Cornwall, beautiful beautiful Cornwall :)
It's a horribly long journey but oh it was worth it! I'm back from a week in Cornwall, staying in a flat in a house right on the edge of the beach that was near where I lived as a child. It was gorgeous - this is the view from our living room room there :) and the marram grass you can see is the end of the garden and there's a path straight down to the beach from there.
To the left is a forest of tamarisk bushes and to the right it was marram grass. The rabbits who live there came out in the mornings and evenings and kept the lawn short! Evening primroses grew amongst the marram grass and tiny tiny mauve flowers were everywhere in the short turf.
The weather was pretty kind to us - the few times it rained were when it really didn't matter and the clouds made the skies beautiful.
The surf was wild at times with huge waves crashing over the rocks and the surfers were out in the safe centre of the beach. The main surfing beach is a few miles away at Fistral Bay but Mawgan Porth is prettier!
it was so good to be there to see the tide at all times of day and watch the sun set over the sea - which was spectacular :) - I haven't uploaded those photos yet.
Each way down to Mawgan Porth is a steep steep hill with a hairpin bend - fun! Cornish roads are also mostly very very narrow, between old stone banks covered in flowers - which leaves you very little room when you meet a wide vehicle and nowhere to go!
When I was young I lived about 2-3 miles away from here for quite a few years - first at St Mawgan village and then St Eval. I loved it and hated leaving - it always feels like going home to go back.
I didn't want to come home :( this is my 'special' place - where's yours?
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Comments
Lindsay I'm dying to get painting but I've got a really heavy week of work ahead :( so it's going to be grabbing what moments I can.
I went to a great KJ exhibition in Truro while I was there - really inspiring :)
Jafa - yes Bamburgh castle I can understand, I've only passed it on the train but it has a huge presence and atmosphere.
And yes, very good for the soul :)
Sarah I think you like the sort of places I do from where you live and what you paint - what good taste!!! the distance certainly did make me work on visually absorbing everything I could.
Do you think the place we are when we are between the ages of 4 and 8 imprints itself on us. I still think of Cheshire as being 'real' home. We always used to go to Scotland on holiday and I know when I first visited Cornwall it just seemed to be Scotland with a bit more sun, a bit less rain and a lot less heather!
I did a consultancy job in Penzance once and used to have drive there and back every week - I think I got it down to five and a half hours in the end if I got up really, really early - and the only reason for doing it was it was faster than the train and I could award myself days off in St Ives!
My father has a real feeling for woods - his childhood at that age was in Hampshire and Kent. He has no feeling at all for the coast I love and I feel a bit shut in with anything bigger than a small wood! I want views and hills and twists and surprises - like Cornwall!
we moved to Cornwall when I was 3 and left sobbing when I was 10 - so a very formative age. To make it even worse we moved to the Fens - utterly flat and the rivers/dykes often higher than the land :(
Himself likes more people about in places than I do - something about an Irish childhood and largish families living around????