Porthleven

In this weekend's newspapers, my Hesp Out West feature is all about the wondrous food you’ll find in the little harbour town of Porthleven, down there on the Lizard’s north-western shoreline. I first went there to write about the place nearly 25 years ago in an article for an old newspaper series called Hesp’s Harbours, in which I visited over 50 West Country ports.

So here’s the article I wrote all those many long years ago…

There's a famous photo of the Bickford-Smith Institute and its gaunt clock-tower surrounded by wild seas. In a way, the picture is an icon that illustrates man's mad desire to be by the sea, regardless of what the elements may chuck at him. He will sail, surf and swim, he will fish and frolic on the beach - he will even build a special place in which to read - just as long as he can be beside the sea.

Anyone who's ever been to Porthleven will know the Bickford-Smith Institute because its dark, rather austere old reading rooms dominate the harbour mouth. The adjoining 70 foot clock-tower watches over the town and lords it over the occasional tempest - just like Big Ben watches over the Thames and stands aloft from the boiling cauldron of Westminster.

Stark and indomitable the tower seems to say to the ocean - look, you have your mysteries-of-the-deep and your terrible violence; we have intelligence and books.

Man meets sea. And when he does he must build - not only literary institutes - but groins and quays, piers and wharves so that he can protect his frail vessels from the mayhem of the waves.

At Porthleven that mayhem is kept firmly outside the Baulk, the narrow mouth of the inner harbour where massive beams of timber are lowered to take the punch out of the waves that come hurtling past the pier, past the Institute and into the outer basin whenever there's a sou'westerly howling in across Mount's Bay.

It's an odd name - the Baulk. Being in a reading-room frame of mind I looked up the word in a dictionary and it said: "A hindrance, a check; a disappointment."

Disappointing indeed if you get home in a storm and find that the harbour staff have used the derrick on the quay to lower each beam into its special place. They're not meant to, and don't without contacting each of the port's vessels, because this is an official Port Of Refuge according to an Act of Parliament in 1860. At least, that's what a local skipper told me and he seemed proud of this curious old-fashioned status.

The ‘baulk’ doing its job

But disappointment can also rear its ugly head when massive waves pick up the big beams and throw them about like match-sticks. I talked to some Porthleven men who were congregated by the harbour-master's shed and all of them had seen the Baulk come unseated in a gale.

"It takes a special sort of wave from a particular direction," said John Russell who works at the harbour. "And it has to be big..."

Gigantic I would have thought. The pieces of timber employed to create the Baulk are between 28 and 32 feet long and two feet thick. Each one weighs two tons, but John and the other men had seen the beams plucked from their settings like bits of cork.

Later harbour master Ken Milburn explained to me that the timbers weren't designed to be an impenetrable dam, but float in their seatings and act as a calming influence on the big 'runs' that come into the harbour in gale force conditions.

"It doesn't even have to be gale-force," said Ken. "If you get a south-easterly swell in certain tide conditions, you can get a run occurring in here big enough to damage things. Anyway, when they were tightening belts in war-time, they narrowed the channel at the bottom so they could use up some damaged pieces of timber and this narrowing had the effect of allowing the beams to float more. But they don't come out often - I can only remember it happening two or three times."

"I'll tell you one thing," laughed Jim Allen who has lived in Porthleven all his life. "The timber's a lot better than the steel gates we had about 25 years ago. They only lasted two tides and were so bent and damaged they had to be cut out."

Porthleven's problem is that the narrow, natural inlet faces south west, straight into the eye of the worst weather you can get roaring across Mount's Bay. A pier points nobly out to sea on the southerly side of the harbour mouth, but it can do little to prevent the waves from entering the outer sections of the port and building up into what Mr Milburn calls a run.

Just past the Institute, the natural contours of the valley curve slightly to the north and this is where the Outer Harbour, with its own small outer quay, offers the first stages of protection.

The community to the north of the inlet is called Breageside and it is here, near the Ship Inn, that a second quay forms the Inner Harbour where the boats are moored. You'll see the baulks of timber and the derrick on this quay, waiting for the weatherman to use the words south-westerly in conjunction with the term Gale Force.

Just inside this quay are the fishing boats and it was here that I met skipper Robert Williams of the "Girl Penny" who had just been out, in what I thought was a horrible chop, to reap the harvest of his pots. He was kind enough to do us a good deal on a fiver's worth of crabs, but alas we were far too poor to even ask the value of the splendid eight-pound lobster which he proudly hauled ashore.

"I remember the days when we could catch 100 of these in the 150 pots which we would put out," shrugged Robert looking down at his haul of about a dozen lobsters. "But a lot of them were really crayfish and we don't seem to get them anymore."

I told him that I didn't envy him his work on a day when you could hear the surf booming at the harbour-mouth. "I'd be sick as a dog," I cringed.

"I get sea-sick, suffered from it all my life," laughed the skipper. "Sometimes its worse than others. If the crew behave though, it doesn't tend to be so bad..."

What about being caught out at sea when the weather's brewed up rough? "You can go to Newlyn, but the harbour master here will always radio to ask you if you're coming back or not. He's got to because its a Harbour of Refuge according to the Act of 1860."

I asked Ken Milburn about the shutting of the Baulk: "You usually get plenty of warning of gales and I try to have a word with each crew before they go out to see if they intend coming back. Then, if things get worse, we'll radio each boat. If they say they're coming back, we'll wait 'til they do."

None of this was necessary back in the 14th century when Breage on one side, and Sithney on the other, were tiny fishing hamlets surrounding a stream flowing into a small cove. A bar of shingle created the only protection for the tiny boats that worked out of here back then.

Work on a proper harbour began in 1811 because of the increasing need for coal and supplies for local mines. It was a good time to start - soon there were plenty of prisoners from the Napoleonic wars to do the donkey work. But even with their help the development took 14 years to complete and was eventually opened in August 1825 with a feast of roast beef and plum pudding.

30 years later Harvey & Co of Hayle leased the harbour and built the inner basin so that trade could increase with imports of coal, limestone and timber and exports of tin, copper and china clay.

From that time Porthleven became well-known as a ship-building port. Clippers, schooners and yachts were built in the big flat yard just behind the inner harbour in a trade that survived until the late 1970's.

Much of the local fishing fleet, which crowded the harbour 120 years ago, must have been built just a few feet away. No fewer than 144 boats worked out of here in 1880 with a total crew of 583 men and boys. Hundreds of women and children were paid threepence an hour to salt and pack the large catches of pilchards which were processed along the harbour-side and, added to these, were the craftsmen making sails, nets, ropes and other equipment essential to the fleet.

So thank goodness for William Bickford-Smith of Trevarno who, in 1883, spent a large sum on finding them all something to do with their spare time rather than drain the contents of bottles.

He built his Literary Institute so that they could go down to the sea and have a thumping good read regardless of the tempest that would occasionally rattle the Baulk in this most pleasant of ports.

Do say to a local: "Where can I get some good fish and chips?" A good chippie is a rarity nowadays but Porthleven has a great one - Chips With Everything in Shute Lane where "everything" gets fried in fresh palm oil for a lighter taste...

Don't say: "Dash" The Dash was a Porthleven lifeboat last used in service during the 1920's. Now she's a rapidly deteriorating hulk in a car park wearing the sad air of the sinkable and some locals are a little ashamed of her demise.