Carn Brea - Cornwall

Its been such a busy few days with Easter in the middle, that I haven't had a chance to write up about the fun we had doing the Carn Brea Driving Trail in Cornwall when we were down there a few weeks ago.

Carn Brea itself was amazing - the views were awesome and the restaurant sited in the castle up there was incredible! But I am getting ahead of myself.....

The mission we were on was to stop another of Dr Madden-Badd's madcap ideas. Inspired by the legend of the giant Bolster, who could bridge the 6 mile gap between Carn Brea and St Agnes Beacon in stride, he has invented a device with similar capabilities. It uses a strong force field installed in the soles of a pair of hiking boots and a power unit that can be carried in a back pack. With it he can escape from the direst trap and we needed to find the secret code to disable his device!

We started the Trail at Gwennap Pit by the village of St Day. This was an absolutely amazing place and totally unexpected. We thought it would be just to do with tin or silver mining, but in actual fact it was (and I am now quoting from the Trail) a favoured venue of the founder of Methodism - John Wesley. He preached there in this amphitheatre which was created by mining subsidence. It really is worth seeing as I had no idea there was anything like it around. One of the two clues there was easy and the other a little harder to find which gave us a flavour of the type of Trail we were on!

As this is a driving Trail, we had to get back into the car and head off to Carn Brea, to find three clues.... none of which were obvious, but it was a great place to wander about and get a sense of history! It was also incredibly windy up there!

After that we were directed to a disused copper mine where we spent ages looking for the picture clue as we had a photograph as a reference point and had to get ourselves to that place using the photo and once in position, we would see the clue..... finding the position was tough, but we managed it in the end and enjoyed the search.

Off then to a tiny little park next to a pub (!) but we weren't ready to stop for refreshments just yet.... the park had a wonderful set of information boards and we discovered the Cornish word for a toad (cronek) as well as another name for otter
droppings (spraint) - you see, they really are educational as well as fun!!

Clue 13 in the park was one of those that you really have to use your brain..... it said, and I quote, "list the 6 different 4 letter words found below this picture. Applying the values A-1, B-2, C-3..... Y-25, Z-26 calculate which word gets the highest score!! As we aren't allowed to submit our answer, I am ashamed to say I haven't yet worked out the answer BUT, really liked the clue and may well use it on one of our new Herefordshire or Worcestershire Trails.

Back in the car to Tehidy Country Park where we had a walk around a lake and picked up more answers to clues and sat for a bit to watch the wildlife! Finally, we made it Hells Mouth and then onto Gwithian - the whole thing took nearly 3 hours and we were certainly ready for some refreshments by then. Gwithian didn't really appeal, so we headed off to St Ives for a Cornish Pasty and sit by the harbour - a fitting end to a really lovely morning's entertainment!