Polruan & Fowey

 Dear Gentle Readers

First a gripe. ATMs are few and far between here in Cornwall. Yesterday I went to one next to Aldi and it had no cash. An ATM with no cash? How useless can you get? Today I went to another one about 10 minutes drive away to find...the keypad did not work when I tried to enter my PIN, only some of the keys were working, so that was a total failure. I finally found one that had both: cash; and the PIN pad worked at today's destination in Fowey. I have never encountered these problems in Australia. End gripe.

Today we ventured down to this coastal village called Polruan. This is the harbour taken from the car park. On the left you can see the town of Fowey. I'll show you a better pic of that next. We had to walk down steep and narrow streets to reach the harbour.

This is Fowey. Both towns are separated by the river and there is no bridge. The only way across is by ferry or car ferry. Not wanting to drive in the very narrow Fowey streets, we took the passenger ferry.

This is our ferry. It takes 26 people and costs £3.50 pp for the trip across. It only takes 5 minutes to make the crossing. A lucrative job indeed. They even charge 50p for dogs, which there were a lot of. Seems every man and his dog was out and about, some with two or more and I even saw one being carted around in a special backpack!

This is Polruan from Fowey, also very picturesque.

This is a typical Fowey street. Like all ancient towns, the streets are very narrow. This building is wider at the top than at ground level. This was done to avoid extra taxes - you were only taxed on what land the building covered at ground level! In some towns I've visited, the streets are so narrow and the buildings so much wider at the top, they almost touch each other.

When a van parks for deliveries, there's not much room for other cars to pass as you can see in this picture.

Parking spaces are miniscule. How this guy managed to get his car in this space is beyond me. They must be parking wizards!

Some houses have private beaches, reached by very steep and precarious stairs.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert came ashore at Fowey in 1846. There is an Albert Quay there now, no doubt named after Prince Albert.

These sculptured lawns and hedges are at the bottom of Polruan near the harbour entrance. No doubt this is the upper class level of the town.

This old structure was at the harbour mouth, no doubt a medieval toll collection point for ships entering the harbour.

And if you have thousands of pounds to spare a night, you can stay at the Harbour Hotel, with views to die for and even a private garden above the foreshore.

After this we navigated the very narrow Cornwall lanes back to our lodgings at the Creamery.