CORNWALL: Tehidy (North) Walk

Date:		11th. April 2007
County:		CORNWALL
Location:		Tehidy Woods
Type:		Scenic Area (Woods)
Sub-Type:		Flowers
Viewed by:		WALK from car park
Car Park:		Free parking.
Difficulty:		Easy. Fairly flat. Muddy at times.
Distance:		xKm.
Season:		Early Spring
Weather:		Sunny.
Time Of Day:		?
Camera:		Casio Exilim EX-Z850 Pocket Zoom (JPG)
Scene Rating:		•••••

The Great Manor of Tehidy was for many centuries the ancestral home of the powerful and influential Bassett family. In 1861 John Basset used his vast income from mining and land rents to rebuild the property based on designs supplied by architect William Burn of Piccadilly, but by 1917 high tax, death duties and reduced revenue from mining industry meant that the mansion had become too expensive to maintain and it was sold for use as a hospital.

By 1919 work on the mansion to ready it for hospital use was complete, but within a few days a fire had reduced it to a ruin.

The hospital was re-built by early 1922 and continued to expand and operate until 1983. The 257 acres of woodland surrounding the hospital were purchased by the County Council the year the hospital closed and it was turned into a recreational park for the enjoyment of the community. The hospital was later demolished and the site redeveloped to provide luxury housing.

We visited the park during the sunny weather over Easter 2007, although our time was extremely limited and we only only explored a small area of the park near the car-park on the northern side (off the road from Portreath.)

However, the park is known for its rhododendron bushes and we plan to make another visit to the park in May, when these should be in bloom.



Despite the unusually warm weather during March and April, the trees were still only covered in small buds.

From a distance it was impossible to see these on the branches and the trees still looked winter-stark against the blue vault of the heavens.



But the trees' nakedness made them no less impressive.

The sinuous boughs and the broad fan of the spreading branches still filled the sky and arched majestically over our heads as we walked down the paths.



The main paths through the woods - wide enough to take a single vehicle - are colour-coded to help walkers negotiate the woods without getting lost. The colour-coding is painted into recessed rings around the tops of stakes driven into the earth at junctions.

We started off by following what was supposed to be a one-and-a-half hour circular route, coded pink. To be truthful, though, we didn't have any kind of map, so we never had no real idea of where we were in the park! (Certainly I didn't recognise any landmarks from the previous visit I'd made with my parents a decade earlier!)

But the paths are designed for walkers of all ages, so seats can often be found offering a brief respite from the trail - and a chance to try to work out where you are!



The real reason we came into the park at this particular time was to see the bluebells.
Having not been able to walk in the bluebell wood at Penmount, I was hoping that I could show Xue this typically British woodland scene in Tehidy.

I succeeded. After only about 20 minutes, we saw an area of low trees and scrub, under which bluebells were growing quite thickly.



A small earthen track wound through the flowers, at right angles to the main track.
We followed it and were soon lost in a fairytale world of lush green, speckled with subtle purple-blue.



In some ways, though, I was a little disappointed. Some of the flowers seemed to be "going over" and they were growing in less profusion than I'd expected. At first I thought that maybe we'd missed the best of the season, but a closer inspection showed that there were many unopened buds and that the flowers would continue to bloom for some time yet.



I then thought that maybe I was just expecting too much: my youthful memory of a thick carpet of uniformly blooming bluebells in woods in the Chilterns had perhaps become exaggerated by time and a nostalgically Wordsworthian imagination.

But further mental rumination told me that my childhood recollections couldn't be totally unscientific: I'd seen photographs that had also recorded much more intense swathes of blue than we were seeing here.

It might just be that Tehidy's bluebells are less dense than in woods elsewhere or that we hadn't quite caught the right season...



...or just that I was seeking the wrong thing.

A single bluebell stem was undeniably beautiful, so maybe I should have just been appreciating that, rather than hankering after a forest full of bluebells where individual beauty gets lost in the crowd!



The path gradually narrowed with infrequent use as it wound through the low trees and scrub...



...until it almost petered out altogether - leaving two or three rather overgrown tracks disappearing into the undergrowth.



Most of the small trees growing here were only putting out small buds - same as the larger trees around the main paths.

But where a larger tree had been ripped out of the earth by age and high wind, the extra light from the gap in the canopy had accelerated the growth of some small saplings, so a few leaves were uncurling like the wings of butterflies just emerged from their pupae.



Bluebells are most commonly found in woodland that has been in existence for several centuries, "so bluebell woods are likely to date back to at least 1600." (Wikipedia)
Many of thesed ancient woods were preseved for their beauty in country estates, so bluebell woods are quite common in all parts of Great Britain and Ireland.

Although they become the prevailing species in areas they occupy and hamper the spread of grass, bluebells still have to compete with oher plant species.

Once established, these species can shoulder them aside. Here the bluebells have been supplanted by a fern.



Bluebell woods are such a part of the British rural tradition and consciousness that the common bluebell was made a protected species in 1981 and was protected further in The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1998.

The trade in common bluebell bulbs or seeds is an offence and landowners are prohibited from removing wild bluebells (or bluebell bulbs) on their land for sale.



Having reached the point where our path had petered out, we turned back for a while - then branched off down another small track in a slightly different direction.

When we arrived back at the wider path, I thought that it was the the same one from which we had departed earlier and oriented myself accordingly.

But it soon became apparent that we'd emerged in a different place and now had no real idea where we were relative to the car-park!



Fortunately (after navigating roughly by the sun) we stumbled upon a married couple who walked regularly in the woods, and who set us back in the right direction.

From that point the 20 minute walk back to the car was uneventful (except when I tried to photograph some wild flowers, which were immediately trampled by a rather fat - albeit unsuppressably friendly - cocker spaniel that had decided to investigate the ground in front of me with a bewildering blur of wiggling, wagging, snuffling, slobbering, rolling eyes and broken vegetation) and we were soon on our way home.



Driving back, the prevalence of wild flowers along the roadside verges struck me keenly as the fragrence of spring came wafting through the open windows.

As a child, I and my friends had picked small wild flowers from grassy banks and made floral garlands from the blooms we found in springtime fields, as country children had for generations before. But the real country festivals had already gone. Maypole dancing, floral dancing and other Mayday celebrations had somehow disappeared into the thick smoke of squat black traction engines, winching ploughs across the shrinking meadows.

Today, spring just slips over the horizon. It's arrival is no longer heralded by welcoming crowds.
I had plenty of time to reflect: the BMW 505 estate in front of me seemed to have it's speedometer locked to 40 mph, and braked at every small curve and incline on the narrow Cornish roads. Yes, it was Easter and the holiday traffic was starting. It was a Cornish spring...


Labels:
Bluebell,
Cornwall,
Flower,
Penmount,
Primrose,
Tehidy,
Trees,
Walk,
Woodland,
Xue