To Portwrinkle and Back

Well, the lovely sunny early autumn weather continues to warm the hearts of our cockles and those of us with a penchant for pottering off for a walk get to enjoy the afternoon heat.


So, you'll probably have guessed that this is one of those mini-travelogue posts that I stick up here from time to time as an excuse for publishing a load of photos.


Yesterday Mrs The Millbrooker and I decided to try a local route that we've not done before - not in all the ten and a bit years that we've lived in this little corner of Kernow. There is a "permissive" route from Tregantle through the MoD firing ranges that is open for public use every other weekend and on certain other days of the year; we'd never walked it, so we headed up that way to take a pootle.

The first thing we did was get the route entirely wrong and instead of following the (quite difficult to spot) South West Way signage, we followed a holidaying Brummie family downwards and ended up on Tregantle Beach.

Mrs The Millbrooker spotted the warning signs that the western end of the beach can get cut off by the incoming tide. But as we were unintentionally at sea level anyway, we decided to walk briskly in that direction and, we hoped, reach Portwrinkle before having to turn tail and try to find our originally planned route.

The tide comes in pretty quickly on Tregantle Beach, so we had one of those little adventures that we're rather fond of as we intrepidly outran it...

...and just about made it over the small rocky headland that separates Tregantle Beach from Portwrinkle without having to paddle too much.

A rather decent double espresso followed at the relatively newly opened The Gook Beach Cafe above Portwrinkle's beach, from where it's just about possible to work out which way the prevailing wind blows from.

And then it was onwards and upwards...

...along the path we'd intended to use on the way out. We took a glance back at Portwrinkle and the Whitsand Bay Hotel...

..and headed off over the golf course (the coast path runs past a couple of the course's holes).

And onwards along the unexplored-by-Millbrooker-feet permissive route toward Fort Tregantle and its firing ranges.

This another of those spots where guessing the direction of the prevailing wind is not a difficult pastime.

The route takes you past the fort itself and we got to see the building from an unfamiliar direction.

Courtesy of an information board next to the path, we got to see the fort from a even more exotic angle.

As we made our way back to where we took our initial wrong turning, the autumn sun was low in the sky over the firing range closest to the coast road to Tregonhawke and Rame.

So, ladies and germs, that concludes our little travelogue around Tregantle. What intrepid adventuring will we get up to next? I can sense your collective breath being bated as I write.....oh yes I can.