Sunday, July 16, 2023

The sun is shining this morning. I repeat: the sun is shining! No slow start for us today. I have an alarm and a concerning amount of coffee and then we’re out. The weather is good and we’re going to St. Michael’s Mount! 

We get on the bus from Mousehole to Penzance with no issue and get off to change busses at the station. We’re there well before the scheduled departure time of 10:00. Then the time comes. No bus. More time passes. The crowd grows larger and more restless. Two busses come, finally, and we get on the one that will take us to Marazion, where we will walk out to the Mount. It’s the first minor travel woe of this trip so far! But it doesn’t turn out to be an issue, thankfully.

St. Michael’s Mount might sound familiar if you know of Mont-St-Michel in France. The latter owned the former for a long time and sent a small group of monks to set up a monastery there. But it was a settlement long before that; excavations have turned up artifacts from the Bronze Age. Nowadays, and for the last few hundred years, it’s been the home of the St Aubyn family, who still live there today. In fact, there are about 30 people who still live full time on the island; they open it during the day and then get to enjoy the space for themselves when visitors have left. 

St. Michael’s Mount rises dramatically out of the bay for which it is named, Mount’s Bay. You can see the island from virtually any point around the bay, including in Mousehole. It looks both farther away and bigger than it really is. The coolest thing about it is that access to the island is determined by the tides: there’s a cobbled causeway that goes from the mainland at Marazion all the way to the island, but it’s only available at low tide. So for half of the day’s visiting times you can walk out, and in the other half, you have to take a boat. This strikes me as so very cool. I’m aware that this is how tides work, but the fact that the water level is so different at different times of day just blows my mind.

 We join the groups of people following the causeway to the island. At the checkpoint we show our tickets and get handed a map. First up is the visitor center in the Barge House, which explains the history of the island and tells some of the stories of the people living and working there today. After that we start our walk up the steep hill to the castle.

At the building called the dairy, there are workers handing out a sticker activity map to kids. It looks like there are different points in the walk to and through castle where you see certain objects and then put the corresponding sticker on the map. Mom sees me looking ruefully at the kids with their sticker maps. She goes back down the hill and over to the guys. “Excuse me, could I have one of those?” she asks. “I’m young at heart.” She walks back to me and hands it over. “They didn’t even bat an eye. I think people must ask that fairly often.”

We start up the walkway properly then, working together on our sticker castle trail map. There’s a well where the fabled Jack apparently threw the remains of a terrible giant, and a heart-shaped cobble that supposedly was the giant’s heart. Higher up, the views open up and the water of the bay is a shining wind-whipped blue. We enter the castle itself and work our way through the various rooms, the terrace, and the church.

I’m over it pretty quickly; the rooms are not all that big and all the people are starting to get to me. It is very cool to be in here and think about the various centuries and people that this building in all its iterations has seen, though. I finish my little sticker map and speed through the end, standing outside where I can take in the views and breathe. That’s the best part of this island anyway—being able to see (sea?) so far. 

Down in the village but still on the island, we grab a small lunch (a pasty for me, obviously, and a cream tea for mom). I’ve been putting off a phone call all day. I hate talking on the phone. Have I mentioned this? Hate it. No matter how simple or quick the call is, if there is a situation where I have to have any kind of phone-based customer service interaction, I will put it off for ages. The current procrastination is calling to hire a taxi for tonight. We’re going to see Twelfth Night at the Minack, an open-air theatre perched right on the edge of a cliff in Porthcurno. We can get to the theatre on a bus, but they stop running long before the show ends. Steve gave me a couple of numbers to call three days ago and, now that it’s the day of the show, I finally have to do it.

I rehearse what I’m going to say over and over in my head, dial the number but apparently it’s wrong, and dial it again, and it takes. It’s probably less than a minute before I’ve booked us a spot in a shared taxi after the show. The lady on the other end sounds bored, like they do this all the time. Of course they do! I thank her, hang up, and wipe my sweating palms on my leggings, fan my face to cool down. Why am I like this. I can stand in front of a huge crowd and talk and not break a sweat, ask for almost anything in person, be at the front of a classroom all day, but making a phone call sends me into hot fits. But it’s done! Sorted. 

By now the tide has come way in and you can’t even see the causeway we walked over to get to the island. I am just so tickled by this. We really did walk out here, but now we can’t, so we get our boat tickets and load up onto the tiny ferry to go back to the mainland.

 

In Marazion we dip into a couple of shops. The one that catches my eye has a postcard with an illustration of the marine life of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. I buy it to send to Mash because, and I have no idea how this started, we’ve begun a game of messaging ocean-based puns back and forth where, I guess, the goal is to come up with the last and greatest pun. Trail things? We also dip into a convenience store where, like a delinquent, I buy a can of Rattler to drink on the bus in the middle of the day. Then we wait for the Land’s End Coaster at the bus stop once again. 

It’s the same guy driving it as earlier when he comes. Oh hey! We get a seat on top in the open-air deck and settle in. We’re taking our own little scenic tour of the peninsula! This bus is going anti-clockwise, first to St. Ives, and then west towards Land’s End, crossing some of the middle of Cornwall before our stop at Porthcurno for the Minack. 

Have I mentioned it’s a beautiful day? It’s radiant and luminous and shimmering. The wind is a little rough up there on the top deck, but you can’t beat the views. The bay at St. Ives, with its kayakers and stand up paddle boarders suspended on the clear blue water, makes me wish we had just one more day and that we could go here.

We turn away from the coast and are in rolling, empty land dotted here and there at the tops of hills with stone piles, like the tors of Dartmoor. We pass through tons of little villages, and we pull into the parking lot at Land’s End. We don’t have time to get out and see the famous sign marking the farthest western point of mainland England, but no matter. I’ll see it again one day when I hike the South West Coast Path. 

Finally, the bus reaches our stop in Porthcurno near the Minack. Mercifully, there is a public toilet right by the stop. And it’s open! Bless. We commence walking up the hill that takes us to the Minack. Every so often we have to dive out of the way of a car and into the bushes, but we do make it to the car park with the sign that reads Minack Theatre. 

This is another giddy moment for me. I’ve seen photos and heard about this place for months now, first from Jumbo, whose family comes to Cornwall on holiday every year, and then from a couple of friends and acquaintances who happened to be visiting the same spots earlier this year. When I first heard about the Minack I knew I wanted to see it, preferably during a show. And then it worked out perfectly that this, our last night in Cornwall, was the opening night for this production of Twelfth Night. 

It is, I repeat, a beautiful day. It’s about 7:30 when we get to the theatre and that special, peaceful kind of evening coastal light is falling on the water behind the stage. The theatre is carved into the cliffs, and there are staircases every which way leading down to the different sections. The Minack also functions as a kind of garden, with plants growing from beds within the rock near the staircases, in between seating sections, and all around the theatre.

We’re directed to our seats in Section C and we settle in, getting very cozy with everyone around us. I go to the coffee shop and get us a pasty and a sausage roll along with some hot teas. Everyone else has clearly done this before because they’ve brought blankets, cushions, picnic baskets, and bags full of food, beer and wine. I’ve got a quarter of a bar of Cadbury fruit and nut, at least? 

I almost have to pinch myself as I look around just before the show starts. I cannot stress enough how close this theatre is to the sea. Directly behind the stage is a rocky cliff where waves crash repeatedly. There’s a cloud with a rainbow. As it gets darker, a lighthouse pops into view, with its beam of light projected way out into the open ocean. 

And that’s just the place. The play itself is also great fun. I’ve not seen Twelfth Night before, so I’ve got nothing to compare this version to, but it’s a delight. There are only five actors in total, and it’s amazing watching them switch into the different roles, back and forth constantly for the entire two and a half hours. It’s a little slow to follow at first, but then the humor ramps up, the crowd has more wine, and the actors are feeding on the energy until everyone is in stitches. Meanwhile, behind them, the waves crash on the rocks and the lighthouse blinks and another day, one of our last on this side of the Atlantic—on this trip anyway—softly draws to a close. 

After the show we get our taxi with no trouble. The driver first has to take a couple to their camping spot, then she drops us off right at the bus stop in Mousehole. It’s late, and even the pub is shutting down, and the lights aren’t on over the harbor anymore, but there’s still the sound of the sea and the smell of the salt and the inexorable something beating through the quiet veins of this little village. 

Back at Dormouse we pack up as much as we can so that our morning won’t be quite as painful. I look at photos and wonder, were I to move here, to what extent the sea would consume me as it does those born on these shores.