| Date: | 11th. April 2007 | |
| County: | CORNWALL | |
| Location: | Godrevy (Gwithian) | |
| Type: | Scenic Area (Coast), Wildlife | |
| Sub-Type: | Beach, Headland, Coves, Lighthouse, Seals | |
| Viewed by: | WALK from car park | |
| Car Park: | Flat £3 fee National Trust (free in winter.) | |
| Difficulty: | Mostly Easy. Fairly flat. A little climbing. | |
| Distance: | xKm | |
| Season: | Spring | |
| Weather: | ? | |
| Time Of Day: | ? | |
| Camera: | Casio Exilim EX-Z850 Pocket Zoom (JPG) | |
| Scene Rating: | ••••• |
The week of fine weather, which lasted throughout Easter 2007, gradually started to cloud over on Thursday 12th. April - so it was fortuitous that we chose Wednesday 11th. April to take a drive down the coast to the area near Gwithian!
It was a day with perfect weather. In fact, the Redruth area registered the nation's record for the day: over 12 hours of uninterrupted sunlight and blue skies - enough to heat the spring air to almost 20 degrees. With our blood thickened by the English winter, this enabled us to shed our sweaters for the first time since we arrived.
The area around Godrevy Head (just north-east of Gwithian) belongs to the National Trust, so it's well documented on various web-sites. The guide information assumes you will approach on the A30, from which you take the Hayle exit, travel through Gwithian village and then turn left to Godrevy. We drove along a quieter route - via Towan Cross and Portreath - which allowed us to turn right to Godrevy (just before a small, single-vehicle-width stone bridge) without needing to go into Gwithian itself.
Being the week after Easter, the National Trust car-park was already manned and we needed to pay the £3 fee. You could probably avoid this by parking in one of the pull-offs along the road from Portreath (opposite Hell's Mouth cafe) and then walking down the coast from there (although it's a lot further, of course.)
The car park by the toll booth was already quite full. We didn't realise that if we'd continued straight on past the entrance, we could have driven another 400 meters of single track road and reached a second car-park - on grass - just above the Godrevy beach. This was less full - although there were still a lot more vehicles than I would have expected for April.
Anyway, it wasn't a long walk from the first car-park to the second and it gave us time to take in the view down the coast, over the Towans (towan means "dune" in Cornish) to Hayle Sands and across the bay to St. Ives - which was clearly visible (although the back-lit haze meant it didn't merit a photograph!)
As soon as we crested the first low hill beyond the entrance, Godrevy's most famous and iconic feature came into view - the lighthouse on Godrevy Island.
The Godrevy lighthouse "is said to have been the inspiration for Virginia Woolf to write her novel 'To The Lighthouse,' when she saw it across the bay while visiting St Ives, though in the book she relocates the lighthouse elsewhere." (Wikipedia)
But the attraction for most holiday-makers resides in the small beaches nestling amongst the rocks opposite the island. These were already well populated by holiday-makers who'd staked an early claim to their chosen patch and erected defences of colourful wind-breaks against the barely tangible breeze ... and against marauding children from other clans...
Having had the coastline largely to ourselves (along with retirees walking their dogs) for the duration of the winter, this invasion was something of an unwelcome shock.
I suppose there are families taking beach holidays like this worldwide, but - maybe because my most intense contact with beaches was when I was a child, taking holidays with my family - I always associate it with behaviour that's quintessentially "British."
As someone who's always liked to see and explore my environment, I've never quite understood the attraction of flopping down on a patch of sand like a beached whale and spending the day burning the surface of your skin bright red, only distracted from total drowsiness by the brouhaha of quarrelling children and pet dogs, but it seems a perennial attraction for many!
Moving past the edge of the beach, the coastal path led us up higher until we reached the beginning of the headland.
From here, we could look down into tiny gravelled inlets, edged on three sides by rock cliffs - steep, but as yet not very high.
On the top of the rock a thin cap of grass nervously overhung the edge, giving the sense that it might suddenly slip, and slide off like a bald man's wig.
Beyond the inlet was another beach - much larger and made up entirely of rock - and beyond that the ever-present white tower of the lighthouse.
The octagonal white walls of the lighthouse itself were quite pretty, but the overall attractiveness has been largely ruined by a bare grey-concrete wall, built in an irregular oval around the thin surrounding grass.
The lighthouse was built in 1858-9 to warn shipping away from the rocks beyond the island, on which the S.S. Nile was wrecked in 1854 with the loss of all on board.
The tower is 26 meters high and was originally manned by three men, but in 1934 the lighthouse was made automatic and in 1995 it was converted to solar powered operation (monitored and controlled from the Trinity House Operations Control Centre in Essex.)
The rocks opposite the island are more attractive and are free from seaweed, except for those bordering the water at low tide.
Despite their solid castle-like towers, there are several fissures (3-5 meters deep and up to 2 meters wide) running through them, usually from the shore in the direction of the island, through which the incoming waves are often funnelled in dramatic fashion.
The chunky geological structure of the rock forms natural steps, which makes climbing easy - although traversing the whole length of the rocky beach can be hazardous due to the fissures.
The gullies are narrow enough to be jumped easily, but any mistake could lead to a dangerous fall.
Depressions and gullies in the rock also give rise to natural pools. These can be quite deep.
The shallower ones tend to become ringed with think fronds of green weed, but others are scoured clean by the turbulence of the tides and the clear water is deep enough for the adventurous to dive into - as this family found.
Their own private swimming pool!
Predictably, Xue's interests were more oriented towards things gastronomical! So she spent some while patiently peering into pools likely to be a refuge for creatures that might be edible!
Crabs, lobsters, prawns, shrimps or even shellfish would have been equally welcome！
As it was, even a more intense investigation amongst the weed and under rocks proved fruitless.
We were eventually forced to retire from the pools crustacean-less and mollusc-less...
There were small beds of common mussels on some of the rocks, but they bore very little comparison to the green-lipped mussels found in seafood restaurants in Hong Kong. Even large specimens of this black British variety have very little meat and a dull taste (or so I'm told...)
We didn't test the temperature of the water, but the idea of wearing a wet-suit in the pools struck us as a generally good idea!
On closer inspection, we found that the rocks themselves had been worn into an endless variety of interesting patterns.
This one looked like charcoaled logs or a dark plank from an old sailing ship bored by sea-going worms.
The rock is highly stratified, with each layer being quite shallow, so that it easily forms ragged blades to cut the unwary.
I've tried to find details about the geology of the rocks around Godrevy head, but haven't succeed. It seems likely, however, that they are made up from a variety of Devonian slate. This is found along a large part of the north Cornish coast.
The County of Cornwall website says: "Much of Cornwall is underlain by slate (which) originated as sea floor mud during the Devonian era, from about 405 to 362 million years before the present. The processes involved in the conversion of marine mud to rock involve deep burial, compression and heating within the Earth's crust."
The dark grey colour of the rocks on the Godrevy beach would seem to agree with this description of slate.
The Godrevy rocks are clearly sedimentary, with very well defined strata. But, equally obviously, they have been subjected to severe pressure and heat at some time during their history, since a lot of the rock has been buckled into curves or waves.
The differing density and hardness of the strata must then have led to erosion at irregular rates, leaving the raised ridges we see on the surface today.
Climbing up a v-shaped gully we rejoined the coastal path.
As you gain height, the clarity of the water becomes more apparent as the surface reflection decreases and only the refraction remains.
Both in the rock pools and in the shallows of the sea around the rocks, the water had a light bottle-green crystal appearance. But there was still a slight murkiness - man's pollution is very hard to escape these days.
Another thing we noticed was that, although they had fissures and a wild variety of shapes, the cliffs and rocks along this part of the coast formed a single mass.
There were very few loose rocks or boulders, as if any falling rocks had been immediately taken away by the current and deposited in bays further up the coast.
Just below the coastal path, where the rock was too bare to support any grass, it was covered with a variety of tousled lichens and odd succulents that we'd previously only seen in rock-gardens and rockeries.
The ruddy "jelly-bean" style leaves on the succulent suggest that it was probably some kind of sedum, but I've been unable to identify it exactly.
Sheared rocks with steeply-angled faces were fully covered in thin beards of white-green lichens, far too tough and tenacious to pull away from the surface of the stone with your fingers.
The type of lichen reminded me of the fronds I'd seen growing on some thorny shrubs on the headland above Trevaunance Cove in St. Agnes (see earlier post.) But for some reason, the white-green in combination with the deep yellow surface lichen beneath, somehow gave me a sense of peace similar to that I'd once found in old Celtic churchyards in Ireland.
The combination of bearded white-green (foliose) and deep orange-yellow surface (crustose) lichen, together with their associations of old Celtic stones, was also evident a little further on - although here it was the bright crustose lichen which gave the dominant colour.
Initially it was the visual contrast of the yellow patches and the deep navy blue of the sea which attracted me to drop down on to the rocks below the path again. But having got a Celtic association into my head it was easy to see this eight-foot splinter of rock - wedged at a crazy angle against the stone bulwark of the cliff - as a kind of bridge in time and space back to a more spiritually-organic, druidical era.
The Celts were a people whose magical cosmology was rooted in nature and natural forms, so that circles of trees and of stones gained a power not just from the circular shape, but also from the materials themselves: living wood and the stone used for megaliths and dolmens.
In this sense, it's easy to see a kind of continuum from natural shards of stone like this one, to standing stones, then to the stones erected upon tombs (first pagan, then Celtic Christian) and finally to round Celtic towers and monasteries.
Stone seems somehow to "belong" naturally to the countryside. A stone ruin is reclaimed by nature and becomes part of it, in a way that brick ruins never really can - and concrete ruins just look stark and ugly for eternity.
Lichens play an important part in the reclamation process, changing bare rock into something which gradually becomes more and more habitable for tough little plants - although it's often difficult to see what many of these little plants are managing to hold on to!
If you see lichens growing on a tree branch it's easy to believe that they are some kind of parasite, but when you see them growing on rock it's clear that they are not!
In fact, "lichens are symbiotic associations of a fungus ... with a photosynthetic partner (the photobiont) that can produce food for the lichen from sunlight. The photobiont is usually either green algae or cyanobacteria. A few lichens are known to contain yellow-green algae or, in one case, a brown algae." (Wikipedia.)
As I climed back up the rock to the path, I couldn't resist a final shot of the lichened rock against the lighthouse.
It was almost as if the finger of rock and the white man-made finger of the lighthouse were somehow pointing towards some mysterious intersection in the sky.
Ley-lines (lines of power) and astrological projections were also important to Celtic druids, of course - as they were to many ancient cultures, such as many pre-Inca civilizations in South America (Nazca, for example.)
While I was busy bonding with associations of stone and lichen, Xue was gradually moving along the coastal path and having her own advantures on the cliff above.
Coming around a blind bend in the path, she stumbled upon a middle-aged British couple sunbathing naked in a rocky nook! Retiring back long the path, she called down to me (in Cantonese) - first relating the information about the naturists and then (more excitedly) about a huge fish she could see in the water!
By the time, I'd wound my way up the rockface and rejoined her, the fish was no-where in sight and the (fully clothed) couple were innocently wandering away in front of us...!
As we climbed further up the hill, leaving the lighthouse behind us and heading towards Mutton Cove (around which the coastal path described a broad curve before striking off towards Navax Point) Xue remembered that my father had told us that there are often seals here - and sometimes dolphins. She thought that maybe the "big fish" she'd seen was actually a seal under water.
So from that point onward we had our eyes trained on the sea, waiting for the tell-tale shape of seal-heads popping out of the water to breathe. Several times we thought we'd seen one out of the corner of our eyes, but the "sighting" always turned out to be the movement of a buoy marking the location of a lobster pot! (Floating orange markers put out by lobster fishermen are very common along this stretch of coast.)
From the top of the hill, you can look across Mutton Cove to Navax point. In the distance we could see St Agnes Head and the sands of Perranporth, although they're barely visible in the haze in the photo below (top left, if you're checking.)
As I was looking into the distance, Xue finally saw a seal pop up in the middle of Mutton Cove. At first we only saw the head, as the light was reflecting off the surface, but as we got closer we could also make out the sleek, bullet-like shape of its body speeding under the clear water.
We were staring so intently at the lonely seal in the water that it was only when we reached the very lip of the cliffs enveloping the next beach that we noticed a much more obvious population of seals - about 50 of them! - strewn out across the sand. They were laying so still that our cursory glances had just taken them as rounded boulders.
As we looked around, we saw that the edge of the Cove was only a short walk from the top edge of the grassy car-park - so even retired people could easily make their way up to the rim and peer down at the sleepy hoard, basking in the sun below.
There was a steep path down the cliffs which could have brought us down to where the seals were lazing, but a sign at the top requests visitors not to do this. Any disturbance to their habitat makes it less likely that future visitors will be able to see them.
As it is, the curved clifftop which surrounds the beach is frequently lined by an wide arc of people, looking down as if in silent prayer!
Xue was excited enough to ask for documentary proof that she and the seals were both there! She then started to acost passing dog-walkers with excited questions like: "Did you see the seals?"
"Yes," said the first man (with two dogs) brought to a sudden standstill by her question: "They're there nearly every day." (It turns out that he lived nearby, which rather poured cold water on the moment...)
The colony living around the Cove are Grey Seals - which are actually much more common in Cornwall than the so-called Common Seal.
Despite the name, there is a wide variety in adult colouration - from dark grey, to silver grey and even a kind of beige colour. Even with the muted spottiness that some of their fur has, many of the seals were surprisingly hard to see against the beach.
According to the BBC, half of the world's population of Grey Seals are found around British coasts and numbers here have doubled since 1960. This probably explains why some local fishermen are now calling for a cull.
The BBC Science and Nature website also says that "Male grey seals are much larger than the females, and have broad shoulders, an elongated snout and a heavy muzzle. The females have a thinner snout and a less rounded profile. ... Females tend to be paler than the males."
It seems that the difference in size between male and female is more in bulk (230Kg vs 160Kg) than in length (2.1 meters vs 1.8 meters.) Looking down at the sunbathing throng, it was hard to see much difference in size. Apart from a few smaller ones (probably juveniles) it was as if a school of exactly the same kind of fish had just been dumped from a basket, on the beach!
We moved around to the other side of the beach where it was quieter and sat observing the seals for a while.
Apart from a sporadically-waved flipper, they were so soporific and unmoving that they could have been adult holiday-makers from the first beach we'd seen - apart from the lack of stripy windbreaks and old one-piece swimming costumes, of course.
Occasionally, though, one of the adolescents would trespass into the space of a bigger one and there'd be a rippling burst of agitation in a part of the group, before the invader was driven away into the sea.
The difference in elegance in the movement of seals on land and in water is quite amazing. On land, the ungainly pitch of the animal - as it heaves its heavy bulk forward in great rippling lunges - leads to progress so slow that it's comical, but once deep enough into the waves to be able to swim, the animal takes off with the aerodynamic speed and agility of a guided torpedo!
On both sides of the path running along the top of the Cove, there were a variety of pretty wild flowers nestling in the low tangle of undergrowth.
Not being anything of a botanist or horticulturalist I couldn't identify this one...
...but there were many with which I was much more familiar.
The Lesser Celandine is common all along the North Cornish coast and the bright yellow of its small, sharp-but-sunny blooms give a vivid contrast to the intense dark green mass of its leaves, which form a kind of wide, spreading base behind them.
There were also many violets, shyly peeking from the between the blades of grass.
The larger groups of the little flowers were beginning to shrivel and fade, but there were many isolated blooms still fresh and in their prime.
And of course, there were primroses - not as thick and dramatic as the ones at Penmount (see my last post,) but pretty none the less.
Some primroses could also be seen clinging to the parts of the cliff where erosion had occured and soil had been able to gather. This was odd. The cliff face along this particular stretch of coastine spends much of the day in shade and the colour of the blooms is barely abe to break through the ombre.
The steeper and more inhospitable parts of the cliff were also dotted with lighter specks. These were the soft grey and white shapes of gulls - whether nesting or resting, it was hard to tell which from our vantage point.
Moving away from the seal beach towards Navax point, the walk became must more similar to our earlier walks along the coast near St. Agnes.
Unlike St. Agnes, however, the water is not so deep at the base of the cliffs and you can still see the seabed.
The coastline here also seems to have had no tin deposits and has been spared the ravages and spoil of tin mining which is so evident in other areas.
At one point, the path traversed a stile and ran through the edge of a field dotted with many raised lumps. Given their shape and the way the ground had been trampled, it's likely that cattle had been kept there and that the lumps had previously been protected by some kind of food or salt-licks, as the cattle milled around it.
The cliffs seem to be more stable along this stretch of coast than those in the north-east, so farmers have been bold enough to build dry-stone walls very close to the clifftop.
The design of the walls was no different to the St. Agnes area, however - layers of stones stacked on their ends (side by side) and bound together by heavy growths of grass and small bushy shrubs.
(I'm in shot just to give a little colour to the grey and green, by the way - and so that Xue could show it to me later, to prove it was time for the spring-time haircut!)
As with the rim around Mutton Cove, the top-soil and grass was growing right to the edge of the cliff - or even overhanging it.
You could quite often find flowers growing within a few inches of the precipitous drop to the bottle-green shallows...
...like these little flowers, which had the same size, colour and globe-like shape as clover - although the shape of the petals were quite different.
The coastline near Navax Point did not have the dramatic rock formations we'd seen on Godrevy Point, but there were many rocks jutting out of the water to form little islands.
Some had been eroded by the surf into streamlined shapes, like a viking boat ready to to cut both ways through the oncoming and receding waves.
The plants near the tip of Navax point were more familiar: gorse bushes thick with dark yellow blooms which (like the orange-yellow lichen we'd seen earlier) stood in stark contrast to the bare rock outcrops thrusting through the blue sea beyond.
However much I photograph blossoming gorse bushes, I never seem to tire of them!
I'm not sure if it's the sheer profusion of the tightly packed blooms, or the smoothness of the petals by the side of the thorny leaves, or the bud-like shape of the flowers (backed by two curiously buttefly-like petals, which stick up behind the bud-shapes like stiff Elizabethan lace) - but whatever it is, I always feel cheered when I see them!
Time was getting on, so we decided to draw the line at Navax Point and not continue onwards to Hell's Mouth.
But we also decided against taking the shorter route back through the grassy car-park. Instead we retraced our steps past the curving crowd of worshippers standing atop the natural amphitheatre above the seal-beach, and crossed the hillock back to the rocks near the lighthouse...
....and from there back along the coastal path and single-track road to the car...and home...
Beach,
Cliff,
Coast,
Cornwall,
Dik,
Flower,
Godrevy,
Gorse,
Gwithian,
Headland,
Holiday Makers,
Lighthouse,
Primrose,
Rock Pools,
Rocks,
Sand,
Seal,
Walk,
Wildlife
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