The River Camel runs for 30 miles from Bodmin Moor to Padstow Bay, making it the longest river in Cornwall after the Tamar.
The Camel Estuary is a geological ria - a deep valley flooded by rising sea levels after the last ice age, stretching from the headlands of Pentire Point and Stepper Point all the way to Wadebridge. The estuary is designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a Marine Conservation Zone.
Harbour Cove is the beach on the opposite side of the Camel Estuary from Daymer Bay. There is a beach at all states of the tide at Harbour Cove although at low tide, the vast beach stretches out towards Doom Bar and merges with the other beaches, making it possible to walk around Gun Point to St George's Cove across the sand.
During Victorian times and even during the early 20th Century, the main river channel ran alongside Stepper Point and so there were no sand dunes or sand bars here and the cove was surrounded by rock platforms below the edges of the field. Harbour Cove itself was a tiny beach at the mouth of the inlet in the area which is now marshland with an old double wooden walkway.
Harbour Cove is also known locally as Tregirls beach, named after Tregirls Farm. In 1600, the name was originally "grylls" but was corrupted into "girls" over the years. It's possible the name of the farm arises from the Grylls family who were part of the Cornish gentry.
The path to the right leads to Harbour Cove and is easier than the paths further along the route that descend over the rocks. In all cases this involves crossing the stream to reach the main area of the beach but the stream is normally quite shallow where it spreads out across the sand.
A cordial can be made from blackthorn blossom by dissolving 100g of sugar in 1 litre of warm water mixing one large handful of blossom, scaled up to produce the quantity you require.
Lichens obtain nearly all their nutrients from the atmosphere and therefore can be very sensitive to air pollution. As a general rule of thumb, healthy lichens means clean air, but more specifically, different species have been found to be sensitive to different pollutants. By identifying common species that exhibits change for a particular pollutant, lichens can be used as an early warning dashboard showing not only how much air pollution there is but also what kind.
In 1899, a second lifeboat station was built at Padstow, a short distance upriver of Hawker's Cove, for a new steam lifeboat.
In a rescue in April 1900, as she was leaving the harbour, the steam lifeboat was caught by a heavy swell, capsized and wrecked, killing eight of her crew of eleven. Padstow's first motor lifeboat was commissioned in 1929, operating from this station. Due to river silting, in October 1967, the lifeboat was relocated to Mother Ivy's Bay on Trevose Head.
The first Padstow lifeboat was built by the Padstow Harbour Association in 1827 and kept at Hawkers Cove. The RNLI took over the station in 1856. In 1931, the original boathouse in Hawker's Cove was replaced with a new boat house and roller slipway for a second motor lifeboat to join the one already running from the second station to the south of Hawker's Cove. The station closed in 1962, due to Hawker's Cove being filled by sand as the river channel moved across the estuary. This left only the station to the south operating for a few more years, before it also became blocked with silt.
At high tide there can be little or no beach at all at Hawker's Cove with the sea reaching the slipway on spring tides. As the tide goes out, Hawker's Cove merges with Harbour Cove into a huge sandy beach, stretching out to the Doom Bar. At low tide, these merge with St George's Cove so it's possible to walk most of the way to Padstow on the sand.
The row of six cottages at Hawker's Cove were built in 1874 for the crews of pilot gig boats allowing them quick access to reach ships entering the mouth of the estuary before they foundered on the Doom Bar. During the 19th Century, the deep river channel ran along this side of the estuary so launching at lower states of the tide would have been much easier than it is today. A pilot's lookout was situated on the edge of Iron Cove, facing out into the mouth of the estuary.
The Camel Estuary is notorious for the Doom Bar - a sand bar which has caused many ship and small boat wrecks. For ships sailing into the bay on the prevailing SW wind, a great hazard was caused by the immediate loss of power due to the shelter from the cliffs. Once becalmed, they would drift helplessly and run aground on the Doom Bar. Therefore rockets were fired from the cliffs, to place a line onboard, which could then be used to pull the ship to the shore. Along the coastal path, on the cliff top, is an abandoned manual capstan which was used to winch the ships towards the harbour.
The beaches on the opposite side of the estuary from left to right are Pentireglaze Haven and Polzeath (which merge at high tide), Greenaway (in the middle, sandy at high tide with a rock platform at low tide) and Daymer Bay (by the hill).
The middle of the three islands around the Camel Estuary, which is almost exactly 1km offshore from Pentire Point, is called Newland and is home to seabirds such as cormorants and shags. The reef which surrounds the island contains some large gullies over 10 metres deep and some Pink Sea Fans several metres in height.
The Stepper Point coastguard lookout, facing out from the mouth of the Camel Estuary, re-opened in 2000 and is now manned by volunteers from the National Coastwatch Institution. It is electrically self-sufficient from its solar panels and wind turbine.
The National Coastwatch Institution was set up to restore visual watches along the UK coastline after two Cornish fishermen lost their lives within sight of an empty Coastguard lookout in 1994. The first station - at Bass Point on The Lizard, where the fishermen had died - opened in December 1994. The organisation, staffed by volunteers, now runs 50 lookout stations around England and Wales.
Skylarks are the most common member of the lark family in Britain and are often known simply as "larks".
The phrase "to lark about" may have its origins in the aerobatics of the skylark. At the start of the 19th Century, young boys who played about in the rigging of ships were known as "skylarks". The use of "to lark" as a verb can be traced back as far as the early 19th Century. By the middle of the century, it had reach America where "larking about" is first recorded.
The 40ft stone tower on Stepper Point, affectionately known as "The Pepper Pot", was built as a daymark - a navigation beacon for seafarers during daylight. At 240 feet above sea level, it is visible from 30 miles away. When it was built in 1830, the daymark cost the sum of £29. The money was raised by giving donors voting rights in the Harbour Association: one guinea would buy one vote.
The rocks off the end of the Trevose Head (ahead with the lighthouse) are known as The Quies and their surrounding reefs have wrecked many ships. On a map of Cornwall, Trevose Head sticks out a long way into the sea so shipping following parallel to the rest of the coast would find themselves passing quite close. During the Second World War, German submarines would lurk off the reefs to torpedo ships as they passed around the headland.
Waves pounding into a cave compress the air inside. This can often be seen venting quite explosively from a cave as a blowhole. Inside the cave, the force from the air being rapidly compressed and decompressed gradually fractures the rock. Eventually this is unable to support the weight of the roof of the cave. Once this collapses, the sea washes away the soil and smaller stones leaving just the largest boulders which are slowly smoothed by the wave action.
The inlet has been known since at least Victorian times as Butter Hole, and is said to be due to the yellow colour of the sand. Some of the inlets a little further down the coast near Porthcothan have names like Wine Cove and Pepper Cove which are based on what was being smuggled there.
The Devonshire method for preparing a cream tea is to saw a scone in half, paint each half with clotted cream, and then shovel strawberry jam on top. In Cornwall, things are done a little differently!
Many commercial cream teas in Cornwall resemble Devonshire cream teas, using scones and no butter, with a token reversal of jam and cream. Fortunately, armed with a few splits from a traditional bakery or by baking your own, you can prepare your own cream teas to exacting standards.
Dissolve 10g fresh yeast and 1 tsp sugar in 350ml of warm milk. Whizz together 500g flour (roughly 50:50 mix of strong bread flour and plain flour), 10g salt and 80g butter in a food processor. Combine dry and wet ingredients and make into a dough. Kneed, prove in a warm place until doubled in size, shape into golf-ball-sized balls and return to a warm place to rise. Bake at 180°C (160°C fan) for around 15 minutes until golden.
Pop a few strawberries, some sugar and some lemon juice in a bowl large enough that it won't froth over when it boils madly. Microwave for 5 minute intervals until jammy.
Cornish clotted cream is described as having a "nutty, cooked milk" flavour and now has a Protected Designation of Origin (it must be made with milk from Cornwall). The unique, slightly yellow colour is due to the high carotene levels in the grass in Cornwall.
Traditionally, clotted cream was created by straining fresh cow's milk and letting it stand in a shallow pan in a cool place for several hours to allow the cream to rise to the surface. It was then heated, either over hot cinders or in a water bath, before a slow cooling. The clots that had formed on the top were then skimmed off with a long-handled cream-skimmer.
Clotted cream is similar to Kaymak (or Kajmak), a delicacy that is made throughout the Middle East, Southeast Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Turkey. It is possible that it was introduced to Cornwall by Phoenician traders who ventured to the area in search of tin.
The Camel Estuary is a nursery ground for bass and is a designated conservation area. Young bass spend their first 3-4 years in estuaries and then move into inshore waters. At 6-7 years the bass are sexually mature and migrate out into the Atlantic into deeper water to breed during the winter, returning each summer to coastal waters. Fishing for bass is illegal in the estuary during the summer and autumn to help protect the breeding population.
The sea fish known traditionally in the UK as bass, but internationally as the "European seabass" (to distinguish from river species particularly in North America), is a member of the perch family. Given they are normally found in the sea, bass are surprisingly tolerant of freshwater and sometimes venture quite a long way upriver. Bass is very nice to eat but is a slow-growing species and therefore threatened by overfishing. Since 2010, two-thirds of the population has been wiped out in what has been described as "an unfolding environmental disaster" and although there are emergency EU measures in place to restrict both commercial and recreational catches, there is evidence that commercial catches are still well above sustainable levels.
Gulland is the most westerly and largest of the 3 rocky islands around the Camel estuary, lying between Stepper Point and Trevose Head. The name "Gulland" is likely to be a corruption of the Cornish word goelann meaning "gull", and the rock appears as "the gull rock" on map of 1576. It is reported to be used by seals as a nursery. Puffins can also sometimes be seen here and it is postulated this might be a small colony distinct from the larger colony on The Mouls.
Red-and-black-spotted Burnett moths can often be seen feeding on nectar-bearing flowers alongside the coast path. The red colour is a warning that they contain hydrogen cyanide. The larvae normally create it by breaking down more complex cyanide compounds from the birdsfoot trefoil on which they feed. However they are also able to synthesise it themselves in environments where it isn't readily available from food plants.
The SS Arthurtown was a small cargo ship. In 1944 it was on its way from Southampton to Androssan with a cargo of scrap steel and old engine blocks. It struck The Quies off Trevose Head in fog and attempted to limp into Padstow harbour but didn't quite make it and sank off Stepper Point. The steel cargo has concreted together in the seawater which preserves the ship's shape even though much of the hull has corroded away. However, the rear of the ship is missing due to unsubtle salvage techniques in the 1970s involving dynamite. According to one source, this detonated the explosives in a torpedo that the ship was carrying.
Alexanders are a member of the carrot family and grow along roadsides in places similar to cow parsley. The leaves are more solid than the lacy cow parsley leaves and the flowers are yellow rather than white. The name arises because the plant was introduced to the UK by the Romans and was known as the "pot herb of Alexandria". It is also sometimes known as horse parsley.
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.
Another place that alexanders are commonly found is near the sites of mediaeval settlements, in particular religious settlements where they were cultivated by monks as a vegetable. In mediaeval cuisine they were used as an alternative to celery (which was a more bitter plant back then). It was traditionally one of the "pot herbs" that were added to stews and the dried seeds can also be used as a spice. Alexanders were particularly useful during lean winters as its new growth is available in the late Autumn, before many other spring greens.
All parts of the alexanders plant can be eaten and it is a good source of iron and vitamins A and C. The flavour has been described as somewhere between parsley and angelica. However, foraging alexanders is not recommended unless you are experienced at identifying it because novices can confuse it with hemlock (the most poisonous plant in the UK - just a few leaves from this can kill you).
Boards with vertical sails were in use by Polynesians for short trips between islands. The idea of using a universal joint to connect a sail to a board was conceived in 1948 by Newman Darby in the USA who spent the next two decades perfecting the approach. The first boards went on sale during the 1960s and the sport of windsurfing was popularised in the 1970s.
Grey mullet are related to the perch family (which includes bass) and are surprisingly unrelated to the "red mullet" (which is in fact a type of goatfish). Mullet caught in the open sea are excellent eating fish and can be used in similar dishes to bass. However, those living in muddy water (such as the harbour) generally taste of mud. This can apparently be diminished by soaking them in acidic, salty water but the flavour is still described as "earthy".
Golden samphire is a plant that grows on cliff edges in similar locations to rock samphire. Like rock samphire, it has with thick, fleshy leaves but it is related to fleabane and part of the daisy family and so not closely related to rock samphire (which is part of the carrot family). It is usually a taller plant than rock samphire and has brighter green leaves (rock samphire has blue-green lives). Golden samphire easiest to recognise during the late summer when it's in flower. The golden yellow flowers have a large centre surrounded by a ring of petals - fairly similar in structure to a daisy.
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.
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.
Razor clams are molluscs that get their name from the shape of their shell which resembles a cut-throat razor. They live in burrows in the sand using a powerful foot to dig to a safe depth. Their presence in the inter-tidal zone is indicated by keyhole-shaped holes made by their siphons as they filter-feed for plankton. They are very sensitive to changes of temperature and salinity and this has been exploited to catch them (pouring salt or brine down their holes) as well as simply digging them out. They have been quite overfished on many beaches and are in decline in many areas. In deeper water, they face a different problem: suction dredging hoovers them up with the sand. Although they usually survive the actual dredging process, they are deposited on the seabed and often get eaten by fish before they can dig to safety.
Elvan is very hard volcanic rock formed where magma intruded into other rocks to form a (vertical) dyke or (horizontal) sill that cooled fairly quickly, resulting in fairly small crystals. Elvan can be seen in many of the churches across Cornwall where it is often used for intricate parts of buildings, such as doorways, so they can be finely carved.
The term "white elvan" is sometimes used for those which are chemically very similar to granite (but in the case of granite, slower cooling resulted in large crystals) i.e. formed of mildly acidic compounds.
The term "greenstone" is used by quarrymen to describe igneous rocks that, unlike granite, are rich in (basic) iron and magnesium compounds and these often give it a blue-green colour. When greenstone is formed as a sill or dyke it is sometimes called "blue elvan". This is also fairly common in Cornwall and has been quarried for a long time: in the Neolithic period, stone axes made from blue elvan were exported from Cornwall to various parts of Britain.
A DEFRA survey recorded over 300,000 cows in Cornwall (a lot of moo is needed for the cheese and clotted cream produced in Cornwall) so there's a good chance of encountering some in grassy fields, but also on open moorland and sometimes for conservation grazing on the coast path too. Around 70% of agricultural land in Cornwall is used for grazing and agricultural land occupies over 70% of Cornwall's land area.
Cows are thought to have been domesticated in the Middle East around 8,500 BC. By about 6,400 BC they were being traded into Neolithic Europe. This is just about the point where the land bridge between Britain and Continental Europe (known as Doggerland) flooded with rising sea levels, so the first few cattle may have just managed to walk across.
The word cattle is from the same origins as "capital" and was originally a word for any portable wealth. Later it came to mean specifically (any) livestock which was still the understood meaning in Tudor times. It is only in relatively recent times that the scope has been limited further to just cows.
The Ramblers Association and National Farmers Union suggest some "dos and don'ts" for walkers which we've collated with some info from the local Countryside Access Team.
Do
Don't
Cows are very gregarious and even short-term isolation is thought to cause severe psychological stress. This is why walking along the hedges of a field to avoid splitting a herd is so important to avoid a cow bolting in panic to rejoin its friends.
Scientists have found that cows tend to lie down when the weather is cool but stand up when it's hot to improve air circulation and regulate their body temperature. The folklore about cows lying down being a sign of rain might well be due to the cold fronts causing precipitation being reflected in the "cow thermometer". Cows also lie down to sleep but they only sleep for about 4 hours a day.
A beef cow produces around 30kg of dung per day. As dairy cows need to eat more to produce milk, they also produce roughly double the amount of dung which adds up to around 20 tonnes per year.
Cow dung is high in nitrogen compounds which makes it a useful fertiliser but depending how this is spread on the fields (e.g. sprayed as a liquid), harmful ammonia can be released into the air and run into watercourses. Large tanks of slurry can also decay anaerobically releasing methane so storage mechanisms are being re-examined in light of climate change.
A group of grazing animals known as "ruminants" (which includes cows) have evolved a "pre-stomach" called a rumen where microbes break down cellulose into digestible materials. These microbes produce methane as a by-product. Cows emit around 250 to 500 litres of methane per day but contrary to urban myths, the vast majority is by burping rather than from the other end.
Since methane is a powerful greenhouse gas (reflecting more heat than carbon dioxide) and there are around a billion cows in the world, this has led to concern about the contribution that methane belched out by livestock is making to global warning. However, since methane is quite a short-lived greenhouse gas (about 12 years) and since the number of cattle hasn't changed that quickly over time, atmospheric methane levels are fairly stable. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, lasts hundreds of years in the atmosphere so this is much more able to build up over time. One other factor is that pastureland is able to absorb triple the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide as grain fields so grass-fed cattle are preferable to grain-fed.
Scientists have found that adding a cupful of red seaweed per day to a cow's diet reduces the amount of methane that the cow burps out by about 80%. Due to the relatively short lifespan of methane in the atmosphere and the strong greenhouse effect from methane, this has the potential to make a quite quick but significant reduction to the rate of global warming, whilst the more tricky accumulative problem of carbon dioxide is being worked on.
Sheep were one of the first animals to be domesticated by humans. Domestication is thought to have started roughly around 12,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. The first sheep weren't woolly and were used for meat, milk and their (woolless) hides which were sometimes tanned to make leather. Woolly sheep were bred about 4,000 years later in Iran.
Once domesticated sheep had become woolly, individuals with white fleeces were selected for breeding as this was the easiest colour to dye. This was made easier by the genes giving rise to a white fleece being dominant. The recessive genes still do sometimes come together to produce a black lamb in an otherwise white flock. The expression "black sheep of the family" arises from this and its negative connotation was based on the economic undesirability of their fleeces.
Sheep are now farmed pretty much solely for their meat rather than their wool. The reason that you may see scruffy sheep with wool falling off is that due to cheap synthetic (plastic) fibres, demand for wool declined through the late 20th and early 21st centuries resulting in many sheep not being shorn due to the wool price being lower than the cost of the labour to remove it.
Meat sold as lamb comes from sheep of around 1 year of age. Mutton is from a sheep typically of around 2-3 years of age and is much darker red in colour. Due to more muscle and fat, the flavour of mutton is stronger and the meat is tougher so it typically slow-cooked.
As well as being environmentally-friendly, wool fibre has a number of technical properties that synthetic fibres lack including fire-resistance and the ability to absorb and release moisture. Some novel high-tech uses are now being found for it including biodegradable ground cover matting to control soil erosion. As concerns grow over the effects of plastics in the environment and micro plastics turning up in all kinds of unwanted places (such as 80% of the human blood samples tested in a study), this may also lead to a renaissance in natural fibres including wool. It may therefore not be too long before demand increases and fields are once again full of neatly-shorn sheep.
At short range, ewes and lambs are able to recognise each other by smell. At longer distances, they can recognise each other visually. Where this is not possible, they are able to recognise each other solely though their calls. Sheep can identify a unique signature for each individual based on the pitch and timbre of the bleat.
Due to their flocking behaviour, sheep have gained a reputation for not being intelligent but actually this is more about being nervous of being eaten. In a study, their intelligence was found to be on a par with cows: they can recognise human faces, learn a name given to them etc. This may even extend to problem-solving: in Cornwall we've seen them escape into a neighbouring field by operating a kissing gate and in West Yorkshire there are reports of sheep that have worked out that they can cross a cattle grid by rolling on their backs with their feet in the air.
The words "lamb" and "sheep" are from Germanic languages via Old English. The word "mutton" came via Norman French from a Latin word multonem which itself is thought to have come from a Celtic word for ram. The Cornish word for a neutered male sheep - mols - is thought to be from the same origin.
If there are sheep in the field and you have a dog, make sure it's securely on its lead (sheep are prone to panic and injuring themselves even if a dog is just being inquisitive). If the sheep start bleating, this means they are scared and they are liable to panic.
If there are pregnant sheep in the field, be particularly sensitive as a scare can cause a miscarriage. If there are sheep in the field with lambs, avoid approaching them closely, making loud noises or walking between a lamb and its mother, as you may provoke the mother to defend her young.
Sheep may look cute but if provoked they can cause serious injury (hence the verb "to ram"). Generally, the best plan is to walk quietly along the hedges and they will move away or ignore you.
Full page maps cannot be printed due to copyright and terms of use.