20th April 2021 Day four at Sennen Cove

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20^th April 2021:   Day Four at Sennen

We start the morning with a walk out over the cliff tops to blow away the cobwebs. A tractor ploughs one of the cliff top fields, churning up clods of dry brown soil. Dust blows inland. It hasn’t rained down here now for almost three weeks. The ground is baked hard and parched. Seagulls wait expectantly, heads darting downwards to find unfortunate worms and grubs. Across grassy fields and over granite stiles, we amble along in light breezes and hazy sunshine. The gorse is in full bloom and smells wonderful.

We come back around the rear of the airport, pausing to watch a plane land. The runway is short but the Twin Otter plane lands easily within a 200m length.

After the 3-mile stroll, we break for Lattes and move the motorhome over to the motorhome service point to empty the water tank and refill the freshwater tank. I haven’t quite got ‘motorhome management’ buttoned down yet. Then we head off on the bikes down the lanes to Porthgwarra because I want to see whether it would make a safe haven for my small cruising dinghy, should I decide to venture this far south down the coast from Plymouth. The answer is no. There are two open fishing boats pulled up onto the steep slipway but there is little beach and in anything other than westerlies, the cove would be a rough anchorage.

The ride down and back is pleasant. Hedges lined with blue bells and newly emerging cow parsley. Working farmyards with plenty of machinery and interesting things to see are bisected by the meandering lane. New fence poles and cable drums of barbed wire, pallets, crates for potatoes; drums of fertiliser and insecticides; bales of hay and silage. Tractors clean dairy yards of slurry after milking has been done. Typical rural tranquillity which hides the hardships of farming today. Many of the farms we pass have diversified; old barns turned into holiday cottages, some allowing camping on fields, a few with static caravans. 

Porthgwarra is well worth the ride down the hill. The café serves up some tasty fayre. We settle for a salad wrap and a cheese, ham and chutney sandwich with a coke -  £12.00. Everything seems expensive and whilst we understand that many places lost revenue during last year and only just survived, the prices still seem a steep increase on 2019.

Could we get our motorhome down there? Just! But with few passing places, it would be an ‘interesting’ adventure and the turn into the car park is a very tight right-angled bend. It is probably best to be under 7m for this lane.

 Land’s End is relatively free of tourists and almost pleasant to call in at. People are making the most of walking the cliff tops between here and Sennen Cove.  We cycle the route 3 national cycle trail out of Land’s End, pretending we are on the start of a mammoth trip to John O Groat’s. By Sennen Cove, we’ve abandoned that idea!

Back at Bryony, it’s time to do some cleaning. I’m on bathroom, flush tank and toilet cassette duty. I drain off some of the waste water tank into the collapsible bucket and after my fourth trip to the waste water point, the investment in another bucket would be a good idea.