Note that there are 2 stations at Lelant. The trains now only stop at Lelant (village) and no longer at Lelant Saltings (the one next to the car park) but it's an easy 800 metre walk from Lelant (village) station back to the car park at the end. Also note that not all trains from St Ives stop at Lelant so check carefully. Alternatively you can catch a bus from St Ives to Lelant (stops near the village hall). There's some more info in the last direction of the walk about how to get back from each location.
Just before it reaches the old station house, the route passes a gate on the left with a green "Anne's Wood" sign.
The wood was given to the Woodland Trust in memory of Anne Rostron, hence the name, and stands on the site of a 19th Century clay works. The clay was used to make firebricks for lining the furnaces in South Wales. The woodland consists of mature Beech, Sycamore, Oak and Ash interspersed with Holly and young trees. Beneath the dense canopy are shade-loving flora including ferns and ivy.
The route also passes the house where Rosamunde Pilcher lived - the second house on the left after the old station house - known as No 2 The Elms when she lived there.
Rosemunde Pilcher was a British writer of romance novels who grew up in Lelant. She began writing at the age of 7, published her short story at the age of 15 and continued writing until she was 76. She died in 2019. Pilcher has become particularly well-known in Germany where over 100 of her stories have been produced for TV with many of the filming locations in Cornwall.
The mortuary chapel was built in the cemetery for the Nonconformist Christians - the dying wish of a local Methodist, who put up the money for it but this turned out to be insufficient and had to be topped up by another benefactor. It was completed in 1879 and was enlarged in 1909.
In spring 1877 the Cornish Telegraph reported that one of the ancient Celtic crosses was vandalised: painted with the word "Popery" and the crucifixion figure smeared with paint. It was thought this was done by St Ives fishermen who came to Lelant to paint their boats on the beach near the railway station. The cross was moved into the churchyard for safety in 1878, just before the Methodist chapel was also built there.
The current church building in Lelant is thought to mostly date from the 15th century, incorporating a few earlier Norman features. The earliest records of the church are from the twelfth century, though it is likely that there was a church in Lelant dedicated to St Anta before this one which is dedicated to St Uny. Exactly where a previous building would have been located is uncertain, possibly on the current site which is the highest point in the area, though there are tales of a chapel buried by the encroaching sand dunes. As well as ecclesiastical duties, the church at Lelant was also used for the storage of contraband spirits. The churchyard entrance incorporates black blocks of slag from the copper smelters at Hayle.
A Site of Special Scientific Interest extends from pools of the Hayle Estuary to Carrack Gladden, including the beach and dunes of Porth Kidney Sands. Hayle is Britain’s most southwesterly estuary and due to the mild maritime climate, it never freezes. Up to 18,000 birds have been seen here in the winter. During the spring and autumn, its far westerly location makes it a very important site for migratory birds to stop and rest. Ospreys have been seen here in a number of years.
Within the sand dunes stretching from the golf course towards Porthkidney beach, there have been a number of finds of human remains. When remains of a building was also discovered in the dunes, this led to speculation that it might be a lost chapel of St Anta. The building is now once again lost in the sands so this cannot be investigated further. It is now thought more likely the building was a remnant of the mediaeval port town of Lelant. This was originally situated downriver from its current location but was abandoned due to encroaching sands. The human remains are thought to date from different periods, with some very likely being prehistoric.
Porthkidney Sands stretch for approximately a mile from the mouth of the River Hayle in Lelant to Hawk's Point in Carbis Bay. At low tide, the beach can also stretch almost a mile out to sea. Due to the very flat beach, the tide comes in very fast indeed. If you are attempting to walk across the beach to the point and the tide starts to race in, then head straight to the dunes. Paths lead from the dunes to the coast path which runs alongside the railway line and you can continue this way to the point. Note that the dunes are sometimes used by naturists.
In October 1886, the German ship Albert Wilhelm was on its way to Fowey from the Isle of Man but as it passed around Godrevy Head it struck Stones Reef which made a hole in the hull. The leaking ship made it to Porthkidney Sands where it ran aground and the crew were rescued by Hayle's lifeboat. Most of the ship was broken up and removed but the bottom of the hull still remains, usually buried in sand but occasionally uncovered by winter storms.
During late April, St Mark's flies occur in quite large numbers. They are recognisable by their shiny black colour, slow flight and dangly legs and have a habit of landing of anything in their path, walkers included. The larvae live in the soil feeding on roots and rotting vegetation and hatch around St Mark's Day (25th April), sometimes later into May in a cold year. The adults only live for about a week but they do feed on nectar, making them important pollinators. Each of the males eyes are divided into two parts by a groove and each part has a separate connection to their brains. This allows them to use one half to fly whilst using the other half to look for females.
Because bluebells spread very slowly, they're considered to be an indicator of ancient woodland sites. In areas where trees are not very old, the fact there are bluebells around can indicate that there has been a wood on a site for a very long time. Even if there are no trees there at all, bluebells tell us that there was woodland there some time in the past. The bluebells along the coast are a relic of the gnarled oak woodland that used to grow here before it was cleared for grazing. There is still a patch of the ancient oak woodland left along the coast at Dizzard.
St Michael's Way is a 12.5 mile route on footpaths and some roads established in 1994 by Cornwall Council, waymarked with a symbol that looks a little like rays of light but is actually a stylised shell, based on the Council of Europe's sign for pilgrim routes.
The route is based on a prehistoric route from Lelant crossing the peninsula to Marazion. This avoided the need to negotiate the submerged rocks and strong currents at Land’s End. Later, St Michael's Way was used as part of a pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in North West Spain. It is believed that this route was a key factor in Cornwall's rapid conversion into a Christian faith.
The modern route has two different options for reaching Marazion. The more direct route involves crossing through A30 and A394 traffic followed by a path through Marazion marshes. The longer route is via Gulval towards Penzance and then doubling back along the coast path from Penzance to Marazion.
Along the path that leads from the beach up to the waymark is a platform on the rock outcrop opposite a mine adit. There are several other mine adits around Carbis Bay.
An adit is a roughly horizontal tunnel going into a mine. In Cornwall these were important for drainage as many of the ore-bearing veins are close to vertical, through which water can easily seep. Drainage adits were sloped slightly upwards to meet the main shaft, so water trickling into the main shaft from above could be diverted out of the adit. Below the adit, engines powered by waterwheels or steam were needed to pump the water up to the level of the adit where it could then drain away.
The beach is sometimes referred to as Barrepta Cove or Porth Reptor which are remnants of the original Cornish name for the beach, the exact meaning of which has been lost. This was documented as Parrupter around 1499 and Porthreptor in 1580. Porth rep tor can be translated as "beach beside the hill". However in Cornish, as well as "hill" or "high land", torr can also mean "gash" (which has similar roots to "torn" in English) which could apply to the long, thin Carbis Valley.
The name "Carbis" is from Carbis Farm which was recorded as "Carbons" in 1391. In Cornish karr means "cart" and pons means "bridge" so this is thought to mean "causeway" but no trace of any structure remains to which this could be attributed. It's possible it was a bridge crossing the stream in the Carbis Valley as part of the road to St Ives. It is said that to avoid Bubonic Plague reaching St Ives, money was left at the bridge and goods were dropped without any face-to-face contact.
When the St Ives railway was built, a station was created at the bottom of the Carbis Valley which the railway called "Carbis Bay" and this eventually became used as the name for the beach.
At low tide, a shipwreck can sometimes be seen on the eastern side of Carbis Bay. This is the remains of the SS Vulture a steam-powered British cargo ship that was driven ashore in the storm of 1893 that became known as the Cintra Gale. That night, three other ships were also wrecked in St Ives Bay including the Cintra - a collier which was driven ashore beside the SS Vulture. The 12 man crew of the SS Vulture were all rescued using rocket apparatus, but the 12 crew on the Cintra fared less well - only 7 survived. Even less fortunate was the Hampshire, which sank 10 miles north of Godrevy when a spare crankshaft broke loose and punctured the hull; only one of the 22 crew survived.
The Carbis Bay Hotel was built in 1894, not long after the railway was built to St Ives. The name "Carbis Bay" was invented by the railway for the name of its station in the Carbis Valley and eventually came to be used for the beach. The hotel was designed by the famous Cornish Architect Silvanus Trevail, and is located on the site of an old mine. Its guests have included Virginia Woolf, who stayed at the hotel in the spring of 1914. It is also the basis of the fictional "The Sands Hotel" in the novels of Rosamunde Pilcher.
The "clickety-clack" associated with trains is from thermal expansion gaps between rails when railway tracks were all jointed. The gaps were offset by half a rail length so the wheel axle didn't slam into both gaps at once. The downside to the gaps was that the rail ends were weak points prone to break off and shifting ballast under the railway sleepers could also cause the unsupported ends to bend under the weight of trains.
To reduce wear and reduce maintenance costs, continuously welded tracks were introduced. In these, the rails are pre-stretched using hydraulic jacks before they are installed so that as they warm up, the "pulling" tension already in the rail drops until it reaches a point where it starts to act in the opposite direction as a "pushing" tension. The mounting mechanism for the rails is designed to handle these forces but during very hot weather the track can buckle if there is a weak point.
The pre-tensioning is tuned for average temperature so a warmer climate may require rails to be replaced. Greater temperature extremes are more troublesome as the forces on the rails may increase beyond the levels that the mounting infrastructure can cope with.
St Ives was the most important fishing port on the North Coast. The pilchard fishery in St Ives was the largest in Cornwall in its heyday during the mid 19th Century. The annual pilchard catch in St Ives frequently exceeded all of the rest of Cornwall combined. The largest recorded catch in St Ives was in 1847 when over 57 million pilchards were caught in a single day. At the end of the 19th Century, the pilchard shoals stopped coming inshore and the industry had died out by the early 1900s.
During the early 19th Century, visitors to St Ives commented on being overpowered by the smell of rotting fish emanating from the town. A number of pilchard cellars surrounded the harbour but by the 1920s these had either been demolished or converted for other uses (the St Ives museum was originally a pilchard curing cellar).
In October 1907, the St Ives-based Susan Elizabeth was on her way home with a cargo of coal from the Mumbles. She was driven onto the rocks at Porthminster Point by a gale. After many valiant attempts by the lifeboat, the crew were finally rescued just before the ship broke up. The remains were dynamited two years later.
In February 1901, the French ship "Julien Marie" was bound for Bordeaux with a load of coal from Swansea. The captain tried to make harbour in St Ives to escape a storm but due to large breakers and encumbrance caused by sails hanging down broken from a broken mast, this was impossible. The crew attempted to anchor but this did not hold and the six crew and their dog were rescued by the St Ives lifeboat before the vessel was driven onto the shore on Porthminster beach and became a total wreck.
In January 1908, the Falmouth schooner "Lizzie R Wilce" was on the way to St Malo in France with a cargo of coal from Swansea. She tried to enter St Ives harbour to escape a storm but missed the stays and struck Pednolver Point before being driven ashore on Porthminster beach. The crew were rescued by St Ives lifeboat and the ship then became a total wreck. The crew were safely landed in the harbour at 10:30 pm but because the sea was so rough, the lifeboat could not return to the lifeboat house and had to stay in the harbour until 2 am.
Just three hours later, another schooner on its way from Swansea - the Mary Barrow loaded with anthracite - attempted to seek shelter in St Ives harbour but grounded on a sand bar and was driven onto Porthminster Beach. In the very heavy sea, the lifeboat managed to anchor and position itself next to the wreck and the crew were rescued.
Photo of the "Mary Barrow" from 1908 at the National Maritime Museum
Photo of the "Lizzie R Wilce" from 1908 at the National Maritime Museum
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.
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.
The RNLI was founded in 1824 under the original name of the National Institution for Preservation of Life from Shipwreck. It was renamed to the RNLI in 1854. Until 1890 all the lifeboats were rowed with oars until some steam-powered boats were introduced. By 1905, petrol-powered boats were being trialled and fairly quickly replaced the bulky steam-powered predecessors. Today a fleet of over 340 lifeboats provide a 24/7 search and rescue service around the UK. The charity has saved over 140,000 lives since it was set up.
The current church building dates from the early 13th century and the south aisle was added roughly a century later. The font is also thought to date to the 14th century and some of the carved bench ends are from the 15th century. In the churchyard is a late mediaeval lantern cross which is over 10ft high. The elevated churchyard is thought to have arisen due to the lack of space for burials resulting in a "multi-storey" approach being taken.
Lelant was a sea port in the Middle Ages, but the trade was lost to St Ives when the estuary silted up. The first recorded spelling of Lelant was Lananta in a document dating from around 1170. The Cornish word Lan within a place name usually refers to a church, in this case of St Anta to whom Carbis Bay church is dedicated but nothing is known. Curiously, Lelant's parish church is instead dedicated to St Uny.
John Knill was a charismatic Collector of Customs at St Ives from 1762-1782 and mayor in 1767. During his Customs role, it is thought that he might have engaged in a little smuggling himself as there are reports of him fitting out a privateer for the purpose. He built his own memorial: the 50 foot high triangular granite obelisk, known locally as "The Steeple". He also devised a quinquennial celebration which consists of a dinner for the Mayor, Vicar and Customs Officer and guests in the George and Dragon Inn. This is followed by a procession from the market house to the monument, lead by a fiddler with ten young girls (who had to be the daughters of either fishermen, tinners, or seamen) dressed in white, and two widows. The mayor, vicar, customs officer, girls, widows and fiddler then dance around the monument whilst spectators sing the hundredth psalm. The first was carried out in 1801, which Knill attended. In his will, he left money for the upkeep of "The Steeple" and for the celebration to take place every 5 years after his death on St James' Day, 25 July. The delightfully eccentric ceremony has been carried out every 5 years for over 200 years, though the changing industries in St Ives have required the constraints on trades of the young girls' fathers to be relaxed, and the Customs Officer now has to commute from Penzance.
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."
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 chapel on Smeaton's Pier dates from mediaeval times. It is dedicated to St Leonard and fishermen would pray here before going to sea. The friar was paid a percentage of the catch.
Virginia Woolfe, the modernist 20th Century writer, was strongly influenced by spending every summer in the family's holiday home (Talland House) in St Ives during her childhood. In her own words: "Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall?" She returned to Cornwall many times in her adult life to spend time walking.
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.
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.
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).
Porthminster beach is sandy at all states of the tide. It is the second largest beach at St Ives (after Porthmeor) with nearby parking and facilities at the top of the beach so it can get pretty crowded in summer especially at high tide. On a low spring tide, it joins up with the beach at St Ives harbour, making it possible to walk between the two along the sand.
A drainage pipe, carrying rainwater run-off from the coast - effectively a stream in a pipe - empties beneath the beach. This can cause a bubbling hole to appear in the beach when there has been a lot of rain. It has "swallowed" a couple fences intended to keep the public away from it and the tabloid media have melodramatically described it as a sinkhole but it is more like quicksand caused by the flow of water. It is therefore wise to keep clear of it.
The beach faces northeast and is sheltered by Porthminster Point on which the large trees help to act as a windbreak. There is a sandy beach at all states of the tide. At low tide, the beach joins with Porth Kidney, with sand stretching all the way to the Hayle river at Lelant.
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