Saint Michael's Mount...

In the months of the start of the pandemic, we stayed 4 days at the fabulous le Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy which made us decide to do the same at its English counterpart, the tidal island St Michael's Mount in Cornwall, 330km away to the north-west. Given that distance, it may be surprising to consider that the two were religiously combined until war and church ructions split them up. Both share "the same tidal island characteristics and a similar conical shape, though Mont-Saint-Michel is much taller" according to Wikipedia.

St Michael's Mount at hightide, showing the flooded causeway, the castle atop the Mount and the village below. The tiny harbour is on the right. [4433]

Mid-tide shows the partially flooded granite causeway. [4447]

The unpronouceable Cornish name for St Michael's Mount means "hoar rock in woodland" which makes you think that it wasn't always a tidal island, but nowadays, at high tides, you need a boat to get to it, and at low tides, there is a granite causeway allowing access on foot. The tides here are around 4m, so it was fascinating to watch how the water rushed in and out every day, alternately flooding and drying the causeway.

The Mount illuminated in purple for a special National Trust event. The castle is normally only illuminated on Saturday nights, in an amber colour. For the coronation, it was red, white and blue, of course! [4463]

Visitors monitor the tides and visit the Mount en masse when they can use the dry causeway. [4519]

Beached boats in the Mount's tiny harbour. [4556]

View from the village to the castle on St Michael's Mount. [4559]

The older section of St Michael's Mount village cemetery. [4573]

We speculated on the presence and absence of the flag atop the castle, that it may signify whether the St Aubyn's were at home. [4577]

The Mount was a monastery from the 8th century, and the oldest current buildings, including the castle on top, are dated in the 1100's. In about 1600AD, the church abandoned the Mount which reverted to the Crown in about 1640 it was sold to the St Aubyn family who have lived here ever since! In 1954, the family gifted the Mount to the National Trust as well as funding its ongoing maintenance. The St Aubyn's still live in private quarters in the castle, but the bulk of the island is available for public visitation, so we did!

The Great Hall of the castle is named Chevy Chase, a term used in medieval times to describe the horseback raids made into disputed borderlands against the French. [4626]

A view of the Mount's gardens as seen from high on the parapets of the castle. [4637]

Inside the chapel of the castle. Sadly, the bells are now electronic. [4660]

Made from champagne corks by a family butler, a quite accurate model of the castle. [4670]

Castle battlements: that flag is not the Scottish Saltire, so not sure what it repesents. [4674]

Archaelogists in the castle's grounds looking for evidence of ancient civilisations. [4687]

In the castle garden. [4695]

Visitors boarding the boat in the Mount's harbour back to Marazion. [4704]

Directly opposite St Michael's Mount is the "ancient market village" of Marazion. We got there by a fast Great Western Railway (GWR) train from London Paddington to Penzance (no pirates in sight), a 500km journey which takes over 5 hours, an express to Plymouth, then stopping everywhere. Marazion is only 3km from Penzance. The scenery was fascinating, and both train journeys were very comfortable with trolley service for catering, and staff who went out of their way to be helpful. Our seats had power outlets and free WiFi, and indeed, our London Musings blog was finalised and published from the train. GWR offered compensation to passengers on the return journey because the arrival at Paddington was 16 minutes late! Imagine that level of customer service in Australia!

The GWR express to Paddington, awaiting us at Penzance station. [4820]

Marazion is a classic Cornish coastal town sharing the coast of Mount's Bay with the much bigger city of Penzance. At low tide, the water disappears from view leaving boats in harbours high and dry. In the village the streets are narrow and twisty (but the 20mph posted speed limit is obviously only for tourists) and the houses and shops are old and quaint and picturesque. Marazion's history is a little vague and maybe the subject of some mythology. The name implies a marketplace and Jewish origins. Evidence of ancient tin mining exists, but the town was not listed in the "great survey of much of England, the Domesday Book of 1088, and it was only chartered in the 1600's.

The boats are running but the causeway is only just flooded and many people are happy to get their feet wet. [4645]

The 1883 Marazion Institute, one of the town's notable civic buildings, with a general store next door. [4456]

Marazion's Town Hall - the clock can be seen and heard from Mount's Bay. [4506]

Traffic in Marazion, and the Chapel Rock Cafe at which we enjoyed Cornish Pasties. [4525]

The Cutty Sark is a popular restaurant, attached to a pub, in Marazion. [4723]

The state of the tide determines where the boats load and unload Mount visitors. This is the "mid-tide" loading point. [4727]

The Morazion cemetery. The leaning gravestones mostly date in the mid 1800's. [4734]

Colorful decoration in a tiny front yard of a house in Marazion. [4738]

The Kings Arms hotel in Marazion was the venue of one of our dinners. [4777]

Someone's folly maybe, a castle on a point of private land in Mount's Bay. [4783]

Union Jacks in Marazion's main street celebrate King Charles' recent coronation. [4789]

A painted rock, a modest celebration of the Coronation of King Charles III. [4798]

The Marazion town well, in use until 1870 when town water arrived. [4799]

We stayed three nights in the Godolphin hotel, easily the best located in Marazion, being closest to the Mount. The staff here were exceptional and, more than anything else, contributed to us having a most enjoyable time. The weather was equally exceptional: cold mornings were followed by warm and windless sunny days which tempted many of the rejoicing Brits to take to the high tide waters of Mount's Bay. We were tempted too, but the water itself was only 11C which is particularly character building during immersion! Also at high tide, trailer-sailer yachts take to the bay as well as kayakers, stand-up paddle-boarders etc.

Our hotel, the Godolphin, is in the peak position for viewing St Michael's Mount. [4484]

The Godolphin hotel from the beach. Craby's is the open air beer-garden, and Shuuters restaurant is upstairs. [4762]

After a most pleasant time in Marazion and Saint Michael's Mount, we taxied back to Penzance for our return to London on the GWR express train. Time allowed a brief walk around Penzance's busy High Street shopping strip.

The high street of Penzance, with Lloyd's Bank and dome on the left. [4818]

As seen from the speeding GWR train, the sprawl of housing that makes up Plymouth, the city from which Captain James Cook set out. [0427]

Musings in London...

Gloomy walkway to a pub under railway overpass near London Tower Station. [4086]

The lead-in to our Arctic expeditions had us flying from Sydney to London. After researching, we avoided Qantas (too expensive!) and opted for British Airways on the basis of only one aircraft for the entire journey so, even if late out of Sydney, we couldn't possibly miss our connection in Singapore. BA16 left Sydney a few minutes early, the stopover in Singapore was maybe less than an hour, and we arrived at Heathrow early. Nothing could be faulted about this flight in a new Boeing 787. The crew were attentive, service was excellent, but we have to say that the new seat pods in Business Class were cramped compared to our memory of older 'planes, and the floor-plan was weird. First-world complaints from a trouble-free and comfortable flight! The arrival at Heathrow was similarly smooth with no queues and no delays. Immigration through an automatic machine, baggage out quickly, nothing to declare at customs, and no queue for taxis. The first human we had contact with after deboarding was the taxi driver!

Historic firestation in Tooley Street, rebirthed as an upmarket restaurant. [3986]

One of a multitude of fabulous fast food offerings at the Borough Markets. [4068]

Three iconic double-decker buses await the lights near London Tower Bridge station. [4092]

Absurd and loud, these Pediibuses, driven by alcohol charged revellers, mix with the traffic near Tower Bridge. [4093]

A half week stay in London was for the purpose of getting over jet-lag, not so much for sightseeing. This is a city we have visited many times previously, before COVID of course, and so we spent our time here mainly just walking around. We did have one important task: we discovered that our paper currency (saved up from previous trips) was no longer legal tender and could only be exchanged at the Bank of England HQ in Threadneedle Street. We've done this before and can't work out how we still had old notes. Didn't we swap them all over last time? Obviously not. Anyway the procedure at the Bank is slow and cumbersome, security guards manage the long queue, and it took about 90 minutes in total, as they satisfy themselves that the punters there are not money laundering. People with much bigger bundles than we had got a comprehensive grilling. Our paltry transaction was trouvble-free.

Not only New York has a Flat Iron Building. This one in Southwark, London. [4163]

Grungy grotto somewhere near the London Festival Hall. [4155]

One place we hadn't discovered before is St. Katharine Docks. On the site of and named after a long gone 12th Century hospital built next to the Tower of London, commercial docks were established here in 1828 but could not service increasingly large vessels. After a long period of neglect, the docks are now reinvented as a marina and a village of upmarket residences and restaurants. Just further downriver is Wapping (meaning marsh), an East London suburb heavily bombed during the Blitz, and now a trendy gentrified residential enclave. The 1758 Town of Ramsgate is a famous pub in Wapping, supposedly the oldest on the river and is next to the site of the Execution Dock where convicted pirates, including the notorious Scottish privateer Captain (William) Kidd in May 1701, were executed.

Ornate decoration on the heavy bollards at St. Katharine Docks. [4116]

Great place for a cleaning ale is the Dickens Inn at St Katherine's Docks. [4121]

Narrow path to the river beside The Town of Ramsgate Hotel. Maybe this is where Captain Kidd was taken to the Execution Dock to be hanged? [4010]

Moving memorial, by Wendy Taylor (2007), to the people of Wapping who suffered terribly during the Blitz of WW2. [4019]

Rope Circle by Wndy Taylor adorns Wapping's Heritage Basin. [4029]

The great coal-fired power-station at Battersea, built in the 1940's and decommissioned in the 1970's, has, after several planning false starts, just (last year) been rebirthed as an elegant retail shopping complex complete with brand-name stores, restaurants and cinemas. The area surrounding the building is now packed with many apartment blocks of interesting architecture. While some industrial artifacts remain in the power station, notably overhead cranes, and the four iconic chimneys still stand proud (one with an observation deck), the history of this grand building seems have been subservient to the business imperatives of profit. A lost opportunity, maybe, but business is business. Next to the power station is the 80ha Battersea Park, established in 1858 from marshland and market gardens. It was warm and sunny for our visit, and this large green space was crowded with Londoners enjoying the lovely sunshine after a period of unusual cold and gloom. Battersea Power Station tube station is London's newest (2021) is on a new spur of the Northern Line and was built to service the new suburb and shopping complex, and was very convenient to take us back to our hotel at Tower Bridge.

The now reborn Battersea Power Station, tightly surrounded by multiple apartment blocks. [4174]

London's Peace Pagoda beside the Thames in Battersea Park. [4181]

An early rose in the gardens of Battersea Park. [4202]

Boating with the ducks on the lake in Battersea Park. [4210]

Coal-fired electricty generators have been replaced by upmarket shops in the Battersea Power Station. Only the overhead crane has survived. [4215]

A bucket list item we had never achieved on previous visits was Kew Gardens, the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world", founded in 1840, and near the end of a long London Underground journey to the southwest in the general direction of Heathrow (whose arrivals overfly the gardens with annoying and monotonous regularity). At 120ha, the gardens are huge, and it took us the best part of a day to cover a good part of the territory. The highlights of the gardens include several temperate houses, some of historical interest being early wrought iron constructions. It was a nice day, and the spacious gardens were very popular with visitors, and the entrance is a pleasant 300m walk from the tube station through the Kew Gardens town village.

The 1848 Palm House at Kew Gardens houses endanged tropical plants and was the first large scale structural use of wrought iron. [4247]

At tree-top height in the Kew Gardens Palm House. [4264]

Inside the Waterlily House at Kew Gardens. [4280]

The Princess of Wales Conservatory features warm arid flora. It is an enormous 10 Zone computer controlled addition to Kew Gardens, opened by Princess Diana in 1987. [4307]

Reflective artwork "The Breach" by Leandro Elrich, a comment on the loss of biodiversity, within Kew Gardens. [4320]

18m up and 200m long, the Treetop Walkway of weathering steel at Kew Gardens offers visitors a unique view of the canopy in the arboretum. [4323]

Inside the Temperate House in Kew Gardens. [4335]

Looking up the Great Pagada Vista with runs from the rose garden in Kew Gardens. The pagoda was a gift in 1762 to Princess Augusta who founded the gardens. [4341]

Up, Up and Away Again...

At long last, after a long COVID winter in which we have all suffered, we are about to embark on a trip which was booked and paid for well before the pandemic, but was cancelled. This is our opportunity to use up a lot of accumulated travel credits, but we also notice that all prices have escalated sharply and we have had to fork out a lot more cash for expeditions and even on a daily basis. We'll be flying British Airways to London. Qantas, an airline we have been loyal to for decades, is just too expensive. Qantas may have come out of the pandemic financially better than most other airlines (maybe?), but in the process the company has managed to completely alienate its staff and its previously loyal customer base. We'll see what we think of the BA experience, before we head further north!

We won't go into details of our intended itinerary here, but these are some highlights, some bucket list items, we hope to achieve. Of course, the photographs below are not mine.

Saint Michael's Mount, Cornwall

Having been captivated by Mont Saint Michel in Normandy on our last trip, it was inevitable that we would seek to visit this historical tidal island near Marazion in Cornwall. At high tide, the causeway floods, the Mount becomes an island and access is only by boat. At low tide, you can walk there. The Cornish name for the island translates to hoar rock in woodland. On the privately owned (since 1611) island, there is a village with a harbour, and a castle on the mount. We expect to be swamped by other visitors, since we will be there in peak season!

By Chensiyuan, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60956425

Bergen, Norway

Everyone has seen the iconic picture of Bergen's colourful skyline as, apparently, seen from the water. We look forward to this sight. The photograph below was taken on a rainless evening, by the look of it, whilst, on average for the month of our visit, it rains 13 days.

By The Chouhans, visitBergen.com

Svalbard, Norway

We can only hope to get as good a view of polar bears or walruses when we visit Svalbard as shown in this fantastic capture by A.Weith. Probably not the season for it, so if not, maybe we'll have more luck with puffins in this northern outpost, an abandoned whaling base, and a lot closer to the North Pole (1300km) than we have ever been, even when we visited Barrow, Alaska (2100km).

By A.Weith - https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51548912

Fingal's Cave, Staffa, Scotland

A picturesque cave made famous after being visited by composer Felix Mendelssohn in 1829, who, entranced by the accoustics, composed an overture The Hebrides, Op. 26 to be played here. We doubt if we'll have an orchestra for this visit, but maybe someone will bring an MP3 player with a bluetooth speaker? Such was its fame that it was later visited by Queen Victoria and Jules Verne even mentions it in Journey To The Centre Of The Earth and elsewhere.

By Unknown author, ca 1900 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23953

Scottish Northern Islands and the Faroes

Just off the northern tip of Scotland, the sparsely populated Orkneys and Shetlands have been made famous by popular police dramas on TV. They were part of Norway until the 1470's. The Faroe Islands, with Viking ancestry, are further north and belong to Denmark. There are puffins here too, in case we miss them in Svalbard.

By Hallmers, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2215317

Iceland and Reykjavik

Iceland was first settled in 874AD by a Norwegian chieftain, but it has been an independent nation since 1918. We hope to see many parts of this island, and do a self-driving trip in the popular environs of the capital Reykjavik, including the geothermal highlights of the Golden Circle. We're not likely to get as good a shot of the Gullfoss Golden Falls as this aerial view by Nickspix.

By Nickspix - Own work, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47843235

And then we come home!