Cornwall: Magnificent Mevagissey

I know it’s no longer fashionable to use alliteration when composing a title for a blog / article / whatever but I couldn’t help myself. Mevagissey is another of Cornwall’s magical, captivating, picturesque, charming and quaint old fishing villages, and it really was magnificent.

Mevagissey is named after two saints, St Meva (or Mevan) and St Issey, who were, apparently, Irish saints who brought Christianity to the tribes of Cornwall, but human occupation in this place goes back much further. Bronze age arrows have been found locally, and the Romans had a camp, named Colonia, at nearby Chapel Point.

The traditional industry is, of course, fishing, with large quantities of sardines and pilchards appearing in regular seasonal shoals along much of this coast. Several of the historic buildings around the walled harbour relate to the fishing industry, and would have housed barrel makers, sail makers and boat repairers, as well as net lofts and basket weavers. According to a sign in the village, in its heyday the pilchard fishermen landed between 12 and 15 thousand tonnes per annum – that’s a lot of fish! At that time, there were up to 30 large fishing boats operating out of Mevagissey but nowadays both the number and size of the vessels are much smaller.

The sign also explained why the narrow streets of Cornish fishing villages like Mevagissey meander circuitously around the harbour, rather than being in any kind of grid pattern. In the 18th century Mevagissey was notorious for being a smugglers’ lair, with brandy, gin, tea, silks and fine lace, as well as tobacco, all passing quietly through, and the suggestion is that the town’s streets were deliberately ‘designed to impede the efforts of the enforcement officers’. Sneaky!

We meandered with the streets, walked up the hill for a panoramic view, walked out along both sides of the enclosing harbour walls, had the obligatory Cornish pasties for our lunch (backs to the wall again so as to deter the gull pasty thieves), and mooched around the gifty shops (still hunting for that elusive present for our cottage owners – great excuse, eh?). It was all simply splendid!

I’ll round off our visit with a couple of pub signs. The 16th-century Ship Inn sports a glorious sailing ship and it has a fabulous story of a resident ghost, a former landlady who protects the inn from flooding. And the Fountain Inn is even older – the building dates from the 15th century, though wasn’t always a pub. The interior still contains evidence of its use for pilchard processing in the 18th and 19th centuries. We visited neither of these places but both definitely sound like they’re worth a visit ... or six! Obviously, I’ll need to go back one day.

East Sussex: a pocketful of Rye

At the end of our wonderful wander around Rye Harbour Nature Reserve I was feeling a little peckish – all that sea air and exercise, you know – so we headed to the nearby town of Rye, partly for a little exploration and partly to find somewhere to enjoy an early dinner.

Built on a hillock that was once surrounded by the sea, Rye is an ancient town. It was probably a shipping port in Roman times; it was gifted to a Norman Benedictine Abbey by King Aethelred and remained Norman property until 1247; and it was part of the Cinque Ports Federation, an important port in cross-Channel trade and commerce.

During the 18th and 19th centuries Rye was a strategic base for local smuggling operations – apparently the two pubs shown in the photo above, the Mermaid Inn (right) and the Old Bell Inn (left), had a secret passageway between them for use by the smugglers.

The steep and narrow streets are very photogenic, if a little tough on old leg muscles after a long day’s walking. However, as I might never go there again, I just had to walk up to the top of the hill, where sits St Mary’s Church, and back down the cobblestones to the quay alongside the River Brede. It was very lovely, awash with beautiful black-and-white buildings and with the type of charming old houses that look like they cost a fortune to own (I checked property prices later – a fortune, indeed!).

However, I do have one negative comment to make about Rye. In the middle of summer, at the height of the tourist season (and there were a lot of visitors about), the local cafe and restaurant proprietors should not be shutting up shop at 5pm! I’m quite sure we weren’t the only people looking for a riverside cafe to enjoy a bite in the late afternoon sunshine. Rye’s loss was Battle’s gain – we enjoyed a delicious cod-and-chips dinner at The King’s Head pub on the way home.