed Hilary Stock photograph in Portscatho public toilets.”
Armed with tin snips and a pair of thick gloves from Portscatho Stores, we catch the bus as far as |Ruan High Lanes, before walking cross-country through Veryan to Nare Head car park. Here Betty drives gingerly along the narrow, blackthorn-lined lane with me going ahead snipping several hundred would-be paint scratching twigs for the next hour. It is back-breaking and exacting work and thankfully no other cars appear – to add to the drama. Eventually we are free and Betty is a much happier bunny.
(*That night I was onto both the National Trust and Cornwall County Council about the matter of inadequate cutting by the contractor and the paucity of the signage to warn of the lane’s narrowness. Credit to both organisations, they got back to me, apologised for any damage and promised to address the issue immediately. Don’t you love Cornwall?)
“Portscatho, its beach and a repurposed World War 2 sea mine.”