OS Explorer map 102, Land’s End: Penzance & St Ives – I own this map, and had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 17th September 2022.
Google Maps location links: Hayle, St Ives, St Erth
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. The Previous Visits section will be new though.
After visiting Truro earlier that day, I got on a GWR train westwards to visit St Ives. However, to get to St Ives, I’d need to change from the main line to Penzance onto the St Ives Bay Line. Watching this bit of this All The Stations video a few years ago, I enjoyed finding out this fun piece of railway trivia: a single-track line with no passing loops, the St Ives line’s signalling system is “staff working“, whereby a train is only allowed onto the track if the driver has the single wooden staff conferring access to the line – in that video, Vicki is appropriately delighted at being handed the staff, which is likely the same one that’s been in use since the line opened in the 19th century! However, being a single line, if I travelled by rail, I’d need to go to St Ives and back again on the same line, but it’d be more interesting to do something different in each direction. For this reason, I got off on the main line a stop early, at Hayle, and caught a T2 bus to St Ives, to get the train back.
I had 20 minutes or so to wait in the centre of Hayle, which sits in the shadow of a great big viaduct carrying the main line. There was a nice little public garden under the viaduct, behind which was a rather spaceship-like branch of Asda! The bus to St Ives interestingly had a cluster of four seats around a table on the upper level.
St Ives was really lovely! It does have a reputation as a nice place so I was expecting it, but even given that it was pretty great – I enjoyed walking through the narrow streets past fun little shops, and along the harbourfront then up to the little St Nicholas’s Chapel, from which a view opened up down along the other side of the isthmus that I’d been walking along below, to the very photogenic Porthmeor Beach. In the middle of town, I stumbled into a crowd who, were watching a cèilidh band play and dance in the street: to my surprise, it turned out to be the Cambridge University Ceilidh Band out on a trip – I knew a few people who were in that a few years ago when I was a student!
After exploring the town a little, I bought some mussels, chips and mushy peas from an unusually posh fish-and-chip shop for lunch – mussels being an exception to my vegetarianism – and sat down outside the railway station to eat them. They were really nice: I know some people like their chips crispy and look down on anything that would cause that to be lost, but I’m a big chips-(cheese-)and-gravy or chips-(cheese-)and-curry-sauce fan, and in this case, chips-and-the-creamy-salty-sauce-that-the-mussels-came-in was very good.
I just about finished my meal in time to get onto the train that would, at last, take me along the St Ives branch line to St Erth. The short journey took me past yet more pretty beaches, and I was sat behind a Francophone couple, where the woman seemed French herself, but the man had an interesting combination of seemingly very fluent French but with a comically strong English accent. At St Erth, I changed onto a mainline train, which I rode back past Truro and all the way out of Cornwall, to Plymouth, there to change again to head towards Tavistock, where I’d be ending my day.
Previous visits
I came to this map area on a holiday in June 2016 with the Dearest Progenitors, where we stayed a few days in the village of Mousehole, just south of Penzance.
Mousehole was very pretty! From there, we did a few trips out, in this map area visiting Penzance and Lands’ End. I don’t have any particularly strong memories from the trip to write about I’m afraid!
After our time in Mousehole, we headed eastwards to spend a few days in Devon, which have been described on this blog before!
Visiting all the maps! 
One thought on “102: St Ives (Cornwall)”