During Victorian times, St Ives consisted of two quarters known as Upalong and Downalong, between which there was a fierce rivalry. Upalong, on the higher ground, was an area of farming and mining. Downalong, situated beside the harbour, was the realm of fishermen and sailors.
The residents of St Ives were collectively known by the pejorative of "Hake" or "Hakeies" which is said to be based on the irreligious practice of fishing for hake on Sundays when most other fishermen stayed ashore to go to church.
The area to the right is known as Ayr and is on the site of an old mine - Wheal Ayr.
In 2002, eight houses on Wheal Ayr terrace had to be demolished when they began to subside into a mineshaft. A year later, part of Porthmeor Hill also subsided into a horizontal tunnel connected to the workings.
The path across the fields is known as the Zennor Churchway or Coffin Path and runs all the way from St Ives to Pendeen across the flat "bench" cut into the granite by waves when sea levels were higher during the Pliocene era.
The path was marked by a number of round-headed wayside crosses which date back to early mediaeval times, although not many survive intact. Some are now only evident as cross-bases - a roughly trimmed boulder containing a square hole to take the cross shaft.
The hedges in fields such as this one provide a habitat for stoats which are most likely to be seen early in the morning before any dogs have been walked.
Stoats and weasels are related to badgers and to otters, which they more closely resemble. The stoat is roughly twice the size of a weasel but can be distinguished without the need to measure it by its black-tipped tail. The weasel preys mostly on voles, but the stoat will take on prey much larger than itself including birds and even full-grown rabbits. During the winter, the coat of the stoat (and also some populations of weasel) changes colour from brown to white to camouflage it in the snow.
The soft, silky winter fur of the stoat is known as ermine and garments made from this were a luxury associated with royalty and high status. Given that stoats mark their territory using pungent anal scent glands, it’s likely a fair amount of washing of the furs occurred before being draped over royalty.
The stones of sloes (and plums, cherries and peaches) contain the compound amygdalin which is metabolised into hydrogen cyanide. Therefore breaking the stones is best avoided when using them in cooking, gin etc.
The name "blackthorn" is just a general reference to the dark colour of the bark, rather than anything specific to do with the thorns which are not any darker than the rest of the wood. It's primarily a comparison with hawthorn where the bark is lighter (in fact hawthorn is also known as "white thorn" despite not having white thorns). Just to confuse things further, the flowers of blackthorn are whiter than hawthorn!
Hellesveor was originally the larger (veor being the Cornish word for "large") of two tenements that Helles was divided into during the Middle Ages, the other being Hellesvean (as you probably guessed, vean means "small"). The name Helles itself is likely to be from the Cornish words hen lys (sometimes written together as hellys) meaning "old court". The name Helston is from the same origin (with some subsequent Saxon re-branding).
The Ramblers Association and National Farmers Union suggest some "dos and don'ts" for walkers which we've collated with some info from the local Countryside Access Team.
Do
Don't
All members of the carrot family have the potential to cause a blistering rash if touched. This caused by chemicals in the plant's sap which are made more reactive by sunlight. Cow parsnip seems to be worse for this than the other common ones such as cow parsley but nowhere near as bad as giant hogweed.
Giant hogweed is regarded by some as the most dangerous plant in the UK (although hemlock is also a good contender). If you encounter giant hogweed, avoid touching it and children and dogs should be kept away from it as the sap contains a chemical which is extremely phototoxic. When activated by sunlight, this binds to the DNA in skin cells and kills them. Skin reaction starts as an itchy rash and can develop into third degree burns and scarring. It also makes the affected areas susceptible to severe sunburn for several years.
The plant gets its name as it can grow more than 10 feet tall, topped with white umbrella-shaped flowers. Due to the similar style of flowers, it is also known as giant cow parsley although the giant hogweed leaves are much more solid with a toothed edge, more similar to cow parsnip (normal hogweed). It is typically found near water or on waste ground.
The plant was introduced to Britain by Victorian botanists in the 19th century as an ornamental plant and has escaped from gardens into the wild. It has been spreading across the UK (as one plant produces 50,000 seeds) but is still very rare in Cornwall. A project to eradicate it along the Tamar River system is helping to stop further spread into Cornwall.
If you find giant hogweed in Cornwall (and are sure it's not normal hogweed), take a photo and report it to invasives@cormacltd.co.uk
The word "stile" is based on an Old English word stigel for ladder. This in turn came from an old Germanic word stig meaning "to climb" and the word "stair" also came from this.
Conversely, the word "style" (now used for fashion etc. but originally for literary style or a writing tool i.e. stylus) is from French origins (naturally!). This came from an Old French word stile, derived from the Latin stilus. It's thought the "i" might have been changed to a "y" for snob value to be more like the (unrelated) Greek word stylos (for pillar).
The patchwork of small fields may date from the Celtic period.
In Celtic times, fields were small and surrounded by banks or stone walls. The fields were used both for growing crops such as oats, wheat or rye, and for keeping livestock. The field shape was round or square, rather than rectangular, so that the stones didn't have to be carried further than necessary. The small size was because they needed to be weeded by hand, in many ways similar to a modern-day allotment.
Despite how tough mature dock plants are, at the seedling stage docks are very poor competitors with other plants such as grass. On grazing land, farmers can use docks as a warning sign that there have been bare patches of earth. This could have been caused by livestock damage or uneven spreading of manure which has killed patches of grass by blocking sunlight.
During Victorian times and earlier, small amounts of land in Cornwall were measured by the goad - a unit of nine feet in length, derived from the name of the staff used to drive oxen.
An area of two goads square (18ft x 18ft) was known as a "yard of ground" or "land-yard". This is confusingly not the same as a "square yard" (3ft x 3ft). In fact one land-yard was 36 square yards!.
Larger areas of land were measured by the Cornish Acre defined as 160 land-yards (or 5,760 square yards). A unit of land consisting of 4 Cornish Acres was known as a "Knight's fee".
The settlement of Trowan was first recorded in 1327 but is thought to be on the site of a much earlier farmstead, possibly even prehistoric. The name is Cornish, but there are different theories about the word following the "Tre". One is that is from oghan, meaning oxen. Another is that is from an extinct word that existed as waun in old Welsh, meaning meadow.
It is thought that around 150 people would have lived in the hamlet during its heyday. By the end of the 20th Century, the village was abandoned and many of the buildings were used as barns. All but one of the buildings were sold together for £1 million and a restoration project began to rebuild each of the buildings in the village. In 2016, the final building, Morveren House was sold after being repossessed and was purchased and restored to complete the whole of the settlement in what overall was a 15 year project. The village well is still used for the water supply, minus the bucket.
A local archivist uncovered a tale of a miner from Trowan who awoke on a dark winter's morning to find "a frightful apparition - two staring, large, glassy eyes, an enormous mouth, with ghastly teeth, and a pair of hideous ears! He started back, crying that the Devil was upon them. But when a candle was brought, he found that the creature was a dead donkey which some waggish youths had brought under cover of darkness and propped up before the miner's door."
According to folklore, you should not pick blackberries after Michaelmas Day (11th October) as this is when the devil claims them. The basis for this is thought to be the potentially toxic moulds which can develop on the blackberries in the cooler, wetter weather.
As well as producing seeds both sexually and asexually, brambles can also clone themselves to create daughter plants either via underground stems (rhizomes) or by the over-ground stems rooting where they meet the ground.
A survey of over 5 million clover leaves found that the frequency of four-leaf clovers is about one in 5,000 (twice as common as originally thought).
The world record for collecting four leaf clovers in one hour was set at 166 (in 1998). One very determined collector managed to amass 170,000 four-leafed clovers in a lifetime.
The word "farm" has the same origins as (e.g. law) "firm". Both words are related to the mediaeval Latin word firma meaning "fixed payment". Its original use in English was to do with contracts and leasing (which is why "to farm out" means "to subcontract"). In fact the word "farm" had no association with food production until the 19th Century. In the 16th Century it began to be applied to leasing of land and the association with farmland developed from this.
The settlement of Trevalgan was first recorded in 1320 as Trevaelgon and is thought to date from early mediaeval times. The place name is thought to be based on a personal name e.g. "Aelgon's farm".
Electric fences are typically powered from a low voltage source such as a car battery which charges a capacitor to release a periodic pulse of high voltage electricity. This is often audible as a quiet "crack" which is a good indicator that a fence is powered. As with the high-voltage shock caused by static electricity, the current is not high enough to cause serious injury but touching an electric fence is nevertheless unpleasant. If you are answering the call of nature in the vicinity of an electric fence, be mindful of the conductivity of electrolyte solutions!
Where an electric fence crosses a footpath, it should either be covered by an insulating sheath (e.g. on stiles) or there should be a section that unclips with insulating plastic handles to allow access through the fence. Ensure that you re-clip this on passing through so animals cannot escape. The connecting cord/spring between the handles is often conducting so avoid touching this and be aware of any dangling rucksack straps.
Grazing animals very quickly learn to avoid electric fences so that the fences can even act as effective barriers when not powered. Some animals have gone further in their learning and developed crafty techniques for breaking through electric fences. One is to push another animal through the fence so that it gets the electric shocks instead!
Fossil records indicate that bracken dates back at least 55 million years. By 24 million years ago it had a worldwide distribution and it is now thought to be the most common plant in the world.
The long, large hill on the left with the chimneys is Rosewall Hill. The name is likely to be from the Cornish word ros, meaning hill-spur.
Behind Rosewall Hill is Trendrine Hill, the second highest point in West Penwith at 247 metres. Watch Croft, the highest point on the peninsula, near Rosemergy, is only 5 metres higher.
The chimneys on Rosewall Hill are relics of a Victorian tin mine. The mine is thought to have been opened in around 1818 and operated until the end of the 19th Century. Between 1827 and 1892 it is recorded as producing over 16,000 tonnes of "black tin" (concentrated tin ore) and in the 1860s employed 170 people. There were three engine houses: one for pumping water from the mine, one for winching the ore up from the mine, and one for crushing the ore.
In order to be processed, ore-bearing rock mined from mineral veins needed to be crushed to a powder. In earlier times, millstones were used to grind down lumps of ore but later it was done using a process known as "stamping" where the ore was crushed by dropping heavy granite or metal weights to pound it against another hard surface (often a piece of granite known as a mortar stone - as in "pestle and mortar"). The crushing was automated first with waterwheels and later with steam engines. The process was far from quiet and could often be heard from a number of miles away.
Once rendered into a powder, the tin ore was separated from fragments of less useful rock, usually using water and taking advantage of the heavier tin ore sinking more quickly out of a suspension than the other minerals. The slurry was sometimes run slowly down an inclined wooden board: the heavier tin fragments would settle near the top and could be scraped off whereas the fragments of lighter rock could be discarded from the bottom, and the material in the middle could be recycled into the next batch. Conical structures (known as "buddles") with rotating brushes were also used. It's possible that the Cornish mining word for the waste sludge of rock fragments - gange - is the origin of the English slang word "gunge".
In August and September, thistles produce their seeds attached to white fluffy plumes, known as thistledown which disperse in the wind like dandelion seeds. Wet weather makes their parachutes collapse so the dispersal success varies a lot with the weather. Around 90% of seeds fall within a metre of the plant so thistles are often found growing in patches. The remaining 10% disperse more widely and can travel as far as 30 metres even in light wind.
Thistle seeds are a favourite food of goldfinches and the down is used by birds as an insulating lining for their nests.
Skylarks are the most common member of the lark family in Britain and are often known simply as "larks".
The collective noun for larks ("an exaltation") dates back to "The Book of Saint Albans" printed in 1486 which provided tips on hunting, hawking, and heraldry. It also included "a murmuration of starlings", "an unkindness of ravens" and "a clattering of choughs".
At least seven old tin mines including the 18th Century Wheal Fat and Wheal Brea and the older Wheal Parkis were combined into the Brea Consols in Victorian times and worked intermittently until the early 20th Century. The lodes were rich in high-quality tin but very small, typically only three inches in width, which eventually made mining uneconomical. The ruins of some of the engine houses can still be seen on Trevega Cliff and a little further inland.
Lichens are a partnership of two different organisms: a fungus providing the "accommodation" and an alga or cyanobacterium providing the "food" through photosynthesis. The fungal partner provides a cosy, sheltered environment for the alga and tends it with mineral nutrients. However, the alga partner is more than simply an imprisoned food-slave: it is such a closely-evolved alliance that the fungus is dependant on the alga for its structure. If the fungal partner is isolated and grown on an agar plate, it forms a shapeless, infertile blob.
Known as the "Merry Harvesters", the stone circle beside the Coast Path is reported as being fairly recently constructed to resemble one of the ancient stone circles, although many of the ancient circles were themselves reconstructed in Victorian times: The Merry Maidens near Lamorna Cove even gained an extra Maiden during its Victorian reconstruction.
The northwest-facing coastline of Penwith was particularly treacherous for shipping. The high cliffs along the coast prevented ships from being able to see the lighthouses at Trevose Head or the Longships. From Cape Cornwall, the wall of granite runs towards the rocks of the Wra, or Three Stone Oar, off Pendeen, some of which are just below the surface. The cliffs continue all the way to St Ives, and part-way along is the protruding Gurnard's Head which was another major hazard for shipping.
If you encounter what looks like a small snake on the coast path with a golden-coloured stripe along the length of its back, it's a slow worm.
During the summer months, slow worms can sometimes be seen basking in the sunshine, particularly on pieces of stone which act as a sunbed. Being reptiles, they don't generate their own body heat so they need to get it from an external source. Despite their resemblance to snakes, slow worms are lizards that have evolved to lose their legs. They are a good example of convergent evolution, where quite unrelated groups of animals have evolved to fill a similar niche. Slow worms are surprisingly long lived, and may exceed 30 years of age in the wild and over 50 years in captivity.
Sea foam (also known as "spume") is formed due to organic compounds known as surfactants present in seawater. Under turbulent conditions, the surfactants form persistent bubbles which float to the surface, stick to each other through surface tension and are driven onshore by the wind. The surfactant compounds themselves arise from processes such as the offshore breakdown of algal blooms.
On beaches, sea foam can conceal deep pools and gullies with an apparently flat, uniform surface. Tread carefully, especially on beaches you don't know well, to avoid walking off the edge of a precipice or vanishing into icy cold water.
The foundations of an engine house are all that remains of the mine buildings which were once on Hor Point. The mine worked a copper lode which is exposed on both sides of the headland.
At Hor Point, a radar station was built during the Second World War to monitor shipping and low-flying aircraft. The stations required the antennae to be swung back and forth to detect reflected signals. These were originally powered by members of the Women's Auxiliary Airforce mounted on wheel-less bicycles which chains attached to a gear system, but were later replaced by electric motors. After the war, in 1945, the radar station was disposed of using explosives, reducing it to rubble which rolled down the hill. Chunks of the debris are still on the coast path and in the undergrowth above it.
St Ives has a reputation amongst artists for its light. As well as the more obvious reflections from the sea, the north-facing aspect also has a bearing on this.
To see a rainbow it must be sunny behind you and raining in front of you. As sunlight passes through raindrops, some is reflected back to you. Since in Cornwall the equator is to the south then the place to see rainbows over the sea is on the north coast (especially in the mornings).
The beach ahead is Porthmeor, which has a typically functional Cornish place name, meaning "big cove".
In January 1938, the SS Alba was on its way from Italy to Wales and sheltering from a gale but mistook the lights of Porthmeor for those of St Ives and ran aground. The St Ives lifeboat was launched and rescued 23 crew from the ship but then capsized and was washed onto the rocks. The lifeboat crew were all rescued but five of the Alba crew drowned. The boilers from the Alba can be seen on Porthmeor beach at low tide. Bomb disposal experts were acquainted with them in 2012 after they were mistaken for an unexploded sea mine by holidaymakers unfamiliar with Cornwall's metallic shoreline fixtures.
The Holy Well of St Ia (Venton Ia in Cornish) is a spring located opposite Porthmeor Beach, below the churchyard. The spring has been incorporated into the stone walls that surround the cemetery and now consists of two recesses each containing a trough of water. The resulting frenzy of stonework has been described as not one of the prettiest holy wells in Cornwall, despite the effort that must have gone into it. A plaque states "The holy well of St Ia, until 1843, the main water supply to Downalong" (the name for this area of the town).
Porthmeor is the largest beach at St Ives, and consists of golden sand. There's a beach at all states of the tide although it's quite a narrow strip at high tide. The beach faces north into the Atlantic so it gets some reasonable surf.
The name means "big cove" in Cornish. It is often referred to as "Porthmeor beach" and although the appended "beach" is technically redundant (given that the name already means "cove"), it does serve to distinguish it from Porthmeor Cove, not so far away along the coast near Morvah.
Smeaton's Pier was constructed towards the end of the 18th Century and was originally about half the current length, ending with the lighthouse. In the 1860s this was extended by adding a wooden pier (which was even longer than the current one) but this had collapsed within 20 years. The remains of the wooden supports can still be seen at the lowest point of the tide. Finally the stone pier was extended at the end of the 19th Century and the three arches were added so that sand could flush out from the harbour to prevent it silting up.
The Sloop Inn, which lies on the wharf, is dated to "circa 1312", which makes it one of the oldest inns in Cornwall. The building is likely to have been rebuilt a number of times over the centuries and the current structure is thought to date from the 17th-18th century. It is described by Lonely Planet as "a classic old fishermen's boozer, complete with low ceilings, tankards behind the bar and a comprehensive selection of Cornish ales."
St Ives has had a lifeboat since 1840, though the original was a rowing boat launched from the harbour. In 1867, the RNLI relocated it to Porthgwidden beach and built a boathouse for it. This was not well thought out as launching through the surf proved near impossible and so it was quickly replaced by a building in Fore Street. In 1911, a new boathouse was built on the quay which was better suited to launching the lifeboat which had become motorised by this point. This was finally replaced with the station you see today which was built in 1993 to accommodate a larger modern boat.
During Victorian times, open air painting became popular and the scenery and mild climate of St Ives generated a reputation as the ideal place for marine painting (of the decorative rather than boat-keeping kind). Once the railway was completed in 1877, St Ives became more accessible. Around this time, the pilchard industry was in decline which resulted in many unoccupied net lofts, cellars and workshops. These became converted into artists studios, with the first recorded in 1885 which had been converted from a sail loft. In 1920, Bernard Leach arrived and went on to make St Ives internationally famous through his pottery. St Ives has continued to attract artists and is now considered to be one of the most important art centres in Britain. In 1993, the St Ives branch of the Tate Gallery opened (named after the sugar magnate Henry Tate of Tate and Lyle). Since 1978, there has been a St Ives September Festival which runs for 15 days during which many artists open their studios to the public.
Barbara Hepworth moved to Cornwall at the outbreak of WW2 in 1939 and was part of the St. Ives School of Painting. She is famous for her abstract sculptures, which often featured simple, geometric forms and was a close friend of abstract sculptor Henry Moore. She died in a fire in her studio in 1975 thought to be caused by smoking in bed.
There are several reasons why seagulls should not be fed.
One is that human foods are not nutritionally suitable for seagulls but seagulls are not smart enough to know these can damage their health.
Another is that seagulls become dependent on humans and lose the skills to obtain food from natural sources.
The reason most affecting us is that feeding seagulls makes them less scared of humans. Since seagulls do not have have the emotional wiring to empathise with humans, fear is the only thing preventing that interaction being aggressive. Seagulls are innately aggressive when it comes to food as their behaviour with other seagulls demonstrates. There are many examples of children being attacked (who then drop food, reinforcing the behaviour).
The extra distance covered by going up and down also adds to the distance shown on a map. However, despite your legs telling you otherwise, this is actually not that huge either. There are two parts to it:
On an exceptionally arduous walk solely on the coast with lots of deep valleys, the distance travelled "up and down" is likely to be at most about 10% compared to the distance on the flat. For a more normal coastal circular walk the "up and down" distance is typically not much more than 5% of the distance on a flat map.
The second consideration was worked out by Pythagoras. The shallower the incline, the less significant the elevation adds to the overall route distance. Even with an average gradient of 1 in 3 (which is insanely steep), you're looking at only around 10% of the total elevation distance being adding onto the route length.
So since the elevation distance itself is already a small percentage of the route length (5-10%), the small "pythagoras" percentage (less than 10%) of the already small elevation percentage is not much more than a gnat's whisker.
Bernard Leach is considered one of the pioneers of the studio pottery movement. After learning ceramic skills in Japan, he set up a pottery in St Ives in 1920. Bricks salvaged from the National Explosives Works at Upton Towans were used for the first kilns and rhododendrons growing near the Steeple were harvested as fuel. Clay from the pits at St Erth was used for some of the pottery. Leach wrote several books on pottery and was influential in promoting the Japanese pottery tradition in the West. In 2008 Leach Pottery was restored and reopened as a museum to celebrate his work and legacy.
The large car park in St Ives was once the site of Wheal Trenwith which was mainly a copper mine, although a small amount of tin ore was also extracted. Amongst the copper ore was a black crusty ore that miners thought was copper oxide, but smelting it proved unsuccessful so it was discarded on the waste tips. It was identified as pitchblende (a Uranium ore, containing other radioactive decay products of Uranium-238) but it was seen of no value. An account from 1843 states:
Pitch-blende occurs in great abundance among the copper ores of Wheal Trenwith, and was long carefully collected, and thought to be black copper ore. The low prices obtained for the ores with which it was mixed, and the inferiority of the metal they yielded, equally disappointed the miner and the copper-smelter; until a specimen of the copper was examined by Mr. Michell of Calenick, and found mixed with uranium in a metallic state. The ores were then inspected, and pitch-blende being discovered among them, its nature and prejudice to the copper ores were explained to the workmen, by whom it has been, of course, since rejected. Was there ever an instance in which an acquaintance with Mineralogy and Chemistry would have been more useful ?
By 1907, the economic value of radium was well understood and waste tips were being worked for this valuable ore; small pockets were also extracted from the shallower areas of the mine. Between 1911-1917 there were 694 tonnes of uranium ore recovered, mainly from the waste tips. There are reports that pieces of the pitchblende ore can still be found around the edges of the car park today. It is radioactive so handling pieces of the black rock is not advised.
The game of bowls dates from mediaeval times and was first clearly documented in the 13th Century. From the 14th Century, it was banned along with several other sports for being a distraction from archery practice. However bans on bowling continued long after guns had replaced the longbow due to the disreputable nature of bowling alleys which were often attached to taverns. Until 1845, labourers, apprentices and servants were forbidden from playing bowls except at Christmas under the supervision of their masters!
Bamaluz beach is little more than some granite boulders at high tide but as the tide goes out, a sandy beach is revealed. On a low tide it joins up with the harbour beach and it's possible to walk along the sand on the seaward side of the pier. The name is from the Cornish bal maen luz which roughly translates as "greystone mine".
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