Last night’s hotel rather grew on me as the maintenance man came to fix the lock on my door. When he isn’t maintaining he is either surfing or firefighting. He definitely brightened my day! The food was pretty good too.

I had no luck in Perranporth with finding a new memory card for my camera so I had to do a bit of judicious editing which was absolutely essential as there were certainly some fabulous views to take.

The path starts out along the glorious golden sands for nearly a mile (although it was not brilliant weather). Right at the end there were the rather pitiful remains of a whale that beached a few days ago – the pong was pretty fierce, and we were rather boggled at the number of people who seemed to see the poor creature as a tourist attraction.

At the end of the beach you climb up onto the dunes. We didn’t go quite far enough and made heavy weather of climbing up the dunes rather than going up the nice wide stoney track.  The path then skirts along the headlands, dotted with a few Shetland ponies. The wind was fierce, although other than a shower just when we were starting out, the day has been mainly sunny. This morning was cold though. I don’t know what the wind chill factor was, but it felt no more than on 12 or 13 degrees. Not good for mid-July.

Rounding the headland, you come to the little cove of Holywell. At the head of the beach is a pub, where we stopped for coffee and cake, then a stiff climb over dunes.  Always hard going and at one point I thought I had pulled a calf muscle but all seems well now.

Above the dunes we saw a kestrel, and heard what we thought were its chicks. Back out to a headland, and round a second, past what looked like an army training camp, before turning into another narrow bay, with good surf.  We saw another kestrel dive bombing a crow. The crow seemed unconcerned, just ducking as the orangey – brown bird of prey shot over its head, circled and came in again. We assumed the crow was too close to the kestrel’s nest, but we didn’t see any chicks.

The next bay is the Gannel estuary. The sun had come out and it was full of children and dogs enjoying the waves. I took my boots off to walk over the Crantock Bay sands which are very fine.

Unfortunately, at some point, I managed to lose yet another water bottle. Very annoying. It is only possible to cross the long inlet by ferry or going quite far inland to cross a footbridge. We were in time for the little ferry, which cost us the astonishing sum of 60 pence each as we only needed to take it halfway.

With the tide low, the ferryman came to a little platform half-way across. On the far side, there was a little shop with live lobsters and crabs, waiting to be chosen and sent on their way to the local dinner tables. The hotel at the top gave us our first cream tea of the trip. Around another headland, on top of which there was a mediaeval huer platform (where someone was posted to watch for the pilchard shoals) and then along the path above the beach at Fistral, past Rick Stein’s fish restaurant. Don’t think we’ll be eating there!