St Ives, Cornwall

From St Denys to St Ives (and to St Just): 7th October

Cornwall is a very saintly place. We came to Cornwall and to St Ives in particular to continue our exploration of the Tate Gallery—the ones in London will be subject of a future blog. The St Ives branch was, you guessed it, closed to prepare for a retrospective of the abstract painter Peter Lanyon—one of a number of painters and sculptors including the Nicholson ‘brood’, Barbara Hepworth, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, who at various chose to live in St Ives for its drama, light and sense of community. Even though there were no paintings to see in Tate, St Ives, there was a painting of sorts to behold from the gallery’s fourth floor café and which more than compensated for the lack of any real Lanyon’s. The other gallery in the Tate, St Ives complex is the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, which consists of her former studio and her garden, where many of her sculptures are located among luxuriant vegetation. In our view some of the best galleries in the world are domestic ones, housed in homes, and so it is with Hepworth’s. Arthur Boyd’s in Bundanoon, NSW, comes to mind. One can sense the ghost of invention in such settings, as one cannot in the cold, clinical setting of the mega-museum, which are often devoid of personality, as if the living has been removed from the artefacts.

The other thing to do in St Ives if you are not ‘arting’ is to walk. We undertook two, one along the sands to Leland Salting, which on the pleasantest day we have had since leaving Sydney, was a joy. The other was a walk from nearby St Just to Cape Cornwall (where the Atlantic meets the Irish Sea), where we caught up once again with the Coastal Walk. The area around the cape, with its high promontories and rugged bays and distant lighthouses, is about as dramatic as any in Britain.

As we compile this blog on our last evening in St Ives we are watching, from the Pedn-Olva Hotel guest lounge, the high tide swallow the beaches of harbour and drench the walkways around West Pier. Our hotel is perched out over the water (unbelievably on the site of an old copper mine) and we almost feel that we could be on the bridge of the Utrillo on a day when walking along the decks was verboten. Our last meal here however will consist of specialty fare of local seafood and produce, the freshness of which has been a culinary highlight of our three days here.

St Ives is a self-recommending place to visit.