This is the last post in a series; you can read it in reverse order through the tag or start in Penryn here.

Dartington Hall is a lovely medieval estate, currently very much at the top of a historical sine wave of investment and decline. Built in Plantagenet days, it endured centuries of this before some rich oddballs bought it in the early 20th century to adapt into a sort of Bloomsbury Group combo of agricultural and domestic education college, artists’ retreat and back-to-basics proto-hippie-commune with elements of monastic self-sufficiency (it’s just down the road from an actual monastery, Buckfast Abbey, which mostly seems to make enormous amounts of money as a conference venue and selling bottles of what-the-hell-are-you-looking-at to neds.)* On a bright summery day it was quiet and felt extremely Proper. The main courtyard of grey, licheny three-storey buildings sets off the massive front of the hall itself, which inside has a really very good hammerbeam roof and some weird modern banners.

Through into the gardens, a great sculpted bowl of earth claimed semi-convincingly to have once been a tiltyard; a huge staircase was spaced in flights like a miniature Odesa Steps,** a carved stone otter had been munching on the same stone fish for who knows how many years. In the fun sprawl of the gardens, odd little doors led into the hillside (probably housing lawnmowers rather than hobbits) and plants bloomed out in an absurd diversity of shapes and colours. Set in a graveyard of overgrown stones with half-decipherable names, we found the Spookiest of All Trees: a yew so knotted it resembled a rope fender sized for the Ever Given. Only the brilliant sun stopped it all from feeling Proper Haunted. (Will we be seeing it in the new Utterly Dark?)

We visited Totnes for a nice brunch and a trip to the castle (working out my pandemic-underused CSSC membership). The castle, a fourteenth century stone enhancement of a Norman motte-and-bailey, is now basically just a little double ring of stone and earthworks, its guts all gone centuries ago leaving little to really engage with. Totnes, however, also boasts a perfect town museum in a Tudor house, with hundreds of exquisite, specialised artefacts each evoking memories of the town as a highly developed hub of trade and industry: tin, slate, pilchards, timber, the manufacture of coins, pottery, medicine, imports from Spain, Russia, the Low Countries. It’s a reminder of a very different world, before virtually everything that involved the creation and movement of physical objects was moved far out of town (and, ultimately, largely out of the country), where towns themselves were where things were made. The modern, Guardian-reader Totnes of cream teas, second-hand bookshops and new age tat that inhabits its buildings now feels as close to the Totnes of the museum as a hermit crab is to a sea snail: a completely different creature that just happens to live in the same house.***

Exeter showed to advantage on another blazing day. The local dark red sandstone comes heavily grained with veins of quartz, leaving the ancient city walls looking bizarrely like fat-marbled raw steak. Within those walls (crossing a Yaroslavl Bridge, which reminded me pleasingly of bits of Kutaisi and Newport being named after each other) it was a bright, cheerful place, a mix of really quite ancient buildings and modern shopping arcades all bustling with the life of a society trying its best to get out of under the pandemic. A trendy coffee shop provided some high quality shortbread, a castle complex rather at the bottom of the neglect sine wave provided a fun walk. Naturally, we had to go to the city museum (properly the Royal Albert Memorial Museum). One of the last recipients of serious pre-austerity investment in such things, the museum is another treasure, a pleasing mix of bonkers old artifacts and modern cultural appreciation for them, with some admittedly jarring moments like a Victorian staircase full of stone carvings painted hot pink. Outstanding pieces included a lot of echinoderms (especially if one’s companion is an author writing about 19th century science with an emphasis on sea horrors), and an immensely detailed 18th century model of the entire town.  (The museum’s own link is dead but in looking for it I found a wonderful then-local blogger who posted about it and many other Exeter treasures – have a look!)

A Chinese money cat looted during the Opium Wars; a lascivious scallop; a c.1900 Nigerian caricature of a European officer; an 1850 engineering diagram explaining how Chinese characters could be sent through a telegraph; a warning of the dangers of blogging; and some characterful ceramics by the same chap as that crab back in Plymouth.

 

Finally, the cathedral. I have never really met a cathedral I didn’t want to be friends with, and this one Has It All. Happily spared much of the iconoclastic vandalism of the Reformation and Civil War, and the frosty machine-cut rectitude of later Victorian sensibilities (though not the war, which annihilated a lovely chapel), it is a joyful splurge of bright colour, gilt and over-the-top high-relief zaniness, with mawkish memorials from every century. An astoundingly detailed wooden choir boasts an elephant misericord dating back to Henry III, and a side chapel to Hugh Oldham is literally entirely owls. Enjoyably, it’s the home of an absolutely mad number of Green Men, whose upsetting, leaf-sprouting faces can be found all over the place, especially in the many ceiling bosses. I am certain at this point there were more depictions of the Green Man in there than there were of Jesus. (All quite high up and hard to photograph, though.)

This story trails off a while, as many of my logs do, because the remainder isn’t really of public interest. I stayed a little while longer on Dartmoor, enjoying a poodle chasing himself up and down the drive, bunnies on the lawn, ill-considered waltzes up tors in driving rain, and very good company. It was time to go home (and get a new raincoat.)

 

Everyone is fond of owls.

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

 

^{* The Wikipedia article for Buckfast Tonic Wine has probably been stripped of everything fun by now, but essentially it’s a surviving example of quackish Victorian ‘tonics’. The drink combines a lot of alcohol, caffeine and sugar in a glass bottle, meaning the person who has got to the end of a bottle is drunk, awake, energised, and armed. I don’t know if any of this is still current but it once caught a fair bit of flak for intensifying anti-social behaviour in deprived parts of Scotland, and when I tried to buy some near Inverness for the memes I got IDed despite looking about forty. It didn’t taste good.
** The Potemkin stairs are carefully designed so that looking from the bottom you can only see stairs and from the top you can only see landings. This staircase sort of managed it.
*** To be clear: I’m really not actually nostalgic for a world of small-scale, local, inefficient primary and secondary industry and all its comorbidities. I’m personally fine with a Britain which allows me and a very large number of other people to shuffle data on a screen for seven hours and then have an afternoon off rather than spending twelve hours trading fingers for lung and skin diseases in a factory. It’s just fascinating to think of how impossibly different the economic landscape was even a hundred years ago, and how transitory our own seemingly settled world of said pointless data-shuffling might be. My actual problems with a system where food, goods and tangible value are all created elsewhere and most economic “activity” in the West is just increasingly complex and baroque ways of sharing that value are: how unequal the current formula is, how it just puts the suffering out of sight and mind in the global south, and how much of it ends up hived off into parasitic rent-seekers and billionaires who don’t even do anything interesting with it.****
**** There are a lot of bad things one could reasonably write about, say, Armstrong, but he gave us some fantastic bridges, Nu-Bamburgh and Cragside. The current rich list are notable only in how incredibly banal their excesses seem to be.}

St Austell was a comprehensive disappointment. I wanted to visit the Wheal Martyn china clay museum (which I’d been to as a wee un but have almost completely forgotten – vague memories of clay-white wooden leats in the turf and a huge iron power linkage up into the mines). Prior research indicated that there was no public transport to get to the museum (which is 45 minutes’ walk away along B roads with no pavements, uphill with my large backpack), so plan A had been to get a minicab from the station. Unfortunately, the minicab would not take card.*

Plan B: into town in search of an ATM (and lunch). The town is a stark and miserable contrast with Falmouth or Penryn, a closed post office and a food bank on the road into town the least despondent of the parade of empty, mossy shopfronts.** I found a caff full of glum pensioners for the most disappointing full English I’ve had in years (they also didn’t take card, but I’d found a cashpoint by then). Feeling committed to the china clay museum, I looked up the numbers of two minicab firms, but one didn’t answer and the other wouldn’t have a car free for an hour. I trudged back uphill to the station where there was at least a taxi rank; it was empty and the other firm still wasn’t answering. An announcement told me the next Plymouth train would arrive in two minutes, so I decided fate was telling me to give up on St Austell.

The whole experience was frustrating on both a personal and a local government level: St Austell has sundry attractions (including the immensely popular Eden Project) right on its lap and could do very well as a rail gateway there, but the complete lack of options for anyone not in a car (not to mention GWR’s actively vicious policy towards bringing bikes on a train) completely scotches that. A Cornish colleague I was messaging reminded me that yes, Cornwall is by some metrics one of the most deprived areas in Europe, and this is what that looks like. I felt guilty for getting quite so annoyed, but also satisfied that I’d tried my best.  On to Plymouth.

Plymouth’s appeal to me is twofold: it has an outstanding array of Victorian coastal fortresses, and its urban core is (still) a very interesting example of postwar British town planning. The “Plan for Plymouth” was drawn up while the Luftwaffe were still handling demolition duties in the town centre, in those heady, technocratic years when nobody had clocked that zoning doesn’t work or that unpainted raw concrete buildings look vile when they’re new and worsen with age, and it sketches out a plan of modern shopping precincts flanking broad boulevards, with a grand pedestrian avenue from the railway station down to the seafront. The production values are high (a lot of the fronts are actually proper stone rather than concrete) and the ambition prodigious. Unfortunately – like in those towns the other side of the Iron Curtain built to similar principles – the 2021 local economy and the council’s fountain budget are not quite up to the dreams of the designers, so there is something a little betting-shop desolate about the cyclopean boulevards and dry watercourses, even though there are some outstanding buildings left and the core of town is genuinely humming.

I found my guest house – the front lounge was all retro-American-diner fashion with red and white striped seating, boxes of lateral flow tests at reception and a big white dog with heterochromia chilling in the hallway – dropped off my stuff and set on out. Museums require bookings at the moment, and I’d got one at The Box, Plymouth’s city museum (in the Victorian-museum-with-a-bunch-of-modern-stuff-grafted-on fashion). Upon entering you are immediately greeted by a vast wall of Royal Navy ship’s badges, and the lower galleries did well both at explaining the centrality of the Navy dockyard to Plymouth’s entire existence and touching on the many lives affected by its rise, peak and gradual decline. An upper library level had archives and maps (including models of The Plan for Plymouth)  – but the whole place lacked any mention of the forts, the other big draw. Otherwise, great museum, would come again.

The “Barbican quarter” is that part of the waterfront old town that was spared from both Nazi bombs and British town planners, and was lively and active in a “virus, what virus?” way. One chippie had a terminal trying to sell me Bitcoin; I demurred and got a battered sausage. Sutton Pool, the oldest part of Plymouth, is now a mix of trendy Waterfront Development, antique party district, and – most surprisingly – actual real live fishing boats. Plaques commemorate the setting-off points of the Mayflower (and the first colony ship bound for New Zealand – hands up who knew it was called the Tory?) I didn’t see anything about the Armada – the English fleet that sailed out to defeat the Armada did so from Sutton – but given the general Pro-Drake vibe scattered around the town I’m sure it was there somewhere.***

I took the little yellow crossharbour ferry south to Mount Batten – it was not called the Spirit of Lord Louis, which I felt was a missed opportunity – for a wander in the hills, where polygonal forts are known to dwell. But in the interests of manageable post length, that’s a story for another day.

 

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

^{* OK, yeah, it’s a cab and obviously they don’t pay taxes, but I didn’t have any cash because it’s 2021 and one way or another I haven’t needed it since “coronavirus” first entered the wider public vocabulary.
** Every single town I visited this holiday had a barbershop with a big black window design showing some variant of a skull and crossed razors. I noticed the pattern here, although it was the third I’d seen.
*** Well. Weather defeated the Armada; the English acted as auxiliaries and support staff to the weather.}

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