In which Sid and Doris find some more determined cyclists and potter gently away from them.
A brief detour to get a new inner tube saw your duo soon onto the coastal path past Mont St Michel or indeed St Michael’s Mount, as there are matching tourist opportunities on both sides of the Manche here.
The goal today is to get all the way from Penzance to Falmouth which might be twenty seven miles. Armchair cyclists should note that one Cornish mile seems to take about the same effort as two miles elsewhere, or six miles on an Austrian Danube cycle path. We fall in with a group of American cyclists, also of a certain age and level of fitness (and a certain level of electrical assistance, says Sid) who have signed up for a three week Le-Jog trip and are finding the first forty-mile day from Lands End to Truro hard work.
We comfort them with the news that this is probably their steepest day. The bad news they do not yet know is that their support vehicle is hunting in vain for any lunch venue. They should get by on bananas, but a pub meal would be a better omen.
S and D, fuelled only by a long bygone breakfast, pause in a Road Closed village to watch the Penzance Morris Men (mainly women, but this can be contentious territory) until we can carry on up the Road Closed.
Not being in a rush we divert to see the Leeds shaft on the Great Work Mine that is part of the Godolphin estate. From five shafts they brought out tin and copper from the 1500s until it was all over in 1930, adding maybe 300 to the unemployment rolls in a tough year.
In late 1600s Elizabeth, wife of Charles Godolphin who was MP for Helston in Cornwall and the mine owner, endowed a school to educate orphaned gentlewomen in Wiltshire. The school is still in Salisbury (it all joins up…), now looking for boys to join too as numbers of children fall. Best known alumnae Dorothy L Sayers and Jilly Cooper.
Just as Sid is thinking it is time for a stop Doris declares the hills are over and it is all downhill to Penryn and coffee. Soon the old Marine Hotel, Falmouth is in view. Changed and chipper S and D set off for the English Heritage that is Pendennis Castle, a handy fortification to protect Carrick Roads and the Falmouth harbours from Spaniards, Frenchies and Germans (but not all at the same time).
There are fortifications and guns from all eras. S and D see them all, including the Bofors gun ready to defend the WW2 six inch gun batteries from German air attack. It seems mostly to be suffering from salt attack, but it illustrates the point.
A final walk on the one-way road that encircles Pendennis point led past this charming if slightly illegible monument to the motorbike road races that tookplace here. The Pendennis motor bike and light car road races ran from 1931 to 1937. These were the first races on UK public roads, with all proceeds going to the pre NHS pre anti biotics Falmouth and District Hospital.
And so to the new adventure HQ. The Marine Hotel is now much more trendily named The Chain Locker, which is more appropriate to the undeniably cool Sid and Doris.