Last weekend my husband and I took the girls on a trip to Cornwall, which is a breathtakingly beautiful county and a unique cultural area. It was a Brythonic kingdom, one of the Celtic nations during the the Atlantic Bronze Age, and retains a strong reginal identity to this day. It is surrounded by sea on three sides, and has some of the most gorgeous coastline you have ever seen.
One of the highlights of the trip was the walk out to the southernmost point in Great Britain, Lizard Point.
It was almost painfully lovely … something you’d see in a movie or postcard and you can hardly believe is real and right in front of you. The sun was bright, the flowers were blooming prolifically, and the breeze was exactly the right temperature and strength to be refreshing without chilling you or making you feel tumble-blown.
They don’t really show up in any of the photos (my camera phone was unworthy of the scenerey) but the sky was full of birds wheeling and the cliffs were speckled by resting gulls. Here and there you could even see a red-billed chough, only recently reintroduced to the area. Legend had it that the spirit of King Arthur could take on the form of chough, so Cornwall was pleased to get them back.
There were also a profusion of gift shops offering things made of serpentine, a type of igneous and metamorphic rock found only in a handful of places across the globe, including Lizard Point. Serpentine is the result of continental drift 90 million years ago, when “dense oceanic rocks of the Normannian tectonic plate partially subducted under the lighter continental crust of the Laurasian plate to the north … in such a way that rocks usually only found in the mantle, below the moho, namely serpentine, are visible today at the earth’s surface.”
The flowers on the point were almost gaudy in their brilliance. Foxgloves were everywhere in heliotrope clusters, bracketed by yarrow and buttercups and clovers on every patch of greenspace and pathway. Even the humble little daisies seemed more festive in the grass of Cornwall. On the cliffs, the blooms of juicy succulents looked even more delightful against the backdrop of blue skies and bluer seas.
I have no idea of what the real names of the flowers (pictured below) were that grew clinging to the rockface of the point, but my daughters and I christened them ‘blooming jellybeans’ because there plump leaves looked for all the world like elongated green jellybeans growing wild and sprouting blossoms.
On the tip of the peninsula was a little cafe, where we stopped for early dinner.
The whole visit to Lizard Point was a joy from end to end, and I cannot wait to go again.
