In my last post I wrote about the first part of our holiday, now for the last bit. We are now back in Hastings, having returned a bit early – the weather was dodgy. We broke our journey overnight in Bournemouth. Can it be cool? Yes.
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| Impending storm – view from our house |
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| Evening view |
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| Our house from the coast path |
Plenty of cliff walks, but only a few classic coast path episodes with yellow gorse, blue sea and grey rocks. I like to take those pictures away in my memory. Sadly, Philosopher has a bad hip so couldn’t do many walks, and unlike our Brummie friends, I am a fair-weather walker – after a bit, one grey and misty cliff path looks much like another. Also, although our Hastings Channel sea is not like Cornwall, we do live in a seaside place and can look at it whenever we want. Oh there it is, outside my study window – looking blue and sparkly today.
This is the Cornwall I like – Carn Goose on a sunny afternoon:
We spent a day in Penzance, where Philosopher and I visited one of our favourite places, the Penlee Gallery, where there was an exhibition of the best things from their own collection. They have such wonderful paintings by Cornish artists, the Newlyn and St Ives groups. The atmosphere and the light captured in these paintings enhances the Cornish experience for me. Here are a few examples. Internet reproductions never quite capture the light properly….
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| Frank Bramley |
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| Henry Meynell Rheam |
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| Walter Langley |
Another day, in St Ives, we re-visited the Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden, which we discovered
last year. I put plenty of photos on that post, so here is just one –
the misty view of St Ives church from the garden.
We visited the gardens at Trengwainton. I am particularly fond of the spooky mossy trunks of the ancient magnolia trees:
Here are a few more classic Cornish views:
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| Cape Cornwall |
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| Near Zennor |
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| Walking down to Porthgwarra |
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| Looking across to Lands End from Sennen Beach |
Our last view of Cornwall for another year….. Marazion. The clouds are drifting away – typical, when we were on our way home.
Then back to Hastings via Bournemouth, to break up the long journey and visit an exhibition at the fabulous Russell Cotes Gallery It was sunny when we got there…..
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| Looking across to the Isle of Wight |
This time we stayed at The Green House, a profoundly cool award-winning ‘eco-hotel’ full of hipsters, with organic goose-down duvets, waiters in tight black jeans and a variety of artisan gins in the bar. I’d booked it after careful research because last time we stopped in Bournemouth we ended up in an old-style unreconstructed place full of blue-rinse oldies on full-board holidays. Battleaxe recommends the Green House. It is a pretty, nicely-restored Victorian Gothic house and is excellent value. The restaurant is good too, even though their vegetables were served dangerously close to raw. Perhaps our rickety teeth yearned for the over-cooked cabbage in the oldsters’ hotel….. We had a comfortable night and the breakfast was excellent.
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| The Green House |
The Russell Cotes Gallery is just totally fantastic and Battleaxe would urge everyone to visit it. I wrote plenty about it in my last post on Bournemouth. The old Victorian house is fabulous. Then the pictures… the rooms… the collections.. the loo…
This time they had an exhibition of twentieth-century art from their collection. We have a print of this one in our bathroom at home – another thing about this gallery, they have an excellent shop selling reproductions of their own paintings.
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| Spray – Harold Williamson |
The main collection specialises in Victorian pantings and Pre-Raphs. I say specialises but one of the joys of the Russell Cotes is that Mr and Mrs RC collected just about anything and everything. The place is absolutely crammed from top to bottom. Here is one of my favourite pictures:
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| Jezebel – Byam Shaw |
Got home to discover to my horror, that I had put on five pounds in weight. I knew the ‘pint of Tribute and a packet of crisps’ approach was bad, but that is very,very bad……
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