My mother and I recently got back from a trip to Cornwall.
If you are a fan of British television, you may be somewhat familiar with the Cornish landscape. On the telly (or on PBS in the United States), Cornwall is home to the maverick Captain Ross Poldark and his struggling tin mine. It is also home to Dr. Martin Ellingham and the wonderfully looney residents of Portwenn on “Doc Martin.”
My mother and I recently got back from a trip to Cornwall.
If you are a fan of British television, you may be somewhat familiar with the Cornish landscape. On the telly (or on PBS in the United States), Cornwall is home to the maverick Captain Ross Poldark and his struggling tin mine. It is also home to Dr. Martin Ellingham and the wonderfully looney residents of Portwenn on “Doc Martin.”
In terms of scenery, modern-day real-life Cornwall is not much different from the Cornwall that you see on these shows. It is coastal and rural, with green rolling hills, windswept cliffs and small fishing villages. Of course, the mining is pretty much all gone and some of the coastal villages have switched from fishing to watersports (our hotel in St. Ives offered surfing lessons), but the scenery is the same.
Our group tour of Cornwall actually started in London, which is filled with enough museums, parks, monuments, culture and miscellaneous attractions to keep a first-time visitor to Great Britain busy indefinitely. It is also quite walkable.
Pretty much any tour of the English countryside will start in London, given the proximity of major airports and main train stations in the area. Unfortunately, that also meant that the first and last days of our tour were spent getting to and from the actual area we wanted to visit.
Still, we managed to see a lot of Cornwall and neighboring Devonshire. Once we reached Cornwall, our little tour bus shuttled us quickly from Port Isaac (a.k.a. Portwenn) over to St. Ives and all the way out to Land’s End with ease.
“Downton Abbey” is not set in Cornwall, but the show’s “end of an era” vibe could be felt at the stately homes and gardens we visited. These estates all seemingly had the same history of being the home to some rich lord’s family, which held on for as long as they could until death, war casualties or financial problems led to the home being given to the historic preservationists at either English Heritage or the National Trust.
Perhaps the rainy English weather helps, but we saw some excellent gardens on our trip. Naturally, when you travel halfway around the world, you get to see some plants and flowers that you don’t ordinarily get to see at home. Of course, we also got to see some plants which were very familiar. During the height of the British Empire, English botanists and other world travelers used to bring home exotic plants from such far-off places as … California and Hawaii. It is rather remarkable to see how they managed to get giant sequoias and tropical plants to grow in Cornwall, and it goes to show that “exotic” depends on what you are used to.
Ironically, one of the best of these gardens was not surrounding a historic Jacobethan or Victorian manor, but inside the very modern bio-domes of the Eden Project. The Eden Project holds a very Star Trek-like optimistic view of the world, with a strong emphasis on science, knowledge, protecting the environment and fostering cultural understanding.
Even beyond the Eden Project, one gets the feeling that Great Britain is adapting very well to the environmental challenges of climate change. Everywhere we went, we saw tall wind turbines taking advantage of the windswept nature of the Cornish coast, as well as a surprising number of solar panels.
Finally, I can’t talk about a trip to Britain without mentioning the food. Once upon a time, England had a reputation for bad food, but that old stereotype is completely outdated now. Everything I ate tasted both healthy and delicious, from the English breakfast that our hotels provided to the fish and chips to the sandwiches to the Cornish pasties — a complete lunch in a baked pastry shell.
Was it just the quality of the ingredients? There can’t be that big of a difference between the Ploughman’s sandwich I got from a food court just off the motorway and the equivalent cheese sandwich I might get at a minimart in California, can there? The United Kingdom does follow European-style food standards, and those are stricter than in the United States. Whatever the cause, I didn’t have a bad meal while visiting England.
In short, I highly recommend England as a travel destination in general and Cornwall specifically as an oft-overlooked part of a nation with many wonders to explore.
James Fujita is a former GVN news editor. He works as a copy editor for the Visalia Times-Delta in California’s Central Valley. Fujita can be contacted at jim61773@yahoo.com
