Polzeath Beach

Viewed from New Polzeath, the opposite end of the bay from the pano shot I took on Sunday.

Today I felt it was time to try walking a smidgeon of the Cornish coastal path. Tuesday's walk to Daymer bay along the path had been cut short by the discovery of Greenaway beach and the sudden urge to sit on it and relax all afternoon. This time I chose the section from New Polzeath, up on the cliff where some of the older looking houses are situated (!) to Pentire point, on the Pentire headland, which is owned and farmed by the National Trust. I was after some lovely views along the coast, but what I found was another small bay, which I resisted, and a poster advertising a barbecue and a bat spotting event, that very night. I made a mental note, and proceeded to the Point, where I found a comfortable place to lie and read, while watching the waves crash far below. I observed that most of the other walkers around me appeared to be speaking German.

After finishing my book, I continued my walk inland, past Pentire farm, Pentireglaze farm and eventually back to New Polzeath via a track through a cornfield and down a valley. I didn't carry on along the coast to the sticking-up promotories called The Rumps, because they looked far away. They will have to wait for a return visit.

The bat experience took place after sunset, when along with other participants, I waited by the coastal path, where I'd been earlier, for the horseshoe bats to emerge from the old silver lead mine works in the cliffs. Around twenty-five minutes after sunset, they begin to fly upwards, directly overhead, on their way out to hunt for insects. At first there are just one or two, but over the course of say, fifteen minutes, dozen of them emerge and fly away, as suddenly as they appear. Far too fast for me to photograph, I am sorry to say. We had the use of bat detecting machines, so could hear the bats 'twittering' like small birds. Without the machines, their sounds would be inaudible to human ears, as it's on a frequency of about 80 mHz.

As it was growing completely dark, I was forced to make my way back to the car park, where I begged a lift from a woman and her grandson. They are local and had been on the bat walk the previous year, and returned because they'd enjoyed it so much. Certainly, it's something I'd like to do again, perhaps in the park in Stroud.

As well as getting closer to nature and being out of doors, the bat watching helped me to overcome my fear of bats, which was fuelled by sharing my mother's attic space with a colony of horseshoe bats in the early 80s. Horseshoe bats like a warm up space to fly around in, before they take off for the night's hunting. unfortunately for us and the bats, that space was a bedroom! All those horror films we'd watched in the 1970s hadn't helped much, either. Still, having attended the prefatory talk about bats, and learned about the loss of their traditional habitats, I feel more well-disposed towards them, and realise that those poor creatures who scared us so much were probably far more frightened themselves.

PS made this into a montage, two shots taken at different times the same day, as you can see from the difference in the tide.