We settle down for a week in Polruan, Cornwall

We were lucky to be invited to share a cottage in Cornwall by a long time work friend of Gary.

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This cottage is in the idyllic village of Polruan on the deep water Fowey River in Cornwall. The views from the first floor lounge room windows over the river towards Fowey are very pleasant, especially as some of the days have been sunny and charming. 

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This village was a fishing and boat building port, now very much into tourism. 

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The one downside of this idyllic village is that as the houses are built on the side of the hill sloping down to the river, car parking is very problematic. The car park is a pay and display one on the top of a hill on a Second World War bomb site (thank you Herr Hitler) and ten minutes of hard walking up hill from the cottage.

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We have used Polruan as a base and visited other parts of Cornwall such as St Austell, Penzance, Lands’ End and St Ives.  They are all within easy reach of Polruan for a day out. For St ives we parked in a Park and Ride car park and caught the local train into St Ives station. The town was buzzing with lots of tourists, not all speaking English!

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Lands’ end was cold and windy as expected and everything closed up at 5pm, not very tourist friendly when it is still daylight until after 9pm.

Gary’s friend works as volunteer at a nearby preserved standard gauge steam railway, so we have also visited the Bodmin and Wenford railway. The weather on that day was the usual British summer conditions, overcast with intermittent showers and drizzle but not cold!

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Just across the river from Polruan and accessible by separate foot and car ferries is the better known town of Fowey.

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There are also some lovely villages found along the lanes on the way to other places in Cornwall.

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One such village is Lerryn on the upper reaches of the Fowey River. There is a sign in the car park warning that in very high tides the car park floods! Luckily it is a free car park.  Or the church at Lanteglos where author Daphne du Maurier married, she also wrote many of her novels while she lived in the Cornwall area.

We bid a sad farewell to Polruan and headed to the Isle of Wight, that is our next blog.