The Pirate Restaurant of Penzance (England, Day 2)

Today we woke up to a full English breakfast, which I’ll have photos of tomorrow because tomorrow we will take a picture before digging in. After that we set off on a whirlwind journey, covering the Minack Theater, Land’s End, St. Ives, Lizard Point, and Penzance.

The Minack Theater is an open-air theater that is built into the side of a freakin’ cliff. 

View from adjacent to the theater. Yes, it’s a long way down.

Guardrails for the actors’ safety had to be added a few years after they opened in 1931, because performing on the edge of a cliff is probably terrifying. The whole theater was built—as in, like, cleared and granite carved and moved—by one woman (Rowena Cade) and her gardener Billy Rawlings and his friend Charles Thomas Angove.

Cade ran the theater from 1931 until her death in 1983. During the hiatus caused by World War II, she crawled under the barbed wire (set up by the army to defend the coast) with her mower to cut the grass. Now THAT’S dedication.

 

Gratuitous theater porn for Diana.

We moved on to Land’s End, the extreme southwestward point in Great Britain. Land’s End to John o’ Groats, the acknowledged northeasternmost point of Scotland, is the traversal of the whole island. A ton of people take the roughly thousand-mile (838 by road, 1200 off-road) journey every year. It’s like the Amazing Race meets Top Gear and a pilgrimage all at once. People have done this journey by automobile, wheelchair, on foot wearing nothing but the clothes on their backs, on foot wearing nothing but boots… you name it, it’s been done.

End of the land at Land’s End, and requisite picture of the famous signpost. They’d put your homeplace and the distance in the sign if you posed for an official photo, but we decided to forgo that cost.

 

Two excellent signs. We COULD see  the Scillies islands. Gratuitous pun for Theo.

From there, we went to St. Ives for lunch. The streets were very narrow and confusing—the English seem to have a thing for one-lane roads. We didn’t meet anyone with an exorbitant amount of wives or sacks full of cats and their kits, but it was very nice all the same.

The beach at St. Ives—it was overcast and only in the low 60s F, but people were surfing and in their bathing suits. I guess the English are determined to holiday no matter what the weather.

In St. Ives, I had my first Cornish pasty! It was full of steak and squash and onion, and I gobbled it up before I got a picture, so I have a fun fact about Cornish pasties from Land’s End instead:

 

Heathcliff, this information may address any concerns you have about ingesting chemicals.

We went horseback riding in Mullion, on a “beach hack”—meaning we took our horses along the water. My horse, Nancy, was scared of the water, but I did get to go trotting for a bit, which made up for it. I always forget how much I love horseback riding! I didn’t take any pictures on the hack, but it was on Polurrian Bay, which you can find on googlemaps.

Lizard Point is the southernmost part of mainland Great Britain. The lighthouse and visitor’s center were closed when we got there, but I walked up to the latter and was rewarded with my favorite sign ever.

Not so secret anymore, eh?

Luckily, I made us take a walk down a wooded path, and since I took the “avoid stairs” route (my family went “via stairs”), I got a nice picture of Lizard Point looking very lizard-y.

I was going to make a guide, but my trackpad is being a massive pain. You’ll have to use your imagination a bit harder if you can't see it.

We’re guessing this is some kind of boat ramp. Other guesses included “bridge to nowhere” and “highway to the danger zone.”

We were going to have dinner somewhere fairly normal, but my dad really wanted to go to Penzance and eat “somewhere pirate-y,” which was exactly what we did. Branwell’s Mill Meadery was an excellent choice.

Tune in tomorrow for St. Michael’s Mount, Falmouth, Pendennis Castle, Mevagissey, and Eden Project!