Beach Gems on the Gentle South Coast
"What's that beach you told me about called again?" I knew I'd asked about ten times over recent months and forgotten yet again. "Pendower. You've really never been?"
Katie was always inordinately patient when I was having my senior moments and had frequently come to work telling stories of happy weekends exploring the beaches of the Roseland Peninsula, close to where she grew up in Truro. More than once she'd shared with me the fact that Pendower Beach was her favourite childhood touchstone; the one that brought back all of the cherished memories of those endless summers that only seemed to happen when we were young and free of the cares that adulthood threw at us later on. I'd grown up just a few miles further away in Falmouth, across the water from the Roseland. We had no less than four of our own beaches within easy walking distance of home, and if we ever went further afield it was almost always to go surfing along the north coast at Gwithian or Perranporth. For me the Roseland was somewhere that, while undoubtedly lovely, was quite frankly a bit of a faff to get to. From Falmouth you really needed to drive around the coast in a bit of an inverted U shaped movement, via Truro and all of its traffic lights. Why go to all the bother when you could be on the beautiful and unspoilt Maenporth Beach within ten minutes of climbing into the car?
But this time I wrote it down so I wouldn't need to trouble my friend anymore on the subject, and one day last Easter Ali and I set the compass to the east for a change and headed towards the Roseland at last. She'd been reading about a certain food outlet with a big following on another nearby beach and wanted to see what all the fuss was about - all I can remember is standing in a very long queue before parting with more money than seemed absolutely necessary and still feeling hungry afterwards. Queuing a second time for the ice creams seemed like too much effort so we walked instead, and found a deserted stretch of shoreline where we languished in the sun for a couple of hours before marching rather more urgently back to the car park as our ticket was soon to expire. Finally that day we stopped here at Pendower to collect those final rays, immediately feeling that wonderful sense of calm that comes from a quiet south coast beach on a gentle warm April afternoon. I tried to photograph a man sitting in his deckchair close to the shoreline, but the light wasn't helping me and so it never made the headlines. "We'll come back here when we've finished work" we agreed.
And that was it until yesterday. We're keeping the campervan ticking over before bigger adventures come later this year by heading out in her at least once a week. Pulling up and cooking your own veggie sausage and egg sandwiches and brewing your own coffee is still a very liberating experience to us. You can't help feeling nauseatingly smug as people who arrived here in cars wander past and peer into your cosy little space. Of course some of them are frowning at you and probably wondering whether you're planning on spending the night here and using the clifftop as an open air latrine, while others are no doubt inwardly sighing at the amount of space you've taken up in the small and narrow parking area, but we pretend we haven't noticed them and smile quietly as we remember there's a sachet of brown sauce in the cutlery drawer that we lifted when we last had brunch at the local Morrisons. They like to give you four when you only really need two.
Finally we descended to the beach where the tide was on its way in. We'd come in search of precious gems, which are freely available on so many of these south coast beaches if you take the time to look towards the ground around your feet. Small fragments of ocean seasoned sea glass, worn smooth from the ebb and flow of a thousand tides lie waiting to be found. Just losing yourself for a couple of hours of idle searching is a quiet delight that costs nothing and where success or failure really doesn't matter that much. In the bright sunlight you'll catch regular glints of green, less often brown, and if you're concentrating you might make out a piece of clear glass. We'd overlooked the practical step of bringing containers to collect them in, and so were reduced to using a pair of handy and thankfully empty bags normally reserved for clearing up after the dogs. Over that couple of hours, Ali clearly won on the collecting front, not only having found the largest exhibit, but more impressively a tiny scrap of rare blue glass. I'd diversified into interesting pebbles and small but perfectly formed seashells. Between us we'd added more than fifty small pieces of glass to an ongoing collection (one which was commenced eight years ago in Fuengirola of all places), the largest a handful of centimetres across, the smaller ones no bigger than the tiniest of slivers. One day we might work out what to do with them all. Some sort of decoration to go in the van and remind us of happy diversions in memorable places perhaps.
As the light began to intensify I stopped my search and set up the tripod. It's not a location that immediately grabs me as one riddled with photography opportunities, but the stream that dissects the beach bends into a very appealing S-curve just before it drains into the sea and that was enough to make it worth trying, especially when the soft winter sunset was illuminating the water in front of me. Unlike their north coast cousins which are routinely swept into states of pristine cleanliness by huge and vigorous tidal ranges, many of Cornwall's south facing beaches are cluttered with extensive drifts of seaweed, meaning that shooting in brighter light would have brought a very untidy scene, so I deliberately left the shadows in near darkness and concentrated on that curve of light. Although I can't stop feeling excited that Brenda, our campervan is the larger one of the collection of vehicle silhouettes in the top right hand corner. I never have a problem forgetting where I left her when we're leaving a supermarket.
Eventually the colours began to recede, leaving only a darkening sky. Ali had already returned to the van, but as usual I was having difficulty in tearing myself away from this reverie, and returned to staring at the space around my boots once more. And then I learned something important - not something earth shattering like the joy of simple pleasures or the happiness of witnessing a winter sunset - what I'd discovered was that in the fading light I could only find the clear variety of sea glass. Suddenly they appeared so obviously in front of me that they were almost bouncing off the beach and straight into the dog poo bag. Funny what you find out when you're not expecting it really.
Beach Gems on the Gentle South Coast
"What's that beach you told me about called again?" I knew I'd asked about ten times over recent months and forgotten yet again. "Pendower. You've really never been?"
Katie was always inordinately patient when I was having my senior moments and had frequently come to work telling stories of happy weekends exploring the beaches of the Roseland Peninsula, close to where she grew up in Truro. More than once she'd shared with me the fact that Pendower Beach was her favourite childhood touchstone; the one that brought back all of the cherished memories of those endless summers that only seemed to happen when we were young and free of the cares that adulthood threw at us later on. I'd grown up just a few miles further away in Falmouth, across the water from the Roseland. We had no less than four of our own beaches within easy walking distance of home, and if we ever went further afield it was almost always to go surfing along the north coast at Gwithian or Perranporth. For me the Roseland was somewhere that, while undoubtedly lovely, was quite frankly a bit of a faff to get to. From Falmouth you really needed to drive around the coast in a bit of an inverted U shaped movement, via Truro and all of its traffic lights. Why go to all the bother when you could be on the beautiful and unspoilt Maenporth Beach within ten minutes of climbing into the car?
But this time I wrote it down so I wouldn't need to trouble my friend anymore on the subject, and one day last Easter Ali and I set the compass to the east for a change and headed towards the Roseland at last. She'd been reading about a certain food outlet with a big following on another nearby beach and wanted to see what all the fuss was about - all I can remember is standing in a very long queue before parting with more money than seemed absolutely necessary and still feeling hungry afterwards. Queuing a second time for the ice creams seemed like too much effort so we walked instead, and found a deserted stretch of shoreline where we languished in the sun for a couple of hours before marching rather more urgently back to the car park as our ticket was soon to expire. Finally that day we stopped here at Pendower to collect those final rays, immediately feeling that wonderful sense of calm that comes from a quiet south coast beach on a gentle warm April afternoon. I tried to photograph a man sitting in his deckchair close to the shoreline, but the light wasn't helping me and so it never made the headlines. "We'll come back here when we've finished work" we agreed.
And that was it until yesterday. We're keeping the campervan ticking over before bigger adventures come later this year by heading out in her at least once a week. Pulling up and cooking your own veggie sausage and egg sandwiches and brewing your own coffee is still a very liberating experience to us. You can't help feeling nauseatingly smug as people who arrived here in cars wander past and peer into your cosy little space. Of course some of them are frowning at you and probably wondering whether you're planning on spending the night here and using the clifftop as an open air latrine, while others are no doubt inwardly sighing at the amount of space you've taken up in the small and narrow parking area, but we pretend we haven't noticed them and smile quietly as we remember there's a sachet of brown sauce in the cutlery drawer that we lifted when we last had brunch at the local Morrisons. They like to give you four when you only really need two.
Finally we descended to the beach where the tide was on its way in. We'd come in search of precious gems, which are freely available on so many of these south coast beaches if you take the time to look towards the ground around your feet. Small fragments of ocean seasoned sea glass, worn smooth from the ebb and flow of a thousand tides lie waiting to be found. Just losing yourself for a couple of hours of idle searching is a quiet delight that costs nothing and where success or failure really doesn't matter that much. In the bright sunlight you'll catch regular glints of green, less often brown, and if you're concentrating you might make out a piece of clear glass. We'd overlooked the practical step of bringing containers to collect them in, and so were reduced to using a pair of handy and thankfully empty bags normally reserved for clearing up after the dogs. Over that couple of hours, Ali clearly won on the collecting front, not only having found the largest exhibit, but more impressively a tiny scrap of rare blue glass. I'd diversified into interesting pebbles and small but perfectly formed seashells. Between us we'd added more than fifty small pieces of glass to an ongoing collection (one which was commenced eight years ago in Fuengirola of all places), the largest a handful of centimetres across, the smaller ones no bigger than the tiniest of slivers. One day we might work out what to do with them all. Some sort of decoration to go in the van and remind us of happy diversions in memorable places perhaps.
As the light began to intensify I stopped my search and set up the tripod. It's not a location that immediately grabs me as one riddled with photography opportunities, but the stream that dissects the beach bends into a very appealing S-curve just before it drains into the sea and that was enough to make it worth trying, especially when the soft winter sunset was illuminating the water in front of me. Unlike their north coast cousins which are routinely swept into states of pristine cleanliness by huge and vigorous tidal ranges, many of Cornwall's south facing beaches are cluttered with extensive drifts of seaweed, meaning that shooting in brighter light would have brought a very untidy scene, so I deliberately left the shadows in near darkness and concentrated on that curve of light. Although I can't stop feeling excited that Brenda, our campervan is the larger one of the collection of vehicle silhouettes in the top right hand corner. I never have a problem forgetting where I left her when we're leaving a supermarket.
Eventually the colours began to recede, leaving only a darkening sky. Ali had already returned to the van, but as usual I was having difficulty in tearing myself away from this reverie, and returned to staring at the space around my boots once more. And then I learned something important - not something earth shattering like the joy of simple pleasures or the happiness of witnessing a winter sunset - what I'd discovered was that in the fading light I could only find the clear variety of sea glass. Suddenly they appeared so obviously in front of me that they were almost bouncing off the beach and straight into the dog poo bag. Funny what you find out when you're not expecting it really.