The Otter & The Spaniel

5 Things About My Weekend In Cornwall

1. Yesterday I got back from a long weekend in Cornwall with Alex. We stayed at the Whiteford Temple, which is a little Landmark Trust place stuck out in the middle of nowhere, just the other side of Dartmoor. It was built as the summer house of a bigger estate; the rest of the estate was demonlished about 90 years ago, and the Temple is all that's left on top of a hill overlooking the Tamar valley. We made the most of the three huge floor to ceiling windows by waking up at 5am on Sunday morning to watch the sunrise. And then go back to sleep for another five hours....

2. On Saturday we went to The Eden Project, which was v touristy of us, but I'm glad we did it as it's really interesting, and very cool. I like what they're trying to do there; to make people realise the effect they have on the world, and get a real sense of the environmental cycle. It's not done in a preachy or self-righteous way, it's just very informative and interesting.

3. We walked quite a lot. We went for a late afternoon walk along the cliffs at Polperro for about two hours on Saturday, and on Sunday took the brave decision to walk five miles for our dinner! We went to the Springer Spaniel in Treburley. It took about 70 minutes to walk there in the dusk, but the fun bit was walking back after dinner! We were both quite pissed by this point, and thought it was a great idea to walk along the lanes without using the torch. It was worth it though, just to see the stars. You're lucky in London if you see five stars in the sky at night and at my parents in Somerset you see hundreds more, but I've never seen as many as this. The whole sky was sprinkled with them, and the more you looked the more you saw. Miraculously we made it back without getting lost.

4. It was gorgeous sunshine all weekend, with fluffy white clouds and cool wind. We spent Sunday wandering around Cotehele house and gardens. The house was good, but the gardens were better, and we wandered down to Cotehele Quay in the sunshine and had a cream tea. We took everything slowly this weekend, which is just what I was after, and had a lovely relaxing time, with no particular stress about anything, except when I navigated badly around Exeter. An easy mistake to make.

5. Bless Alex's car. He has a 1967 Morris Minor 1000. It's everso cute, but is not the speediest or the most comfortable thing in the world. It took us more than seven hours to get back yesterday, although that did include a short stop at a pottery on Dartmoor and lunch in Ottery St. Mary. Ottery St. Mary is a very odd little place, and you can't help thinking that it has suffered from having the bypass built around it, as it has the look of a place which used to have far more tourists, but hardly anyone ever goes there any more. We were disappointed to discover that the 'Ottery Nursery' was in fact a flower market, and not a home for baby otters.