Tramping Diaries. SWCP – Newlyn to Mousehole September 12th.

It’s a lovely late Summer’s day. It’s still shorts weather. It’s better for walking if I can wear them. I like to keep it as lightweight as possible. Almost taking it to the same extremes as pa.

At his memorial service there was a picture of him walking with the Austrian Alpine Club. He was high up on a snow covered ridge tied onto a rope that disappears to somewhere behind whoever is holding the camera. Probably a few thousand feet up and wearing khaki shorts!

The A30 stretches all the way through the tapering leg of Cornwall and then ends at Penzance where the road follows the coast and then heads up a hill towards Newlyn. I’m into the countryside along leafy lanes and then come into Newlyn from the north. I feel like I’m arriving through the back door.

I pull up next to a large factory like building which hums gently and smells of fish. ‘W Harvey and sons Shellfish’. This moment is great. I turn off the engine and just sit thinking of nothing, letting the journey fade from my mind.

Across the road the stream bubbles along parallel to the road. Lush ferns and other greenery sprout from its banks. There is the smell of figs from a tree hanging over the stream. It doesn’t look or feel like the UK.

The road passes the Newlyn Filmhouse on the right. How excellent: having an independent cinema with a bar and food too in a relatively small town. I’m glad to see they’ve managed to survive the pandemic (or so it seems). I stop and fill up the Sigg bottle.

The road flows down to the junction. The bus stop is on the left where I ended last time in the drizzle. The fishing harbour is there but quiet today. It’s Saturday. The path here is the road like many other coastal towns I’ve been through: Weymouth, Torquay, Plymouth and so on.

The road/path curls the two miles to Mousehole. En route I phone the Old Coastguard to see if I can eat there. It’s one of two Mousehole pubs that I find on my phone. Only if I get there at 6.30. Like last year staycationers have flooded Britain’s tourist spots. I hope it’s good for the local economy.

The road climbs and turns to the left following the line of the coast. On the right are grey stone houses with large green doors. They look like stable doors.

To the left I look down on boats washed up at low tide. Three generations of a family potter about the seaweed around a clinker built two mast dinghy. It could be a scene from a painting by Stanhope Forbes, one of the preeminent artists of the Newlyn School.

Recently I took a walk around the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. in the same room as Picasso and other major modern pieces of art was an abstract work by Roger Hilton called ‘Large Orange (Newlyn)’. I was impressed but confused by it. How great that Newlyn has exerted a pull on artists for at least 150 years.

Another slip in time. These moments of absence are lost to the past and I have no memory of what happens. But at the time I’m in my own dreamer world.

Mousehole appears around the corner. Shiny black lines of rock appear parallel with the road before they fade into the wavelets of the sea. Beyond that a slim island of rock. Beyond that a thick band of clouds on the horizon.

Rising up and down in the channel between the shore and the islet is a wooden dinghy with two rust coloured sails. I have always loved the look of boats like this ever since I use to play with one as a young boy while the bath water got cold around me.

I am half aware this could be the last ocean swim of the year so I’m quick to get in. Sometimes the yearning aches like being in love. There is a square tidal pool blown or carved out of the rock. It reminds me of the bigger pool blasted out of the coastal shelf, Dancing Ledge, in Dorset by two brothers after the war. I walk past this and jump from one line of rock to the next until they get lower and closer.

There is no hesitation.

The water is cold and clear and constantly moving as the waves break over the rocks. I have goggles on and the white of the bubbles and rush of water hurl me through channels between the rocks. All around me is a mass of kelp. It is also being swayed and pulled by the waves. They remind me of the strips of hard cloth that whizz all over your car at the carwash. After 15 minutes I feel drunk. As I surface I tilt my head and whoop like I’ve heard surfers do when a set is appearing from the horizon.

‘What a weirdo’, a husband is probably saying to his wife outside the whitewashed cafe which overlooks me. It makes me happier than anything.

I come out and change in minutes. Up the cliff and drink a good local IPA while I look at the same island and horizon and the little boat disappears around a headland.