From Tintagel across the top of Bodmin Moor

In which Sid and Doris ride from Camelot’s mythical round table, via Davidstow (more famous for its cheese than Steve and Sheila Perry’s cabinet of military curiosities) to The Horn of Plenty.

Camelot Castle hotel is a project. Room 104 was set out in 1985 with a bathroom module by Baudet Composites.

There is possibly a case for conserving one of these in a museum. S and D used to see them in very modest  French hotels. There is not so much of a case for their persistence in a hotel linked to Mappin and Webb, jewellers to royalty.  Either way, after a rather unsatisfactory breakfast and a glance at a somewhat unnerving picture over the reception desk (I bet he didn’t stay in room 104, or at all) your spooked duo set off for Davidstow.

The day starts with a 1,000ft climb from the sea to the Bodmin moors. The 1,000’ is important to the Silk as even without a view of the sea this puts another 50p into the ice cream budget, and so when we reach the top of the hill and the elevation is only showing 998′, Doris waves the phone around as high in the air as she can reach.

If Davidstow is famous for anything in the UK it is Cathedral  and Davidstow long matured cheddar cheese. Milk comes in from 400 farms each day. The cheese is good to great but banish any idea of people in white coats and hair nets stirring cauldrons of whey. They are making 900 tonnes per week in the country’s largest cheese factory. Looking to visit, Sid and Doris are rightly considered to be a bio-hazard and are directed next door to the Cornwall at War Museum, where they may safely be shown a video which is slightly more mature than the cheese.

Actually the Cornwall at War Museum seems mainly to be at war with the Davidstow Airfield RAF Memorial Museum. Sid first stops by the RAF museum, offering to put the bikes down and come in. Unfortunately they have put out an aged volunteer greeter who cannot hear or make himself intelligible. S and D cycle through the red gates and are lost to The Other, the land of Steve and Sheila Perry.

With hindsight the museum of RAF Davidstow Moor would probably have been more satisfying. We can go back. At the Cornwall at War show Steve and Sheila have built large sheds in which to display almost everything, except perhaps a penny farthing and a stuffed bear. Otherwise: real, if non-flying, Fairey Gannet and a Hawker Hunter, a Bedford truck,  a nearly new Land Rover Wolf (a military spec Defender) and best vehicle a Scammell Pioneer (not looking as nice as this one).

Then there are rooms of themed stuff, mannequins, guns, radio sets, models at all scales and from all theatres.

One of the rooms deals with air sea rescue. The RAF wants its pilots back, and it’s the deal in many (non-Russian) militaries that we won’t let you die if we can help it – and besides we have invested in your training. So, many exhibits of twin Merlin powered rescue  launches plucking plucky airman from the briny. Also explained is the Uffa Fox (famous among the people to whom he is familiar, as a boat designer) air-dropped 32ft life boat with sails, two outboard motors with fuel and plenty of flares, plus a light and a whistle for attracting attention.

It was dropped from a converted bomber such a Hudson or Warwick. It fell under six parachutes which detached when the boat hit the water setting off rocket propelled 300’ ropes so the airmen could haul themselves in.

This picture was taken through a glass frame. The boat, with inflatable bow-deck cover is coming toward the bottom left of the frame. You can just see the crew man under the stern shelter.

Meanwhile back at the non-Epic Journey, today’s main challenge is finding somewhere to cross the Tamar.  We last saw the Tamar from the railway bridge just after Plymouth.  It marks the border between Devon and Cornwall for almost all its length – rising only a few miles away from the North Devon/Cornwall coast and after that the boundary boffins just went a short way west until they found the Marsland river to complete the remaining couple of miles to the coast.
Anyway, the problem with the Tamar is that it is fast-running and full of water and it has had plenty of time and energy to carve a nice deep wiggly steep-sided valley across which people have not found many places to build bridges.  In our newfound awareness of the importance of those little chevrons on the road, Doris has chosen the least bad option which is the old bridge at Horsebridge – allegedly built by French Benedictine monks in 1437 when it was the last crossing over the Tamar before the sea, some 15 miles further south.

While taking the opportunity to pose with the decidedly dog-eared “welcome to Devon” sign we meet Kev (you can see him in the background of the bridge picture).  Kev is an experienced cyclist of a certain age (he has the proud claim of having beaten Bradley Wiggins in a cycle race – although he did say it was one of Young Wiggins’ earlier outings) who has brought a mountain bike and an impressively small collection of camping kit.  He is aiming to get from Penzance/Land’s End along through Dorset and thence the South Downs to the North Downs.  He is finding it extremely hilly and thinks he might have been a bit over-ambitious.  We agree that it is always important to remember that a holiday is supposed to be a holiday, and leave him climbing determinedly onwards to his camp site somewhere the other side of Tavistock.

Our hotel tonight, the “Horn of Plenty”, is described in a possibly unintended pun as “inextricably linked to mining”.

In a moment of great happiness Doris spots that our room is joined to Porthcurno and the world via a KAOLIN INSULATOR!! Hooray and huzzah, everything joins up even more.