OS Explorer map 105, Falmouth & Mevagissey: Truro & St Mawes – I do not own this map, and had not visited it before starting this blog. Visited for the first time 17th September 2022.
Google Maps location links: Wimbledon, East Croydon
I visited this map area as part of my All Line Rover trip in September 2022, for which I did day-by-day blog posts already, and am now going through doing my regular posts about the new map areas I visited. The main content below will therefore be just a lightly edited version of relevant parts from my post about Day 1 of that trip; for a more connected narrative I recommend taking a look there instead.
On the first full day of my All Line Rover trip, I arrived in Cornwall on the Night Riviera sleeper train from London. I had a good sleep, and awoke to sunny views out of the window, before receiving my ordered vegetarian breakfast, which turned out to be a very strange mix – freeze-dried kiwi and banana, a pot of pineapple segments in juice, a coconut protein bar thing and some lemon biscuits.
I was intending to get off right at the end of the sleeper journey at Penzance or St Erth, to then head up to St Ives, but as it turned out, the train was 45 minutes delayed. I’d finished my breakfast by 7:30am and felt impatient to start my day rather than waiting another hour to get to Penzance, so I got off early, at Truro, switching around my plans for the day a bit. I didn’t leave the station – I’d be returning to Truro later – and instead got straight on the waiting connecting train to take me down the branch line to the seaside town of Falmouth.
Now, there are a lot of branch lines in Devon and Cornwall, so I’d had to be judicious with which ones I’d go down. I’d picked the Falmouth branch because it enables a fun little multi-modal loop: after getting the train down to Falmouth, I’d take the regular passenger ferry to St Mawes across the estuary of the River Fal, and then get a bus back to Truro. Arriving in Falmouth, it was still a great blue-skied, sunny-but-not-too-hot day, which was a good sign for the ferry journey!
I walked through Falmouth to get to the pier the ferry would be going from, and the town seemed very nice, though it was very quite at 8am on a Saturday morning. The pier, by contrast, was heaving: the ferry itself looked pretty small, and I wasn’t at all sure how the eighty or so people who seemed to be waiting were going to get onto it, but in the end, we all boarded comfortably – it was a rather Tardis-like boat! I stayed outside at the front during the 20-minute crossing, which was a good decision, as the views were great.
The Fal estuary at this point is very wide, with a lot of little subsidiary inlets, so first I could see back towards Falmouth, more and more of the town becoming visible, but then views would open up in other directions: to new little btis of shoreline, out to sea, and then eventually to St Mawes with its interesting little castle.
At St Mawes, which was a pretty enough little village, I had a fifteen-minute wander up to the castle and back, and quickly made use of a very high-tech public toilet – which not only allowed me to pay the 20p via contactless card, but also gave me regular voice updates on such matters as “door is now locked” – before getting on the #50 bus to Truro.
Boarding the bus, I was very pleased with the Cornwall Dayrider ticket I got – £5 for unlimited bus travel throughout Cornwall, all day and on any operator. Cornwall is generally doing extremely well on bus services at the moment, I believe, being a current winner of one of the government’s rather silly grant lotteries for bus funding: while I got a £5 paper ticket since I wanted to be able to keep it as a souvenir, I could have paid via London-style “tap-and-cap” on my normal contactless debit card, and been automatically charged the lowest amount for my actual journeys up to the £5 daily cap. They also have this great whole-county bus map, which is printed large-scale and very solidly installed in a lot of their bus shelters. Now we just need to get the same thing in the rest of the country!
The bus journey was nicely scenic, with views both out to sea and of nicely hilly rolling countryside, and after a little under and hour we arrived in Truro, where I had a wander around town. There was a big market on and the town centre was bustling with shoppers. There was a service on in the cathedral, so I only poked my nose in rather than having a good look around, but still enjoyed mself – Truro would be a nice place to come back and spend a little longer in on a later date.
After a brief wander, I made my way over to the train station, and got on a GWR service in the Penzance direction, heading out of this map area, to visit St Ives as I’d originally planned to do as the first thing in my day.
Visiting all the maps! 
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