Holiday Snaps: Our Week In Cornwall

Friday: Last time I walked across this viaduct it was about 5.30am, on an equally fine morning, in July 2008:

Dartmoor was looking particularly lush and inviting just off to our left.

Later in the day, in Launceston I spotted a top contender for ‘sign of the week’:

Saturday: On the north side of Bodmin Moor, Mick was impressed with the size of the horns on these coos (I suppose I should have done a bit of cropping and zooming to give a better view)

Meanwhile, elsewhere, on the other side of Bodmin Moor, I was quite impressed with these samples:

Sunday: Jade was back on the walk, and after a gentle couple of  miles we came across some challenging stiles; particularly challenging when you can’t easily lift your one leg.

The overgrown brambles (not in evidence so much in the photos, but I assure you that they were there) added to the challenges.

Then, when the stiles got easier, there were the added obstacles of slurry-filled water obstacles combined with brambles and nettles.

Monday: Winner of the ‘sign of the week’ award:

Tuesday: Becks holding an ‘ickle mouse. Or  maybe it’s a leaf. Easy mistake to make. This campsite was also the venue of the ‘biggest spider ever’ incident:

Thursday: They were no doubt cursing my route choice as we negotiated this muddy little lane:

A little while later we found that a different mud-fest had been surfaced. Never seen ‘ashtray shells’ used for this purpose before:

As we had entered this field, we scratched our heads for a while as to the whereabouts of the exit. Not being able to spot it, we just followed a bearing and sure enough, when we were about 3 feet away, it became clear. It looks far more obvious in a photo with Jade demonstrating the location of the wall-stile steps. (The other side of this stile was the location of the unfortunate incident involving the handle of my walking pole and a cowpat.)

In a week that was mainly road-walking, the first four miles of this morning really crammed in ‘interesting features’. Here’s another mud-fest of a track which was just before the killer dog and killer horse incidents.

A good way to end a day: Becks delivers two scones to our tent, complete with clotted cream (food of the devil!) for Mick:

Friday: Demonstrating the best way to carry your lunch (in antenna style), as they set off on another murky morning.

Meanwhile, Mick and I went to explore how little we could see off The Lizard. Very little was the answer:

At the end of the day the girls were happy indeed to see their first road side with a mention of Land’s End.

Saturday: I didn’t do a full blog post about the last day (of which I walked all but the last mile with Jade & Becks), so I didn’t have to mention to the world-at-large how I led the girls astray as I took them trespassing across farmland, nor how we had to negotiate a barbed wire fence and impenetrable gorse and prickles. They arrived at Land’s End looking like they’d had an adventure, what with the bloody, scratched legs!

Although many prickles were encountered (not to mention a few back-tracks; I can’t believe they remained so good humoured when I led them astray so close to the finish!), some of the moorland was absolutely stunning in its purples and yellows:

The plus side of the faffing around with finding a way to trespass our way to the coast was that, by the time we were backtracking once again to find our way off Carn Brea in the right direction (at which point we were on Access Land, but with the impediment of dense gorse preventing a direct route in the direction we wanted), the murk finally melted away. By the time Mick had joined us just outside of Sennen Cove the sky was turning blue (you can just see the last of the murk disappearing off in the top right of this photo).

By the time we got to Sennen Cove it was looking absolutely stunning:

Having quickly nipped around to Land’s End in the car, we were there to see Jade and Becks achieve what they’d set out to achieve:

After the End-to-Enders book had been signed, Jade & Becks went off to join Becks’s family for a  picnic and we decided it was time to wend our way home.

It may have been a bit of a spur of the moment holiday, and the weather was undeniably disappointing, but a top time was had. Such a good time, that it’s strange to think that we had only met Jade and Becks for the first time three weeks earlier!