Boards of Canada: In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country
Finally, after Cheltenham, St Austell, St Ives and Perranuthnoe, here's the last honeymoon post, four months after the event.
(Incidentally, this afternoon I'd typed a great long post for this that took a couple of hours to put together - only for Typepad to inexplicably lose and autosave over the top of it just now, which is immensely frustrating as I have no idea how it happened. The safest move seems to be writing the text of the entry offline on Ecto instead, but I had assumed the Typepad system was solid enough to rely upon. This suggests otherwise. Anyway...)
We'd spent a week staying two nights a time at three luxurious yet different B&B/hotels, allowing us to see different areas of Cornwall despite being reliant on public transport and our own little legs, but by this point we'd done all our touristing and just wanted to spend some time with each other, the countryside and not much else, far from the gibbering crowds, staying in the kind of place that normally we would absolutely love to go to but wouldn't be able to justify the cost. And so, Badgers Hollow.
Badgers Hollow is part of Coriander Cottages, based within walking distance of Fowey but far enough away that coach parties are but a distant memory. It's an old cider mill that's been superbly renovated into an environmentally kosher open plan holiday cottage, complete with solar panels, wood burning stove (sadly we had no excuse to light it, the weather remaining gorgeous for our whole stay there, but its presence makes the thought of a winter stay most attractive), fleece insulation (ditto on the winter stay), a jacuzzi bath big enough for two and a ultra-tech kitchen with appliances more intelligent than us, full of the sort of things that we'd have in our dream home, if only we could make it come true. But the location was the icing on an already perfect cake - the view from the front door looked like this...
And the view from bed:
Why yes, those are my feet. Not that we would often leave the curtains and patio doors open whilst in bed, but even if we did the only neighbours likely to see us were horses and ducks - oh aye, there was that pheasant that popped round one day. There are others staying in the adjoining barn and the main farm area, but it's arranged in such a way that if it's solitude you want, solitude you get, and so we did. We went for self-catering - while you can choose to have B&B rather than self-catering, it felt better to spend our time there living entirely at our own pace - besides, another week of meaty cooked breakfasts could have left me looking decidedly portly. There were some basics waiting for us when we got to Badgers Hollow - cereal, milk, tea, juice, local meat, fruit & veg - much of which lasting our whole time there, and there were a couple of lovely shops in Fowey itself where we could buy ingredients for dinner. Fortuitously, we were there slap bang in the middle of Cornish asparagus season, along with juicy strawberries and sweet little new potatoes, so my dinner usually looked something like this:
And it was absolutely delicious, as much a pleasure as eating at the Victoria Inn. The asparagus needed the barest of boils, that juicy taste well worth the peculiar smell that would follow, while the bacon and sausages from local butcher Kittows were easily a match for Puddledub and Crombies, washed down with whatever Cornish beer had taken my fancy that day:
We would have dinner (and breakfast, and lunch if we weren't elsewhere) sat outside either on the terrace or balcony with no soundtrack but birdsong, the random whinny of a horse and, now and then, highly aggrieved quacking from the female ducks as the mallards attempted their rather disturbing form of breeding, comically failing at every attempt from what we could tell, leading to their own aggrieved quacking as they walked away from the duck pond dejectedly, while an osprey would routinely arc through the sky, divebombing nests. The sun blazed down, a gentle breeze would blow across the field, multitudes of bunnies would appear in the neighbouring field at dusk, we were in our own little heaven.
Still, we did leave the cottage now and then, mostly to saunter down to Fowey, once to go on an enjoyably gradient-filled walk to a wee village, Golant. Fowey itself is a pleasant enough fishing village, though it feels as though it's tourism not fishing that keeps it going. Certainly not as annoying as St Ives, the amount of traffic winding through the thin streets could still be irritating and we tried to avoid later times in the day when it got busier. A pleasant enough place to visit, but a bit too busy for our tastes, especially with Badgers Hollow waiting for us - it was a relief to know we had that to go back to. We kept coming back to the Dwelling House, an excellent cafe (not that you'd know it from the website) with a particularly good line in cakes and (naturally) cream teas:
Yum! Their fish salad platter maintained the quality, locally caught fish served up with (that word again) locally grown salad, and no doubt we'd have eaten there even more if Badgers Hollow didn't keep calling us back. Food For Thought served a perfectly fine paella, prawn eyes beadying back up at me, but felt a bit too busy and polished for our overly-discerning ways, though their ice-cream stand was a tasty blessing. Pinky Murphys, on the other hand, was much more fun, full of genuine character and good nosh to back it up, while the location meant that those who drove straight into the centre of Fowey and never left it remained oblivious to its charms - we were particularly glad for their wi-fi connection to catch up on wedding snaps and emails. The aforepictured Bird shop is full of kids stuff, the kind of thing we nod approvingly at (stripes! wood! Moomins!) and White Doll Arts featured some lovely simple pottery, which we bought, and a floofy cat, which we didn't. And I could hardly visit a coastal town like Fowey without partaking in a fish supper, courtesy of The Other Place (I commend their restraint at not going for 'Plaice' there). There were a couple of restaurants that looked delicious for lunch - most notable Restaurant Nathan Outlaw - but without vegetarian choices on the lunch menu they were no good for us. A pity, but we probably would have felt utterly out of our depth, honeymoon or not, and when the alternative was home-cooked goodness eaten overlooking rolling hills as the evening sun gradually dipped behind the trees for a tiny fraction of the price... well, I can live with that.
It really was a little slice of perfection, as much as our week in Stromness last year, a brief step into a different life. With no mobile or internet signal to intrude, we were free to enjoy our own company, sometimes reading, sometimes just soaking up the gloriousness of it all, decompressing from the hyperchaos of wedding preparation, talking about the future and getting used to having a ring rattling around on my finger. It's hard to imagine any B&B topping Ednovean Farm, so self-catering was the only way we could improve on that experience, and so it did, ending the honeymoon on a gentle high. Living up to all the expectations we'd had, we couldn't have hoped for any better and we'd gladly go back (if finances would ever allow). Cornwall may not be the distant, far-flung location that other couples go for, but for us it was ideal - train-travelled, surrounded by countryside and coastline, very well fed, with the time and the peace of our own little world - a perfect honeymoon.
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