With half of Devon and Cornwall to choose from for my first day out on my Cornwall/Devon weekend away, I dithered over the guidebook for all of breakfast. There’s just so much to see and do and none of it quite on my doorstep, except Launceston (which I did last time I was in the area) and Roadford Lake (which I did yesterday). Eventually I settled on Port Isaac. On the one hand, it seems obvious and cliched. On the other hand, so does everywhere else.
It’s a pretty easy 50 minute drive from my glampsite. I parked in the so-called “main car park” which is at the top of the hill and I walked down. Suits me fine because I need to get in my daily mileage. I turned left at the bottom, down the narrow streets and found myself heading for the harbour.
Most people who come to Port Isaac these days are here to see the Doc Martin locations. I’ve caught bits of it here and there but I’ve never sat and watched an entire episode so although the village looks dimly familiar, there’s nothing I know well enough to recognise. “Did you see Doc Martin’s house?” my mum asked when I got back. No idea.
I saw lots of little shops – lots of places to get fish and tin mugs and tasteful souvenirs. I was tempted by the mugs and even more tempted by a tiny Cornish piskie but I resisted. Instead I went down to the harbour. It’s almost perfectly rectangular, wedged between stumpy cliffs and the water is crystal clear and vivid blue. Had I been here in summer – which I wouldn’t be, because you’d never find anywhere to park within ten miles – I’d be tempted to swim. That’s a goal for next summer, to get comfortable swimming in the sea. In October, not so much. But I paddled. Well, I set up my camera on a bit of rock and took some selfies with the view. Then it dawned on me that I could take off my shoes and paddle and get photos. I like to paddle. I’m quite happy to get my feet wet.
After five minutes of paddling and photos, it occurred to me that the water was getting closer to the bit of rock where my camera was propped and then I realised the tide was coming in, quite a bit quicker than I’d imagined it could. I retrieved camera, bag and shoes and returned to the main beach. I don’t think I was ever in danger of being caught out by the tide. I don’t think it was going to get a whole lot higher and never deep enough that I couldn’t paddle back without getting anything other than my trousers wet. I know I overreact to cliffs and tides but I live in Dorset and not a week goes by – barely a day in the summer – without some fool grockle getting into trouble with one or the other. I’d rather not become one of Cornwall’s idiot grockle stories, no matter how remote the chances.
With my shoes back on, a lot more full of gritty sand than they had been earlier, I continued across the mouth of the harbour and up the hill on the other side. This way goes the South West Coast Path but it’s quite a climb and I didn’t want to do it. My legs are doing spectacularly badly with hills at the moment. But it gave me a vantage point over the harbour and apparently took me past Doc Martin’s house. There were swimmers in the harbour and where there had been people making their way along the edge of the harbour, there was now just water and two people perched on the rocks. I think one of them was a swimmer drying off but I was less certain about the person in the yellow waterproof. Still, by the time I got back down to the harbour, they were all on the beach and the swimmers were all dressed again.
I’d seen a path leading out of the village from the hill so I headed back up the hill, stopping for an ice cream. I don’t have ice cream as often as I maybe should and it just so happened that I’d been doing the Fridge 2 module of my Finnish Duolingo course – featuring the verb “to want” and some weird grammatical quirk whereby you add an extra -a to the end of any noun and adjective for reasons I still don’t understand. I realised that although I don’t know much useful Finnish, I knew how to say “I want some ice cream” – “haluan jäätelöä”. In this case, that extra -a that you add onto “jäätelö”, ice cream, turns it into “some ice cream”. Or “any ice cream”, as in “do we have any ice cream at home?”. And then I took a photo and sent it to my mum with the phrase “minulla on jäätelöä”, which is “I have some ice cream”. Ah, it’s fun to learn languages and discover you have usable phrases!
I took the path left out of the village and round the headland. Nice views here. I’d enjoyed my views from Tintagel earlier in the year and now I had some similar ones – not surprising when Tintagel is within sight. I thought it was from the big church on top of the cliff and when I zoomed in with my camera I could clearly see that terrifying bridge across to the outer castle. I’m accustomed to cliff views but the Cornish ones are very different to the Dorset ones – wilder, sharper and somehow more open. Maybe it’s because half the time I can see the Isle of Wight just a few miles away on the other side of the water and when I can’t, I can see Portland. Maybe familiarity just makes it feel smaller. Maybe if I lived here and walked here regularly, this would all look a lot less wild.
My parking was running out so I walked back up the hill to the car where I consulted my guidebook. Even wanting to get back early to get the hot tub lit, it was still far too early in the day to be saying goodbye to the Cornish coast. The book suggested Port Quin, which is only a mile or two away via the coastline but five miles via the road. It appealed to me because it sounded like a tiny, relatively obscure place, and that sounded good. Not that even Port Isaac was exactly overrun with tourists on a grey Saturday in October.
Port Quin is indeed a tiny place. There’s a car park with space for eight or ten cars and an honesty box, although you get free parking if you’re a National Trust member, which I am. It has four cottages with four reserved spaces, also owned by the National Trust. I imagine they’re the sort of places that are a quite reasonable price if you fill them but would be astronomical if I went there on my own. Yes, they’re all around £540 for two nights in October, going down to £320. I had a peek at Guy’s Cottage, the biggest of the lot. It’s sold out for most of next summer but there’s a week available in May at the moment, at £1319 for two nights. It does sleep six but even so. Carolina Cellar, which only sleeps two, is at a mere £989 for two nights next May. Glamping is expensive but a bargain in comparison!
There’s also a few houses sitting precariously on the opposite side of the harbour and a kayak adventure place based in a shipping container. I have to admit, if I’d known this was here, I’d have arranged to come at a convenient hour for their Cornish cliff kayak tour. You can hire kayaks here and you can also use the public slipway to launch your own stuff, at the cost of a couple of coins in the honesty box.
Anyway, in October there was one person swimming in the harbour, two people waiting for him to come out of the water and a family of four with two small children and two paddleboards – who did not pay the launch fee, although to be fair, I left before they actually launched. It’s a very sheltered little bay, rectangular like the one at Port Isaac although nowhere near as big and without any fish restaurants or ice cream shops perched on its edges. There’s nothing here, not in October. It’s a really nice place to just come and sit on the little beach, or paddle, or take a kayak out. I’ve spent very little time in Cornwall but I’m under the impression it’s lost a lot of that back-of-beyond peace since tourism started flooded here and especially since the plague and maybe Port Quin is overrun in summer but it seems like one of those little hidden secrets that genuinely is usually pretty quiet. It looks like something out of an Enid Blyton book, a secluded place with a nice beach where a group of children could have an adventure without any adults around, as long as they brought their own ginger beer, somewhere time has barely touched.
In fact, time has touched it so little that there’s no mobile signal down in the car park – not convenient if you’re using your phone as a satnav to get back to your steamroller living van! Fortunately it returns by the time you’ve slowly wended your way up the lanes and back to the so-called main road. There’s a farm shop right opposite the junction and their car park is the ideal place to hastily set up the satnav before going home. You’re probably going to need that satnav because even though this is only a five mile drive from one of the most visited places on the north Cornish coast, it feels pretty remote. And that’s why Port Quin is one of my favourite places in Cornwall so far.
