St. Michael's Mount

If you are into your fantasy with castles and medieval scenes, then you might want to head down to St. Michael's Mount. This is a unique castle located 500 metres away from the coastline of Marazion in south Cornwall but how do you even get there?

Walking on Water?

Don't worry, you don't need to have special powers of being able to walk on water to visit! In fact, it really depends on what time of the day you go as at low tide, there is a walkway to make your way across. Otherwise, it's by boat. Either mode of transport takes a matter of minutes.

St Michaels Mount at high tide

What can I do there?

There is plenty to do on the island such as exploring the Castle itself, the sub-tropical gardens, local village and harbour or go on a tour. As it is all maintained by the National Trust, there's plenty of information available via the St Michael's Mount website with entertainment for the whole family.

Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to get up close and personal with the castle as the tide was high and we had already made plans to go to St. Ives (hold on to your hats as I'll be talking about that next). But despite this, it's still spectacular to look at from the mainland.

The Castle on St Michael's Mount

St. Ives

The second destination of the day for us was St. Ives in the north west part of Cornwall. Well known amongst tourists for its apartments and hotel "rooms with a view", there are also plenty of restaurants, bars and cafés along the harbour. And of course, ice cream parlours!

Parking

When I've been previously, parking has been hard to come by but I've usually been pretty lucky finding a spot at Park Avenue Car Park. It's a steep descent to the high street (and subsequent ascent when you come back) but it does the job and you're in amongst it within minutes!

The Elusive Pasty - Part 2

But first, let's talk about our elusive pasty, something we were on the hunt for as soon as we arrived in St. Ives! After our previous endeavours in Coverack, we were even more determined that there just HAD to be a place where we could get our pastry based Cornish dish!

After a Google search and a short walk to the High Street, we discovered Pengenna Pasties, who "specialise in home-made pasties". One whiff of this place as you walk past is enough to entice you in - step aside fellow tourists, we're on a mission!

Pengenna Pasties (Image Source - St. Ives Cornwall)

You can tell they are very popular as some of their pasties had sold out when we arrived but we weren't going to let this deter us! So we each ordered a delicious pastry treat, which kept us warm during our short windy walk to Porthmeor beach. Surely, no fool would contemplate playing Frisbee in these conditions?

Porthmeor Beach

Well, actually, us 3 fools would! And that's exactly what we did on one of the more stunning beaches on the Cornish coastline - Porthmeor Beach. This has been rated as one of the top 11 places in Cornwall to view the sunset, but we had other plans (Source: Cornwall Live).

Porthmeor Beach, St. Ives

As you can see from the picture below, the sand was very fine and perfect for doing a bit of Frisbee dashing, although you can probably also see that the waves are quite choppy i.e. very windy! So we had to modify our Frisbee strategy a little bit but we got there in the end… our step counters and pedometers were telling us we'd done over 8,000 steps! So if you wanted to do some exercise without it feeling like exercise, play Frisbee on a windy beach - tips and tricks :D

A windy beach = Perfect frisbee conditions...?

Sunset at Poldhu Cove

Once we had run the equivalent distance of 10 Porthmeor beaches, we made our way back to our cottage in Mullion but not before witnessing a very special sunset at our local Poldhu Cove. This really did shed a different light on Poldark's Coastline and I'd say it was worth having our faces blasted with the wind for this, particularly with views like this! But even for us hardy lads, we weren't going to be playing Frisbee up here!

Hopefully you enjoyed this latest adventure - only one more to come from me from this week's Cornish holiday but I'll catch you soon!