In the UK a roadsign with a brown background indicates a location of particular tourist interest, be it historic, geographical or cultural. In truth the British roadsides are festooned with the things. They seem to be dished out willy-nilly to any site claiming some tenuous significance.
I have become wary of them. Many’s the time that I’ve been drawn in and ended up paying several quid to park the car and then several more quid to look at a big hole in the ground, which never quite lives up to the Grand Canyon I anticipate. Britain sure knows how to fleece a tourist.
This weekend was the first time I have ever encountered a site actually undersold by its signage. I was finally glad that I made the effort to stop and look at what was round the next corner.
Found in the South West extremity of England, Cornwall is a spectacular county. It’s like the whole of the rest of the country but concentrated into a hundred-mile-long package. Every geographical extreme found anywhere else in the kingdom can be found here in a an easily accessible format. The problem is there are so many things classed as “attractions” it can be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Sometimes looking at pretty scenery can be hard work. When you’ve seen one craggy granite bay with Atlantic rollers crashing into the stacks and whirlpools, you’ve seen them all. Every sun-dappled harbour with chocolate-box cottages is lovely in isolation, but when the menu is so heavy with them you can begin to suffer from scenic indigestion. So when I pulled up in the small but busy car park at Golitha Falls it was a mild sense of dread and foreboding.
I was encouraged a little by there being no obvious signs of anybody trying to take money from me, either in the car park or at the entrance to the site. There was signage which told us a bit about where we were headed; essentially a nature reserve home to a broad choice of mosses, mouses and mooses. Flora and fauna are a speciality of my wife’s, so at least she’d be entertained for a while, even if I wasn’t.
I was.
Golitha Falls happens to be the most staggeringly beautiful place I have visited this year. The signs as you enter can’t begin to let you in on what you’re about to find as you walk deeper into the woods. The woodland itself, protected by the National Trust, is pleasing to the senses enough, but when the geography is taken into account, the changes in elevation and the tricky, undulating pathways provide exercise for your soul as well as your soles.
If nature ain’t your thing there are the abandoned mine workings to gawp at, now totally reclaimed by the elements but still displaying clues as to their former life during the industrial revolution and beyond. The Wheal Victoria copper mine had several shafts here and the remains of wheel-pits and supporting infrastructure is dotted around the site. There’s evidence of later historic industry, too, including the aqueduct which used to transfer china clay slurry all the way from the local Parsons Park China Clay works all the way to the coast for transfer to waiting ships. I find all this stuff fascinating.
And then you reach the falls themselves. Taking their watery lifeblood from sources on the famous Bodmin Moor, what they lack in scale and power compared to certain American or Norwegian locations, they make up for in sheer straight-out-of-fairyland other-worldly beauty. We sat there, transfixed, breathing in thick, chewy, hyper-oxygenated air, marvelling at what we had found just three hundred yards from a main road, identified only by one of those poxy brown signs you see everywhere.
The point of this whole screed is that the we all know how the car and the fast roads it runs on has made us very good at going PAST places. Only on the little side roads do you find hidden gems, and even then you have to be careful not to spend ages in the quest for what turns out to be fools gold. Every now and again, though, you take a chance on a whim and are thankful to find yourself somewhere really special.
So what if I do take that next left?
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Rusty, that last paragraph paraphrases my life. Nice find and it looks very relaxing. Thanks for sharing.
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I can identify with that last paragraph because of the endless conundrum I experience(-d) on my eremit-travels: There’s only so much time. Do you go for quantity or quality? This is a real source of uneasiness, because you can’t do it right. I don’t know if anybody’s following that thought, but I for one have decided to focus on a few spots and to try to be there, also mentally, enjoying the moment. Works most of the time and I guess it’s in line with Chris’s message, too.
What I gather from your essays here, longrooffan, you have truly mastered the art of flowing with what shows up at the horizon. Nothing but respect for that!
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You are quite right. We should spend more time going TO places instead of past them.
A similar thing happened on a road that I travelled frequently on. Some seventy years ago, to travel from Napier to Taupo in NZ took several days and involved passing right by a spectacular waterfall. As the road has been improved, (travel time now1.5 hours or less), the falls were bypassed until about twenty years ago when someone had the idea of putting in a little spur road to a viewing site. Again, no charge or concession or tearooms or anything. Just a view from across a valley and the thunder of falling water.
I usually stop now but for ten years or so I raced past the little brown sign.
http://waterfalls.co.nz/waterfalls-by-region/north-island/242-new-zealand-waterfalls/north-island/central-plateau/waipunga-falls/206-waipunga-falls
http://www.tongarirorivermotel.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/images/misc-2009/waterfall-on-taupo-napier-road.jpg -
http://www.nijaeyegermany.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/city-6-Saint-Louis-du-Ha_Ha.jpg
Whether on longer road trips or short day trips, my wife and I usually try and make a couple whimsy stops. Sometimes the sign steers us right, sometimes the sign itself is the only thing of interest.
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