Another sunny day and we decided to go for a walk! Having made some sandwiches, the first challenge was to extract the car from the parking place in front of The Net Loft which required accurate reversing into a turning bay before negotiating a lane barely wider than the car. The sat nav then directed us out of Mevagissey on a different road to the one we arrived on and it seemed to take us for miles down a network of lanes before spitting us out on the B road and we resolved to be rather more wary of its directions in future. We drove back round the coast, through St Austell towards Fowey and parked in a National Trust car park at Coombe Farm so we could walk to Gribbin Head. The path took us down to a field and we had our first view of our destination.
We then took a detour towards Fowey where we could see into the harbour …
… and then to St Catherine’s Point which has had some sort of strategic fort since the Iron Age. Henry VIII built an artillery tower there and more recently, it was utilised in WWII as a firing point for the minefield set across the entrance to the harbour.
Our walk continued up to Allday’s Field, gifted to the people of Fowey in the 1950’s, and containing a number of benches to sit and admire the view. We took advantage of one for our picnic …
… before setting out in earnest for the red and white striped Daymark tower at Gribbin Head. Deceivingly, the coastal path dipped down to concealed coves twice on the way, first at Coombe Haven …
… and then at Polridmouth …
… which also had an ornamental lake and cute cottage …
… and even a small freezer with ice creams for sale, which alas was empty when we arrived!
Finally we reached the top …
… and learnt it has been a lookout since the Iron Age, the site of a beacon for the Spanish Armada, and a decoy in WWII so draw the enemy away from Fowey during D-Day. The daymark stands is 84ft high and was built in 1832 as a navigation aid to enable sailers to pinpoint Fowey harbour. William Rashleigh of Menabilly donated the land in the hope the edifice ‘would be an ornament to his grounds’ so Trinity House commissioned a ‘ handsome Greco Gothic Square Tower’ which is repainted every 7 years or so.
The other claim to fame of this spot is that Daphne du Maurier lived a short distance away at Menabilly for many years as a tenant of the Rashleighs and later at the dower house on the estate called Kilmarth where she died. She used the area as a setting for many of her books – the boathouse and shipwreck in Rebecca take place in Polridmouth, Menabilly was the inspiration for Manderley, and also features in My Cousin Rachel and The King’s General and the farmland round The Gribbin is the ovation for the avian attacks in The Birds. When she moved into Kilmarth, she found bottles containing animal embryos in the basement which led to the drug induced time travel storyline in The House on the Strand, one of her later books which I remember reading years ago.
It was time to retrace our steps to Polridmouth …
… and then take the path back through farmland to the car park. Despite being billed as a 4 mile walk, we clocked up 5.4 miles, and we felt we had done quite enough for the day so returned to The Net Loft, just venturing out later to collect our supper from the Fishermen’s Chippy!
Off Travelling Together 