Monday: 15th May: Weather: 8°C to 14°C: Cool start and cold all day
Portscatho to Portholland: 16.4k walk: 6hrs 30 mins: 10 am to 4.30pm: 2 x 30 min stops: Ascent: 600 metres
Accommodation: Glamping Horse Float Seabiscuit East Portholland
Excess baggage from 3 Capes
St Mawes bakery at 9am
Looking back at Portscatho
Fields of wold flowers
Pesky shetland ponies eating our backpacks waiting for a feed
Morning tea looking across to Dodmans Point
Fields of wilds flowers on cliff
Lunch - bread, blueberry jam, tea
Freshly trimmed path
Glamping in Horse float Portholland
Pre dinner wine at Horse Float
Three pasties on BarBQ for dinner
Yummy pastie for dinner
Highlight of our day 2 was arriving in Portholland to find our accommodation exactly as described on the Air BnB website - a horse float!
We’re awake at 5am to the sound of messages ringing through on Ian’s phone and have a hot cup of tea while waiting for the Co-op to open 7am when Ian ducks down to buy a yoghurt to go with ourt muesli for breakfast. Then it’s time to pack. And then I make the discovery that buried in a hidden compartment of my backpack was almost 1kg of stuff left there from the 3 Capes walk in February this year - the 3 Capes booklet, brochures, maps and 3 packets of dried food. I wondered why my pack felt heavu yesterday - heavier that the sum of the parts I calculated!
We’re out the door of the Ship and Castle by 9am, and wander across the road to buy a few pasties from the renowned St Mawes Bakery. I ask for three frozen ones to take with us to Portholland, and the shop assistant trots across the road and returns with three frozen pastes. Her mother, who clearly is part of the original family who makes the pasties by hand, gives us a diatribe on how to cook the pasties. Heat them for 45 minutes at 120°C then for 10 minutes at 180°C. Ian finds room in his back pack with the rest of the cold stuff - yoghurt, butter and cheese.
Then off to the bus stop for the 9.27am bus from St Mawes to Portscatho. It arrives on time and 20 minutes later we’re at teh Higher Town above Portscatho as the road is too steep and narrow for teh bus to go down into the village. It’s a cold 8°C when we leave teh bus stop to re-join the SWCP, which already is busy with dog walkers. The sun is shining but the South Westerly wind makes it feel very cold.
The path crosses fields of wild flowers as we wind our way around teh cliff edge towards Nare Head jutting out into the sea. It’s a steep climb up to the Headland, often through gorse bushes that have been not so carefully trimmed leaving jagged branches poking out across the path. Ian’s catches his shin just as we’re about to pass through a herd of wild Shetland ponies who are oblivious to us until we stop at a bench for Ian to retrieve a few bandaids. They think it’s dinner time and begin to nibble at the bandaid packet and our backpack straps while we try to shew them away.
By 11.30am, we’re hungry and find a seat in teh sun looking across to the Dodman’s Point. The cliff path spectacularly winds through more fields of wild flowers and two hours later at 1.30pm, we stop for lunch of bread, cheese and blueberry jam, kindly donated by Suzie before we left Newquay. It’s warmed to 14°C as we continue along teh SWCP which is now a narrow 20cm wide and heavily overgrown with metre high grassy bushes as we walk towards Port Louie. We encounter a young chap covered in grass clippings who has obviously been whipper snippering somewhere and on leaving Port Louie, we discover the path is more than a metre wide and covered in fresh grass clippings.
The path between Port Louie and Portholland all up and down, sometimes very steeply up and down and we’re glad to finally arrive at Port Holland and wander around teh road to East Port Holland where we immediately spy our accommodation - a real horse float with a bus stop like structure next to it which we soon find out was a small kitchenette with a tinsy toilet and shower in a cubicle at the end. There’s a sign to say the toilet is only for weeks and for anything else, walk over to the public toilets near teh car park.
It doesn’t take long to find a cubby hole to stash our back packs in the 3.5m x 1.6m horse float which is filtted out with a 4 foot double bed and a small bench at one end. Outside, there’s a BarBQ, and in a few minutes, we have our three slightly thawed out pasties cooking on a low heat while we take turns to shower in the small 60cm square shower - which produced the hottest of hot, hot, water you’ve ever seen.
I’ve carried a small flask of left over red wine from St Mawes, and an hour later we’re having pastie and a glass of red, whilst wrapped up in a large towel to stay warm out of teh wind. There’s not much else to do in Portholland and by 7.30pm we’re tucked in bed blogging away.\