I had another dream about Ukraine last night. I was going to meet a couple in West Ukraine to deliver aid – comically being carried in a caravan on the back of a van – and was getting their details and all the relevant information to cross the border. This was all just at it happened (apart from the caravan).
Every night I dream of border crossings, guards and driving along miles and miles of straight roads through pine forests. This happened and must have made an impression on my imagination for me to keep reproducing the images in my sleep.
C and I are staying in a small B n B just back from the promenade in Penzance. The roads are quiet and slick with rain.
In Newlyn there is a buzzy atmosphere. The shops are open. In the bakery a queue of people wait for fresh pastys, in The Swordfish pub early drinkers are already propping up the bar and a couple look at a painting of a seascape in a window of a second hand shop.
In the fish shop nearest the harbour a woman expertly cuts off the head and tail of a megrim sole the size of a large serving dish before cutting off the fins with scissors.
‘There aren’t so many these days’, she says about the fishermen without looking up.
A man in his sixties with a creased face and a small ring in his ear stands with his back to the wall and looks at her as she works.
When I ask her why she replies without hesitation: ‘because they’re men aren’t they – they don’t like doing a proper day’s work’, and then looks knowingly at her friend with the earring. He just smiles and raises his eyebrows.
Walking into the harbour it seems quiet. The wharves where the fish are unloaded and packed for transportation are swept clean, the only sense of recent activity being a distinct fishy odour. The low sheds that line the eastern edge of the harbour have the old clock faces that show the ‘TIMES OF HIGH WATER’ that I remember from years ago.
It’ll be ten years ago this summer that I did my ‘Competent Crew’ training with a rag tag bunch of other men on a 35 foot yacht in Falmouth. Our surf dude skipper took us round The Lizard in a force 7 gale. I remember the boat pitching and heaving and everyone being sick over the side while one huge great bloke lay still on his front with his head over the side of the boat unable to move. We eventually made it and had to moor up next to two other boats as there were no moorings left on the harbour wall. The next day was totally still and sunlit and I remember the soft light playing on the water in the harbour and the smell of ciragette smoke and those clock faces.
There are very few people about but a strange welcoming party has gathered to meet us on the harbour wall. About fifty small birds with grey wings and backs, pure white undercarriages and orange legs drift quickly en masse from side to side chirruping keenly. With their beady eyes and quick fluid movement there is something comic about them. They are turnstones and used to feeding off scraps from the great hauls of fish that arrive here.
Along one of the piers a couple of big trawlers are getting ready to go to sea. A bulky man with tattoos is checking hundreds of metres of green fishing line. Another man in his twenties with the immediately recognisable yellow waders of his trade was bringing a hose into the fish locker.
‘Yep, we’re fishing today. We’ll go about 30 miles offshore.’
Further on I meet Mike Knowle standing at the back of his pickup chatting to the skipper of one of his two fishing boats. Where is the boat heading?
‘Wherever the fish are’, the skipper tells me. Mike adds quietly ‘probably just south of the Isles of Scilly is where they mostly go at the moment’
They are both positive about fishing. ‘It’s a good living’ the skipper says and Mike echoes this.
‘There’s plenty of fish out there but the young guys these days fon’t want to do it.’
How hard is it I wonder.
The skipper answers. ‘If you’re a builder you’re not going to go and work for f*#king 3 hours a day. Same with this. We go for a week. While we tow two men work a shift of 3 hours while the others rest then swap over with another two. When we come back we have 36 hours while the boat has repairs then we go again’.
I don’t say anything.
Mike says ‘It’s not as dangerous as it used to be. It’s all mechanised now. I was 15 when I first used to go. Now I’m 54 and I prefer staying on dry land.’
He gives me a wry smile as we say our goodbyes.
Up on the north coast I restart from the man made hillocks that spell tin mining activity where I left off yesterday. Another leg. I’m exact about starting where I started before like joing the dots on a massive sketch of the outline of the south west of England. Sometimes I have to park as near as I can and walk back the other way along the path (as I have today). I normally stop and think back to where I was and celebrate the continuation of the walk. If there’s a SWCP wooden sign I pat it encouragingly before I set off. Back again. Rituals that started off as silly habits have now become set in stone.
Just as I start, two shining black shapes screech past and disappear over the edge of the cliffs. Are they choughs? Ever hopeful but alas no. Jackdaws. As soon as they have gone out of sight 2 bits of froth the size of tennis balls spin upwards passing in the opposite direction from the sea hundreds of feet below. It’s like the birds had been transformed somehow and sent back up the cliff in some bizarre moment of reincarnation – no doubt some ancient Cornish magic at work.
Much more of the sea is lit up today. Half of it is emerald green flecked with white spray while the vast shadows of clouds drift across it like continents.
At Chapel Porth the car park is half full. The sun is out. The wind is cold. But families and couples are at play.
Alongside the car park the stream races along almost level with its banks, a sign of the heavy rain that has continued unabated for several weeks. Every person I have spoken to recently have been talking about it.
Everywhere on this stretch there are reminders of Cornwall’s mining past. Signs warning of shaft openings litter the heather covered cliff tops. The old narrow stone buildings with their tall chimneys nestling up to their sides can be seen all along the coast in various states of disrepair.
However, at Towanroath the engine house from the outside has still maintained its original structure like those car stickers in Cornwall which depict a silhouette of an old engine house – a symbol for Cornwall and Cornishness – and almost as ubiquitous as the white cross on black background of the Kernow flag. According to The Cornwall Guide The Wheal Coates mine that existed beneath where I’m standing was worked between 1802 and 1889. The Towanroath engine house is now a Grade II listed building and owned by the National Trust.
‘Built in 1872 the Towanroath engine house was responsible for keeping the water out of the shaft 600 feet below.’ There were two other engine houses here too that were ‘responsible for hoisting and crushing the tin ore.’ (Cornwall Guide).
I have a moment of imagining working 600 feet below ground and shudder. I can’t imagine two places so physically close but so utterly different. It makes me wonder that I must be slightly claustrophobic. Give me loads of space and a great view any day. Coastal walking? Yes. Caving? Er No. Not for me.
Up on the top the wind is blasting. The ground is colourless. Even the heather is grey. It’s getting to that time of year where the world seems to be poised, ready now for the spring to arrive, for new beginnings, new life to be made explicit in the near world. Some day soon it’ll suddenly happen. And we’ll breathe a collective sigh of relief.
At St Agnes Head many people are parked. A mother and daughter walk side by side the wind blowing their hair into one dark mass. A small woman with two dogs focuses on the path ahead. A couple huddled into one another lean into the wind and beam at me when I pass. It is another small section done. Another collection of moments. And once again I look at the cliffs to the north east, pause and then peel off to track back to the car at Chapel Porth.
The Slow Walker 