St Agnes JEMIMA

St Agnes is a pretty Cornish mining village, situated on the north coast of Cornwall. It’s a place that I love, with its narrow, winding main street, its sandy coves with crashing waves, and spectacular craggy coastal walks, but it’s the people that give this place its character.

Let’s start the tour at the top of the village; above a patchwork of tiny roofs on the old miners’ cottages and across the heathery moors, you see tall derelict redbrick chimneys rearing above old tin mines, instantly recognisable as the location for many windswept scenes in the television series “Poldark”. It’s funny how many American tourists spend time looking for the houses that also feature in the series; locals LOVE informing them that those houses are actually 150 miles away in Gloucestershire! As you walk down the high street from the village carpark (because the streets are too narrow for on-street parking), the mouth-watering savoury aroma of warm pasties drifts from the door of Denzil’s pasty shop. With the traditional Cornish name of Denzil Trebetherick, his appeal to both locals and tourists is universal, and you’ll never eat another pasty anywhere else in the world without thinking of Denzil, who still crimps every pasty by hand, and greets his customers with “Dydh da”, in his thick Cornish accent, meaning ‘Hello’. Actually, he could say anything at all, and we wouldn’t understand, and would just cheerfully respond “Morning!” The shop door is so low, that anyone tall has to duck to avoid the ancient stone lintel or spend the day nursing a monstrous headache and wondering if it’s actually possible to fracture your skull on the forehead. Then there’s the Old Post Office, a tiny building long ago vacated by the actual post office, but now home to St Agnes’ vibrant, if tiny, café, with seating for just 8 customers. It offers a good range of fair-trade coffees and healthy cakes, but key to its success is its much-envied high-speed broadband connection. Having already had to abandon their Range Rovers in the village carpark, the ‘second homers’ from London couldn’t manage without the one-shot skinny mocha or email access provided here!

Then there’s the veg shop, with rows of knobbly vegetables and fruits stacked in wooden crates, ready for you to fill your brown paper bags and weigh your purchases on old-fashioned scales, only for your overfilled paper bags to then split the minute you step outside of the shop. So, it’s wise to check behind the shop door, where, on the old, scrubbed pine kitchen table in the corner, lie a stack of homemade colourful canvas tote bags, made by the local “Old Bags” (as the elderly ladies call themselves) for locals and tourists to borrow and use for their shopping.

Twenty paces further on, nestling just below the gentle right-hand bend in the road, there’s the church, which is still the heart of the community. To appeal to a younger generation, the vicar has hung inviting twinkly strings of fairy lights to lead you to the sturdy arched door, past the noticeboard advertising all the different year-round community activities to which everyone is welcome, because this is a community that thrives IN SPITE of the second homers, and not because of them!

Opposite the church is the St Agnes bakery; there’s never less than 10 tourists in the mid-morning queue for the warm, crusty loaves, but the locals have been and gone before 9am, knowing well that the bakery sells out by midday and shuts up shop, leaving tourists confused, empty-handed and often hungry! If you’re up early enough, you’ll see some of the locals outside the bakery, a Denzil pasty tucked inside a copy of the local paper, under one arm, and an elderly Labrador waiting patiently at their feet while they chat with friends who have also lived their entire lives in St Agnes.

Opposite the church is the St Agnes bakery; there’s never less than 10 tourists in the midmorning queue for the warm, crusty loaves, but the locals have been and gone before 9am, knowing well that the bakery sells out by midday and shuts up shop, leaving tourists confused, empty-handed and often hungry! If you’re up early enough, you’ll see some of the locals outside the bakery, a Denzil pasty tucked inside a copy of the local paper, under one arm, and an elderly Labrador waiting patiently at their feet while they chat with friends who have also lived their entire lives in St Agnes.

And then, leading down towards the beach, is Stippy Stappy, a terrace of 6 tiny, crooked terrace stone cottages, originally home to miners and seamen. With front gardens gravelled over for easy maintenance and Farrow and Ball neutral décor inside, they are now second-home holiday cottages, often to Londoners who have snapped up the cottages in spite of having to park their Range Rovers in the car park at the top of the village, and actually WALK around the village.

Trevaunance Cove lies down at the bottom of St Agnes - a horseshoe-shaped sandy beach, with rockpools that teem with tiny crabs, seaweed, and discarded shells after every high tide. Here you’ll find the tourist families gathering, and that’s when the people-watching becomes really amusing - especially when people arrive without checking the tide-times, and are perplexed to find the tide is in, so they can’t actually sit on the beach!

Here you’ll find your average tourist family, usually consisting of Orienteer Dad, who feels the need to walk everywhere with his OS map, wearing unflattering shorts and the most ridiculous hat. He is usually followed by Harassed Mum who takes the sun cream too seriously, and two to four young children who are worthy enough to always choose ice lollies over creamy Cornish icecream! They’re probably staying at the local campsite and will have trudged to the beach along the well-worn rocky coastal path. Their favourite activity is rock-pooling, which Dad spoils by imparting his often-limited knowledge of sea-life, believing he is immersing his children fully into Cornish nature. However, the children have other ideas, forcing mussels apart, tugging barnacles off their rock and keeping the crabs flailing in a bucket for hours on end.

I love St Agnes, but like so much else, it has been changed by the pandemic. You can no longer buy fresh crab from the weathered old fisherman on the beach, who only deals in £5 notes; now you have to buy them from the fancy new deli that only opens May-September and takes card payment only.

But the St Agnes that I love will live on in my memory.