Newquay to Perranporth

15 September 2009 - Newquay to Perranporth

Distance - 13.9 miles

Weather - Sunny

We stayed at - The Perranporth Inn, 36 St Pirans Road, Perranporth, Cornwall, TR6 0BJ Cost - £70.00

I can't say I was all that sorry to leave Newquay and head off into the fresh air, peace and quiet. No disrespects to any young surf dudes that might read this blog. First thing we spotted along the coast path was a huer's hut. It's meant to date from the 14th century and was used by the man that raised a hue and cry if he observed any shoals of fish out in the sea. I wasn't really convinced by this. The other option is that it was used as a hermitage by a monk. It looked like nowadays it was used as a war memorial, as inside there were lots of poppy wreaths propped up against the walls.

We made a short circuit around Towan Head before walking across the surfer's paradise that is Fistral Beach, then carried on to walk around some suburbs, passing the Hotel California. Of course we had that song on our minds all day then! Oddly enough the hotel looked exactly how I'd always imagined the Hotel California to look like! We decided against checking into it! The walk had to do a detour at this point to take us round the tidal inlet known as The Gannel. This was another place where at high tide you needed a ferry to take you across and so I had already factored into today's plans that we might need to walk up to Trevemper in order to get round it. Luckily for us though, the tide had sufficiently receded for us to cross over using the low tide footbridge, which chopped a few miles off of our day.

After we had safely crossed, we walked on until we discovered a cafe by a car park in the middle of some dunes. We stopped there and had a cream tea - well it would be rude not to! Whilst we were there we witnessed a sand storm and later when we reached the nearby car park all the cars were covered with a layer of sand!

The path then meandered through these sand dunes, but it was often quite difficult to see whether or not it was the footpath we were following. At one point we emerged at the top of a great big dune and just ran/slid down it in a most childlike fashion. It was great!

After crossing a footbridge over a tidal river near Holywell, we entered the Penhale Army Training Centre. Throughout our walk through this facility, I was convinced I'd see an infrared dot on my chest near my heart from the automatic weapon of an unseen sniper! Soon after though we were walking on the sandy Perran Beach and were making our way into Perranporth.