Cornwall Part One: The tale of the pitch black cave & the secret blowhole
Since going on holiday to a Warner resort at Perran Sands, on the North Cornish coast, when I was just 7 years old, I have been back to Cornwall for my holidays more than 25 times. It is a very beautiful place and one of my favourite places in the whole world.
With the crowds dying down this year thanks to the end of the pandemic restrictions, we headed back to Cornwall for a fantastic week long holiday, to discover new places and find lots of geocaches - some of which helped to fill empty spots on my terrain and Jasmer grids.
I won’t give details of every place and cache we visited, but here are just some of the highlights and the best caches we found that other cachers really should visit if they ever venture this far south.
My very first find of the trip was Droskyn Point Caves 2, just along the cliff top coastal path from Perranporth. It is actually a replacement cache for one I’d tried to find on a previous visit and it isn’t for the faint-hearted.
To access it I needed to leave the coast path and follow a little goat path down to a little cliff edge. The first part wasn’t too bad, but to get down to the lower ledge there was a final, steep, muddy path right on the edge of the cliffs. I carefully made my way down leaving the other half on a path higher up.
Once down on a bigger ledge I found a huge blow hole, now covered over by steel mesh, but it was amazing to look down into it. Sadly, it wasn’t stormy enough today to see the water blow up through it, but that probably was a good thing…I didn’t want to get soaked or swept away.
The cache was located a few metres away, at the bottom of the higher cliff and was a lovely big box. Well worth the adventure to get to it.
Back in Perranporth I completed an interesting adventure lab series called ‘Perranporth Parks & Gardens’, which required you to select true or false to the questions. And there was a nice bonus cache at the end.
I also picked up ‘Bridge over the river Ponsmere’, which was a mini adventure! I had to climb down under the bridge and then climb up the steep concrete slope underneath.
The final part involved a bit of a crawl under the low bridge, in order to grab the cleverly hidden cache. It was hidden out of sight right between the underside of the bridge and it’s supports. Great hide, and a fun adventure.
Afterwards, we headed onto Tehidy Country Park to collect a number of caches in amongst the forest trees. They included lots of nice customs like rocks and sticks as well as clip lock boxes.
The following day we visited Launceston on the Cornish/Devon border. We’d not visited before, but I’ve wanted to see the stunning castle for quite some years.
The Charlie Bears gallery was really good fun, and so well designed. It had fake cobbled streets and shop windows full of bears all beautifully displayed.
Our wander around the town was a bit of a wet one, but it was lovely to see the castle, collecting gecaches as we went. They included the Methodist Church Micro - a mystery cache that I’d solved a few weeks ago. The final cache proved tricky to spot but after a lot of searching I finally found it.
On the way back to the holiday home we also grabbed the great mystery cache ‘Pick Up’, a puzzle cache, which involved a lot of penguins! And the final cache was a lovely sized box.
We also stopped at Lanhydrock to do the nice village hall virtual - you don’t see many virtuals in this series - which was simple to complete, requiring some information from a sign and a selfie.
The following day we headed to the south coast for a couple of high terrain grid fillers. It proved to be a much more adventurous, and much quieter day than other places we’d visited.
My main goal was to get the brilliant cave cache SallyMINEder. Located on a fairly remote stretch of coast between The Lizard and Coverack it was quite a journey to get there. Towards the end, we were on single track, tiny winding roads and there were no official car parks this far from the tourist hotspots.
We managed to park on a grass verge not far from a farm, just outside Ponsongath and then set off on foot down to the coast path.
Almost as soon as we had l arrived at the up and down coastal path, we left it again to head down to the Carrick Luz Headland and down another goat path to grab ‘The Lizard Ophiolite #2’.
It was a terrain grid filler for me, so I was determined to get it, but the path down was a little hair-raising again. I left the other half at the top of the final steep goat path, and carefully scrambled down alone to sea level.
At the bottom I found myself in a tiny pebble and rock strewn cove and it was great to see the fault line and interesting rock colours and formations here.
It took me a while to spot the cache as my GPS kept pointing higher up a very precarious cliff. I’d investigated it carefully a couple of times, but found no sign of the cache anywhere on it. Trying lower down again, I actually found it hidden under some rocks in a much safer, and easier to access location.
Log signed, I scrambled back up to where the other half was taking a break, before we both set off along the coast path to the SallyMINEder cave cache.
It was a very warm day and low tide was fast approaching so we kept going as quickly as we could. Eventually, with the cave just around the corner, we arrived at a beautiful beach, which was completely deserted. Who says Cornish beaches are crowded! Not this one!
It was truly beautiful, steeped on either side by huge rocky headlands, with an expanse of soft white/yellow sand leading down to the gently lapping crystal clear blue sea.
We had a paddle and a wander about and I even went off to climb over some of the huge rocks jutting out to sea, in the hope I might be able to access the cave cache from here.
We set off on the final leg of the walk, up and over the huge headland. It was a very steep climb up the coast path, dozens upon dozens of steps, up and up we went, until finally the path levelled out.
I then climbed down some huge rocks to get to the pebbly beach, leaving the other half to contemplate the descent, and I headed on past the slowly trickling waterfall to the cave. The cave was higher up than I’d thought it would be, but again it wasn’t too much of a struggle to climb back up some big boulders to it.
Knowing it would be wet inside I changed my shoes for some waterproof crocks and then made my way in. The entrance was just a bit higher than me…one of the few times being just 5ft is an advantage.
A few steps in, it was very dark, and as I’d read in previous logs, I came to an abrupt stop with a wall of sandy rock. I knew at this point I needed to turn to my right and now crawl through a small tunnel to gain access to a bigger cave at the back.
The crawl wasn’t too bad, just a metre or so, and then I could stand up again. It was pitch back inside and I only had my iPhone torch to see around with. The floor was flooded and there was a lot of rather grim rubbish floating about in it, including a lot of what looked like polystyrene. I decided not to look down to much but to start examining every wall for the cache.
The walls were made up of fairly soft sandy mud, not granite as you often see in the caves on the north coast. There was also water trickling down the back wall into the cave, and I momentarily worried about how stable the cave really was, but after such a huge effort to get here, I wasn’t giving up until I found the cache.
After 20 minutes of scouring the walls, high and low I eventually spotted it on the left hand side. I was overjoyed! I had found my first ever difficulty 5, terrain 4.5 cache.
The cache was missing its custom lid…which I presume was a reptile given its name…but the tiny clear tube was pressed firmly into the wall and the write in the rain log was in tact.
After signing my name, I carefully returned the log to the container and then made my way back to the small tunnel to crawl back through and into the daylight.
By the time I emerged from the cave the other half had made his way down to the beach and was waiting outside to greet me. He had been wondering if I’d got lost as I’d been so long, but luckily he hadn’t yet called a rescue team.
It was a great adventure, that I will never forget. I highly recommend the cache to others…if they’re brave enough ;-)
We made our way back to the car by walking the path inland to another farm and then took the road back to Ponsongath. I collected a couple of traditional caches along the way, before climbing back into the car to head to the pub for a well earned drink.
That’s it for now. Join us in a few days for more of our Cornish Caching Tales.
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