To Penzance, Finally

Just arrived in Penzance - a Hitachi 802

The Dream

I’ve been a regular user of London’s Paddington station for half a century now, first during the time when I lived in and around Reading, for which it is the London terminus. Later it became the London end of the Heathrow Express, which has taken me there regularly ever since.

At railway stations as well as airports I can’t resist looking at the destination display, of all the places I could be going to. And the one that has struck me every single time I visit Paddington is Penzance. It’s the very last town in England at the south-western tip of the Cornish peninsula, just 9 miles from the end of the world at Land’s End - next stop, America. For over a hundred years it is probably best known as the setting of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance, though probably chosen by them more for alliteration than anything else.

Lately I have been telling myself that I should stop dreaming and just hop on a train and go there. And finally, taking advantage of a Thursday meeting near London, we did just that. It seems a shame to go all that way and not explore the countryside, so we left on Friday and returned on Sunday afternoon.

The Journey

British trains don’t have a great reputation these days, but our train journey from London was superb. The trains are nearly-new Hitachi 802 class, and the first-class seats are extremely comfortable. The only drawback is the club-style layout, meaning you potentially spend five hours playing footsie with a total stranger. But luckily we found some unassigned single airliner-style seating, for which we abandoned our reserved seats to sit in comfort for the rest of the journey.

We were very pleasantly surprised by the service on the train, as it whizzed through the pretty Berkshire countryside at 120 mph. It left at 10am, meaning the five hour journey spanned lunchtime, but we were served an endless stream of coffee, tea and best of all, Walkers ginger biscuits, as well as a decent sandwich for lunch.

A highlight of the journey is the line westward from Exeter to Newton Abbot, which includes the famous sea-wall stretch at Dawlish. The railway was built right next to the sea, with only a low wall protecting it. It is periodically flooded, and every now and then washed away altogether, a result of the engineering compromise of building the line along the coast where there were plenty of towns and villages to serve. The London and South Western Railway took the inland route, easier to build but serving a much smaller population. Today only the coastal Great Western line survives. It’s a spectacular sight, with only a few hardy souls strolling on the beach between the train and the open water.

The next spectacular sight comes just after the stop at Plymouth. Here the line crosses the River Tamar on Brunel’s magnificent 1859 Royal Albert Bridge, with great views over the mudflats of the estuary. And then, after three hours, we were in Cornwall. The train had been slowing down gradually throughout the journey, and from here it trundles through the Cornish countryside at a sedate 60 mph. Up to Plymouth it made just four stops, but now it turns into almost an all-stations service, abandoning all pretence at being an express. That makes sense, because there are no large towns in Cornwall. The two hours it takes to cover the remaining 100 miles to Penzance are anything but boring. There is a constant panorama of deep valleys and rolling countryside populated by cows and sheep, and the occasional derelict tin mine with its pump building and chimney.

Approaching Penzance the sea comes into view again, before the train pulls into its final stop. I’d seen pictures of Penzance station, generally including one of the original GWR’s magnificent King or Castle class steam engines. The station is nestled against the sea, a car park replacing what was once the goods yard. Main-line terminal stations are fairly rare in Britain’s provinces, and Penzance must surely be the ultimate terminus - beyond, there is nothing, and somehow the station manages to evoke that.

Our arrival coincided with the departure of one of the few High Speed Trains (HST) remaining in service. In their day these were fantastic trains, the first to exceed 100 mph in regular service - they were branded as HS125, for their speed. Watching one depart was always a pleasure, the rear engine roaring past at a respectable speed as the train accelerated out of the station.

One of the last HST sets in service, about
to depart for Plymouth

It’s amazing they are still in service - they replaced the Western Region diesel-hydraulics in about 1976 and so have been in service now for 50 years. I well remember a ride to Edinburgh in about 1980, where they had recently replaced the equally impressive Deltics. Sadly they will all be withdrawn later this year, and they don’t really lend themselves to preservation. This one was ignominously on an all-stations service to Plymouth, where it would never reach even half of its capable speed.

Arrival

Penzance is too small to host any of the usual car rental companies. Luckily I had found a local company which rented us an elderly Renault Clio at a high price - but at least we had a car. The choice of hotels is limited. There are a couple of soulless modern hotels on the outskirts, and plenty of AirBnB type places. The only actual hotel in the town itself is the Queens Hotel, which overlooks the promenade and the beach.

It was built in 1862, with the arrival of the railway from London, and seems little changed since - the best word for it is “quaint”. It has a frontage of 100 metres or so, and must have about 70 rooms. Our room was pleasant enough, big and with a great view over the sea. Apart from an occasional repaint I suspect it hasn’t changed since the 1950s - one giveaway is that there is no shaver socket in the bathroom, which was tiled in a stylishly dated light turquoise.

Once installed, we headed inevitably for Lands End. We passed through the picture-postcard village of Mousehole, pronounced ‘mowzel’, and then along a series of country lanes, often too narrow for two cars to pass. Oddly the signposted distance to Lands End remained at 9 miles for about half the journey.

The place itself is an odd blend of Disneyland and desolation. There is a resort with all kinds of not-so-attractive attractions (and exorbitantly overpriced parking), but on a grey October day almost nothing was open. We walked down to the viewpoint, where a forlorn poster offered photographs in front of a sign showing distances to various faraway places in the world - though there was no photographer amongst the handful of people huddled against the wind. A walk around the hotel revealed a refreshment room, its windows fogged up and one sad-looking couple visible inside. We weren’t tempted. Oddly it reminds me of the small coastal towns in Japan we’ve visited, where even outdoors you can almost smell the mould and decay.

Back at the hotel, Isabelle went for a walk and discovered the Morrab Gardens, a beautiful collection planted in the late 19th century, similar to the English gardens to be found along the Cote d’Azur. Then it was time to think about dinner. Our first attempt was a busy pub round the corner from the hotel, but surprisingly they didn’t sell food. We took the car and drove along the promenade to another place suggested on the web. That turned out to be surreal.

As we entered, at just 7.30 on a Friday evening, the staff looked at us in a mixture of surprise and horror. After a brief huddle, they declared that the kitchen was already closed! In California we were used to the “early to bed” philosophy - by 8pm most restaurants are putting the chairs on the tables, and by 9 the streets are deserted. But we weren’t expecting that in Britain. Luckily, another no-food pub suggested a little place hidden away in an alley, the Barbican Bistro. And there, we had really lucked out. We had really excellent fish, sole and hake, imaginatively prepared and followed by an equally excellent creme brulée.

But now there was absolutely nothing to do except to retire to bed, which we did at the extraordinarily early time, for us, of 10.30. There must be something in the Cornish air though, because we didn’t wake up until 8.30, after ten hours of sleep.

Our hotel rate included breakfast, which was served in a vast, empty room, with just a couple of rows of tables defensively hugging the windows. The menu looked appetising enough, but was let down by the implementation. I asked for some honey to accompany my porridge. They offered me maple syrup instead, which I gratefully accepted, but I had poured a generous amount of the offered product into my breakfast before I realised that its origins owed a lot more to the chemical industry than to maple trees. It had a peculiar odour and taste, a mixture of soy sauce and burned meat, that rendered the remainder of my porridge inedible.

An attempt to buy a map and guidebook led us to the town centre, the oddly named Market Jew Street. The town is in the throes of a massive rework of its road system, which has turned what would normally be the through roads across the town into a series of dead-ends. The main street is totally inaccessible even to delivery vehicles, and apparently all goods have to be manhandled from remote back streets on trolleys. You really have to ask yourself what goes through the mind of people who come up with schemes like this.

We found a nice bookshop (The Edge of the World Bookshop) but the main street is a bit of a sorry sight. About a quarter of the shops are boarded up, and several of the others didn’t look very open. The town as a whole has a tired, semi-derelict feel to it. Maybe it’s different when it’s packed wth summer crowds.

Winery

Rondo grapes at the Polgoon winery

It’s always interesting to visit a winery, to see how they adapt to the local climate and terroir. Penzance has its very own, Polgoon, on the edge of the town though rendered almost inaccessible by another massive set of roadworks. It takes real talent to shut down the town and the only available bypass simultaneously.

Polgoon introduced to several grape varieties we didn’t know before: Bacchus, Rondo and Seyval Blanc. We were impressed that they manage to convince any grapes to grow in the Cornish climate, even though none of them were really to our taste. Bacchus produces a white wine with an almost meaty taste. Rondo is impressive more for its foliage, with huge russet-red leaves.

The very pleasant lady at the winery recommended several restaurants, and for lunch we went to the Mackerel Sky Seafood Bar in nearby Newlyn. They served a kind of fishy tapas selection, which was delicious: scallops, crab nachos and battered halibut, accompanied by cider from Polgoon.

The Communications Museum

In the afternoon we resisted the temptations of St Ives, apparently a hotbed of fancy art galleries and general tourist attractions, and headed for the Communications Museum at Porthcurno. Cornwall is the logical jumping-off point for cables across the Atlantic or south towards Africa. The site of the very first cable - towards India, not America - was chosen because of its remoteness, and the impossibility of bringing a boat close to the shore, with the risk of damage to the cable.

Connector, 1930s style, at the
Communications Museum

In the beginning, forwarding a message from one cable to another - a job now done billions of times per second by network switches and routers - required manual interpretation of the incoming Morse code, and manual retransmission. It was very labour intensive, requiring an army of meticulously trained telegraph operators. Logically enough, the school established for this purpose was at Porthcurno. It lasted for nearly a century, finally closing in 1970. Life must have been absolutely monastic, especially during the half century before cars existed.

Many of Britain’s undersea cables terminated there. During the two World Wars it was of vital importance, so much so that during the Second War, its functions were removed into tunnels carved deep into the granite. The exhibition includes various pieces of contemporary equipment and the story of the cables, the school and the people. It beats parading round overpriced touristy art galleries any day!

After winding our way back along the often one-track roads, we had dinner that evening at a restaurant called Cork and Fork, which was also very good.

I was surprised how few Cornish accents I heard. Nearly everyone we dealt with could have come from within a 50-mile radius of London. A few older people did have the local accent, though it seems very mild compared to Geordie (from around Newcastle) or (heaven forbid) Glasgow.

Departure

St Michael's Mount with Ferry

The next day our train was at 1215, which left us time to do something in the morning. One of the famous sites is St Michael’s Mount, but oddly it is closed on Saturdays so we hadn’t been able to visit it the previous day. The proper tourist thing to do is to walk out to it along the causeway, which is only accessible for a few hours at low tide, but the tides weren’t cooperating that day. At other times, little boats run almost continuously, taking just a few minutes to cover the couple of hundred metres out to the island. We just about had time to take the boat out, walk around the harbour and the museum, and get the boat back, before returning via the nightmare mess of closed roads to the station. It was well worth it, and just maybe one day we will return and hike up to the castle at the top of the mount, and visit its famous garden too.

The Great Western train back was just as enjoyable as the outward journey, though it would have been even better if there had been a King or a Castle on the front of the train, one of the Great Western’s famous 1920s steam engines. Still, I did manage to blag a visit to the cab at Paddington, just as I did when I was tiny and my Dad would hoist me onto the footplate of a newly-arrived Britannia Pacific at Liverpool Street. It seemed vast, with the gaping maw of the red-hot firebox in pride of place. The Class 802 was a superb display of modern railway technology, but not as terrifyingly impressive.

The "Footplate" of our Hitachi 802
just arrived at Paddington