The Water Giveth, and the Water Taketh Away

First, apologies for missing a post yesterday.  We’ve moved to a place where there is quite literally a ‘narrow window of opportunity’ for wireless, so what with traveling most of the day and getting re-situated, we didn’t get one out.  We’ll send explanatory text and especially pictures tomorrow.  But in the meantime, have a PIMM's and settle back…

Every place we’ve been has it’s ‘story’ around which everything else is built.  For Western Ireland, it’s the Potato Famine.  Every town has a monument or museum commemorating the Famine.  For us in Kentucky, and points south, it’s the Civil War.  (For those of you who’ve grown up with it, take from us recent immigrants to The South: it’s the Civil War).   So we’re always paying attention to the stories that everyone references everything to: the marker in time, the symbolic event, the signifying moment that the residents define themselves and their home by.  We’ve been on the coast of Cornwall this past week, but more specifically, the NORTH Coast of Cornwall.  Here, it’s the mixed blessing of the cranky ocean in front of the towns, and the unpredictable things that happen inland that also affect the towns.  The really bad storms come in from the northwest here, with accompanying winds.  All along the coast, those storm winds blew sailing ships right into the coastal rocks, and even pushed storm waves (and the boats tied up in the harbors) right up into the northwest-facing bays, and then streets, of places like Port Isaac, Port Gaverne, Boscastle, and Padstow.  Because the harbors faced right into the teeth of those winds, even being tied up in the harbors wasn’t necessarily a safe place to be.  Port Gaverne once had 7 sailing ships tied up, waiting to load slate, when a hurricane came in and tossed all the ships to splinters against each other. 

1920's Era Tourist Hotel at Boscastle

Now, this is terrible, of course.  The men go out to sea and may not come back.  The rescue/lifeboat crews in every town are the local heroes, now and for the last couple of centuries. There is even a story that the nearby town of Port Quinn (Wenn?) was abandoned when all of the men in town were lost in the same storm on the same day.

There is another side to this tale of tragedy, however.

When ships wreck, they do so on the rocks, near the shore.  They generally carry commercial goods, often stored in barrels or crates or other ‘floatable’ devices, whereas the people on board were not so floatable.  The goods often survived even if the people didn’t.  And therein lies the story of the ‘wreckers’: people who salvaged the goods that washed ashore from shipwrecks.  A century ago, Cornwall was in general depression.  Commercial fishing and mining, the two historical mainstays of the Cornish economy, were basically defunct.  Large scale emigration to the US and South Africa was underway.  A boatload of goods washing ashore along the north coast was better than Christmas, and the ownership of the goods was largely unknown anyway.  Beyond food and valuables, entire houses, or parts of houses, have been built from the substantial beams and masts that have washed ashore along the coast, including, it is said, part of the bar of the Golden Lion in Port Isaac. 

So the ocean is sort of a lottery: it gives the sailor a job fishing or transporting goods, it may take his life, and/or it may give his family/relatives/friends unexpected bounty at any random time.  I think we are building a strong explanation for the sailors’ consumption of alcohol, here. 

What Does the Future Hold, old Crone?

Eventually Port Gaverne, which served as the principal way of getting slate from the Delabole quarries to the rest of the world, was supplanted by the more reliable railroads that were built out into the west country.  Further north, Boscastle has had it’s own tribulations, not all related to the sea.  As with most ports, Boscastle constructed a complicated set of breakwaters to try to keep the sea from trashing boats who managed to navigate their way up its long bay into the harbor. At this they largely succeeded, but still succumbed to the same economic problems as the rest of Cornwall coast.  Now, though, Boscastle is a tidy little tourist destination, complete with a National Trust tourist shop, big parking lot, and a long set of commercial shops leading down on either side of the river as it flows into the bay.  It even has a Witchcraft Museum, not to be missed. 

People Seem Mysteriously 'Drawn' to It.  Hmmm.

However, Boscastle backs up to Bodmin Moor, a range of tallish, rocky crags composed of granite and other extremely impervious stone.  Meaning that, when a really nasty thunderstorm camps out over the Moor and rains and rains, as it did in 2004, Boscastle gets hit with a flash flood that engulfs nearly all of those little

Cars + Boats in the Boscastle Flood

 shops, and takes all the tourists’ nice cars from the parking lot and sends them tumbling down through the streets to the bay to crash into the boats, tied up safe and sound, or so we all thought.   It’s now recovering nicely, but Boscastle’s ‘story’ is about ‘the flood’, and every shop has a line on the wall marking how high the water was. 

Looking upstream from Boscastle Harbor toward town. 

Padstow, a bit west of Port Isaac, is a largish town, which for years had a very deep bay into which larger, heavier commercial boats could come and unload.  But a different, more subtle problem has happened to Padstow.  All along the coast, the uplands were kept in place by the heavy English forests that we hear about in King Arthur and Harry Potter stories.  Those forests were largely cut down a couple of centuries ago for firewood, for charcoal, for ship masts, for houses, for a hundred industrial uses during the British Industrial Revolution.  And when they went, the soil started moving, down the rivers and into the bays.  Over time, Padstow’s bay has filled up with a giant sand bar from sand dunes in the area.   

The Doom Bar of Padstow Bay

At high tide the water is deep enough for shallow draft boats to go in and out (the tide is 15-20 feet high along the coast) but at low tide the harbor presides over many acres of a very impressive, very Florida-looking sand beach, with little sailboats tipping about on the far side, closer to the ocean.  For better or worse, Padstow has become a tourist town full of sailboats.  And their ‘story’ is of the ‘Doom Bar’ that blocks the harbor, temporarily immortalized in a local brew of the same name.  Making beer out of sand bars is sort of like making lemonade out of lemons.  

Having a "Doom Bar' Ale while enjoying the sailboats in the Padstow Harbor