This hike takes you around one of the highest points
in south east Cornwall - a fact which is reinforced by the massive
television mast which crowns the hill. The 750 transmitter provides
half the peninsula with its TV signal - you can see it for miles.
Conversely, you can see for miles if you walk to the top of the
hill.
Basic hike: a circumnavigation of Caradon Hill in South East Cornwall,
starting at Tokenbury Corner car park near Pensilva and travelling
in a clockwise direction past Crow's Nest, up to Minions and from
there to the summit.
Caradon Hill is one of the great cornerstones of the Westcountry.
It rises like a great bold, bald, dome out of the soft lowlands
of southeast Cornwall and does a fine job of introducing the world
to the rocky rigours of Bodmin Moor.
So conspicuous are its bastions, that the hill has given its name
to the local district authority. And thanks to the hill's lofty
heights and its even loftier transmitter, half the Westcountry gets
a reasonable television picture.
Note that all maps on this site are only
indicative. You should never set out without the correct OS map.
This hikes column has been to the village
Minions before and described it as the roof of the Westcountry -
but Minions is only 1,000 feet above sea-level - neighbouring Caradon,
just to the south east, rises another 230 feet.
And it is around the great dome that we walk today. I approached
the hill from a somewhat unusual angle - at least, I imagine I did
given the number of people walking around the Minions side of things.
Pensilva is a mining village through and through, and you will find
it tucked just under the eastern ramparts of the hill. There's a
car park near a place called Tokenbury Corner on the Liskeard-Launceston
road, and that's where I stopped to gain entry to the big moor that
is now public access land.
A track swings due west of this car park across the lower fringes
of the moor and this I followed until I found myself above the small
village and wonderfully named village of Crow's Nest. As I'd never
been there before, I strolled down into what is, or was, so obviously
another miner's roost, then (finding the place completely and utterly
empty) sought out the footpath that leads up through the much-ravaged
valley to Minions.
When I say ravaged, I mean that no other area in the region is
quite so torn about, save for the mining areas around Redruth and
Camborne and, perhaps, West Penwith.
In the mid-1800's, the writer Wilkie Collins described
the area his book "Rambles Beyond Railways" as one of
"monstrous wheels, clanking machinery, bewildering noise -
steam pumps puffing and gasping and copper coloured mud and water".
It's not like that now - especially not on a winter's day when the
only sound at all is made by the odd raven barking.
However, as there is certainly plenty of evidence of all this industry.
Just about every step of the way up the valley towards Minions,
you are surrounded by the waste tips of South Caradon and West Caradon
mines. Gaunt old engine houses, with weird names like Jope's, Clymo's
and Holman's, haunt the place like buildings from some pre-Armageddon
era.
Up to the left there's Rikard's Shaft, below Menadue. Halfway up
the shallow valley there's a place called Gonamena and after that
we get to Ponton's Piece. It is a fascinating place with a fascinating
story to tell - so eerily empty now, and yet once so incredibly
busy.
There were entire shanty-towns up here with names like Darite,
Upton Cross, Common Moor - not to mention Crow's Nest and Pensilva
(once known as Bodminland). Minions was originally called Cheesewring
Railway (after the extraordinary rock outcrop that dominates the
moors a mile north of the village) and it was the highest point
and epicentre of a coppery Cornish equivalent to an American gold
rush
The great temptation at Minions is to plunge north
towards the Cheesewring into the great rock-strewn hinterland of
south-eastern Bodmin Moor, but as we've been to see the Hurler standing
stones and the celebrated rock outcrop before in this column, I
took the road right past the pub and walked the mile up to the very
top of Caradon Hill.
As most readers will know, it is topped by the region's biggest
transmitter mast. After I asked Western Morning News readers if
anyone had any details on the mast, Colin Pooley emailed me to me
to say: "I have a copy of a publication called 'A Guide to
Independent Television' dated 1966 (in fact, I worked on it). It
gives the height above sea level of Caradon Hill as 1,211 feet and
the mean height of the mast as 1,936 feet. The mast therefore is
about 725 feet although they say in the text that they required
a mast of 750 feet."
The wind howls most dissonantly through the mast's big securing
cables. Lights were on in the buildings below, and the thought struck
me that this must be one of the oddest, certainly most windswept,
places to work in the entire peninsula.
Needless to say, the views from the top of the
hill are spectacular - there' s the whole of Dartmoor's Tamar edge
to the east, bits of Plymouth nudge their way onto the skyline down
to the southeast, while the big black dangerous finer of the Dodman
seals the sea-borne horizon to the south west. To the northwest
lie the wild a fabulous nether regions of Bodmin Moor.
Turning north from the summit I walked down across the moor to
the old dismantled Minions-Liskeard railway, passing some freezing
flying men as I went. They weren't flying, but they were controlling
models gliders that were. It looked great fun, and they told me
the flanks of Caradon are a favourite haunt for flyers of radio-controlled
planes.
The old railway loops right around the eastern skirts of the hill
and takes you without effort past its junction with the dismantled
tramway, all the way back to the car park at Tokenbury Corner. After
that it becomes the small highway that leads to Crow's Nest, but
the fascinating, and highly walkable, hinterlands that lie directly
beneath South East Cornwall's alpine world will have to wait for
another day.
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