Base Camp Journal - Another Visit to Cornwall
We were exceptionally lucky to have nice weather again during this year’s stay at Carnon Downs. It remains our favourite site, and I think I’ve mentioned before that it could be likened to an immaculately-kept garden of an estate. There’s an absence of places to go drinking in the evenings, though, with the on-site bar closing at 21:00, and the Beefeater, just across the roundabout, not realy having the atmosphere of somewhere people go to socialise. The nearest actual pub is three miles away.
We made another trip into Truro, because my phone needed fixing. I woke to find it half-submerged in our dog’s water bowl, and the screen quite damaged. It turned out that drying the phone in the sun wasn’t the smartest idea, as the condensation spread to the graphics board. Obviously, I was upset, because I don’t consider even the cheapest of smartphones disposable. Thankfully it was fixable within a couple of hours.
After that was sorted, it was back to Perranporth, as that’s my favourite beach, and it was one of those rare days when it wasn’t windy along the north coast. The water was warm enough also.
PK Porthcurno (Museum of Global Communications)
Robby wanted to see the Minack Theatre, and I wanted to look around the PK Porthcurno Museum of Global Communications. Both are within 1km of each other, so we spent most that afternoon at Porthcurno.
Around the coast of Cornwall, there are several landing stations for Trans-Atlantic fibre-optic cables, which carry Internet traffic between Britain and several other countries. Isn’t it amazing that a router in Cornwall is continuously communicating almost directly with another router on the other side of the Atlantic?
PK Porthcurno was probably the first cable landing station, but it was an exchange specifically (and exclusively, it would seem) for telegraph communications, with one cable being laid in pretty much a straight line, across the Atlantic, to a point 1,000km south of Newfoundland. That was laid sometime in the early 1860s.
Most the exhibits in the museum’s main building are telegraph machines from the 19th and early-20th century, and there are a few sections of the old cables - they’re quite heavy, because they were multi-core, shielded with strands of thick wire, and the whole assembly was sealed with tar. There are a few other displays for children to learn the basics of electrical circuits and signalling.
The bunker next to the main building houses telegraph equipment and ancillary kit that were in service during World War II, some more educational hands-on displays to demonstrate the basics of fibre-optic communications (mainly glass tubes and laser diodes), and a collection of radio transcievers. The transcievers aren’t too dissimilar to the CLANSMAN kit I used in a previous life.
While there’s nothing at PK Porthcurno that’s directly relevant to Internet communications, one can learn a surprising amount about its inner workings at the museum and the exhibits in the bunker. After all, the first known example of remote access from a teletype terminal to a computer, over the telephone network, was demonstrated (in the United States) in 1940. Though it hardly gets a mention in textbooks, it had as much to do with the Internet’s history as ARPANET, especially given the latter was in operation about five years before the early version of TCP/IP, and given it was NSFNET, not ARPANET, that became the ‘backbone’ of the Internet.
So, if someone asked me how old the Internet is, I’d say the the Internet is a complex stack of technologies and communication protocols that were developed incrementally over the course of ~120 years.
Today’s smartphones and laptops encode emails as electrical pulses representing 1s and 0s, just as operators did with telegrams 120 years ago. The difference is that emails are wrapped in several layers of messages that tell networking equipment and servers how to relay the payload to the right destination. And, get this: The stream of 1s and 0s sent over the Internet is actually intelligible to humans, with some knowledge of binary-to-hex-to-decimal arithmetic and the positioning of each TCP/IP segment along the bytestream.
What I’m getting at, I think, is the Internet is fundamentally about electronic circuits, and considerably less about data or the Web. The TCP/IP and Ethernet datagrams we read about in textbooks are descriptions of the sequences of electrical pulses that cause electronic circuits to do specific things.
How could anyone not find all this fascinating?
Minack Theatre
It was a short walk from the museum, up a relatively steep hill, to reach the Minack Theatre. This is an open air theatre that was carved out of the rock face during the winter between 1931 and 1932. The first play there, if I remember correctly, was Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The entrance fee was about £20 for both of us, but it was worth it because the theatre is also a garden with a large variety of rare and exotic plants that, I’m guessing, were imported from warmer parts of the world - it’s something we find a lot around Cornwall, even at Carnon Downs. A theatre company was doing a sound check, and, while enjoying the nice weather, we saw fragments of whatever play they were preparing for. All that could be seen behind the stage was the vast expanse of blue sea.
Padstow
The water around Padstow is clear, and the sand is bright and clean, which is unusual for a harbour town. I saw many little fish in the harbour itself, which Roby told me were sand eels, that are commonly used as fish bait. Lobsters are also bred in this area, and are sold in a nearby restaurant on the other side of the estuary.
Rick Stein’s name is everywhere around Padstow, and I think that’s what draws a large percentage of the tourists to that place. He owns the chippy, a restaurant, an hotel and a cafe in the side streets.
I wasn’t that enthusiastic about the chippy myself, because chips are almost never as nice in restaurants and gentrified places as they are in the old-fashioned chippy that uses a bog standard fryer and wraps things in paper.
I’ve read reviews of Rick Stein’s place, and saw comments about the regular fish and chips costing £17, which does seem extortionate. According to the menu itself, though, the chips are just over £5, and there’s enough fish for two people - the price is actually comparable to similar places around Padstow.
But I was more interested in the shops that sell locally-produced gin that’s not easy to come by elsewhere. I bought myself Tarquin’s (still my favourite brand) Black Cherry gin, which had only been distilled within the last year, and Robby loves the whisky I bought him at the Rock Gin shop.
St. Michael’s Mount
The Mount is a small island roughly 200 metres from the village of Marazion, near Penzance. It could bee seen from the distance, as we approached the village and parked about 1km from it. To get onto the island, one can walk along a raised causeway when the tide is out, or by a vey short boat ride. Hypothetically one could also swim there, as the water really isn’t that deep, and the current wasn’t strong.
It is quite a walk from where we parked, and making our way along the beach wasn’t such a good idea because the ‘sand’ is like gravel. As it happened, Robby and I made it there on foot, ten minutes before the tide came in and the causeway was submerged.
The first thing we did was order a cream tea at the cafe. Robby tells me there’s a tradition of putting cream on scones before the jam, or the other way round, depending on whether one is in Cornwall or Devon. I reckon whichever is harder should go on the scone first.
St. Michael’s Mount has a connection to the very similar island, on the coast of Brittany, called ‘Mont St. Michel’, with a Benedictine community relocating from there to Cornwall sometime in the past. There’s nothing on the island today that indicates a religious community was there - I’ve only known a few religious orders that resided in castles, and the ‘castle’ on St. Michael’s Mount is more like a manor house.
The island has a few residents living in a short row of stone cottages, and they have their own boats moored in the small harbour.
The grounds are beautiful, with a large expanse of grass that looks a bit like a gold course. The garden itself is past the far side of the field, along a winding path leading upwards to the rear of the ‘castle’, and it has its own collection of exotic plants that don’t seem native to Britain.