Kynance

A brief visit to Cornwall and a picnic lunch atop the somewhat treacherous and hard-to-reach Asparagus Island in Kynance Cove, on the Lizard.


Cormorants perched on the jagged serpentine rocks below, hanging out their pterodactyl wings to dry. An anxious oystercatcher clanged out an alarm call at our intrusive presence. We felt exhilarated.


We were a bit surprised when our solitude was interrupted by a pale man sweating his way to the summit. He looked more suited to the office than the rugged Cornish coast but was there looking for a geocache. He held out his phone. "It's somewhere in a 2m radius of where I'm standing." After a bit of poking around he found it, a soggy roll of paper in an old 35mm film canister tucked into a crevice behind a pile of stones. He unfurled the paper, took a photo, put it all back again and was off. "I've another 83 to find and only two days to do it in". "Good luck" we said.

I can understand why people get into geocaching. It's a kind of letter-boxing for the iPhone age, a treasure hunt, a magical mystery tour. It ends in a kind of transcendence I suppose.

But the problem is that you risk being so hell-bent on the quest that you don't notice where you are.


Kynance is one of the holy places of Britain. It's worth noticing. There's a lot to miss.












It's a place to dawdle, for when the tide comes in again it's all quite hidden beneath the waves.




2 comments:

  1. Being married to an avid geocacher, I had a good giggle at the image.

    What I will say, we have got more walks out with our kids by making it a treasure hunt and they are following travel bugs across the world, finding out more geography than at school from the piqued interest.

    BUT, some cachers do miss out on the beauty around them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for that Charlotte! Can imagine it being a lot of fun, especially with kids.

    ReplyDelete

 

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