Polzeath Walks

14/03/2025

Book your free seat at the Wadebridge Cinema on April 3rd to see "We Are All Artists" featuring the Polzeath Beach Art of Bill Bartlett.
With a Q&A after the film you'll get the chance to ask both artists about Polzeath and perhaps why so many "creatives" are drawn to this part of Cornwall.
For more information about the film and a link to book at Wadebridge Cinema go to my website at https://www.northcornwallcoastpathwalks.co.uk/beach-art/we-are-all-artists

12/03/2025

Surprisingly it was one of those almost-too-good-to-be-true mornings on the beach today.
I know, because I was waiting for someone/anyone to turn up for my Wellness Wednesday Beach Art session (free to locals) and knew that some had been put off by the early morning dark clouds, cold and rain.
A heavy downpour around 10 didn't last long and finally I was joined by a couple from Oregon, with Camelford connections, and two locals from Bodmin for a wonderful session.
As you can see the sands were perfect although a little wet to start with.
If you would like to join the Beach Art festival I am organising you will find it as an event on facebook or check this page link https://www.northcornwallcoastpathwalks.co.uk/beach-art/beach-art-festival-2025

11/03/2025

If you missed this you may be interested in this report on the excavation at King Arthur’s Hall in 2022.

https://youtu.be/_TP23scwOIc

It certainly made me think about what was going on in Polzeath around 3000 BC and to look again at the early section of my Polzeath Timeline featured in edited form in the Spring issue of Link Magazine.

8000 years ago: sand bars, including the 'Doom Bar', formed around the Camel estuary when sea-level rise speeded up and deposited sands in a short space of time
6000 years ago: Daymer Bay forest, with many long lived trees like oak and yew, grew but was submerged by rising sea levels and buried in sand around 4000 years ago (not discovered/revealed until about 1800)
2500 BC: Bronze Age people construct Tumuli around Polzeath, including on Miniver and Tinners Hills overlooking Polzeath, until about 800 BC
2000 BC: The technology of smelting copper and tin to form a durable alloy is first seen around the copper deposits of Cyprus. Because the Mediterranean region had few tin deposits a tin trade started in Cornwall, initially focusing on river gravels containing ore. Phoenicians, a maritime trading culture that flourished from approximately 1550 to 300 BC, very likely came to Harbour Cove and Stepper Point because Cassiterite, a tin ore, was to be found around here
1600 BC: The Nebra sky disc, a Bronze Age map of the Cosmos, although found in Germany in 1999, was crafted using Cornish tin, copper and gold.
352 BC: first written mention of the Cornish Tin Industry
100 BC: The Cliff Castle at The Rumps probably built. A significant example of an Iron Age settlement reflecting its strategic importance at a time of social change when local communities were adapting to a new era of iron tools and weapons
55 BC: Romans arrive in Cornwall (until 410 AD). They quarry tin at Mulberry Down (13 miles south of Polzeath)
1086: The Domesday Book compiled: Rosminver Manor (renamed St Minver), Trewornan Manor to east by River Amble, Pentire Manor to north, Penmayne Manor (an ancient sub-manor) to south of Polzeath. The total population of the whole of Cornwall about 26,000 (about that of St Austell today)
1184: Hundred of Trigg probably given “shire” suffix. Our Trigg area is one of ten administrative hundreds in Cornwall and extends to Bodmin Moor
1201: Cornish Stannary Charter granted by King John established 4 areas for smelted tin to be taxed: Helston, Truro, Lostwithiel, Liskeard
1260: St Endellion church built. St Minver & St Enodoc likely have earlier sites
1269: Bishop of Exeter, Walter Branscombe, sets the St Minver boundaries
1337: ​​Duchy of Cornwall gives title to run the Black Tor Ferry between Padstow and Rock
1350: Half the population of Bodmin killed by Black Death

In this webinar you can discover the methodology behind the amazing excavation that took place at King Arthur's Hall in September of 2022. This webinar also ...

09/03/2025

1940 1946
Presented by East Ham County Borough Council
To commemorate the kindness shown to the children of Aldersbrook Homes by the residents of Polzeath during the war years 1940 46

06/03/2025

"The Portraits" are playing alongside an impressive lineup at St Merryn Church in "The Odes of March" on Sat 15th March 2025.

I don't usually do adverts but The Portraits are musical New Polzeath neighbours, talented friends, and my mother was their biggest fan and had all their albums!

If you have never heard them sing then go to the event or listen to them online here https://soundcloud.com/theportraitsmusic

By all accounts it looks like an interesting evening with Fern Britton as the compere.

There are tickets left which you can order online.

03/03/2025

Incredibly there is not much to see today of the fishing boat that sunk yesterday afternoon. I suspect airbags were placed inside last night, which were then inflated to patch the hole, and then on last night's low tide it got towed away.
However, I am almost certainly wrong! Anyone know?
If I am wrong then the sea has done a great job in breaking the boat apart and hiding it in less than 24 hours.
Photos of Sandinway Beach, which is not often seen unless on a very low spring tide, and the Rumps from some different viewpoints so you can see the amazing Iron Age earth ramparts.
Note Seven Souls rock and near it the place where the Maria Asumpta sunk in 1995. She sunk as qu**ky it seems as did this fishing boat but sadly with the loss of 3 lives.
Any boat close to a lee shore with engine failure is at risk of being pushed onto the rocks and the Maria Asumpta was "effectively doomed" when its engines stopped so close to the Rumps and, sad to say, this is most likely what happened to this fishing boat.

03/03/2025

The Spring issue of The Link features part of my award challenged Polzeath Timeline. There is just too much information to fit on two pages so it has been heavily edited and 1930’s onwards will feature in the summer edition.

01/03/2025

Welcome to March! I put my drone up early this morning after a cold night. You can expect a high of ten degrees according to the forecast but it already feels that Spring is on the way with daffodils out in the gardens and welcome sunshine. Have a good day.

28/02/2025

I’m guessing this photo of the Trenant Valley was taken from the garden of Polzeath Lodge Hotel around 1920.
The first of the railway carriages is just visible behind the bell tent (1913) and West Ray House alone on Dunders Hill was built in 1908.
Taking the buildings in turn starting on the left is the cottage named The Nook (and the one by it which became known as Treasure House). The Nook was owned by Mr and Mrs Botterall and they had bee hives in the gardens and sold honey.
Below the Nook and Treasure House, is Fovant Holiday Retreat owned by Peter Knight of Wadebrdige and is in the old sand dunes. Next to it on the right is a long building which was divided up into 4 small letting properties. Below the bell tent, going to the right again, is Bob Couch's residence (out of sight) which became the chip shop and is now just being demolished for new buildings (2025).
This side of the old chip shop you can see the end wall of Ann's Cottage which was occupied by Jonathan Buse and he kept a donkey. Now its been demolished and there are very big holiday apartments overlooking the carpark on the site.
Across the road, again going right, is Couch's hut which used to serve cream teas. It probaby was once an engine house for the mines here around the 1850's and would have had flat rods going across to Taylor's Shaft under Tinners Hill and across in the other direction to Wheal Caroline which is now in Valley Caravan Park.
The big building on the right had steps on the outside leading upstairs to Male's Tearooms. At the bottom you can see a door that led to the engine room where ice cream was made. In front you is a gypsy caravan which was a holiday retreat for the Oliver family from St Teath.
Behind the building you can just make out a gypsy caravan and summer huts for lettings owned by Bob Couch.
There was no road across Polzeath at that time and you can make out the old footbridge and the old ford and also the space used as a park for the charabancs and pony traps in front of Male's Tearooms.
Thanks to Dennis Hardman for letting me have a copy of his annotated 1920's printout.

28/02/2025

Sunshine again today. A Brazilian walker I met today at Lundy said that she had come down by train from London, and booked into the St Moritz for the next few days, because she'd heard that it was going to stay fine for a while. Where better to be?

26/02/2025

I didn't quite realise that Trevone was such a sister village to Polzeath. Both developed around their beach in much the same way and both even have an Atlantic Terrace that look similar.
Today, new buildings and rebuilding on the sites of old ones, seems to be the trend in both places. But with just one road in, like New Polzeath, I imagine that Trevone is crowded at the height of summer.
Although Trevone is just out of line of sight from our side of the estuary it's only the other side of the old airfield at Crugmeer.
Like Polzeath, Trevone has great surf and also an interesting literary heritage.
At the time that Laurence Binyon was writing his poem on the cliffs around Pentire, Dorothy Richardson was having the first of her 13 volume Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs, published.
She started this volume of Pilgrimage on her first visit to Cornwall hosted by J D Beresford in 1912 who went on to lend the impoverished writer his holiday home. The same one he lent to DH Lawrence who finished off "Women in Love" in his house in Porthcothan in 1916.
Anyhow, Richardson never really made it financially in her lifetime. Despite her recognition now as an important writer she never sold many copies of her books and was forced to seek out of season lodgings in Trevone to see out the winters somewhere cheap with her eccentric painter husband Alan Odle, who made even less money than she did.
From 1917 until 1939, Dorothy and Alan spent their winters in a number of basic houses and lodgings in the Trevone area to save money. Sometimes in places like Rose Cottage where there were also tea rooms and they got to know their landladies. There is a good video from which I have taken some shots of an interview you might like to watch on Youtube of Bridget Woods, the daughter of Norah Hickey, who was Dorothy Richardson's landlady at Rose Cottage, Trevone and Cosy Corner, Harlyn Bay. She also owned and ran the Cot Tea Rooms. Before these properties passed to Norah, Bridget's great-aunts Beluah and Nellie Ponder owned all three. Richardson it seems was great friends with all three Trevone women and they still have a recipe she wrote out in her beautiful writing for them for American Slaw and Bacon omelette for two!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTtdJMAFuc
From 1940 until 1945 Alan and Dorothy finally moved full time to Zansizzy, a bungalow in Trevone.
Over the years locals got to know the couple well and from all accounts they seemed decidedly eccentric, often sitting up all night talking, smoking and drinking, and not going to bed until dawn. There's an amusing account of Alan, with his long nails and very long hair, going off for a walk in a high wind and losing his hat to the Atlantic.
Despite spending so much time here, Dorothy never really published much about our part of North Cornwall, although her many letters, many available online at https://dorothyrichardsonexhibition.org do tell us a bit about life here.
In one letter of late May/ early June 1927 she writes that:
"More and more of the sophisticated intelligencia come down here. The Golders Green variety. Literate. At the moment the whole neighbourhood has its nose in the air. The Prince is coming to stay three days at the Metropole, in Padstow, next week. "

17/02/2025

The BAFTA awards on TV last night featured Blitz, a film that reminded me of the children evacuated from London to Polzeath in the war.
A clip from the film showed a little boy jumping off a train leaving London. Although nominated three times the film didn't actually pick up awards but it did make me look again at a post that Julie Arnold posted about her father, Joe Miechielsens, who was evacuated from Aldersbrook, with 300 other children, to the Polzeath area in the war.
Watching a recent BBC news story of him learning to write in his care home made me think that his life story could easily make an inspirational film itself!
Joe was born in 1934 and was put in the Aldersbrook Children Home in London after his mother took her own life. He was just three weeks old and suffered from a genetic craniofacial syndrome which affects the shape of the head.
His father was a Belgian WWI refugee 27 years older than his mother and Joe, like many others, traveled to Polzeath by train, a journey that he recalled took all day. His train had likely come from Norfolk where the children's home had originally been evacuated to and he would have finally arrived in Wadebridge. Joe recalled staying in a large house in Polzeath that had connections to the church, and that he was happy there. This was likely Tristram House on Atlantic Terrace in New Polzeath. Since the war the old house has been demolished and rebuilt as what I always call the blue house but records and photos of his days have been lost.
Due to a stammer and his "unusual head shape", Joe was classified as educationally subnormal and did not attend school in Polzeath like the other children. They were schooled in two classrooms up near the St Moritz Hotel. Instead, he worked on a local farm from the age of 7 which was likely Pentire Farm.
After the war, Joe was placed in South Ockendon Institution for Mental Defectives, which he disliked and about a year later, he was sent to a boarding home for the educationally subnormal in Forest Gate, East London, where he stayed until he was discharged at 16.
Joe loved his time in Polzeath and spoke about it often. Now 90, Joe has dementia but despite that, and the labels that he has had to live with through his life, he finally learnt to read and write in his carehome. He and Julie were recently featured in a very moving BBC news story which you can see on this link.
Perhaps worth a BAFTA nomination itself! https://www.facebook.com/100025193651197/videos/1040506461060723/

16/02/2025

Getting to Cornwall is an experience in itself and usually better forgotten about once you’re here!
I wrote a post a few years ago about how in 1909 Virginia Woolf- then Virginia Stephen and just shy of 27 - made a snap decision to come to Cornwall on Christmas Eve and caught the 1 pm train from Paddington to arrive at her Lelant Hotel at 10.30 pm. The next day she wrote:
“ I am so drugged with fresh air I can’t write, and now my ink fails. As for the beauty of this place, it surpasses every other season. I have the hotel to myself- and get a very nice sitting room for nothing. It is very comfortable and humble, and infinitely better than the Lizard or St Ives”
One of the 20th century's literary giants one wonders what she might have written had she tried to get to Polzeath by public transport instead!
Feel free to comment!

12/02/2025

For those who believe in treasure and fairies then Polzeath used to have you covered. I think it still does but this 1950’s Skillywidden advert from Treasure House shows that they perhaps believed a bit more than us.
If you’re wondering what a Skillywidden is then I understand that translated from the Cornish it literally means a small person with white wings.
These fairy-like beings, often described as no bigger than a kitten, are often associated with hidden treasures and it would be a lucky holiday indeed to come across one. Perhaps you have?

In The Piskey-Purse, Legends and tales of North Cornwall (1905) by Enys Tregarthen, she writes in the introduction that:
The tales given in this small volume, with one exception, are from North Cornwall, where I have always lived.
The scene of ‘The Piskey-Purse’ is from Polzeath Bay (in maps called Hayle Bay, which is not its local name), in St. Minver parish. This charming spot was once much frequented by the Piskeys and other fairy folk, and many a quaint story used to be told about them by the old people of that place, which some of us still remember. The spot most favoured by the Piskeys for dancing was Pentire Glaze cliffs, where, alas! half a dozen lodging-houses now stand. But the marks of fairy feet are not, they say, all obliterated, and the rings where Piskeys danced may yet be seen on the great headland of Pentire, and tiny paths called ‘Piskey Walks’ are still there on the edge of some of the cliffs.

Of course many of us lament 120 years on that alas! those half dozen lodging houses have somewhat multiplied and grown. Indeed the Treasure House itself has transformed into a large boutique guest house surrounded by a wall high enough to keep most piskies out. There’s certainly no friendly puzzle shop or Grannie’s Grotto anymore and once you’ve crossed the ford your journey into the Trenant valley is more likely to be monitored by cctv rather than fairy folk.

Carl Jung understood the importance of the mystical elements of life and it’s likely that in the summer of 1923 he walked up the Pentireglaze valley and saw the huge fairy rings that we still see today. In the old orchard he might have come across fairy folk too and perhaps that’s why it was reported that “in Cornwall the fire burned in him”.

While researching this post I came across Richard Curtis talking about the music he used in his wonderfully Cornish movie “About Time”. One key song “Gold in Them Hills” optimistically reminds us not to lose heart. Despite the changes we see on the hills around Polzeath the treasure is certainly still here. Maybe sometimes buried or hidden but we’re privileged enough to be surrounded by it still.

Have a lucky holiday!

11/02/2025

Polzeath has many connections to pilots, which isn’t surprising because there can be few places on earth that have been surrounded by as many airfields!
A hundred years ago though, there weren’t actually any operational airfields locally, with Crugmeer (Padstow airfield) having closed at the end of WW1.
It wasn’t until WW2 that the building boom in airfields in the Polzeath area began. This story predates WW2 and sadly, like many others in the history of aircraft technology, doesn’t have the happiest of endings.
If we go back to the Pentireglaze Estate map of 1924 you can see the name “Waghorn” on a Gulland Road plot. This short dead end road starts opposite the New Polzeath car park and the Waghorn family have owned most, if not all, of the houses on the left side of Gulland Road over the years but today just own beautiful Rabbit Hill at the end.
In 1924 Henry Richard Danvers "Dick" Waghorn was 19 and a cadet at the Royal Air Force College Cranwell where he graduated in August of that year, and was awarded the Sword of Honour as the best all-around cadet. His father was a civil engineer but I believe died when he and his younger brother David were only 4 or 5. Perhaps that’s why the 1924 map is marked just Mrs Waghorn.
In 1929 Dick was the fastest man on earth having broken the world speed record in front of an estimated 1.5 million spectators. If you find that hard to believe there’s a Pathe news reel that shows just how many people lined the Solent to watch him , including his new wife Dolly and their Alsatian dog.
After the Schneider Trophy win and record breaking, Waghorn continued with experimental and high-speed flying but tragically died in 1931 at the age of 26 when the Hawker Horsley biplane he was testing crashed. He and his passenger both parachuted but Waghorn was severely injured in landing and died two days later.
David Waghorn, his younger brother, was also an RAF pilot and in 1931 became a member of the High Speed Flight. He reached the rank of Air Commodore by the end of World War II, but was killed in 1945, on active service flying a Spitfire.
Both Waghorn brothers played important parts in pushing the boundaries of aviation which directly influenced and inspired the designs and technologies used by R.J. Mitchell in the development of the Supermarine Spitfire.
Spitfires were stationed in Cornwall at RAF Perranporth in 1941 until the airfield was decommissioned in April 1946.

07/02/2025

I found this amazing “Official Guide to Polzeath, Rock and District” in Wadebridge library last week. Although it’s not dated I’d guess it was published about 1951. The current King George VI is referenced as visiting St Enodoc golf club for tea and that dates it pre 1952 when he died.
And I say “amazing” because it really sells a belief, that I guess we all know, but sometimes forget, about Polzeath being somewhere quite extraordinarily special.
This belief, highlighted by post war rationing and people’s inability to afford overseas holidays, appears genuine. How could anyone not be impressed by hot and cold water in many of the guest houses adverts, lashings of cream teas and all that fresh food?
Then there was a top trump in Surfing, a new wonder sport, on the safest beach in Cornwall, and probably the sunniest. Plus our “jewel” of a coastline which is “without any doubt” “the finest coastline in Europe”, pretty well undiscovered and only 6 miles from the railhead at Wadebridge.
What’s there not to like?
I heard the travel journalist Simon Calder on the radio the other day talking about the fall in tourist numbers to Cornwall and what he felt could be done to reverse this trend. He was actually a keynote speaker at the 2025 “Visit Cornwall Tourism Summit” in Truro. His suggestions felt pretty lame compared with the belief that sparks out of this old guide book but one thing he said that I did agree with, was that he felt places in Cornwall needed to get better at telling and selling their own unique stories.
As I’m continuing to discover Polzeath has stories by the bucketloads!
My thanks to all of you who contribute and share your own.