A Quiet Magic on The Coast

(News Today) - I hadn't thought a slow worm and a harvest mouse could be more exciting than a rhino and a giraffe, but then children find magic in the strangest places. Last year my son Jimmy Joe was lucky enough to come to Kenya with me on safari. He loved it, of course, but there was something about the disconnected distance of watching animals from a truck that meant that he hadn't really, really loved it.

A few months later, we went to Cornwall. It was a wet, green, early summer's afternoon, and the children and I joined a nature walk with reptile specialist Gary Zammit. We were exploring a very ordinary field, with the pounding presence of the sea in the distance and a strip of sand bordered by jet-black rocks. Gary had left some strategically placed pieces of corrugated iron in the long grass, which he invited Jimmy Joe to lift, to see what he could find underneath.

"Snails! Look! Lots and lots of snails!" he said, round-eyed and excited as his sister Dolly crouched down in the grass beside him to peer at the find. "A whole nest of snails, I think," she said sternly, as Gary told her they were hibernating.

The walk took us round the edge of the field, where Gary showed the children more animal activities under the tins. A slither of copper-coloured slow worms particularly delighted Jimmy Joe, but Dolly preferred the reptilian scuttle of a lizard into the bracken as the tin was lifted. Gary told us that tins are a good way to encourage pockets of wildlife, and that they're an old trick used by naturalists who want to examine the habits of animals such as toads, voles and shrews.

Gary pointed out a scuffed area of soil. "That's a badger latrine," he said confidently, "used by badgers for over 150 years. Badgers are creatures of habit, and like coming back to the same place again and again."

Jimmy Joe wrinkled his nose. He said he could smell garlic, which I assumed was the fresh green plant with little white flowers growing among the bluebells. Wrong, Gary told us. That was a three-cornered leek, which smells just like wild garlic. Later, he showed us his hand-reared heron, pink-tongued and cantankerous.

We were on holiday just above the village of Portreath, on Cornwall's north coast. I had had fantasies about staying in a romantic fisherman's cottage, with views out to sea. Unfortunately there must have been a run on fishermen's cottages, because I couldn't find one, so it was with some trepidation that I booked a holiday in a luxury log cabin at Gwel an Mor, owned and run by Hoseasons.

It had a sea view and several double rooms, and was large enough to accommodate my children and several of their friends. It was rather low on character, but had a comfort that was alluring after a chill afternoon on the beach.

In fact, after a wet afternoon with Gary, who works at Gwel an Mor, I was rather relieved not to be returning to a tumbledown cottage, however romantically pretty. Our cabin, which was part of a village of lodges above Portreath, was impeccably clean and brilliantly equipped with books and board games. An on-site indoor swimming pool also meant that the children were happy all the time, even in the pouring rain. There was also a little spa, to which I slunk off guiltily for a massage one afternoon.

The stretch of the coast from Portreath to the south has a quiet magic that's certainly not in evidence in the Babylon that is Polzeath, just a little way up the coast. We hired boards and wet suits at the Savage Surf shop, and when we all failed to catch a wave, drove a few miles to Godrevy, where the waves were easier. On the way home to Portreath we stopped at the ominously named Hell's Mouth Café, in business since the Thirties and an excellent place for coffee and superb chocolate brownies.

At the end of the week, we spent an afternoon at St Michael's Mount. Laden with legends and ghosts, it proved a surprisingly good place to take children, who loved all the fables and spooky stories, as well as the subtropical gardens dotted with colourful flowers and shrubs from Mexico, the Canaries, South Africa and beyond.

Afterwards, tide out, the children ran on the beach, before begging for ice creams as I folded them into the car to drive farther south to Land's End. The visitor centre at Land's End isn't really worth a visit, but there is something enduringly exciting about the austere landscape of this farthest toe of mainland England, where odd, imposing granite farmhouses rise from the windy fields, and a sense of eternity blankets the land. The children ran around, dodging gulls, clambering over rocks, while I steeled myself for the drive home and the seeping return of real life that accompanies the end of a holiday.

Getting there

Hoseasons (0844 847 1100; www.hoseasons.co.uk) offers a three-night weekend, or a four-night midweek break, in a VIP Tregea Lodge sleeping six, at Gwel an Mor from £395.

Source : kompas

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