| Weather: Cloudy and cool |
| Distance covered today: 13.5km ( 8.3 mi) |
| Last night's B&B: Rosevidney Barton (£35) |
| % Complete: 2.7% |
| GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 3 |
The difference between quaint and prosperous coastal Cornwall and the rural interior is already very real. Right at the moment I am sitting in a pub in a village a mile or two from my B&B, where there is at present no-one other than my hostess and I, and she doesn’t seem surprised. She told me rather matter-of-factly that the first to close was the petrol station, then the post office, then the shop and now she is trying to sell the pub, but there are no buyers.
Of course, we know all this, but today has been an exercise in experiencing in practice the things I knew in theory. Just a few miles from the coast, the new reality of Cornwall is inescapable, and it is poverty through change.
I saw something of this yesterday as I trudged between Newlyn and Penzance. I wanted some sugar-free mints and some sugar substitute for my tea. I thought I might find them in a Lidl store I passed, a little out of the way of the tourist trade. Silly me! I had never been in a Lidl store before, let alone one in Cornwall. As I negotiated the aisles, I had trouble even recognising the brands! Of course I couldn’t find what I wanted. People who shop here don’t watch their diets.
On the way out, I had to go through the tills even though I didn’t want to buy anything. I watched the locals checking out. A couple of them didn’t have enough cash to settle and had to surrender some items. No embarrassment, no negative reaction at all from the cashier or anyone else in the queue. Just an everyday experience. Then, literally one or two hundred yards up the road in a more fashionable part of the town, I came upon a myriad of boutiques selling quaint items and objets d’art for ludicrous prices.
Of course the cataclysm facing the rural communities of England is well documented and is readily evident beyond the rural communities of the Home Counties. But somehow, it seems to me more starkly etched here in Cornwall. For what it is worth, I think it is because the incursion of the well-off here has had the opposite of the trickle-down effect. Everyone knows that it has played havoc with property prices, but there is another more subtle effect. They are perfectly entitled to do so, but as the wealthy buy what they need, so the market responds. The laws of demand and supply operate as usual and all the luxuries are available, satisfying the market, but the process drives prices, not just of property but of everyday commodities, inexorably upwards. In the event, it creates a two tier market, much as exists in most of Africa and the third world. The clientele of Lidl are evidence of the underclass.
The young here can’t afford to buy property and anyway they are lured away by the bright lights. Their place is taken by people escaping the city. They have no tradition here, nor, in many cases, much stability. But they are used to competing. The locals are pushed even harder. In the pub tonight, I quietly asked my hostess and she said that there was only a couple of Cornishman out of every 10 patrons. The locals can’t afford to drink in the pub, she said. If the traditional community is not moribund; it is in deep trouble!
Not that the authorities haven’t noticed! There has been this big effort to stimulate business in Cornwall and I came upon evidence of this in the village of Leedstown. At the local village hall, I found a sign advising that Leedstown is the location of an experiment in super-fast broadband up to 40MBPS, something we can only dream about in Surrey, where my broadband crawls along at 5 or 6 MBPS. I happened to stop for coffee at the local pub and I asked the publican whether anyone was interested. She told me most people had no idea what they would do with it, and surely it was more than one needed for movies. I said that I thought it was aimed at business innovation rather than entertainment and she looked at me a little patronisingly and asked me whether I wanted to break my habit of not drinking at lunch-time! A case of supply-push, rather than demand-pull, I fear. If anyone takes up the offer, they will doubtless come from elsewhere and they may well make a fortune but I doubt that it will trickle down here.
There are other signs of economic activity. While I was there in the lunch-time pub, I noticed that in the lounge-bar there was a meeting going on with a fellow presenting to an audience. I snuck in and found that he was a representative of Natural England (a UK government quango) presenting a PowerPoint presentation to a bunch of farmers on some extremely technical stuff about manure. The whole thing was very professional. I have never before seen farmers engrossed by a business slide-show. Somehow, I hadn’t associated PowerPoint with rural Cornwall. I thought I recognised Brian Aldridge from Ambridge in the audience, but I couldn’t be certain. After all, I only know his voice….
And tonight, I met a farmer/businessman who told me he grows industrial amounts of courgettes that he sells to Sainsbury’s and Tesco’s, and he has even exported his surplus to Italy. He grows much else besides, and has a highly sophisticated packaging and marketing operation. I heard on Radio 4 this morning that agricultural land prices have tripled in the last two years. There are others in the community who appear to be doing almost as well.
Clearly there are winners as well as losers in Cornwall.
(Tomorrow is a rest day, so you will be relieved to hear; no post!)
Off the beaten track, little evidence of prosperity.
Superfast broadband for Leedstown!
How to store manure!!
A lovely winding road through rural Cornwall
A beautiful example of Greater Stitchwort (check me out!!!)
St Erth. I discovered St. Erth derived its name from St Erc, an early Catholic from Ireland who came here to convert the heathen in the dark ages. So much for earthy maidens, then.....
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