There are three roads in and out of Mousehole. The main one runs along the coast from Newlyn and the other two are at either end of the little village and both involve steep, narrow hills unsuitable for twoway traffic.
Ragginis Hill is at the far end – the Fish Store end – and you can see it winding upwards in the distance from the harbour. It is a killer to walk up and it doesn’t get easier, however often you do it. It is worth the effort, though, because Ragginis gives spectacular views back down across this end of the village, past the Fish Store and the island, with eyes inevitably drawn towards the harbour or across the sea to St Michael’s Mount. The views get better the higher you go and the more your calves begin to ache. Raginnis is also the beginning of the route to the coast path. The exact whereabouts of this path is the cause of repeated concern to new visitors to Mousehole. Often they miss Raginnis and take the left fork which runs parallel to the sea and which seems the obvious choice. At Merlin Place, just outside the big blue doors to the Fish Store garage, there are two signs. One, painted green with washed-out white writing, has been there for years. The other is smaller and smarter and made of white metal with black trim and writing. It sports a National Trust acorn and is relatively new. The trouble is that the signs point in different directions. Locals are amazingly good-tempered about steering people up the alley past the Johns’ house, where the gradient of the hill really begins to bite.
Not very far up Ragginis, you come to the Wild Birds Hospital. I often walk past the back of the hospital, down Love Lane. Here you can see huge wire aviaries where the birds that are well enough to recuperate live. There are usually a few seagulls nestling comfortably on top of the cage, wondering, if they’re capable of wondering, what the birds inside are doing.
Love Lane, being higher than Raginnis, is an even better place to ‘aerial-view’ Mousehole. There are many artists’ studios up here, and consequently numerous paintings of the village from this viewpoint. This little lane is also where several of the famous Christmas lights are cunningly positioned to be seen from the other end of the village. This is where a group of reindeer ‘run’ in the darkness and where a crib scene is hidden in the hedgerow. You can see evidence of the lights and their elaborate wiring all year round, but by the middle of October more equipment and piles of coloured light bulbs appear. These lie heaped in filched red trays from Newlyn Fish Market, semi-hidden at the back of the houses and studios, waiting for the walkie-talkie-wielding task force to swing into action. Our beautiful but bedevilled lurcher Peanut used to love comingup here and he’d disappear in the steep meadows behind the lane on the scent, no doubt, of a rab bit. But Love Lane is a road to nowhere which peters out into a grassy track leading to a painstakingly restored property with keep-out security lights which discourage curiosity.
Off to the right there are two or three muddy tracks between the overgrown vegetation that meander back down to the village. One in particular is used by all the dog walkers and is instantly recognizable by a clump of giant rhubarb on one side and an ancient tangle of thick, sinewy ivy creepers overwhelming a spiky blackthorn on the other. To the right of the track are well-hidden allotments but the left side is edged with coppice. Running alongside the path is a stream which comes from the meadows behind Love Lane. Most of the time it tumbles down the steep slope, but when it’s raining hard or there’s been a storm the water thunders down the hill behind its stout wall in a hurry to reach the sea. This might well be the very same stream that runs underground past the side of the Fish Store, meeting up, perhaps, with whatever goes on under the gaggle of manholes where South West Water hide meters for the houses nearby. There have been occasions when it has rained so hard that it has been possible to hear water gushing past under the ground as well as on top of it. The force sucks at our water closet, pumping vigorously as though it were being worked by some unseen hand.
On either side of the bird hospital are several grand houses built high above the road with entrances behind a granite wall. Outside one of them, growing out of its overhanging garden wall, are several splendid rosemary brushes. These flourishing plants have informed many dishes cooked at the Fish Store. It’s obvious that the plants respond well to our steady pruning.
At the top of the hill, past a couple of picturesque cottages and Royden’s netted allotment, which backs on to a network of small terraced fields sloping steeply down to the sea, the road forks round to the right. On the left is a wide gravel track which passes a large, imposing house opposite a few converted farm buildings set back from the track in a semi-private courtyard. This house, its outbuildings and fertile meadows used to be called Asphodel and was a prosperous farm devoted to market gardening. Years ago, Royden’s mother Violet used to work there, sorting and boxing the early daffodils, anemones and violets. I’ve always thought it rather romantic that Lionel, Royden’s stepfather, used to pick violets as part of his job as a general land worker. It’s not often that you see violets on sale these days, but when you do they are always bundled up in a little posy cloaked by their leaves and laced up the stems with soft twine. I was really touched one Christmas when Royden gave me a bunch he’d picked and done up like this, in the old-fashioned way. To keep them fresh, Lionel told me, violets have to be dipped in cold water twice a day. Treated thus, they should last a week.
When Zach was a baby, Ben and I thought of up selling up in London and moving down to Cornwall. It wasn’t a very realistic idea but one of the places we fantasized about was the Ashpodel outbuildings.
This track is the real start of the coastal path to Lamorna and beyond. The stretch from here to the Coastguard’s Lookout – probably slightly less than half a mile – is inexplicably known as ‘The Crackers’. Past Ashpodel, those once productive meadows which run down to the sea are overgrown with brambles, bracken and ivy. The path along here is incongruously edged with purple and red fuchsia, their lanterns growing profusely on gnarled old trees instead of the more usual 3 or 4 foot shrubs. In the spring the meadows are peppered with wild daffodils, survivors from bulbs chucked out eons ago. Someone told me that during the war the village was banned from growing the famously early flowers and so, to beat the ban, the bulbs were thrown into the hedges and thus not commercially planted. The flowers were duly picked and sent up to London. On Easter Sunday there was a Mousehole tradition of walking to Lamorna and back across the fields to see those surviving early spring flowers.
Along the coast path, the track passes a broken-down, derelict cottage set in a dark and particularly ivy-clad and overgrown patch which rarely sees sunlight. It has a very spooky aura. I hurry past this spot and on beyond The Lookout, now empty and boarded up but which was manned in poor weather until the sixties. Henry would like to convert it into a studio because it has the most amazing view of the entire bay. The path is thick with bright yellow furze bushes and in spring and summer a panoply of pink and white flowers flourish next to tall orange montbretia. Just a little further along the track a well-used wooden bench gives that same superb view. To the right, looking down as the track winds through the steep abandoned meadows and probably halfway to Lamorna, a patch of tall, dark fir trees marks Pellen Point and the start of Kemyal Crease Nature Reserve. This cool, gently sloping glade smells dank and earthy and is in sharp contrast to the little path through the meadows which is what locals are referring to when they say they are ‘going up the Crackers’.