Portreath - Devoran Coast to Coast Mineral Tramway Trail

Note that all maps on this site are only indicative. You should never set out without the correct OS map.

The 11-mile Coast to Coast Mineral Tramways Trail from Portreath to Devoran is one of the most pleasant and easy ways of crossing the Westcountry peninsula.

To be honest I'd say the Coast-to-Coast Tramway Trail is actually better suited to cycling than walking, but the easy going stroll makes for a pleasant day out nevertheless.

Basic Hike: from Portreath to Devoran along the Coast-to-Coast Mineral Tramway Trail.

Recommended map: publication: Ordnance Survey Explorer 104 or Cornwall County Council leaflet on the trail.

Distance and going: 11 miles, very easy going.

It may seem unbelievable now, but Portreath was once one of the county's premier coal importing harbours. Colliers were calling at the port until just 30 years ago but, if you'd visited 70 or 80 years before that, you'd have found the three linear basins packed to the gunnels with shipping. There are old photos of the dock in its grimy heyday when huge piles of the black stuff were strewn across the great yards alongside huge piles of Cornwall's innards - i.e. copper-ore from the neighbouring mines.

Until 1809 Bassett's Cove, as Portreath was known, was not much more than a fishing village. Exports of copper were beginning to change the port's fortunes as were imports of Welsh coal, but it was in that year that a tramway - one of the earliest railways in Britain, and the first in Cornwall - was opened linking Portreath to St Day some five miles inland. Other tramways were developed south of the watershed down the Carnon and Poldice Valleys, and this entire network has become the basis for the excellent trail.

Along the way, especially in the two valleys just mentioned, you will see some of the most extensive 'mine-scapes' to be found anywhere in the country. The word ravaged doesn't quite do the scenery justice, and yet there in an austere beauty which you will not witness anywhere else. The tramway begins near the inland end of Portreath harbour and continues parallel to the B3300 road out of town until it reaches the hamlet of Bridge. Here it climbs gently into the pleasant countryside around Cambrose before passing close to quaint little Mawla hamlet and on, higher and higher, to the main A30 road bridge at Scorrier.

This is the watershed - it's all downhill to Devoran from here. And for a mile or two the landscape becomes almost shire-like, with graceful woodlands and dingly dells. But this doesn't last for long - just north-east of St Day we arrive in the Poldice Valley - a place which boasts the sort of landscape that Dr Who was forever landing his Tardis in.

Wide areas of bare soil and grit have been left denuded of plant life by the numerous toxins that came out of the old arsenic mines. Some bits down towards Wheal Henry look more like the buttes you get in the badlands of Missouri than anything you'd expect to find in the Westcountry.

No road runs down this lonesome defile, and the place has a strange and other-worldly feel about it. To be honest, it is easy not to realise the valley system exists until you walk down it, but once you've discovered it you can return to do several of the circular walks on offer.

Eventually, past the tiny hamlet of Twelveheads, the trail goes by the corrugated iron fortress of Mount Wellington Mine and enters the slightly more agrarian acres of Bissoe - slightly, because a giant arsenic works still dominates the place.

Now the trail is escorted by the Carnon River - which is the weirdest stream you'll ever see. It's the only waterway in the world with day-glo mud-banks. How anything grows at all in the area you cannot imagine - the ground must be heaving in mine-related toxins.

Anyway, it's all most picturesque down under the giant Carnon rail viaduct - indeed it's the sort of place where you'd expect to see kingfishers - if there were any fish in the stream. Which I doubt.

Careful when you get to the A39 Truro to Falmouth road, it's a bit of a dangerous crossing. And then you are in Devoran - yet another old port that no longer deals with mercantile ships and the sea.

Strictly speaking, this is the south coast - but it's all very silted and estuarine and the open sea is still several miles down the Fal. But never mind - having walked the 11 miles you really do feel like you've crossed the peninsula from coast to coast.

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