Cornwall

(oh btw tico tico, ptee and starry, dutch for woodlice = because of the smell)

Riding through Hackney on a no. 56 bus this evening I heard a man of about 60 telling his friend about his holiday. The holiday cost him 'ninety paand' and if you go to a nightclub in Newquay and miss the last bus it's 'ten paand' for a 3-mile cab ride. Something else cost him 'thirty six paand' but I couldn't catch what it was.

Anyway, revive, I'm going to Cornwall again THIS FRIDAY so let's talk about it and you can all recommend me fun things to do in and around St.Ives.

(Yes I know there was a bit of discussion on the places on the British coast holiday thread, but this is specific KERNOW thread so suggest specific Cornish fun pls.)

Anyone recommend a cottage to rent in Cornwall? For 2 people.

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Have used Classic Cottages a few times for Cornwall and the West Country. They're a little pricier than some other holiday letting companies, but the standard has always been dead good.

I need to read this thread properly but looking for Cornwall recommendations: places to go, restaurants, pubs etc. Will be based in Hayle, just outside of St Ives.

Hayle kinda sucks tbh (altho the nearby beach by The Towans is good), maybe try to spend as much as time as you can in St Ives re the above stuff

Thanks Bluski. Any particular St Ives recommendations? A good pub crawl for instance?

The Sloop and The Castle (the Sloop has the views, only place on the waterfront where drinking is allowed, but The Castle has the beer selection) and if you can walk the 6 mile trail (only 4 miles if you can find the secret overground shortcut) to Zennor, you've well deserved a pint at the Tinner's Arms.

I have to heartily recommend Spinacio's, even if you're not vegetarian, it's just plain amazing food. (Had a table of meat-eaters sat next to me exclaiming over amazing it was.) I found Porthmeor cafe to be the best, though Porthminster gets all the good review. (I'm sure Sick Mouthy will second that suggestion, too.)

St Ives - Zennor: a recommended walk?

It's not my absolute all time favourite Cornish country walk (that would be Mousehole to Lamorna which is just incomparably beautiful, esp if you time it to arrive at Lamorna just at sunset over the creamy-yellow harbour walls, and walk back over the ridge in the gloaming, I get shivers just thinking about it) but it's definitely top five.

The coast path St Ives to Zennor is quite hard going in some places, esp near the end where you have to clamber over some quite huge boulders, and it's very up and down (most of that 6 miles is vertical) but it is so so so v v v pretty and completely worth it, Burthallen and Tregerthen just such amazing almost tropical turquoise coves, D.H. Lawrence was not kidding when he talked about peacock coloured Atlantic.

There is also a bus back from Zennor if the walk kills you dead, like it did the first time I did it (the open topped 300, which is also worth taking all the way around the coast to St Just and Lands End and round to Penzance and back to St Ives, all wiggly-windy roads and sea views to lose your breath, though bring a jumper it gets cold up on the high carns.)

If you're interested (which you're probably not but I'm just gonna put this out there anyway) I forgot my camera the last time I was in St. Ives so I ended up sketching landmarks instead, there's lots of suggestions of interesting things to see and do in this set of sketchies, Zennor and Tregerthen and St Ives are all in there:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/masonicboomk8/sets/72157625669311648/

These are gorgeous! I for one am glad you forgot your camera.

The St Ives to Zennor walk is definitely recommended. St Ives is a great place to stay, especially if you like art (Hepworth museum and Tate are both well worth visiting).

I agree, that whole set is eye-candy, Kate!

Can't wait for some Cornwall walking myself.

I feel like I am derailing the thread by adding my wuv for those KTG pictures, but they are too good to go unpraised.

When Rener and I were in St. Ives we liked the one pub that is in the Camra guide. It had an endearing "serious drinkers only" ambience in the front (and young people jumping around to music in the back). I will try and find its name and post it here.

you should make sure also to have plenty of cream teas, so that you do not waste away after your long walks.

Would buy all those pictures as a set of postcards and send them to all my friends and relatives, who would phone up and say "when were you in Cornwall?" and I would go "uh, I wasn't, but, is it not pretty?"

If Kate's not sitting right now in a shop in Cornwall selling those, then she's not being a millionaire by next week.

yarp.

Beautiful sketches, feel like I want to see those landmarks and buildings IRL now.

Thank you everyone for saying such nice things about my sketchies, that's a bit overwhelming. :)

I actually have quite mixed feelings about St. Ives and in particular its "arts scene" which probably make me feel a bit precious. It is a very pretty town, pretty to the point of being twee and sometimes a bit cloying. But especially the kind of cottage (fnar) industry surrounding the whole "move to St Ives and paint the sea" ~lifestyle~ - I dunno, there's some very good art that has come out of St Ives in the past. But there's also a LOT of phenomenally *bad* art (badly executed art, overly mawkish "K-mart Art", match-the-sofa art) floating around the town *everywhere* which makes me kind of hate the place.

There are these sort of... glassed-in booths in buildings just off the seafront, and all around Downlong, which are combination studio/shop spaces and there's something just so desperate about them. Like these artists in cages, like performing animals, painting the same picture over and over and over, and you can see that it's probably not because they are obsessed with that image but because that's what sells.

Not that there's anything wrong with creating art to sell, but because they look so *unhappy*, or maybe I'm projecting because that situation would make me so unhappy, but it's this commodification of this dream which starts with "escape the ratrace" and ends with a glass cage in an art supermarket where you perform for the tourists. (And yes, I recognise the self loathing implicit in my ph34r.)

So I'm glad that you all like them, but the idea of sitting in a shop in Cornwall selling them as postcards fills me with utter abject terror.

So what I like best about St Ives is actually the ability to run like hell and be out of it in about 15 minutes, and up in the hills and miles away from "Artists", even as I'm sketching. I didn't really understand the amount of anger and loathing in Sven Berlin's Dark Monarch until I spent some time there, and then completely understood his wish to blow the place up.

Feel bad now because I do not want to put DJH off hir holiday, and I'm sure they will have a lovely time because it is very very beautiful. But this is why, when people say "you should set up shop and sell yr..." (as lots of people, not just on ILX, have said) I run screaming with my hands over my ears because I see those glass artist cages.

(I wasn't being serious, you know, it was more my way of saying "they are that good")

Yes, I have seen those oldish blokes with beard/strawhat/pipe, doing nowt but making sure nobody nicks the art...

We have been pondering visiting CWall for a weekend... Hmm, there's a bank holiday coming up.

No, I know, and thank you. But there are, f'rinstance, ppl in mine own family that say that kind of thing FOR REALS like I am squandering some giant opportunity and pointing at the glass artcages as we walk by saying "YOU SHOULD TOTALLY DO THAT" with the implication that I am stupid or selfish or petty for refusing their brilliant idea.

Shaun Ryder made a comment one time about "the things that you love, start to own you"

when I was in St. Ives there was some local musicians playing (or maybe a lifeboat choir, it does not matter) on in front of the harbour. People were standing and listening. Two young ladies who had been drinking alcohol came by and stopped because one of them wanted to listen to the music. Her friend wanted to keep talking drunkenly. Another woman who was listening to the music asked her to be quiet, whereupon she threw a wobbler about how tourist scum had no place saying anything to locals (before her friend hustled her away). A few minutes later the friend (the one who liked the music) came back and hugged the woman who had asked the angry drunken woman to be quiet; she was rather overcome by the experience.

Karin/Kate/Karen - I don't know for real if there is any money in pictures, but your pictures are very attractive and you should keep making them if only so that the amount of beautiful things in the world continues to increase.

Thank you, DV. That's the loveliest thing anyone's said to me in a long time, and pretty much the best reason to go on doing anything.

The whole tourists vs locals thing is quite complex. I mean, it'd be easy to frame it in the issue of "it's not tourists vs locals, it's people who try to be considerate vs inconsiderate, over entitled twats" but it goes deeper than that. There are resentments for genuine reasons as well as just being drunk and stroppy.

I'm aware, for example, that there is a huge housing crisis in Cornwall, that the property market has been massively overinflated due to second homes and holiday rental cottages, and people whose families have lived there for hundreds of years have been priced out of being able to find somewhere to live at all (be it to own or rent.) And I'm aware that in hiring said holiday cottages, I'm helping to perpetuate this injustice. But I'm also aware that the area's single biggest industry is tourism, so I'm in a bind as to whether it's ethical or not, if I do my utter best to support local shops and industry while I'm there.

I have read that Cornwall has quite terrifying levels of poverty and stuff like that, but I still find myself thinking that it must be better being poor there than in some really grim urban hellhole. But yeah, it is a pisser if you can't find somewhere to live because of people buying second homes and stuff.

Thanks for this.

Right, now to start on a thematic holiday CD-R ...

So, basically, this time tomorrow I'll be sat on the Cornish coast listening to Movietone's "Porthcurno" with a decent beer.

Kate, there are many, many agents who distribute and represent illustrators and graphic artists - thus eliminating the need to be a trained seal in a St. Ives box.

Thanks for all the hints.

Managed to drink in The Castle (good beer - 3 blokes in the pub all nursing solitary pints) and The Sloop (packed). Very much enjoyed The Tinners Arms (but was driving, goddamn) and The Gunnards Head (for food but would happily go back for a proper pint). Mousehole to Lamorna was a classic, didn't manage St Ives to Zennor (didn't sound like a walk to do in the rain). Really enjoyed The Lizard, a Sennen Cove-Land's End walk and Porthcurno. Ditto Cape Cornwall. A lovely breakfast in Porthmeor cafe, too. Not sure about St Ives itself - felt like everyone who'd ever bought a tube of aquamarine paint was there.

Hayle itself not great but here http://www.tomsholidays.co.uk/html/directions.html served its purpose well (good view, nice enough beach).

Might write something more elequent some other time.

Hey! I've bought tubes of aquamarine paint in my life!

Actually I think it was ultramarine, but point taken. This is one of my fundamental problems with St Ives - it is basically just Shoreditch for 50 year olds. Sigh.

I've never managed to get to the Gunnards Head (it's just that bit too far for walking) but I always hear good things about it.

Gunnards Head is probably worth catching a bus for - think it manages the tourist (ie. me)/local divide well. Delicious food. Good vegetarian options. They need someone to send them some decent compilations (Mum, Movietone, Yorkston would work) to replace the Norah Jones. But, yeah, a trek on foot.

St Ives is a funny one - I did see the "worst painting that I've seen for sale in excess of £500" in a gallery. I assumed it was supposed to be "naive art" but was by someone professing to have a fine art degree.

Countryfile ignoring incredible landscapes to focus on some moss and a few local nutters

Ok. Bookmarked this thread for all eternity. But this is finally *happening*, in two months. Shame Kate/Ms. Tregasking isn't around anymore.

Staying in a cottage with seaside views, near Pendeen. I got the St.Ives-Zennor and Mousehole walks down, if anyone else has prime recommendations, come forward!

My wife has ancestory from Cornwall. She spent time in Mousehole in 1981 and enjoyed it. She watched a play in some outdoor cliffside theater overlooking the ocean whose name and location I cannot tell you. This, too, she enjoyed. I don't think the acting was the main attraction, though. Try looking up some local menhirs. It makes a good excuse to wander the countryside.

Thanks! I have that theatre, on the cliffside, down on my to see list ~ can't remember the name now either.

Ordered the Lonely Planet for Kernow and Devon, should be good.

Next step independence

Cornish indie, fuxxors

Not entirely Cornwall but we've got a "tour" of YHAs booked that goes something like Beer, Boswinger, Lizard, Land's End, Perranporth, Dartmoor.

Recommendations of things to do welcome ...

Avoid the ~Lands End Experience~ thing IMO, and walk down the coast to Nanjizal to see Kan A'n Mor/Song Of The Sea arch. (Or up the coast to Sennen, but that goes without saying.)

The Minack is the name of the theatre on the cliff edge round the corner from Lamorna, but that piece of info probably comes too late for LBI. (Hope you had a splann time!)

there's some really nice hiking along the south coast near praa sands(?) [lol im american] if the weather is nice-ish. my wife and I also knew some people who had a house in mousehole outside of penzance which was pretty chill and interesting

Hi Branwell, no, we went to Minack's, ta! Which was great. The tiny beach next to it (with the steep climb up the rocks to the theatre) was a treat too. Mostly did loads of coastal walking, stretches of 7-10 miles a day. Incredible scenery. Mousehole, Penzance, Zennor is fab too.

Portheras Cove was a true find, too, and rather quiet as it takes quite a climb to get there. If you want something educational or museum like, Geevor's Tin Mine was impressive, but agreeing with Branwell: avoid Land's End like the plague. Good god, they turned that landmark spot into some sort of US western shopping mall ugh. Terrible.

http://i.imgur.com/SIUkCCg.jpg

I took this photo while there, which is basically a blueprint of my time there. Warm weather all day every day, and these views, these views... sighs