Secret Cornwall 7 - Porthgwarra and Treen

I’ve put together the podcast above - with a photo of Anita George, landlady of the pub at Treen - to give readers some idea of the very special Cornish place we’re talking about here… The podcast also includes an interview with Christine Gendall - a retired local health worker - who’s great love of the area is detailed below…

There’s another kind of SSSI – ecologists and environmentalists have their Sites of Special Scientific Interest but 15 years ago I invented another type while writing a series of articles for a newspaper.

They were called Sites of Special Sentimental Interest.

Just about everyone has his or her very own special place and the series set out to explore the singular, exceptional, outstanding, fascinating and lovely locations that readers wrote in to suggest. 

The point of the series, as the name suggested, was that each Site of Special Sentimental Interest will have a story behind it that strongly connects the location with the person who has suggested it – for whatever reason.

It could be that your ancestors have come from the place for generations, so that the very rock and soil upon which it stands seems to line your veins. It maybe that something wonderful and exceptional happened to you in that location – perhaps the very last time you saw your Spitfire-flying fiancée was on the cliffs above Salcombe – to manufacture a somewhat overly romantic example…

Porthgwarra

Perhaps there’s something in the place that grasped your imagination – a rare butterfly or plant, for instance, that you have spent years helping to conserve. It could be that you are a painter or a poet who has become obsessed with just one amazing setting - painting it or writing about it time and again. 

Then again, you may be a business person who has some particular site to thank for your success – or, conversely, some grim tragedy may have happened to you or your family there. 

It really doesn’t matter where the place is as long as it is within the peninsula or has some very strong link to it – nor does the actual reason for choosing it matter as long as it is a real story and not just because: “We happen to like it there.”

The idea was inadvertently given to me by a Western Morning News reader called Christine Gendall from West Cornwall. Christine told me she was involved with nursing all her life, rising through the ranks to become a well known Sister down in Penwith – but it’s a wonderful little book that she’d written in aid of the St Julia’s Hospice Fund that really grabbed my attention.

In my West Country Walks column I had admitted to being a little mystified about certain aspects of the wonderful, little known, rarely visited and enigmatic fishing cove called Porthgwarra tucked just around the corner from Land’s End. Christine had all the answers at hand – in her book named Porthgwarra, which is a slim but fascinating volume that describes the remote community in great detail.

In the very first sentence of her introduction, Christine writes: “Many people have a special place which they yearn to revisit and I am attracted back to west Cornwall’s Porthgwarra – a haunt of my childhood.”

Somehow those simple words written by a woman who has worked with so many poor patients preparing to leave this wonderful life of ours – lying there ill and dying, perhaps, in a hospice and no longer able to visit their special place even one last time - hit a nerve with me.  

Most of us do have a special place. When we are troubled or ill, lonely or depressed – or even overjoyed by excitement and change in our lives – these are the places which we may fleetingly visit in our mind’s eye. They are the rocks up which our mental houses stand – the unshifting locations that will be there long, long after we’ve quit this mortal coil.

Cove Cottage at Porthgwarra

Which is, I guess, why so many people wish for their ashes to be scattered somewhere special after they’ve gone.

But let’s not be morbid or maudlin about this – our Sites of Special Sentimental Interest are nothing if they are not flagships for positive thinking, pure enjoyment and harbingers of wellbeing. 

If you closed your eyes and tried to dream up the perfect Cornish fishing cove, the resultant image would probably look a bit like Porthgwarra.

The shallow sheltered valley dips from the high fields and moors taking with it a stream, accompanied by all manner of bird-filled thickets surrounded by wild flowers. Up at the higher reaches, ancient farmsteads lurk as if they’ve been here since the very granite rock itself was born, but lower down there’s a scattering of cottages old and not so old – with the odd 1920s shack thrown in for romantic measure – one of which is now the hamlet’s shop.

This attractively cluttered, secluded and protected vale eventually terminates at the cove itself – but it’s not a simple meeting of rock and wave. The soft, partly decomposed granite has been eaten away in different chunks so that a mini-headland exists plonk in the middle of the cove. An old stone slipway stretches down to the sand on one side, but on the other access can be gained through a rough hewn tunnel, carved many years ago by local miners to help farmers glean seaweed from the beach. 

This somewhat cluttered indentation of the littoral has a strange picturesque quality that creates a romance all of its own. The various tunnels carved here and there in the soft rock suggest an age of swashbuckle and smuggling, though most were dug and blasted for prosaic workaday reasons.

But there’s something extra wild about that sea out here in the far west. It may be a mere nuance born of a journalist’s fancy – but I’d swear it looks more angry and potentially more perilous than elsewhere. After all, England’s ultimate corner lies just two miles around past nearby Gwennap Head. And just offshore there’s the clanging buoy that marks the dreaded Runnel Stone – a needle that has taken countless mariners to a watery grave. 

There’s even a perpetual seal lurking in the cove at Porthgwarra, as if to remind visitors that they really are halfway to a world that is more sea-salt and wave than rock and soil. And the day we were there a huge basking shark swam on by heading for goodness knows what salty domain – its big dorsal fin and tail flapping lazily and ominously in the west wind. 

Christine Gendall looks around at all this with a discernible glint of passion and belonging in her eye. To spend an hour with someone like Christine in such a place, is to know what this series is all about – and to know how important it is that we create such a body of work in a regional newspaper. Imagine the oldest, most comfortable, and favourite coat you’ve ever owned and you may get just an inkling how someone like Christine can be so entirely enwrapped and mentally swathed by such a loved and intimate environment. 

For such people, these special places – these sites of special sentimental interest – are not so much made of clay and stone, they are the very embroidery that creates a vibrant, vital, backdrop to life.  

“There was talk when I was younger that I should move from Cornwall and get on with some bigger more important sort of career,” Christine told me at one point during our day together out there on the western tip of this peninsula. “But I never have. Never wanted to. I could never think of living anywhere else but here in West Cornwall.”

Christine’s career flourished anyway – and she became a well known nursing sister working within the West Penwith community. But it is the parish of St Levan in general and Porthgwarra in particular for which she reserves a very special kind of love. Since retiring from the health service she has written two books about the area – Porthgwarra (the fascinating little tome which inspired this series) and more latterly Soil and Toil – A look at working lives in St Levan in the past.   

“I wrote the Porthgwarra book a few years ago,” she told me as we sat on the steep slipway. “I read in a magazine that they wanted articles about Cornwall and I sent in one which was accepted - and they wanted some more. My mother said, ‘I'm sure you could write a book Christine’.

“She was ill with cancer at the time and I started writing this book and read it to her chapter by chapter as I wrote it - but unfortunately she died before I had the book published. It’s sort of in her memory.

“It’s been interesting because my father had written some notes when he was older and not very mobile,” she went on. “We found he had written notes about his early life and some of the occurrences here in Porthgwarra - shipwrecks and his early life - and so I had something to start from.

“And we had a mass of old photographs because his grandfather had his picture taken several times by a photographer called Hawk who was coming around taking photos in the area - and he looked such a traditional Cornish fishermen - those photos are actually still at the Truro Museum. 

“I was a Harvey before I was married,” Christine told me when I asked why this place in particular had such hold over her. “I was born just a mile or so up the road, but my grandmother lived here in Porthgwarra and I used to come here as a child. Both her family and her husband’s family were born in cottages in the little hamlet – so it’s the family connections and the beauty of the place…

“It just is such a special place to me. I like coming back on a quiet day and sitting here and you can just imagine what life was like in those days…

“The original Jackson, William Jackson, came there (to Penberth just along the coast) as a coastguard and he had quite a large family who started fishing at Penberth - and we think they may have fallen out with the other fishermen about shares of a seine net.

“So the Jacksons decided to come to Porthgwarra where there were only five cottages at the time – the Harveys were already here and the Rowe’s - but the Jacksons built some of the cottages we’ve seen today.

“They were quite a large family and they had a number of children each and so it was virtually a Jackson-Harvey cove,” smiles Christine. “When I was ten my grandmother moved up the road to live next to us, but until then I’d come to stay here at Porthgwarra at weekends and for my holidays and often in school holidays mum would make pasties and we would come down at lunchtime and stay down for the day.”

You can see why writing a book about her beloved Porthgwarra was a work of some passion for Christine. And it is a most fascinating read – for example, she originally contacted me to put me right about the strange tunnels which are, as I’ve mentioned, a feature of the cove. 

“The tunnel was primarily built (by St Just miners) to improve beach access for the local farmers,” wrote Christine. “They would collect and remove seaweed for use as fertiliser on their potato crops. Mrs Nancy Trewern told me that the fairly steep tunnel floor was slippery for the farmer’s horses pulling the seaweed laden carts – she remembers all the frantic activity and effort involved with the farmers persuading the horses up.”

Such is the stuff of real, living, history. There was some swashbuckle back in days of yore, but there was a lot more hard work, hardship and sweat. 

The book even describes how Porthgwarra’s main tunnel was in fact two different apertures in a figure-of-8 until the intervening floor collapsed – which may or may not have happened during the Mount’s Bay earth tremor of 1998. 

Adorned with lots of old black and white photographs, the book goes on to describe the astonishing industry created by the hamlet’s long lost seine-net fishery and goes into some detail about how they used to salt and cure the pilchards that were brought in by the ton. There’s fascinating material on local shipwrecks and tragedies – plus a section on the much feared Runnel Stone which became just a little bit less feared after a steamer called The City of Westminster rammed the submerged pinnacle in 1923 knocking off its top 20 feet.

Sit in Porthgwarra on a quiet autumnal day now and it is difficult to imagine all the teeming salty maritime life that once went on here. Only one fisherman keeps a boat in the cove now and he told me he’s giving up because of some mysterious skin rash that locals get after 25 years lobster-potting in these waters. 

Coastwatch station at Gwennap Head just west of Porthgwarra

“They each had large families,” shrugged Christine talking of the Jackson family who built many of the cottages in the hamlet. “Now there are only two houses in the cove that are lived in all year round - the rest are holiday cottages.”

At least the visitors buy her book, which is very good news for the local hospice movement. “The book has gone to a reprint and £1 from every sale goes to Cornwall Hospice Care which runs the two hospices in Cornwall,” Christine told me. “I do a lot of fundraising for them – and so far we’ve raised over £1000 by the sale of these books.”

For that reason alone it’s worth visiting www.porthgwarrashop.co.uk or emailing sales@porthgwarrashop.co.uk to order a copy – but the bonus is that by reading the book you will learn a great deal more about Porthgwarra, which no one will deny is a very special place indeed.  

We stayed at Cove Cottage which is owned and run by St Aubyn Estates https://www.staubynestatescottages.co.uk/

Sidebar

As we walked around Porthgwarra so Christine shared her memories of the remarkable community: “Cove Cottage here is now just one property – but it used to be two. My great-grandparents lived there but great-grandfather died when he was 33 and left his wife with seven children to bring up.

“And this is where she raised those seven in the 1890s – she lived 60 years as a widow - she died when she was 93 when I was about nine, and I remember her dressed in old fashioned dark clothing. 

“She didn’t actually keep them all at home all the time,” she said of the children. “One went up to the farm at the top to live with his grandparents, another went to live with an aunt, so the family helped her out. And she started work - because the Cable and Wireless (Company) had started over in Porthcurno and had a lot of students - she was actually a laundress and she used to launder the shirts and stiff collars for them, carrying it over a mile-and-a-half over the cliffs to Porthcurno.