I never fail to be surprised, every time I go further west than Bristol, that this country is actually wide enough for a five hour train journey. The first segment is familiar, constantly saying hello to the Kennet & Avon canal, and town after town goes by, with clutches of clean redbrick new builds going up at their fringes, offensive in their shrunken living spaces and distended profit margins rather than their utter visual blandness. Entering Plymouth, a trio of arches across the river earned a curious google (the remains of an 18th century amphitheatre, apparently), and the citadels of the huge Royal Navy dockyard a murmured “I’ll see you in a few days”. West, the country gets more rugged and the crisp new Hitachi train feels more and more incongruous, a huge futuristic Brunswick-green missile nosing cautiously across buddleia-covered viaducts Brunel built. Dense, bosky tree cover, muddy rivers and tidal lagoons, and glimpses of the sea beyond.

At Truro I changed to a tiny little DMU, which took me down the old Cornwall Railway spur now branded the “Maritime Line” to Penryn (whose station, through some shenanigans with points, manages to get two platforms out of one platform). Obviously, it started to rain hard. I made my way to the campus jointly owned by Falmouth and Exeter universities, where I’d booked a room in halls for two nights. There were a striking number of Orthodox Jews around campus, and hand-lettered signage in Hebrew warning about the seagulls. I googled this, and apparently every year masses of Hasidim use the campus as a conference centre/summer camp together, brightening my evening with the peculiar spectacle of a number of serious, respectable-looking men in big cylindrical furry hats singing together in a slightly crummy student kitchen.

Penryn is a town of no great size but quite a bit of charm, the approach road tightly packed with little two-storey stone terraces with huge monolithic lintels of the local granite. It was an important port town in medieval and early modern times, when all an important port town needed was a warehouse, a quayside and a letter from the King; it lost that last privilege for picking the winning side in the Civil War, and was subsequently eclipsed by Falmouth, although the usual set of formidable Victorian public buildings on the high street show that it wasn’t left completely destitute. It doesn’t feel overly active (the intensifying rain probably had something to do with that), but it feels well-loved and well-preserved.

Continuing south, through a band of bleak marginal zone, all swishing roundabouts and fenced-off yards littered with the fibreglass corpses of yachts, I came to Falmouth proper. It’s much bigger and noticeably more touristy than Penryn, with an interminable (but still nice) high street of ethnic restaurants and characterful little tat shops – all stone dead at 1730, with the shop signs indicating that peak time was between 10am and 4pm. I explored the (closed) pier, the huge (closed) maritime museum complex, and across to thedockyards where at the huge technically-not-quite-a- hospital ship Argus was back from its trip to the Caribbean to support some Overseas Territories with the pandemic.

A little train took me back to Penryn and dinner at a chippie called Nemo’s (beef dripping chips! it’s been so long!) where I was told, if I fancied a friendly drink, to head down the road to “The Famous Barrel”. I ended up there, after some more wandering which took me around the site of Glasney College, namesake of my residence – Penryn had been an important site of Cornish and Catholic letters and learning until Henry VIII and the wars of religion rolled over both. I did get a sense later that some of these grievances are being dusted off again by people with Baner Peran bumper stickers.

It’s a fun little pub, with a magnificent collection of brass toasting forks (but a surprisingly limited cider selection), and as it got dark I myself chatting round a table with a group of locals (with leftover fishcakes and chips my new pal from Nemo’s brought), about the Device Forts and Brunel, about whale intelligence and dragonfly nymphs.  Sincere apologies for a) being from London and b) bringing the weather with me broke whatever ice was there (ok, they did say “chuck the emmet in the harbour”, but they didn’t actually do it). I stayed out late with one fantastic old bloke, whose dad had served on the Warspite and who had any number of lurid tales about working in a strip club in Soho in the sixties, and he gave me a lift back to the halls. The forecast for the next day was looking up.

 

Out West 2021 

Out to Penryn – St Mawes and Falmouth – St Austell and Plymouth – The Forts of Staddon Heights – Drake’s Island and Saltash – Totnes and Exeter