Inspiring lights in the Celtic gloom

August 29. Inspiring lights in the Celtic gloom

Ushant! A name to strike fear into any mariner’s heart: an island of violent storms, savage reefs, treacherous tides, impenetrable fogs and tearing Atlantic gales; rising low but menacingly, like a crocodile in a whirlpool, on the edge of the continental shelf where the Bay of Biscay joins the English Channel; at the very western tip of France. “Ouessant”, they call it here. “The Westernmost” is how I like to translate it. Mind you, the Celts called it Enez-Eussa - the Isle of Terror - and the channel that separates Ushant from Molene is From-Veur - the strait of fear!

Except that, today, when I made the long anticipated sea crossing from Le Conquet, there wasn’t so much as an Atlantic zephyr, let alone an Atlantic gale, either to stir the waters into their customary anger or, more to the point, to shift the low, misty cloud that has enveloped the north-west coast of Brittany like a grey shroud these last four days.

But I made the best of it – hiring a bike which enabled me to see most of what is, without the assistance of the more violent among the elements, a rather flat and dull island. It occurred to me halfway round that Ushant is a bit like Lundy: the sort of place that everyone interested in the western seaboard of Europe ought to visit – but probably only once!

Ushant’s hallmark is its lighthouses. There are five of them in all: three at the outer edges of the reefs that stretch out towards one of the busiest sea-lanes in Europe, and two on the island itself. I paused for a glass of cider and a packet of crisps on the Pointe de Pern – the most Westerly point in France – where two ruinous pylons and a crumbling stone barn provided, respectively, electricity and a gigantic steam-powered fog-horn for the Phare de Nividic, just offshore. With its ceaselessly churning sea and gigantic masses of granite, the peninsula reminded me powerfully of Wingletang Down on St. Agnes.

Gibbo at the most westerly point in France - the Pointe de Pern on Ushant. In the background, the now derelict equipment for powering the lighthouse.

But even more impressive is the Phare du Creac’h, reputedly the most powerful lighthouse in Europe, if not the world. It is black and white and massive. Du Creac’h is to normal lighthouses what the Millennium Eye is to fairground wheels. This is the daddy of them all!

And thereby hangs a theory of mine. The Bretons are big on lighthouses. There are hundreds of them. On the Ile de Vierge – Virgin Island – they’ve built not just one, but two of them, one the tallest in Europe. Now if that’s not making a Gallic, or better still a Celtic point, I don’t know what is! Because this fondness for tall straight things, penetrating the very skies above, goes back a long way in these parts. Around every corner is a standing stone, sometimes made decent with a cross on the top, but by no means always.

Yesterday I stopped off at the tallest menhir still standing in Brittany, at Kerloas near St. Renan. It has two protuberances, about a metre from its base, against which newly married couples were once wont to rub their naked bodies: on one, the man, so as to beget a son; on the other, the woman, so as to be the boss of her household. One of them still looks suspiciously shiny and worn, and I’ll bet I can guess which!

The menhir of Kerloas - with that suspiciously shiny bump!

Be it sacred or profane, lighthouses seem to me to have much the same significance in modern Brittany as menhirs did in the old days. What finally convinced me of that was when, after returning from Ushant, I cycled down to the Pointe de St. Mathieu, at the western end of the Rade de Brest. There I found the still substantial ruins of a Benedictine Abbey – with an enormous lighthouse standing right alongside the entrance to the nave!

Le Phare de St. Mathieu - presumably Cardinal Newman was asked to advise on its siting ("lead kindly light......")!!

I am camping at Les Blancs Sablons, overlooking the estuary (Aber or Rade) which has given Le Conquet its sheltered harbour. It’s a long way round to the town by road, but no distance at all on foot or bicycle, across the long, low passarelle, which I've discovered is French for footbridge. The beach here is superb. Even under murky cloud, swimming yesterday afternoon was a delight, and there’s surf as well. Le Conquet is a pretty, unspoilt little fishing port. There may be pleasanter corners of North West Brittany, but if there are I’ve yet to discover them.

And if you detect a slightly more upbeat tone as these notes reach their conclusion, there’s a very good reason. The sun has a last broken through. I celebrated by roasting myself an enormous veal chop (and drinking a toast to Compassion in World Farming as I ate it), which was quite one of the best things I’ve eaten all year.

A final postscript to Wednesday’s dispatch: St. Paul of Aurelian did not arrive in Brittany at Roscoff, as I suggested. He came ashore on Ushant. I visited the spot today. He was also indirectly responsible for the original chapel at Pointe de St. Mathieu. In fact, one way or another, I seem to be treading in his footsteps much as I did in those of St. Columba in Scotland and Ireland. I wonder if St. Paul built lighthouses as well?!

Celtic to the core - a holy well in the parish close of Lamber near St. Renan

August 27. On the road again

I write at Camping Les Abers, looking out through Carmen’s windscreen to the clitter-clatter of low, rocky, somehow desolate islands that fringe the North-West coast of Brittany. In the distance, a faint pink glow enlivens the otherwise unremitting grey of sky and sea, offering hope of a brighter day tomorrow.

The campsite is at Aber-Wrach (as in Aberystwyth), just west of Landeda (as in Lanivet).The district of Leon (from Caerleon), where I am presently based, was originally divided up into Dumnonee (as in Devon) and Cornouaille (as in it goes without saying). Even the Breton language, now so jealously guarded, was largely imported from Cornwall and Wales, from the fifth century onwards.

But when we talk about ‘Little Britain’, which is what Brittany literally means, we need to remember that the ‘British’ in question was strictly of the ancient, Celtic variety. The Irish, Welsh and Cornish who colonised Brittany in the Dark Ages were looking for somewhere to escape from the Saxons and Vikings, pressing ever westwards. Armorica, as it was then known, was a bleak, infertile, windswept, storm-ravaged, thinly populated peninsula largely cut off from the rest of civilised Europe. It made the Cornish, the Welsh and the Irish feel entirely at home!

Anyway, by reaching Aber-wrach by way of Wales, Cornwall and a sea crossing to Roscoff, I have been travelling in ancient, not to say sacred footsteps. St. Pol-de-Leon, just a few miles from the ferry terminal, is named for the same Paul who gave his name to Paul, near Penzance, and whose chapel here at Aber-wrach I visited earlier today. He was a Welshman, of course!

Unlike Paul, who no doubt made the crossing on a millstone or a cabbage leaf, I travelled in some style, on the Brittany Ferries flagship, the Port Aven. It is a trip I have made many times, and I was looking forward to its rituals, not least the steak-frites in the self-service restaurant as the boat clears the Eddystone lighthouse (and not a moment before!). The food on Brittany Ferries is not exactly world-class, but it is at least French, which is a good start.

I looked up at the board above the servery, just to check that it was on. Sure enough, there it was: “Entrecote grille”. But what was that in the small print underneath?
“Origin S. America”? I looked again, just to check it hadn’t read “S.Armorica”, which is what one might have expected on a boat run by the fanatic gastro-patriots who are the Bretons.

But no, S. America it undoubtedly was, and S. American it undoubtedly tasted – stringy and gristly. I have rarely been more disappointed with a meal in my entire life. My thoughts turned to Alexis Gourvennec, the Breton farmer who founded Brittany Ferries and who sadly died earlier this year. He was arguably the most effective militant farmer who ever lived. He bullied the Government into funding the Roscoff ferry terminal and he dragooned the notoriously cussed small farmers of Brittany into joining his co-operative – the SICA, as it then was – on pain of having their crops burnt.

Alexis Gourvennec - a pocket battleship of a farming leader

The likes of Handley and Haddock are but pigmies to Gourvennec’s colossus. He transformed farming in Brittany. The magnificent crops of cauliflower, onions, leeks, potatoes, lettuce, shallots, broccoli and artichokes – especially artichokes, although he never did manage to persuade Plymothians to love them! – that I drove past on my way here this morning are a tribute to his passion, skill and belligerence.

I don’t know about him spinning in his grave. I’m surprised that he hasn’t burst forth from it: to blockade the ferry company which has so betrayed his legacy and to threaten to burn its boats, one by one, until every last kilo of foreign beef has been tipped into the grey Atlantic.

That apart, the journey across was relatively uneventful. I stayed last night at Mogueriec, not far from Roscoff, on a campsite which, apart from me and Carmen, was eerily deserted. Even the owner made his excuses and left. It was a disturbed, as well as a lonely night. I was just dropping off to sleep when my ears were assailed by the unmistakeable whine of a mosquito, on its final approach towards my neck. Now, if there is one thing in life that I detest even more than split infinitives and the mispronunciation of west country place names it is mosquitos! I had the light on a flash, armed myself with a rolled up Times, and went in search of the little beggars. I got two in the first sweep, two more later on, and one final buzzing menace was nailed to the window frame just before dawn. Conducive to sleep this was not, so I have invested in an electronic device which promises “45 nuits” of mosquito-free bliss. We shall see.

One thing that that Bretons have not, fortunately inherited from their Celtic cousins further north, is their cuisine, which is Frankish to the core, albeit using the magnificent local ingredients. I cycled to Prat-ar-Coum this afternoon to buy some oysters for my supper. A dozen of the freshest, plumpest, most sea-flavoured bivalves as could be imagined set me back just 4 euros 50. On Sunday, at Lyme Regis, the Hix Oyster and Fish Bar had much less fresh oysters on offer at £1.75 each!

Their sacrifice was not in vain!

I was given a leaflet describing the local attractions when I arrived this afternoon. From this, I learned that, near Plougerneau, there is a “Seaweed Museum”. Now that’s got to be up there, alongside Barometer World (near Okehampton, if you’re desperate), as one of the most unlikely tourist attractions in Western Europe!

July 17 Reflections at the halfway stage

I have driven 3,500 miles, stayed at 28 campsites, played 284 holes of golf, chalked up 17 new breweries and visited goodness knows how many new pubs. Yet, despite the fact that my route has taken me down virtually the entire western seaboard of the British Isles, and included scores of beautiful beaches, I have been swimming only seven times, and surfed (feebly) but thrice. From that you will gather that, whilst the weather has been fine, it has only occasionally been what you might call “beach weather” and not once baking hot.

Which, of course, is precisely what one should expect on the Celtic coast. If I’d wanted unbroken sunshine, and a warm sea that laps rather pathetically at one’s feet, then I would have gone to the Mediterranean. If there’s been a disappointment, it’s not been the weather conditions, so much as the sea conditions. In Scotland and Ireland, the wind was mostly from the East. There was no Atlantic swell to speak of. Wales provided one spectacular storm, but then there was no subsequent offshore breeze to smooth the churning waters into slick-backed, lace-crested rollers. The Cornish waves offered the most promise, but conditions never really progressed beyond what the serious surfers call “messy”.

So, have I enjoyed it? For the most part, undoubtedly. I have to confess that there were one or two days, when the rain beat down remorselessly, and the forecast offered little prospect of an improvement, and I was being bitten to death by midges, that I wished myself back at my cottage in Langport. But the weather was only seriously bad for a handful of days, and never for more than a day at a time. To be able to see the Scottish Highlands in bright sunshine was a particular joy.

What it has been is an experience. Even at this halfway stage, I have been to so many beautiful places, travelled through so much magnificently wild and wonderful countryside, explored the physical remains of so much real or imagined history, as to leave me with memories to last a lifetime.

What have I learnt? That Carmen is longer than she appears, especially when you’re reversing into a parking space! That I really can’t putt! That camper-vanners wave to each other when passing on the roads. That Irish roads are the worst in Europe. That, for all the gloss of re-invented cuisines, the food of the western seaboard of the British Isles is mostly pretty dire. And that the Celtic communities of western Britain really do have a lot in common. One thinks immediately of their spirituality; a fondness for religion and the supernatural; a tendency to excess; an inexhaustible sense of humour; and something of a chip on their shoulder when it comes to the English! To what extent these shared characteristics are the result of a shared racial background, or a shared harsh and elemental physical environment is a matter for debate. My money would be on the latter.

In these terms, the Irish are the most “Celtic” and the Scots the least. Cornwall’s genuinely Celtic characteristics – as distinct from heritage – are now largely confined to the far West. The Welsh are almost a race apart: the senior Celtic nation, particularly in the context of Celtic Christianity. It was from Wales that the missionaries travelled – led by St. Patrick – to convert the heathen Irish. And it was then the Irish, having embraced the new religion with a quite astonishing fervour, who invaded the West of Cornwall, bringing their missionaries with them, many of whom subsequently moved on to Brittany. That seems to have been the rough sequence of events and it does give credence to the theory that the last stand of the old “British” people against the Saxons – which produced the legends of Arthur – took place in Wales, rather than Cornwall.

Anyway, that’s quite enough idle theorising and cod history to be going on with. I have, as I said, hugely enjoyed the trip so far, and am looking forward enormously to the start of the next stage, in Brittany at the end of August.

The best day? Well, that would have to be the Isles of Scilly.

The never before visited place to which I would most like to return? That would be a toss up between remote Durness and the silver sands of Camusdarach. The Isle of Arran was beautiful as well, as indeed were the Aran Islands.

The best golf? Unquestionably, Machrihanish, a truly glorious golf course, although for value for money, you probably couldn’t beat the 15 euros it cost to play at Achill.

The best pub? The Porterhouse Brewery in Dublin, which brewed its own good beer, and stood out from the ocean of keg porter and bitter that surrounds it like a good deed in a naughty world.

The worst day? Aberdaron in the storm was pretty bad, and so was St. Ives in the downpour. But undoubtedly the greatest disappointment was the foul weather that stopped the boats going to the Skelligs on the one day when I could have made the trip.

And Carmen? She was as Rosinante to Don Quixote – faithful, dependable; a constant companion. She’ll now be taking a well-earned rest, before we set off for Plymouth and the Roscoff ferry on August 24. Further reports from then on.

July 15 Choughed!

I was walking back from Kynance Cove to Lizard village on Sunday evening when my attention was caught by a group of particularly noisy black birds in a grassy clearing in the Cornish heath. “You jackdaws have got a lot to say for yourself”, I said to them. Except that, no sooner were the words out of my mouth, than I realised they weren’t jackdaws at all. Jackdaws don’t have red beaks, or red legs. These birds – praise all the saints of Cornwall – could only be choughs.

The spirit of King Arthur?

Fortunately, I had my little digital camera with me and took a handful of rushed shots. At this they flew off, alighting again about 100 yards away, so I followed them, and took a couple more photographs, before the five of them took wing and headed off towards the cliff top. Given that this is one of the rarest birds in Britain – extinct here from the early 1970s until their reintroduction in 2001 – I still couldn’t quite believe my luck. As soon as I got back to Carmen, I transferred the pictures from camera to computer, to study them more closely. There was no mistake: the downward curving red beaks, the glossy black plumage, the red legs. These were choughs: the emblem of Cornwall; the bird in which the soul of King Arthur himself is supposed to reside.

They probably chat to each other in a strong Spanish accent (Asturian, I suspect!), as that is the country from which they were reintroduced. But as far as I am concerned, these were the genuine, legendary, Cornish article. If I’d seen a Phoenix on the wing, I couldn’t have been more surprised or pleased.

That was the highlight of a glorious Sunday, in which I clocked two new breweries (Penzance and Lizard), swam at Gwynver in the morning and Kynance Cove in the afternoon, and basked in the well-nigh unbroken sunshine. The sea at Kynance was crowded with children, most of them wearing wet-suits. It struck me that we are in danger of breeding a generation of wimps, who won’t go into the sea without a wetsuit because “it’s too cold”. Besides which they’re denying themselves one of the supreme sensory pleasures, of cool water on warm skin. I’ve got nothing against wet-suits for surfing, but swimming in them is (one must assume) like making love using an old sock as a condom.

Kynance Cove

“Henry’s Campsite”, in Lizard village, is very different from the wide open spaces of Trevedra, but just as delightful. It feels almost as if I’m camping in a garden; a garden in the Isles of Scilly, at that. We are surrounded by palms, echiums, agapanthus and big white daisies. Chickens poke around between the tents. The pitches are marked out by massive granite gateposts. And, best of all, the little campsite/farm shop sells Spingo, from the Blue Anchor in Helston, which has the oldest working brewery in Britain.

It was gloomy and overcast on Monday morning as I walked first to the Lizard Point, and then onto the Most Southerly point itself, complete with the Most Southerly cafe, Most Southerly gift shop, Most Southerly car park and Most Southerly public toilets. This isn’t a place which hides its location under a bushel. The sea was flat calm, and when the fog rolled in, each blast from the lighthouse station’s foghorn reverberated mournfully for fully ten seconds off rocks and cliffs and glassy ocean.

I lunched on a pasty from “Ann’s Famous Pasty Shop” and I have to say that Warrens of St. Just has a serious rival. The pastry is a sort of cross between short and puff – just as with the incomparable (in my humble opinion) Ivor Dewdney’s pasties in Plymouth (the Exeter ones are a deeply inferior imitation).

This afternoon, I cycled to Coverack, via Cadgwith and Kennack Sands. The sun emerged briefly from behind the scudding mist, but then disappeared again. Goonhilly Downs, across which I cycled, is as bleak a heath as you could meet, but in the little valleys that run down to the sea, I saw something almost as rare as a Cornish chough – half grown elm trees. Presumably, being cut off by the heathland, they’re far enough away from other elms to escape the wretched beetle. But it was a bittersweet moment, because it struck me that my three children are both too young to have seen a fully-grown English elm in all its glory in the past, but not young enough to have any realistic hope of seeing one in the future.

So that is the end of what I think I can safely call the British Isles leg of the trip. I plan to leave for Brittany in late August, and in the meantime, when I get home, will post some photographs, and offer some halfway stage reflections.

Blogging away

Wingletang Down, with lighthouse left of centre. The rather rude rock is, with considerable delicacy, known as the Devil's Punchbowl!



July 12 On Wingletang Down

I rather think that the Isles of Scilly is my favourite place in all the world. I love my home in Somerset, of course; the Blackdown Hills has a very special place in my heart; Dartmoor moves me as nowhere else; and I have a great fondness for the blue sea and golden beaches of the south west corner of Portugal. But I guess that if you were to invite me to choose a place in which to spend a final holiday before the great umpire in the sky draws stumps, the Isles of Scilly it would have to be.

For islands so beautiful, it is quite remarkable how unspoilt they have remained. The air is pure and clean, the sea is clearer than a mountain stream, the sky on a clear night is a wonder to behold. And within every island, there are the most remarkable contrasts between the sub-tropical calm of the lagoon-facing coasts, and the wildness of the cliffs and heaths battered by the open sea.

I would visit all of the inhabited islands in the course of my final holiday (and Samson as well), for they are all beautiful in their different ways: cosmopolitan St. Mary’s; the slightly rough diamond that is Bryher; the white sands and crystal waters of St. Martins; even time-share Tresco has its charms, quite apart from the Abbey Gardens. But the island on which I would base myself would be St. Agnes. It is the smallest of the main islands, the most southerly, the most Celtic and, to my mind, the most characteristically Scillonian..

You can walk its coastline in a morning, as I did yesterday. Starting at the smart new quay, with its formal gardens, I walked anti-clockwise, to the cricket ground, on which I would so love to play, and on to Periglis, with its perfect crescent of white sand, little church, lifeboat station and whitewashed cottages. Troytown Farm is next, with its campsite, its farm shop and the new house for the coming generation of Hicks’ (almost everyone who lives on St. Agnes is a Hicks), as featured on “An Island Parish” on the BBC during the winter.

Then it is out onto Wingletang Down, with its fantastical rock formations, springy turf, ancient sites and the ever-restless sea. I paused at the 400 year old Troytown Maze and threw a coin into St. Warna’s well, into which – according to what I’m sure is as baseless a story as it is scurrilous – the locals used to throw pins and pray for shipwrecks. There is a little beach in the south west corner of Wingletang called Porth Askin.

Porth Askin


The last time we were there, Claire found herself pursued by an amorous seal (well, it was an easy mistake for him to make!). This time, I swam on my own, and there were no seals. The water was cold, but not breathtakingly so.

I made a point of visiting Horse Point, which I’m pretty sure is the most southerly point in the British Isles, before turning north past Beady Pool, to the sandbar which joins St. Agnes to Gugh (off which most of the sand has been washed by last winter’s storms) and finally, the Turk’s Head, which is Claire’s favourite pub, and where I ate a whole Scilly crab, so fresh that it was still warm from the boiler. The sun was out by now, and I dozed the afternoon away on Gugh. It was a day made in heaven.

From the Turk's Head, looking past the new quay towards Tresco

After all of that, my visit to Land’s End this morning was a bit of a come-down. It is by no means the most spectacular headland in Cornwall and any sense of being at the end of the world has been entirely destroyed, not just by the hotel, but by the spectacularly tacky “shopping village” and sundry other “amusements”, which have been allowed to grow up alongside. The contrast with the smart and sophisticated visitor centre at the Cliffs of Moher, or the way in which the French have sought to protect the wildness of the Pointe du Raz by keeping the tourist facilities at a discreet distance is by no means to Cornwall’s advantage.

Just reverting to the Scillies for a moment, it is a mistake to think of them as offering Cornishness in its purest, most distilled form, in the way that the Aran Islands do with Irishness. They do have a strongly Celtic core, of course, but it has been seasoned and enriched over the centuries by the myriad of people who have washed up on Scilly’s shores – often quite literally – and have chosen to remain. They do say that one of the reasons why the islands are so different from each other is the influence of shipwreck. The inhabitants of St. Agnes tend to be short and dark, on account, so the theory goes, of the Spanish ship that was wrecked there in the sixteenth century. The people of St. Martins, by contrast, are tall and blue-eyed, by courtesy of the men who made it to shore when a Norwegian ship went down, many moons ago.

While I was waiting at Lands End airport to board the little aeroplane that would carry me to Scilly, a Cornish lady came up to me and said “you must be a Scillonian”. I had to confess that I wasn’t. But given that Scillonians have a well-deserved reputation for being handsome, unfailingly courteous and well-spoken, I took it as a considerable compliment.

A final word about the campsite – Trevedra Farm. It is the best of the 25 I’ve stayed at so far, bar none. The fields are level, the views are superb ( I can actually see the Scillies in the distance out of Carmen’s windows as I write), the farm shop sells all sorts of local goodies, including excellent pasties, the showers and loos are clean and smart and there is a lovely sandy surfing beach just half a mile away down the cliff.

It’s also only a couple of miles from the little town which really does offer the essence of Cornwall, and that is St. Just. It has two really good pubs (the Star and the King’s Head), the best pasty shop in the Duchy (Warrens) and an excellent fish and chip restaurant, which is where I’m headed on my bicycle to buy my supper. I might just have a pint as well, while I’m there!


St. Martin's

July 10. Wet, wet, wet

It goes without saying that it rained all day yesterday, although ‘rain’ seems a singularly inadequate word to describe what we endured. This wasn’t soft summer rain; it was cold, hard, slanting winter rain, driven in on a chill westerly gale.

Fortunately, a bus runs every hour from the Trevalgan Farm campsite (which I strongly recommend) into St. Ives, so I decided to console myself with a good lunch, at the Blue Fish, behind the Sloop. I went for calamari, followed by sea bass with noodles, samphire and chilli jam, off the fixed price £14.95 menu, washed down with a bottle of house Sauvignon. The calamari were exemplary; the sea bass was rather overwhelmed by its accompaniments. The waitress’ black thong added considerable further enchantment to the view.

The Sloop from the Blue Fish - too wet even for the seagulls

It was still tipping down when I left at 3.00, so I decided to while away an hour or so with a pint and The Times crossword at the Golden Lion (a Good Beer Guide entry whose doors I have never previously darkened). The all-day drinkers were going strong in the back bar. The focus of conversation was a gentleman who suffers from a speech impediment I have not previously encountered. He was incapable of saying anything just once; it had to be repeated at least three times.

“What was it Pericles did? What was it Pericles did? What was it Pericles did?”

We never did discover.

The conversation became progressively more surreal, as the subject of spinach somehow intruded into a debate on Che Guevara.

“Can Che Guevara save the world? Can Che Guevara save the world? Can Che Guevara save the world? With spinach. With spinach. With spinach.”

To which his equally pie-eyed friend replied, with commendable logic under the circumstances:

“Not any more he can’t. He’s dead. The CIA done ‘im in. And bugger your spinach!”

I decided against a £4.75 visit to the Tate St. Ives. Having been left distinctly cold by the contents of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, I didn’t hold out much hope of getting my money’s worth of cultural inspiration at what is a distinctly poor relation.

Sunshine at last

It stopped raining at 6.00 precisely. I squelched my way down to the coastal footpath and sat on a bench, to watch the sun move across the waters, and listen to the larks and the sea.

Today, the weather has been much better. So much so that I fell fast asleep in the afternoon sunshine on Gwynver beach, just down the cliff from what is another excellent campsite (Trevedra Farm near Sennen), and was two hours late for my round of golf at Cape Cornwall. I got round by 9.30.

Cape Cornwall

It isn’t the greatest golf course in the world (some of the holes are deeply silly), but it does have glorious views. Having played at mainland Britain’s most northerly course, just a few miles from one of its two Capes, I felt I was completing the circle by playing at its most westerly, just a few hundred yards from the other Cape. And I bettered my handicap by a shot.

Tomorrow, the Scillies.

July 8 Celtic connections

Trevose Head

St. Piran, the patron saint of tin miners, if not of Cornwall itself, was an Irishman: a follower of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. He, of course, was a Welshman. The father of the Celtic church in Scotland was St. Columba, from Donegal. Did these differences mean much at the time? I suspect not. They were all just Celts, speaking more or less the same language, united in opposition to the Norsemen and Saxons advancing ever further from North and East. Many of the Breton saints have strong links with both Cornwall and Ireland, although the flow does seem to have been predominantly north to south. On the spur of the moment, I can think of no originally Cornish saint who made any sort of mark elsewhere, although that may simply be because the Irish and the Bretons were very much more assiduous in preserving their historical records than the Cornish.

Anyway, in common with virtually all the myriad of Cornish “saints”, Piran was essentially a missionary, who set up his ‘llan’ – a religious settlement – alongside a little stream a mile or so inland from what is now Penhale Bay. In around 550, he built an Oratory, which was overwhelmed by the shifting sands maybe a thousand years ago. By a curious coincidence, it was rediscovered at around the same time – the turn of the 19th century - that the church that was built to replace it was similarly having to be abandoned.

St. Piran's Oratory, re-buried in the sands

This being Cornwall, with its fine disregard for antiquity and beauty, the Oratory had no sooner been disinterred than it was ransacked. Eventually, in the early years of the 20th century, they encased it in concrete, giving it the appearance of a particularly ugly roadside garage. So ugly, in fact, that – this being Cornwall – they decided thirty years later it would be better off buried again!

Despite all of that, St. Piran’s Oratory remains a place of pilgrimage, not to be missed by any self-respecting Celtic Odysseus. So yesterday, I cycled the six miles from St. Agnes Beacon to Perranporth, and slogged the last three miles along the beach and up through the mighty towans, to pay my respects. It was a grey, windy, gloomy afternoon, which would have been a disappointment in mid-November, let alone in early July, and my left knee was killing me. But I was glad I made the effort. It is an atmospheric spot. In Ireland, it would be crawling with tourists. In Cornwall, I had it all to myself.

I made another pilgrimage this morning – to Knill’s Monument, over-looking St. Ives, where we scattered my father’s ashes in 1997. I don’t know what the old boy would have made of his eldest son touring Cornwall in what he would no doubt have described dismissively as “a motorised caravan”; although come to think of it, I do - it would have been “Tcha!” But St. Ives was just about his favourite place in all the world, and all of his four children – myself, Chippy, Adam and Felicity – were taught the rituals to be followed when visiting Knill’s Monument. I may have got this wrong – in which case, father, forgive me – but I think the drill is to walk three times around the pediment of the granite steeple, pausing after each circuit to intone: “Old John Knill pray work my will” and make a wish. Or then again, it could be that you have to walk around it three times and then call upon the old boy to grant a single wish. I opted for the former, but kept the wishes modest, just in case I’d got it wrong!

Knill's Monument

I am installed now not far from Knill’s steeple, at Trevalgan Holiday Park, about two miles west of St. Ives. Looking north from the earthwork (modern, I fear) in front of Carmen’s bonnet, I can see the top of Godrevy lighthouse and even make out (with binoculars) the campsite where I stayed last night on St. Agnes Beacon, 15 miles north up the stupendous North Cornwall coast.

And you’ll never guess what happened this afternoon…. The sun came out! So I tucked my plancha di agua under my arm, packed my wetsuit and swimming trunks into my rucksack, and set off across the fields to Porthmeor Beach and my first surf of the entire trip. It wasn’t exactly historic. The waves were as messy and unsatisfactory as a Gordon Brown compromise (and that’s the polite simile!), but it was unquestionably a surf.

As I write, we are being engulfed by yet another storm from the West. I am comforted by John Knill’s splendid motto, which appears on his monument:

NIL DESPERANDUM!