Finders

Another great day. We weren’t expecting particularly good weather and it certainly felt cooler and looked cloudy when we set off, but in the end we were very lucky to get a lot of bright sunshine most of the day.
We started off by driving down to Dollar and Church Coves at Gunwalloe and enjoyed a wander along the beach scouring the sand and the shoreline for interesting pebbles (once again no shells here). We were surprised to see a slow worm, which at first we thought was dead but then it flicked its tongue and started to move towards the sea. We decided to rescue it and coaxed it into K’s shoe then walked up the beach to some reeds and grass near a stream coming down onto the beach and it quickly crawled away and was lost to view. Hopefully it will stay safe away from predators there. After that excitement we returned to looking for stones and then found a set of car and house keys! Oh my someone must be panicking….we started asking all the people on the beach but they didn’t belong to anyone, so started walking back to the car park to look for the car and leave the keys with the car park attendant. We continued to ask people and were very pleased when a man claimed them…he’d been looking at the other end of the beach Ian’s was clearly very worried! Dollar Cove is so named as you used to be able to find silver dollars here from the many shipwrecks...I guess those keys were modern day treasure finds!
Feeling like superheroes after those two finds we popped into  the 15th century St Winwaloe’s, or the Church of the Storms as it’s also called - a beautiful little place with a lovely carved wooden ceiling, and plain whitewashed walls. It was clearly well looked after and interestingly had a separate bell tower next to it from an earlier church. There was a stone in the churchyard remembering the efforts of two women both called Hilda who’d run a festival on the beach every year from 1920-1938…not sure why but it gave us some amusement to imagine all the planning meetings they’d have had and what things they did at the festival. Lovely to have the stone to commemorate them like that!
Coffee in hand, and after watching the birds around the car park (with some very tame robins!) we drove to Porthleven and had a lovely wander around the market stalls and little shops and a delicious lunch right on the harbour at a place called the Mussel Shoal. The mussels were absolutely heavenly (a sort of Thai inspired rich creamy sauce and a chunk of soft bread full of seeds and whole meal goodness) and our prawn (and crab?) loaded fries were naughtily satisfying too. We were tempted by earrings, paintings, a cuckoo clock, Cornish sea salt and some porcelain spoons, but didn’t buy them all! We did pick up some little jugs from a box saying ‘help yourself’ outside a cafe that was being refurbished though that will be great for entertaining…very satisfying!
We also enjoyed the town trail taking us past some of the historically significant buildings (lime kiln, pilchard house, Bickford-Smith literary institute - quite a surprising one that!) and the history of the harbour’s construction. It’s obviously not just a new thing to run over costs and schedules in major building projects!
We drove from there to St Michael’s Mount and although it was low tide we didn’t make the crossing over to the mount itself as we were tired (we’ve been walking a lot!) and preferred to look at it from a cafe on the seafront with a pot of tea, reading up about its history and the St Aubyn family who lived there.
We visited some art galleries in the town then headed home and tried out the village’s curry club…serving a lovely selection of fresh curries out of a tiny caravan twice a week! We took them home and afterwards did some planning for the rest of the week…..