Go West - dah dit dit dit dah dah dit dah dah dit dit dah dah dah

To save you having to translate the Morse Code that's Day 2!


The major visit today (and one of the reasons for coming to Cornwall) was to Porthcurno Telegraph Museum. My particular interest in telegraph is on the ciphering side, the Lorenz cipher (the German High Command cipher which Colossus was developed to help break) was a telegraph cipher, but it's of general interest anyway. The weather was fairly atrocious when I arrived a while before their opening time so I sat in the 'van instead of having the planned wander around. Fortunately the museum itself is mostly indoors. As often seems to happen to me it took 20 minutes to buy my ticket, 5 to transact the business and 15 chatting to the lady serving! There are three parts to the museum, the relatively new building has various displays and introductions to the whole topic upstairs (the shop and excellent tea room are downstairs), however the more interesting part for me are the wartime tunnels. The third part is the cable house.


An out-of-the-way obscure little Cornish village seems an unlikely place to have become a major communications hub but there are good reasons why this happened. Initially it was planned to bring a telegraph cable from Bombay (Mumbai), via Malta and Gibraltar, ashore at Falmouth however the harbour there is busy and there was too much risk of the cable being damaged by ships' anchors. Porthcurno has a sandy beach and is not a suitable anchorage, plus it already had telegraph lines to Penzance and on to London, so was ideal for the job. Eventually communications with much of the British Empire, and many other countries, passed through the cable house (a very unprepossessing building resembling a public lavatory) and the telegraph station.


The tunnels were dug by tin miners early in WW II when it was realised how vulnerable Porthcurno would be to bombing. Although by then wireless had taken over much of the traffic it's much easier to intercept so the links were vital to the war effort. You go into the tunnels (there are two, interlinked at various points) at "ground level" and don't really get a sense of being deep underground unless you choose to climb the emergency exit, all 119 steps of it! I did so, very glad that the original wet granite steps have been overlaid with modern steel gratings. Unfortunately it was still raining at that point and, as the sign puts it, they didn't consider the view when planning the location. I found the whole place fascinating and, by the time I'd had a decent cup of coffee and some carrot cake, the weather had cleared so I walked down towards the beach. The cable hut wasn't open due to the wet but I got some pictures of the outside.


The second visit of the day was to the Helston Railway. This is definitely one of the smaller preserved railways, running about a mile at the moment (they're hoping to extend soon) but it does have the distinction of having the most southerly station in Britain, Truthall Halt. The motive power today was a Ruston diesel (ex British Sugar and purchased from Northampton Ironstone Railway Trust) and the rolling stock was a GWR brake van! Not exactly glamorous but no worse for that. They do run steam services with hired in locos but the current one is undergoing a boiler overhaul at the moment.


I'd received an invite to join a TOG friend for coffee as, coincidentally, she lives very close to where the caravan site is. Having brought the eBike with me I decided it made sense to ride rather than drive round. It worked out very well since after coffee and a scone, and a lengthy catch up about campervans and various other topics, I went for an explore. The only annoying thing was that I hadn't taken a camera with me as the lighting was ideal for a good photo of Godrevy lighthouse. I'll see how I feel when I get back tomorrow, I may ride or drive round.


Toilet, beach café or major communications hub: