St Ives 7 miles NE of Penzance on the A3074 H Tate St Ives Gallery H Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden H Leach Gallery B St Ives Museum A Knill Steeple I St Ives Festival E Trewyn Subtropical Gardens D Carbis Bay This lovely old fishing town with its maze of narrow streets and picturesque harbour, has been showered with various awards in the past few years.
It won the Gold Award in the international Entente Florale, has made off with more Britain in Bloom top prizes than any other UK town, and a recent University of Surrey survey, using a complex formula to decide which were the best beach destinations globally, placed St Ives at the top of its UK list, and fourth in the world. An organisation called The Most Beautiful Bays in the World has declared St Ives Bay one of its select few, on a par with Caribbean,
Asian and American beauty spots. Another two of St Ives’ five sandy beaches have also qualified for a Blue Flag award. And in 2010 the town received the Coast Award as Best Family Holiday Destination. Culturally, the town is famous worldwide as an artists’ colony. They were drawn here by the special quality of the light – ultra-violet radiation is greater here than anywhere else in the country. JMW Turner was the first major artist to arrive, in 1811, to be followed in later decades by Whistler, Sickert, McNeill, Munnings,
Ben Nicholson, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and the potter Bernard Leach. Art still dominates and, along with the numerous private galleries, there is the Tate St Ives Gallery where the work of 20th-century painters and sculptors is permanently on display in a rather austere three-storey building backing directly into the cliff face.
Opened in 1993, the gallery offers a unique introduction to contemporary and modern art, and many works can be viewed in the surroundings that inspired them. The Tate also manages the Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden and Museum at Trewyn Studio where she both lived and worked until her tragic death in a fire in 1975. Sculptures in bronze, stone and wood are on display in the museum and garden, along with paintings, drawings and archive material. Many of her other works are exhibited in the Tate St Ives Gallery; still more are dotted around the town. The famous potter, Bernard Leach, is celebrated at the Leach Gallery housed in his former studio at Higher Stennack, about three-quarters of a mile west of the town centre. The original workshops Leach used are still in place, and there’s also an exhibition room, a gallery of contemporary work, and a shop.
A new purpose-built studio houses a number of resident ‘start-up’ potters and student potters who make the new range of high-fired Leach tableware designed by Lead Potter Jack Doherty. The original settlement at St Ives takes its name from the 6th-century missionary St Ia, who is said to have landed here from Ireland on an ivy leaf. The 15th-century parish church bears her name along with those of the two fishermen Apostles, St Peter and St Andrew. One of the most important pilchard fishing centres in Cornwall until the early 20th century,
St Ives holds a record dating back to 1868 for the greatest number of fish caught in a single seine net. Known locally as The Island, St Ives Head is home to a Huer’s Hut, from where a lookout would scan the sea looking for shoals of pilchards. A local speciality, heavy or hevva cake, was traditionally made for the seiners on their return from fishing. As well as providing shelter for the fishing fleet, the harbour was also developed for exporting locally mined ores and minerals. The town’s two industries led the labyrinthine narrow streets to become divided into two communities:
‘Downalong’ where the fishing families lived and ‘Upalong’, the home of the mining families. Housed in a building that once belonged to a mine, St Ives Museum displays a range of artefacts chronicling the natural, industrial and maritime history of the area. There is also a display dedicated to John Knill, mayor of the town in the 18th century. A customs officer by profession, he was also rumoured to be an Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden energetic smuggler. Certainly one of the town’s most memorable citizens, he built the Knill Steeple monument to the south of the town to be his mausoleum, but it also served to guide ships carrying contraband safely to the shore.
Knill left a bequest to the town so that every five years, a ceremony would be held at the Steeple when 10 girls and two widows would first sing the 100th Psalm and then dance around the monument for 15 minutes to the tune of a fiddler. For performing this strange ceremony the participants received 10 shillings (50p).
The custom is still maintained - the next will take place on 25 July 2011. A more conventional celebration is the St Ives Festival in September each year which brings together musicians, artists and writers of the highest calibre from all over the country, and beyond. If you feel the need to escape the busy streets, seek out Trewyn Subtropical Gardens, just off the High Street. Wooden sculptures of musicians stand on lawns surrounded by banana trees and other exotic flora. It is not only artists who have been inspired by the beautiful surroundings of St Ives: Virginia Woolf recaptures the happy mood of her childhood holidays here in her novel To the Lighthouse; and Rosamunde Pilcher, famous for her books set in Cornwall, was born near the town in 1924.
Just to the southeast of the town, easy to reach on foot and a great favourite with families, lies the sheltered beach of Carbis Bay where various water sports are also available. To the west of St Ives is a wonderful and remote coastline of coves, cliffs and headland that provides a wealth of wildlife and archaeological interest. Following the network of footpaths from St Ives to Pendeen, walkers can discover small wooded valleys, rich bogs, old industrial remains and prehistoric features such as the cliff castles at Gurnard’s Head and Bosigran. HAYLE 7½ miles NE of Penzance on the B3301 E Paradise Park Established in the 18th century as an industrial village, Hayle was also a seaport with a harbour in the natural shelter of the Hayle estuary.
It was here, in the early 1800s, that the Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick built an early version of the steam locomotive. A short time later, one of the first railways in the world was constructed here to carry tin and copper from Redruth down to the port. With its industrial past, Hayle is not a place naturally associated with cosmetics, but it was Hayle-born Florence Nightingale Graham who set up her own beauty parlour on New York’s Fifth Avenue under the name Elizabeth Arden. The Hayle estuary and sands around the town are an ornithologist’s delight. Some of the world’s rarest and most beautiful birds can be seen at Paradise Park (see panel on page 21),
a leading conservation zoo located on the southern outskirts of the town. As well as providing a sanctuary for tropical birds and exotic animals, the park also has a huge indoor play centre and a special toddlers area. Across the estuary is Lelant, a thriving seaport in the Middle Ages that suffered a decline as the estuary silted up. Now a popular holiday village with a golf course, Lelant is particularly loved by bird-watchers, who come to see the wide variety of wildfowl and waders on the mud and salt flats. Lelant was the birthplace of Rosamunde Pilcher who celebrated her native county in enormously popular novels, including The Shell Seekers.