Watergate Bay, near Newquay, is still sometimes known by its local name "Tregurrian Beach" which is reported as once being Porth Tregoryan (meaning something along the lines of "Cove at Coryan's Farm").
The beach is two miles long and popular for surfing of all kinds including kite surfing. The beach faces west, so the best surf occurs when the wind is easterly. The surf is said to be consistent at all states of the tide.
The two large mounds alongside the coast path between Watergate Bay and Whipsiderry are Bronze Age barrows. A stone axe hammer from the Bronze Age was found in a burial cist next to one of the mounds.
The airfield to the left is RAF St Mawgan.
RAF St Mawgan, on the hill to the south of St Mawgan, was originally a civilian airfield that was requisitioned in the Second World War as a satellite of the nearby St Eval airfield. After the war, it was reopened as a Coastal Command base for maritime reconnaissance which continued until the 1990s. It is also believed that the US Government built an underground bunker housing nuclear warheads during the Cold War. Since the 1990s, the airfield was mainly used for Search and Rescue. In 2008, the runway was handed to Newquay Airport, to resume its original civilian role. There is still an RAF base on the site and there is discussion about possibly relocating the Search and Rescue services here once more.
The name of Whipsiderry Beach arises from some old mining terms: whips (marker flags) and derrick (an elevated structure for haulage situated over a shaft). It is recorded that the Derrick - resembling gallows - was named after a famous hangman by that name.
A cave on the side of Porth Island was enlarged in the 1870s as part of the Porth Island Silver and Lead Mine workings. In the 1920s-30s, a harmonium was wheeled in here at low tide for candlelight concerts and consequently became known as the Concert Cavern or Banqueting Hall. It eventually became unsafe and was mostly demolished with explosives.
Another cave near this, known as Cathedral Cavern, has a pillar and a series of intersecting tunnels. This was once quarried, it is reported, for white marble. Marble is not common in Cornwall, but a bed of it was found deep in a mine fairly nearby in Perranporth so this might be related.
There are also two smaller caves on Whipsiderry Beach named according to their contents: Fern Cavern and Boulder Cavern.
The island on Whipsiderry beach is known as Flory Island or Black Humphrey Rock. Books from the 19th and early 20th Century record tales of a wrecker called Black Humphrey who was said to live in the old mine-workings. So much of the mine workings on the beach and the island have since been eroded that it's hard to imagine how it would have looked hundreds of years ago. A verse is recorded about Black Humphrey based on ships being wrecked by the westerly gales:
When the wind is from the west Pray for me among the rest; When the wind is from the east I’ll to church as soon as Priest;
The alternative name Flory is thought to be a corruption of Phillory, but the significance of the name has been lost.
On Trevelgue Head, alongside the beach at Porth, are the remains of an Iron Age cliff castle. The site was excavated in 1939 but due to the outbreak of the Second World War, the project was never finished and the results never published until nearly 70 years later in 2007. The fort was surrounded by a series of large earth and stone ramparts, and the settlement in the centre included a large roundhouse and even a protected field system. Estimates of when the fort was in use vary, but certainly from before Roman Times. It's likely to have been built somewhere between 3-6 centuries BC, and then been in use for a number of centuries.
There are barrows on the headland, dating back further, to the Bronze Age. Archaeologists have also found remains of a bronze foundry and hut circles from this period. However some remains of settlements on the headland date back even further still, to Stone Age times: flint tools have been found that are estimated to be 6000 years old, from the Mesolithic period.
There is a blowhole in the gully at the end of Porth Island, located on the longer right-hand side, opposite where the shorter side ends. At mid-tide, when there is a swell, the waves washing into the cave, compress the air and force a jet of water and compressed air through the blowhole with a roar.
Blowholes form when waves enter a cave, and the air they compress weakens the roof of the cave and enlarges the chamber. Often the blowhole eventually breaks through to the surface, forming a collapsed cave which ultimately results in a rock stack being severed from the land.
Before continuing, you can make an optional diversion to Trevelgue Head and Porth Island on the right.
The walk continues downhill on the pavement (optionally via the terrace along the river) until you reach a gap in the wall just before the Mermaid Inn leading onto the beach.
The settlement on the opposite side of the valley is St Columb Minor, named after St Columba, to whom its church is dedicated.
The legend of St. Columba is preserved in a manuscript in the University Library of Cambridge. This states that she was the daughter of an Irish King, and that, in order to escape marriage with a pagan prince, she took a ship to Cornwall. She arrived at Trevelgue head but unluckily, she had been followed by the Prince. He chased her through the forest (which is now Porth beach). The princess fled up the valley, past Rialton and Treloy until she was captured at Ruthvoes. The Prince cut off her head and where blood fell, a spring gushed forth and the water following the course of her flight, formed the river that runs across the beach.
The beach at St Columb Minor is known either as St Columb Porth or more commonly just "Porth" or "Porth beach", though the latter is effectively "cove beach", rivalling "Coombe valley" ("valley valley") for the place name most lost in translation.
The narrow beach, between the two parallel headlands, is consequently fairly sheltered and therefore generally better-suited to swimming than surfing. The gradient is very shallow so the tide comes in quite fast. The river running along the right-hand side of the beach is deeper and faster-flowing than you might expect: attempting to wade through in wellies may result in an unplanned swim.
Roughly 20 feet down in the sand on the beach at Porth is the remains of a prehistoric forest which is though to date from around 7,000 years ago when sea levels where much lower. This forest extended out into the bay which would have all been dry land. During the 1950s, a water pumping station was built near the Mermaid Inn which involved digging down into the sand. During the excavation, tree stumps were uncovered that were so large that a bulldozer was required to pull them out. Particularly large storms can strip away sand and cause the tree stumps to be exposed, which happened in some parts of Cornwall and Wales in 2014, allowing the age of some of the remains to be estimated using radiocarbon dating.
Alexanders are very salt tolerant so they thrive in Cornwall's salty climate. They are just as likely to be found along coastal footpaths as along country lanes. New growth appears in the autumn so during the winter, when most other plants are dormant, it is a dominant source of greenery along paths and lanes in exposed coastal areas.
Tarmac was discovered by accident in 1901 when a barrel of tar fell and burst open on a road and then waste slag from a nearby furnace was used to cover up the mess. The resulting smooth surface was noticed by a surveyor for Nottingham County who patented the idea, formed the Tar Macadam Syndicate and registered Tarmac as a trademark.
This has been adopted into the English language initially as tarmacadam and increasingly now as just tarmac. When used as an adjective it gains an extra "k" (i.e. tarmacked).
In much more recent times (the late 18th or early 19th Century), a huer's hut was built on Porth Island.
The pilchard fisheries rose to their peak in Victorian times. The pilchards were salted and then pressed to extract the oil which was sold as somewhat aromatic lamp oil. The fish were then packed with more salt into hogshead barrels which could fit up to 3000 fish per barrel. Huers (cliff top lookouts) helped locate shoals of fish. The huer would shout "Hevva!, Hevva!" (the Cornish word for "shoal") to alert the boats to the location of the pilchard shoals. The name "huer" is from the old French verb meaning "to shout".
The pilchard fishery was particularly important in Newquay, which is reflected in the town's insignia depicting pilchards. A huer's hut still remains above Newquay harbour.
The name is a mangling of the Cornish Lostyn Glas. The precise meaning of this in English is not clear: the not-exactly-similar "little green tail of land" and "place to view blue boats" have both been suggested. One reason for the confusion is that the word glas can be used to represent either blue or green or even grey! The words for the basic colours in Cornish are completely different from English: blue-green-grey is a single colour in Cornish as is grey-brown (loodge) as these were principal colours of the natural environment (e.g. the sea and the soil). This is a nice example of how our perception of colour (which is after all a continuous spectrum of shades that we arbitrarily divide up into named ranges) is influenced by the language we speak; the different languages essentially have a different colour palette.
In the cliff at the back of Lusty Glaze, the remains of an inclined plane are visible which was intended to haul boats from the beach to the St Columb canal 100 feet above on the clifftop.
The St Columb Canal was intended to bring lime-rich shell sand from the coast, to be used inland as fertiliser in the same way as the Bude Canal. The canal was designed as two branches which ran from the coast to the North and South of St Columb, inland towards the town. The northern branch ran along the Menalhyl valley to Mawgan Porth. Lusty Glaze, on the edge of Newquay, was the intended terminus for the southern branch.
Work began in the 1700s, but ran into problems because, around Newquay, the very sand the canal was built to transport, present in the soil, resulted in a canal that would not actually hold water. The resulting empty trench was little use for transporting anything and the project for the southern section was aborted. The northern section of the canal fared slightly better in that it was completed, but lost so much money that it fell out of use within 3 years.
Sea beet grows along the cliff edge here.
Sea beet has been cross-bred with domesticated crops to re-introduce some of the disease resistance from the tougher wild plant that were lost in the domesticated plants. It is also able to withstand quite high sodium levels in the soil which allows it to grow in salty conditions on the coast.
The conical mound is a barrow and the surrounding grassy area is known as The Barrowfields.
The Barrowfields is an area of open space opposite the Hotel Bristol in Newquay. It is so called because of the numerous prehistoric burial mounds (barrows) that have been identified here - fifteen so far. One of the barrows was excavated and, at the centre, a pottery burial urn was found containing the remains of a Chieftan from around 3500 years ago. Sadly, few of the barrows now remain as in the early 1800s, before anyone understood their historic importance, a local farmer removed much of the stone for use in the walls surrounding his fields.
Enid Blyton's "Malory Towers" was based on The Bristol Hotel in Newquay. During World War 2, the hotel was the temporary site of Benenden School (normally in Kent) which Enid's daughter attended. Although her daughter was only there for one term in 1945 before the war ended, the location was an inspiration. The clifftop location and even west-facing aspect were carefully preserved in Malory Towers.
The beach at Tolcarne is sandy at all states of the tide. At low tide, Tolcarne, Great Western and Towan beach all merge into a single beach stretching to the harbour. On spring tides, this also extends in the other direction to Lusty Glaze. Access from the top of the cliffs involves a couple of hundred steps which connects to the beach via the holiday complex at the base of the cliffs.
The beach takes its name from Tolcarne Point, itself named from the Cornish for "rock outcrop on the brow of a hill". Since this is not an uncommon landscape feature in Cornwall, the name crops up in quite a few other places.
Before the railway was built, Newquay was a small fishing village, with around 1,300 inhabitants recorded in 1801. The settlement grew up around a natural harbour and was known as Towan Blystra (which translates to something like "wind-blown dune"). Although protected from the prevailing westerly winds, the anchorage was quite exposed to a northeasterly wind. This may possibly be the origin of the Cornish name but also gave rise to its successor: in the late Middle Ages, funds were secured to protect the harbour by the building of a new quay.
During the 1840s, the Victorian entrepreneur Joseph Treffry created a horse-drawn tramway from the area around Bugle to his port in Par. In 1849, the tramway was extended through St Dennis to Newquay, in an ambitious scheme to export from the mines to both coasts. In Newquay the tramway ran along the trackbed of what is now the railway line, over the Trenance viaduct and beside the current station but rather than terminating here, it continued through the town to the harbour.
When Newquay was a working mineral port, horse-drawn wagons emptied their ore into chutes at the top of the cliff, forming heaps at the bottom. The ore was moved along tram tracks which were laid along the quays to load the sailing ships awaiting in the harbour. Coal and other imported goods were raised from the quay in wagons hauled through a tunnel (now occupied by Newquay Rowing Club) using winding engines.
Towan Island was first sold at an auction in 1838 to the industrious Billing brothers, who were often seen working in their gardens on the Island. Before 1900, the island had a potato patch and chickens were also kept there, and it was accessed by a curving pathway up the sides from the beach.
At the start of the 1900s, a 30m long suspension bridge was built 25m above the beach and is the only privately-owned suspension bridge in Britain. The building on the island was formerly a tea room, and was converted into a three-bedroom Edwardian house in the 1930s.
The house was once owned by Sir Oliver Lodge, inventor of the spark plug. One can speculate whether the gap between the land and the island provided inspiration for the spark plug, vice versa, or whether this is just a happy coincidence.
The concept of fish and chips is thought to be a fusion of Jewish and northern English cultures. Fried fish was originally introduced by Jewish settlers, while chips became popular in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The combination as a dish is thought to have originated in the mid 1800s. During World War II, it was one of the few foods that were not rationed. The practice of wrapping in newspaper was stopped in the late 1980s due to the toxic chemicals used in ink.
Despite being named after sand dunes (that presumably existed here before Newquay was built), Towan is now Newquay's town beach. Towan beach joins with Great Western and Tolcarne beaches at low tide. It should not be confused with the identically-named Towan Beach on the Roseland peninsula.
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!
The walk finishes to the left but first you may wish to visit the harbour (turn right and take the first right - South Quay Hill with the large "Newquay Harbour" sign) and then return here.
To continue the walk, follow the road to The Central (pub).
During the mining boom of the 18th and 19th Centuries, Newquay's mediaeval harbour, which was originally built for fishing, was rebuilt as a mineral port. Work was started as part of a grand plan by a London investor to create a three acre harbour for exporting copper to the smelters in South Wales. He died before it was completed, but his company was bought out by mining magnate Joseph Treffry who completed work on the harbour for mineral export and connected it to his transport links leading inland. The stone pier in the centre of the harbour was originally connected to the South Quay by a timber bridge to create a third quay.
The harbour still has a small working fishing fleet and commercial boats associated with tourism.
The first traffic lights were installed outside the Houses of Parliament in 1868 to stop horse carriages so pedestrians could cross. During the day these used raised/lowered arms (like a railway signal). The red and green lights were only used at night, lit by burning gas and were consequently prone to explosions.
The corn bunting is a small brown bird and as its name suggests, it has a preference for cereals. Consequently it has been living alongside humans since Neolithic times when our ancestors started to domesticate cereal crops. Its common name "fat bird of the barley" gives away its appearance, resembling a very portly skylark that looks like it would have trouble getting off the ground, let alone hovering. Its call is equally unglamorous, described as the shaking of a bunch of keys. Sadly, the once common and familiar bird has vanished from many areas and is now endangered. The rapid decline is thought to be due to industrialisation of arable farming methods. In Cornwall, the coastal land management provides an important habitat in which the birds thrive.
During hot weather, weever fish migrate to Britain from the Mediterranean. They bury themselves in the sand where they are camouflaged, and ambush small fish in shallow water. To protect against predators, they have spines that inject a nerve toxin; if trodden on, this can be very painful. It's therefore a good idea either to wear some form of footwear in the sea or to shuffle your feet through the sand which is more likely to scare away any fish. If you are unlucky enough to tread on a weever, get your foot into hot water as soon as possible as this denatures the venom. Most lifeguards have a kettle on standby (and although its primary purpose might be cups of tea rather than weever stings, they will forego a cuppa in the interests of pain relief).
Kelp is the name given to a group of seaweed species. The most common in Cornwall is Oarweed - a leathery brown seaweed with finger-like strands. It grows at an impressive rate of around 5% per day, doubling in length in about 2 weeks and can reach up to 4 metres in length.
Kelp is high in sodium carbonate and was burned during Victorian times to harvest the alkaline ash which could be used in soap and glass production. Kelp also contains significant amounts of iodine and was used as a source for this too. In 2010, researchers found in laboratory trials that alginate, the soluble fibre substance in kelp, was better at preventing fat absorption than most over-the-counter slimming aids.
Jackdaws can be distinguished from other members of the crow family by their short black beaks and grey necks. They are smaller than all the other black birds in the crow family and are only slightly larger than jays.
Jackdaws are able to recognise eye gestures from humans (e.g. if someone looks at where a food item is hidden). It has been suggested that jackdaws may use this with other birds too and this may be the reason that they have a striking blue eye colour that is easily seen from a distance.
Jackdaws are very adept vocal mimics and have been known to sing virtually anything including opera and Madonna! They can be trained to copy the human voice but only for single words or short phrases.
Jackdaws also use a their calls in a democratic process to make group decisions for a flock such as whether to move location. If enough of the birds "vote" by making their voice heard, the entire flock will respect this and take off, even the birds that didn't vote for it.
Jackdaws have been found to share food and will share more of a preferred food than an unpleasant one. Although the sharing often takes place in courtship and parenting, the behaviour has also been observed in unrelated birds. It is thought that this pro-social behaviour might be a sign of reciprocity ("do unto others...") and possibly empathy.
Jellyfish are the oldest multi-organ animal. They have been around over 500 million years (more than twice as long ago as when the first dinosaurs appeared). They eat plankton which is most available during the late spring and summer. Consequently they are most often seen in large numbers when beaches are at their most busy.
The collective noun for jellyfish can either be a "swarm", "bloom" or "smack". When jellyfish rapidly multiply (due to plankton availability), "bloom" is typically used. When jellyfish actively swim to stay together (not all species do) then "swarm" tends to be preferred. "Smack" is a word play on being stung which is frowned-on by scientists.
Two of the most common jellyfish you're likely to see in Cornwall don't have a sting that is noticeable by humans:
Two to watch out for which are common and sting are:
Much less common, but also noteworthy for its nasty sting, is the Lion's Mane Jellyfish which is large (around 50cm across), reddish brown with thick frilled arms and a mass of hair-like tentacles. Also, if you see something that looks like a purple-and-pink inflatable pasty, it's a Portuguese Man o' War which is technically not a jellyfish but nevertheless has a very nasty sting.
If you are unlucky enough to be stung by a jellyfish, scrape off any stinging sacs stuck to the skin (e.g. with a shell or credit card) and apply ice and take some painkillers. There are old wives tales about urine, alcohol and baking soda being cures; avoid all of these as they are ineffective and likely to make the pain worse. Although vinegar does work in some situations, in others it can activate any unfired stinging cells; NHS advice is therefore to avoid it.
The Portuguese man o' war resembles a jellyfish but is actually a colony of polyps, specialised into four different roles. Some provide the float and others make up the stinging tentacles which can stretch over 160ft long and catch 100 fish in one day.
The man o' war is easily recognised by the pasty-shaped float with pink and purple colouring. They are normally found in the open ocean but big Atlantic storms with strong winds can very occasionally drive them onto the Cornish coast.
It is named after a heavily-armed 18th Century warship as a sting is extremely painful and in rare cases can be fatal.
By-the-wind sailors consist of a ring of blue jellyfish-like material around a central plastic-like sail and can sometimes be found blown onto beaches. Like jellyfish, they catch prey using stinging cells (not perceptible by humans although some people can get a rash).
The direction of the sail along the float determines which way they travel. Those with a sail running top-left to bottom-right drift left of the wind, whereas those with top-right to bottom-left drift to the right of the prevailing wind direction.
They are not a single organism, but a whole colony of coral-like polyps that are interconnected with a canal system to distribute the food caught in the tentacles. However each colony is all of a single gender. If that wasn't complicated enough, alternate generations are singular planktonic jellyfish-like creatures that don't even form a by-the-wind sailor, but their offspring do!
The buoy barnacle is a strange-looking blue creature that sometimes washes up on the shore in groups of a few at a time. It is a kind of goose barnacle but it excretes a substance which resembles expanding foam to create its own float. Several barnacles may latch on to the same float, each adding a bit of extra foam to it if they weigh it down too much.
Goose barnacles are alien-looking creatures, usually found on flotsam such as driftwood that has been at sea for a while. In mediaeval times, before it was realised that birds migrate, it was believed that goose barnacles hatched into geese just before the winter. The association is thought to be based on similarities in the colour and the long necks of the barnacles. Since there were no plastic bottles or wellies floating in the sea back then, they were only ever seen on driftwood and it was assumed that the wood was already covered in the barnacles, laid by geese, before it fell into the sea. This elaborate lifecycle was also exploited as a "loophole" in religious doctrine which forbade the eating of meat on certain days. As geese were deemed "neither flesh, nor born of flesh", they were exempt and could be eaten.
Limpets wander around grazing on algae when the tide is in, but always return to the same parking spot as the tide recedes, gradually creating a depression in the rock at this point. In coastal communities it was traditional to gather limpets, mussels and winkles before Lent. The practice was known as "goin' a triggin'" and the gathered shellfish was known as "Trigg meat". The shells of limpets were known as "Croggans".
Kestrels are members of the falcon family and the most common bird of prey in Europe although in recent years in Britain they have been overtaken by the buzzard. They can be recognised from their fairly small size for a bird of prey, brown plumage and black tips to their tail when in flight. Despite having a wingspan of over half a metre, kestrels only weigh around 200g.
Kestrels are primarily vole specialists. If there are a shortage of voles they will feed on smaller rodents such as mice and shrews, lizards and even on insects if larger prey are not available. Particularly in urban areas where there aren't many voles they will also take birds such as sparrows and even those as large as starlings.
The size of the kestrel population is very dependent on the vole population. The mortality of young kestrels is high. Around 60-70% don't survive their first year and the main cause of this is starvation.
Kestrels are easily spotted when hovering, watching their prey. Whilst hovering, kestrels have the extraordinary ability to keep their head totally still, even in strong winds.
During winter months, kestrels mostly hunt from perches rather than by hovering as this burns too much energy at a time when food resources are scarce. The reason the birds don't do this all year round is that hovering is a much more productive way to catch prey so when temperatures are warmer and food is more abundant they switch strategies.
Over recent decades, the kestrel population has been in decline and is now about half of what it was at the start of the 1970s. The exact reasons are not known but it's strongly suspected it is connected to a decline in vole numbers perhaps due to changing farming methods. Reduced availability of nesting sites (e.g. in old trees) may also be a contributing factor.
The two parishes of "St Columb" are so named because their churches are both dedicated to St. Columba - a local saint with a holy well at Ruthvoes. It is not known exactly who St. Columba was, but it is known she was not Columba of Iona, who is (mistakenly) depicted in a modern west window in St Columb Major church.
The place name, Sancta Columba, is first recorded in the 13th century. To distinguish the 2 settlements, they are now prefixed with "Major" and "Minor". Previously these were known as Higher and Lower St Columb, with "St Columb" often used to refer to St Columb Major.
Stories of mythical half-woman half-fish creatures date back over 3000 years to Ancient Assyria and Greece and have been part of English culture for over 1000 years. The word "mermaid" comes from the old English word mere, meaning sea. Before the mid-19th Century, dugongs and manatees were routinely referred to as mermaids by mariners although in Cornwall, the most likely creature to be attributed to being a mermaid is a seal. The U.S. National Ocean Service felt it necessary to state in 2012 that no evidence of mermaids has ever been found.
Barrows are megalithic tombs constructed with stone supports and covered with a mound of earth. Archaeology has revealed that the ancient tribes of Cornwall practised burial of their dead. Important individuals, such as kings or tribal chiefs, were often buried in monumental tombs to indicate their significance. Valuable items such as weapons and jewellery were often buried along with the dead. However, many barrows have been subject to grave robbers over the ages, meaning much of this treasure has been lost.
The curiously-named beach of Lusty Glaze is just around the corner from Porth, in the direction of Newquay. The beach is privately owned by the Adventure Centre but has full public access. There is a sand beach at all states of the tide. At low tide the beach joins to Tolcarne beach. On a really low spring tide, Porth Beach also merges from the other side.
Great Western beach gets it name from the railway as it's opposite the station. A tarmac path leads down to the beach from beside the Great Western Hotel. At high tide, the beach is a narrow strip of sand. At low tide, it merges with Tolcarne and Towan beach either side. In the afternoon, the high cliffs cast a shadow over the top of the beach.
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