England 2017, Wednesday, 5/24/17

The full English breakfast just gets better.  At The Old Parsonage, partners Morag and Margaret do it up right. Morag bakes all the bread each day and prepares the marmalade and boysenberry jam here in the kitchen.  The eggs are picked up from one of the cottages down the road, and the bacon and sausage are sourced from a local Cornwall farmer and his Gloucester spotted pigs.  The butter is from the local dairy farm.  All are delicious. Margaret is the gardener of the two, and helped to identify some of the more unusual plantings in the garden.

Today is a day of sightseeing and rubbernecking.  First to the scenic village of Port Issac, a coastal village about 12 miles south.  This village is the setting of the TV series, Doc Martin, although renamed Port Wenn in the show.  We arrived near 10:30 in the morning, parked at the main car park and then walked the 700 meters down to the village and port.  It was teeming with visitors and truly quaint and scenic.  As we were making the rounds to the various buildings in the show, we learned and then saw that they were actually filming today.  Martin Clunes (Doc) was out on the sea break wall trying to talk someone down from attempting suicide.  Although all the spectators were kept well away, we were able to get some long distance photos of the goings-on.

We then walked back up the hill aways and stopped in the Old Schoolhouse (also portrayed in the series) for a cup of tea and a piece of cake.  Then onward back to the car park and heading to our next destination, the village of Tintagel.

Tintagel, about 3 miles south of our home base in Boscastle, is the site of ruins of a castle on the very edge of the seacoast.  This is the legendary birthplace of King Arthur.  The village is filled with quaint shops offering everything from antiques, to postcards, to new age stones and Arthurian detritus of the world's finest plastic from China.  The National Trust maintains the old Post Office, a small cottage built in 1380 as a thatched farmhouse and then modified over the years to a slate roofed small building that was used in Victorian times as a post office.  We toured (free of charge courtesy of our Royal Oak Society member cards purchased at home) and were amazed at the home and the wonderful small garden in the rear.

We opted not to journey down and up to the ruins; DebC and I have been there twice before, but we did learn from conversations with local citizens of two other vantage points, one by the old church and another from the overlooking hotel, which give wonderful views of the ruins and are just a picturesque as clamoring over the ruins and then struggling up the hill again.

We returned to The Old Parsonage and enjoyed a glass of wine in the garden before heading out (this time in our trusty vehicle rather than on foot) to our 7:00 reservation at the Wellington Hotel, down by the harbor of Boscastle.  We were seated in the second floor dining room, and throughout the entire meal, we were the only patrons.  However, there was a lively bar scene on the floor below, and at 8:00 the acapella singing began again, this time with a different group.  We stayed upstairs to finish our meal.  The food was excellent, including monkfish on a bed of lobster and leek risotto, a huge serving of mussels, a fettuccine with seafood and a rather nice hamburger for the less adventurous.  Three of our party enjoyed a starter soup; a bisque like cream soup of celeriac with truffles.  This was sublime.

Back to our guest house for the evening and retired by 10:00. Another enjoyable day.