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BASE: ST IVES

Travels in and around the famous Cornish town

By Tommy Nagle

February 29^th, 2016

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through family connections, I’ve been to St Ives more times than I can count.

Visiting during mid-January means seeing the town stripped of it’s lifeblood: tourists. A good thing, some (most?) might say.

But St Ives survives better than many British seaside towns throughout the winter. Yes, it’s windy, it’s cold, most restaurants are closed, and an increasingly alarming percentage of the houses in town are vacant, having become profitable holiday lets for developers. The bakeries which would be churning out pasties and scones by the tray full on summer mornings (and come lunch time would subsequently be picked clean as if by a swarm of locusts) are forced to deploy disinclined staff at their open shop doors, touting their excess wares for discount prices to any passerby who will listen.

But the quality of light that has for decades drawn artists to this part of West Cornwall still remains the same, filtering down narrow cobbled streets and over windswept headlands. Winter doesn’t stop tourists from visiting St Ives.

It’s a beautiful place any time of year.

Five image stitched panorama, whilst battling the wind. You can probably spot the joins if you look hard enough...

↑ PORTHMEOR BEACH ↑

If you were to stand on Porthmeor and face the ocean (and have elf eyes that could see far enough) you’d be looking at County Waterford, in south east Ireland. I remember as a kid I would stand on the beach and imagine that across the water was America, land of Beverly Hills Cop, Goonies and, um, Short Circuit. But then that shows you how bad I was at geography. If there’s any surfing to be had in St Ives, ‘meor is the place, though when I took the above photo, the waves were too rough even for Bodhi.

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dawn LOOKING OVER TO GODREVY LIGHTHOUSE

I got up really early to catch the sunrise. Turns out I wasn’t the only photographer who had that idea.

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THE HARBOUR

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↓ Barnoon Terrace ↓

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ASIMO

It’s funny the things you find on the beach. This little guy now resides on my camera bag. Lucky mascot etc.

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ST ERTH ➼ ST IVES

The St Ives branch line still runs relatively frequently in the winter time, and even the rain doesn’t spoil the views of the coast.

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THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

I butchered an old magnifying glass by removing the lens. There are loads more creative ways of using lenses and prisms in photography, but this way seemed right at the time.

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JUAN PIERNA

This chipper fella (girl? I’m not a twitcher by any means. Feel free to correct) below was happily hopping around with the rest of its buddies, despite the obvious affliction. Most likely it lost its other leg in a freak combine harvester accident. Shame.

FYI, apparently Lance Armstrong used to check into hotels under the name “Juan Pelota”, which sounds a bit like the Spanish for “One Ball”. You know, because testicle.

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BY NIGHT

St Ives is one of the darker places in the UK in terms of ambient light, meaning star photos aren’t out of the question.

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ST MICHAEL‘S MOUNT

The mount is Cornwall’s counterpart to Mont St Michel, which est dans la nord du France, n’est pas? I was going to do a shameless ⌘c / ⌘v from Wikipedia, but if you really care, you can read about it here. Suffice it to say that a) It was closed when we were there for ‘refurbishments’ or some shiz, and 2) The tide was in, so we couldn’t even walk up the causeway and pretend we’d seen it. Because of the former two reasons, we went for a walk instead, along the coast and then circling back across the fields to the town of Marazion, which looks out onto the mount.

Say it with me:

“Ma-ra-zy-on”

‘zy’, rhymes with ‘eye’. Not:

“Ma-ra-zee-un”

Just FYI. You’ll look silly if you say it wrong.

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WICKER MAN practice SESSION

We passed this sight as we drove back from our Marazion walk. I hopped a fence and started taking pictures. It’s not something you see every day. Then a woman emerged from the smoke, a cross between the Terminator and Miss Trunchbull. She shouted “EXCUSE ME? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE.” I explained that I was from the EPA and that I’d be reporting her ass for illegal burnage of hay-like substances.

OK, I didn’t. I apologised and ran away. Badass.

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PENZANCE & NEWLYN

As we walked the promenade along the sea front from Penzance to Newlyn (a 30min train ride from St Ives), we saw that there were decent-sized rocks and large pieces of seaweed littered across the paving stones. Surely the tide didn’t get so high that it washed all this crap up? Nope. It turns out that at high tide, the sea batters against the promenade walls, and the resulting spray shoots stones, pebbles, seaweed and so on high into the air. I waited for a while to see if some unsuspecting tourist would get hit by a massive wave, but no dice. ☹

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THE LIZARD

The Lizard peninsula is the most southerly part of the British mainland. It’s totes dramatic. Rather interestingly it’s been dubbed ‘the birthplace of modern communication’ by the National Trust, as Marconi performed some of his radio experiments nearby. The sea is an incredible azure colour, it’s home to unique species of flora and fauna, and we had it (almost) to ourselves.

↓ Housel Bay ↓

A bit of an experiment, an 86 image panorama that’s almost 20,000 pixels wide. Below this is a 4000-pixel-wide crop from the same image at about 50% resolution. I’m not sure of the maths. This would print the size of a house and still look pretty sharp.

⇣ The aforementioned cropped section ⇣

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While the others went to get a chocolate bar, I harassed these dudes.

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Steeple Woods

There’s a walk from St Ives to nearby Carbis Bay, which takes in this Nature Reserve. Stop by if you get sick of all that blue sea.

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THE JOHN KNILL monument

…sits high above St Ives bay. It’s a large obelisk built by a former mayor of St Ives. For himself. Yeah, he was like that. Apparently the plan was that he was to be interred in a vault inside, but he was buried in London instead. Build yourself your own pyramid, then die 300 miles away, and people can’t even be arsed to bury you in your own tomb? You can’t trust anyone these days.