In which Sid and Doris cycle double chevron roads to see an Iron Age gated community and a Curious Incident at Minack, a cliff-edge theatre.
Carn Euny is an abandoned Iron Age village that was in use until after the Romans left Britain.
In the Michelin system an attraction may be rated Worth a Detour. There is no official scale for a detour. English Heritage explain that Carn Euny is very remote and exposed. The roads have been tough with unfriendly surfaces. CE is reached down a small dead end road, and then a track and then an overgrown path like this.
Doris permits herself a diversionary thought on the subject of roadside flowers. The chief flowers here are crocosmia, agapanthus and hydrangeas, all of which are common garden flowers further east but not normally found by the wayside. Many of the hydrangeas are very very blue indeed, sparking a small childhood memory that it is possible to change your hydrangea colour from pink to blue depending on the acidity of the soil. And oh gosh this turns out to be true. Not only that, but also you need the alkalinity of calcium carbonate (=chalk =Salisbury) to get red, and a naturally acidic soil such as you get in Cornwall to get the blues. Which is intensely satisfying and takes her mind off the true size of the Detour being undertaken.
And although we are truly at the more generous interpretation of Detour, the attraction would need to be Vairy attractive to be Vaut Le Detour. There are five granite walled dwellings and with the help of a couple of local assistants and some careful camera positioning this is what they looked like then and now.
The site owners are perfectly happy for you to scramble over, under and around everything and there are some excellent examples of fluorescent green lichen (or moss or something) in this tunnel called a fougou.
Afterwards S and D try to proceed toward Minack in a more direct (dreckly, as we say in Cornwall) route using what looks like small roads on the map. These are impassable without Kevlar body armour and/or a boat so it is two miles back up the path, track and road.
Mud-splashed and scratched but as always undaunted, it is onward to the Minack Theatre for a play adapted from Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. If you haven’t read this then you might like to. It is about a boy (a different novel) who is autistic, living with his father and his pet rat called Toby. He finds a neighbour’s dog has been skewered with a garden fork. In finding out who did this he finds out a lot else.
The play is beautifully staged and performed, not relying entirely (or maybe at all) on the amphitheatre acoustics and using a lot of sound cues to say people are walking along a road, in the underground etc. A helicopter flies a bit close overhead but no voices are raised – it soon becomes clear that we are on the flight path to the Scillies and the decision has been taken to ignore them rather that TRYING TO SHOUT OVER THEM which would breach the fourth wall.
Many thanks to Doris’s sister who recommended this as tickets do need to be bought well in advance. Well informed audience members brought cushions to sit on the stone seats, fortunately your duo were wearing their padded cycling pants boing boing.
The homeward route starts with an active decision not to visit Land’s End, in a poetic echo of the fact that we completely ignored the opportunity to visit John O’Groats when we went to Thurso and Orkney.
Instead we take the less-travelled road back to Penzance, a route that was only slightly marred by the fact that Doris vaguely thought that the steep-hill arrows on an OS map point uphill rather than (as it turns out) downhill. An issue easily overcome by using the highest setting of help on the e-bicycle, although Doris did have to wait a surprising amount of time for Sid to catch up. During which time she found out that two arrows mean a gradient steeper than 1:5, which is probably why even the e-bike was lifting its front wheel a bit.
For some reason Sid didn’t seem to be immediately mollified by the opportunity to visit the Merry Maidens stone circle… Sid suggests keeping this picture so if we see any other stone circles we need not wait for the other visitors to Get Out Of The Picture.
… or even by the opportunity to learn how to (mis)pronounce Mousehole as Mousll.
With the tide in Mousehole looks quite postcard. However, as this picture reveals, it is no port of refuge for Sid and Doris’s much-discussed circum-navigation of Great Britain.