Secret Cornwall 6 - Cowlands Creek and Old Kea
The upper tidal Fal is without doubt one of the most unvisited, peaceful, tranquil and somehow mesmerising locations in our region. Some stretches are so fantastically Amazonian you almost expect to hear the sharp sudden puff of a blowpipe and find a poisoned dart lodged in your neck.
The thick tree cover on either side of the waterway drips over the creek with not a single break for miles. No tracks, no roads, no homes, not even much in the way of old deserted wharfs and quays…
Voyage up here on a warm autumnal evening and you are transported out of the West Country into some kind of fantasy world that is every bit as exotic as the tropics.
Then, just when you were getting used to being in South America or Borneo or wherever, your flat-bottomed boat noses its way into huge sweeping tidal lakes where the lonely cries of a thousand wading birds are the only sounds to break the complete and utter silence.
I’d go as far as to say these are the most silent places in the peninsula because their great empty spaces are protected both from the soughing of the west wind and from the noise of the 21st century.
Coombe, on Cowlands Creek
Old Kea is a hamlet, if the title isn't too grand, at the head of tiny Church Creek. This is an aptly named stretch of water or mud depending on the tide because just about all there is at Old Kea apart from a farm and a cottage, is a church.
And what a church it used to be. You can see that thanks to the ruined tower where now only jackdaws ascend instead of prayers. It's a noble old piece of perpendicular even now, and is all that's left of a mother church which was once the temple of the parish.
The trouble was that it was a particularly large parish and Old Kea was at the very edge of it. For centuries the locals moaned, until the year 1802 when All Hallows church was built three miles inland.
But Old Kea was an important holy site because of the Celtic monastery that was founded here many centuries ago by Irish St Kea, so a small replacement church was built just a few yards from the forlorn tower.
A lane runs past the churchyard and then peters out by the top of the creek, but here a footpath ascends the hill and leads across the field Trevean and down towards the head-land which divides the Fal and Cowlands Creek.
Suddenly you are at the creek side near the hamlet of Coombe. Not many roads in Britain are tidal - the lane here is and if the water’s in you must take the footpath around the back of the cottages.
I walked here many years ago and discovered that an amazing industry used to be based around the creek. the area was famed for a particular variety of plum. In the season 100s of people would visit to help gather the harvests of Kea Plums and at one point they’d be taken off to Truro up-river where they’d be made into jam on a commercial scale. Nowadays you can still buy the jam - if you’re lucky - at a cottage with an honesty box on the side of the creek.
It’s what it says on the label - in an honesty box on the path going up Cowlands Creek
Now the creek-side road turns into a waterside path. Old boats in various states of decay dot the shore and the occupier of a dreamy demesne has built a number of intriguing corrugated iron huts, all of which are bounded by a jungle of fabulous gardens.
The lovely path which runs alongside Cowlands Creek
"Who lives there?" we asked the old lady who we found sweeping seaweed from a slipway many years ago. "I don't know" replied Mrs Grace Williams, "But I hear he's got it very nice over there."
The Tregothnan Estate has some holiday cottages at Coombe and I’ve been lucky enough to stay in one of them. The estate manager told me it had been a ruin before his team did the place up - and I look forward to making a return visit soon —- https://tregothnan.co.uk/holidays/
