A story of Elizabethan Cornwall

Who was it who once said that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover? Not so long ago, I came across a very tatty paperback (spine cracked, cover page rather faded and held on with Sellotape, original UK retail price 80p) by Winston Graham, best known as the author of the Poldark books. This, though, was one of his other ones, an historical novel called The Grove of Eagles which was first published in 1963. The blurb was very complimentary indeed, and despite having never previously read anything by Winston Graham (or even bothered with Poldark, for that matter) I decided to go for it.

The Grove of Eagles is about the Killigrews, an influential Cornish family who were governors of Pendennis Castle in Tudor times and who were later responsible for founding and developing the port and town of Falmouth (being a semi-regular visitor to Falmouth as part of my work, I already knew a little bit about this family, who as well as being the local landowners were also heavily involved in smuggling and piracy in that part of the world; their memorial, a granite pyramid erected by the last of them, stands in Falmouth today opposite Arwenack House, the old family home which was destroyed during the Civil War and rebuilt in the eighteenth century). In the historical notes at the end, Graham describes them as “a not unimportant Cornish family whose history appears and disappears tantalisingly among the records of the time”. Which, I suppose, makes them an ideal canvas for an historical novelist.

Several of the Killigrews of Arwenack House were called John (it seems to have been a family tradition that this was the name given to the eldest son) and there has been some confusion among historians not only about the various John Killigrews but also their wives; due to knighthoods, history records more than one Lady Killigrew and one such – a woman who was born Mary Wolverston – has been confused with both her mother-in-law and her grand-daughter-in-law, in addition to which we know neither the year in which she was born nor the year in which she died! What we do know is that this particular Lady K. often received stolen or smuggled goods at Arwenack House, and that furthermore she was charged with piracy in 1582 when the crew of a Spanish ship that had sheltered from a storm nearby were murdered and their cargo stolen; she was actually sentenced to death for this but was pardoned by Elizabeth I.

At the hands of Winston Graham, Lady Killigrew became one of the more influential characters in The Grove of Eagles, she being the formidable widowed mother of the master of Arwenack House, John Killigrew (who in real life was born in c.1557 and died in 1605). At the time in which the novel is set, the last years of the sixteenth century, this John Killigrew was in a key position. As well as being the local landowner, and a rather ruthless and unpopular one at that, he was also the governor of Pendennis Castle and as such responsible for the defence of the mouth of the river Fal, “a great natural anchorage, one of the finest in the world”, which could have been of great strategic importance in the event of a Spanish invasion. Alas, the defences as organised by John Killigrew were found wanting at the times of both the Spanish raid on Cornwall in 1595 and the invasion threat of 1597 (of which more later). Although his excuse was that he couldn’t afford to properly garrison the castle (something of which he had informed the government on several occasions), there were inevitably rumours about how loyal he actually was to Elizabeth I – was he, perhaps, secretly in cahoots with the Spanish via intermediaries such as the pirate captains with whom he associated? Although allegations of treason on his part were unproven, in 1598 he was nevertheless deprived of the governorship of Pendennis Castle, and he died in poverty seven years later.

In real life, he had a large family by his wife (herself a member of the Monck family); to this brood Winston Graham added an illegitimate son, a boy unaware of his mother’s identity but nevertheless acknowledged by John Killigrew as his son and brought up with that surname. It is this boy, Maugan Killigrew, who narrates The Grove of Eagles (which refers to the meaning of the name Killigrew, the family coat-of-arms being a double-headed eagle which of course hints at all sorts of duplicity on the grounds that it faces both ways), and what a tale his creator has him tell!

This story of Elizabethan Cornwall, told from the point of view of someone who is of gentry blood yet expected to have to make his own way in the world, is a very good one. Graham, who in the novel’s postscript makes much of having drawn on manuscripts from the time, shows a really good understanding for the period. Where it gets really interesting, though, is when you realise the extent to which The Grove of Eagles is not only populated by real people but based very much on real events, most notably events from the war between England and Spain which lasted from the mid-1580s until the 1604 Treaty of London. Maugan is caught up in the resistance to the 1595 Spanish raid on Cornwall in which troops from four galleys landed in Mount’s Bay and sacked Mousehole, Newlyn and Penzance, beating back a local militia under Sir Francis Goldolphin (whose first wife was a Killigrew; when not trying to defend England, he is shown to be warning his in-laws about how their reputation for lawlessness will lead them to ruin) before withdrawing. Later, Maugan is taken on as a secretary to no less a person than Sir Walter Raleigh – for some reason, Graham makes a point of spelling his surname ‘Ralegh’ – and as such he gets to participate in the English capture of Cadiz in 1596 which allows Graham to provide a fantastic description of this event.

Much is made in The Grove of Eagles of the Killigrews’ misfortune; what with the fate of one of the John Killigrews (see above) it is a running theme in the book, with the set-piece hearing before the Queen herself coming towards the novel’s end. Early on, Graham gives an explanation of this via Maugan. Having referred to the rebuilding of Arwenack House in the mid-sixteenth century on a grander scale than before by another John Killigrew (this one being the grandfather of Maugan’s father), it is noted that the Killigrew family, “for all its ancient lineage and good estate, lacked the solidity of great possessions such as could maintain without strain the extravagant way of life he set for it. From his time, therefore, there was a hint of the feverish and the insolvent in our lives. Each generation tried to re-establish itself; each generation failed in greater measure than the last.” It is this which becomes key to both the family’s apparent lack of regard for the law (any ship that uses the Fal estuary as a haven is fair game, it seems) and the question of John Killigrew’s supposed treachery.

Maugan seems to be particularly unlucky. Captured by the Spanish in a raid on Pendennis Castle, he’s assumed to be dead and as a result his love interest – a young lady whose family has been evicted from their house by the Killigrews for defaulting on the rent – marries someone else (a circumstance that Winston Graham also bestowed on his more famous creation, Ross Poldark; apparently he got this particular idea from hearing the story of a pilot who he met during the Second World War). Later on, our narrator (a bit of a rogue, but one with a conscience of sorts – no Flashman, he) manages to get captured by the Spanish again when returning from Cadiz – he gets put on a ship home by Raleigh after getting injured in a fight while attempting to loot a church, and after being imprisoned for several months he finds himself sailing on the ill-fated Spanish Armada of 1597, the plan being that he will liaise with his father once the invaders have landed in Cornwall. Fortunately for England but not for Maugan Killigrew, this little-known attempt to invade founders thanks to the weather, the result being that Maugan actually gets to go home by way of being shipwrecked off the Cornish coast (the failure of this invasion attempt, which happened in October 1597, really did owe much to a storm that wrecked and scattered the Spanish ships; England was at the time very poorly defended, not just because of John Killigrew but also because most of its ships were absent on the Earl of Essex’s ill-fated expedition to the Azores). For anyone wondering about who Maugan’s mother is, rest assured that this gets revealed at the end although you could probably make an educated guess before then.

Having finished The Grove of Eagles, I’m rather disappointed that Graham didn’t write a sequel; even after more than 500 pages I found myself wanting more. Towards the end, Maugan starts to work (against his better judgement) for Lord Henry Howard, a courtier who would in a few years play a key role in putting James VI of Scotland on the English throne after Elizabeth I’s death (for which he was ennobled as the Earl of Northampton) and turning said king against Raleigh, a man whom Maugan admires. It would have been fascinating to have Graham relate the story of how this played out. As it is, The Grove of Eagles ends with a pensive Maugan getting married, following which there’s a ‘postscript for purists’ which begins with Graham asserting that “bibliographies in the historical novel are pretentious” – this at a time (1963) before the likes of George MacDonald Fraser and Bernard Cornwell made historical notes a standard practice for the historical novelist.

After revealing where he got the ideas for some of the events of his novel from (for example: “the extent to which John Killigrew became committed to the Spanish cause is perhaps arguable, but the evidence which exists does seem to me conclusive … the conclusive testimony comes from the Spanish side … I have no evidence that Ralegh [sic] spoke up for John Killigrew when he was brought to London to answer for his behaviour, but it is not out of keeping with his character that he should have done so”), he explains what happened to some of the characters in the novel who were actually real people (“the mystery of Jane Fermor’s dowry has never been cleared up”, “Jack Arundell of Trerice became Sir John Arundell and was governor of Pendennis Castle in 1646”, etc) before mentioning that Maugan was inspired in part by one Robert Killigrew, a friend of Raleigh’s “who was later innocently involved in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury”. I found myself wanting to know more about this, and also wondering about what might have been had Winston Graham decided to give Maugan another outing; here, alas, a character whose slender luck sadly didn’t extend to a second novel.

But the first and only adventure of Maugan Killigrew, though, is definitely worth reading. I just hope that, should you decide to do so, you can find a copy that’s in better condition than the one I found!

England's lesser-known stone circles (part two)

To Cornwall next, to take a look at another stone circle! This one can be found a couple of miles to the south-east of St Buryan which is off the A30 after you’ve gone west of Penzance. This circle is called the Merry Maidens and consists of nineteen granite megaliths, all of them roughly four feet high arranged in a circle that’s about 78 feet in diameter. They’re said to date back to either the Neolithic period (the late Stone Age) or the early Bronze Age.

They’re easy to get to, being located in a field that’s easily accessible (and sign-posted) from the B3315. The access-point to the field even has a convenient lay-by for parking, and the footpath from the lay-by goes right through the circle itself.

As is apparently the case with most British stone circles, there’s a notable gap between the stones at the circle’s eastern-most part. It’s also worth noting that the size of the stones varies, decreasing slightly in size from south-west to north-east; this, archaeologists reckon, may well have been deliberate so as to mirror the cycle of the moon. Nearby are a pair of much taller standing stones called the Pipers, two of the largest standing stones in Cornwall which due to their alignment with the Merry Maidens are indelibly associated with said circle.

Like the Rollrights, the Merry Maidens are the subject of a ‘petrification’ legend which is where they get their name from. The story is that the stones were nineteen young ladies who were turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday (the stones’ Cornish name is dans maen, which means ‘stone dance’ although it has given the stones their alternative name of the Dawn’s Men). The Pipers are said to have been the two men who were providing the music for the girls, but they heard the bells of the church at St Buryan striking midnight and tried to run away, which supposedly explains their distance from the Merry Maidens. The Maidens and the Pipers are not the only Neolithic remnants in the vicinity; there’s also the Tregiffian Burial Chamber not far away, as well as a lone standing stone called Gun Rith which is reckoned to be also linked with the Merry Maidens, by proximity if nothing else.

Of more recent vintage is the Boskenna Cross, Medieval a way-marker located at the junction with the road to or from St Buryan to the west; this was unearthed in the nineteenth century, having probably been buried at the time of the Reformation.

The Merry Maidens probably owe their survival in part to a nineteenth-century landowner who, obviously recognising their significance, ensured that they weren’t removed so the field could be ploughed and the stones broken up for building material – a fate that befell many stone circles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Western Cornwall, though, does have a rather high concentration of ancient monuments – as well as stone circles, there are also various standing stones as well as cairns, hut circles and holy wells – which has led the area to be described as a ‘sacred country in miniature’. Worth keeping an eye on the road-signs, then.

England's lesser-known stone circles (part one)

There’s more to stone circles in England than Stonehenge and Avebury. It’s just that the rest are smaller and as such they don’t tend to get much of a look-in. Today, though, I’m going to take a closer look at one of the smaller, lesser-known ones. The Rollright Stones can be found in the Cotswolds and are reckoned to date back to the Neolithic period. The reasons behind their construction have been lost in the mists of time (our Neolithic ancestors lived in a pre-literacy age) although the stones themselves were sourced locally – from within a few miles of the circle, archaeologists reckon. The lack of a reason for building a stone circle has created a void that’s been filled by a ‘petrification’ myth (the stones are people who were turned to stone) which has been used in times past to explain how they came to be, with the myth having become part of the story (for, as the man once said, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend). The Rollrights are by no means alone in having a petrification myth attached to them.

They’re located high on the eastern edge of the Cotswolds (around 220 metres, or just over 720 feet, above sea level according to the Ordnance Survey map which covers the area) just off the A3400 on the Oxfordshire/Warwickshire border. The stone circle, known as the King’s Men, is just over a hundred feet in diameter and consists of some 77 closely-placed stones (oolitic limestone, this being the Cotswolds – that’s the material that forms the bedrock of the Cotswolds and which has been used as the local building material of choice for centuries; to this day it is still quarried as Cotswold stone) although legend has it that it is supposed to be impossible to count them all, and if you manage to do so and get the same number three times you get to make a wish!

The location is almost nondescript, or perhaps the word should be modest – parking is in a lay-by on a minor road just off the A3400, and within yards from the road just to the south you’re confronted with the circle which seems almost discreetly tucked away to the side. The private charity that runs it, the Rollright Trust, doesn’t have anyone there to meet and greet but there is an honesty-box next to the gate (it’s £1 per adult). There’s nothing stopping you from touching the stones should you so desire, although sitting on them is frowned upon as it would add to the erosion of the stones. Every now and again, a visitor is confronted with the sight of the occasional neo-pagan who’s gone there for some meditation (pagan groups can book the site for ceremonies, and the Trust apparently stages an annual Shakespeare production in the circle).

As well as the circle, there’s also a free-standing monolith called the King Stone which is located on the north side of the road, which at this point also serves as the border between the counties of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. This is likely to have been erected as a marker for a burial area, for archaeologists have found much by way of evidence of cremated human remains having been buried in the immediate vicinity. Its strange shape can be explained by the fact that it suffered at the hands of nineteenth-century souvenir-hunters (who, as was the case with Stonehenge, often came to visit with a hammer and chisel at the ready), and not long after legal protection was introduced for ancient monuments in 1882 the King Stone was encircled by railings to prevent further damage.

Finishing off the ancient monuments that make up the Rollright Stones is a portal dolmen – a Neolithic burial chamber which is several hundred yards east of the circle. It consists of four upright stones (plus a capstone which is now lying on the ground) and is known as the Whispering Knights. They make for an interesting stop if you’re in the area; the Cotswold towns of Chipping Norton and Moreton-in-Marsh aren’t far away, and nor for that matter is Hook Norton with its brewery, while they’re located just over half-way between Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon. So, if you’re going for a drive around the Cotswolds, why not take a look?

The names given to the various component parts of the Rollrights relate to the ‘petrification’ myth attached to them. The story goes that a king was riding across the country with his followers when they were stopped by a witch (sometimes credited as Mother Shipton) who challenged the king to walk forward, with the promise that if he could see the nearby village of Long Compton he would be King of England. However, his view was blocked by the rising ground, at which point the witch turned him to stone. She then promptly did the same to the king’s followers, who’d gathered in a circle to discuss the challenge, and then she did likewise to four of the followers who had lagged behind, quite possibly to discuss a plot against the king; they became the Whispering Knights.

An interesting story, for the King Stone does indeed stand just below the ridge from which you can see Long Compton which is on lower ground to the north (and a lovely view it is too). 

Another story about the stones is of a more recent vintage and comes from Doctor Who, for the Rollrights were used as a filming location for that show, back in Tom Baker’s day. In it, the stones were used as a worship-site by modern-day druids but they (the stones, not the druids) turned out to be blood-sucking aliens in disguise!

Thoughts (and reading) on the World Cup

Football has a tendency to throw up the unexpected at times. When the World Cup started, for example, I hadn’t realistically expected that I would be sitting here with the semi-finals coming up and having to get my head around the prospect that England could actually do this. I’d reckoned on the quarter-finals (although I had, in a betting pool in which I’m taking part, predicted that England would get to the semi-finals – a rash and overly optimistic act, or so I thought), with a view to the team using that as a point from which to improve in time for the 2022 tournament.

I’m used to tabloid-fuelled unrealistic expectations pre-tournament, and I have over the years become cynical enough to distrust such hype, but this time there was not much by way of it; recent experiences like the 2014 World Cup and the Euros two years ago will do that. Now, the sense of optimism that has developed has been based on what the England team has done on the pitch. Some people started to believe that football might be coming home after the 6-1 win over Panama; yes it was only Panama, but when did England last put six past anyone at a World Cup? Never, that’s when (for those of us who’ve sat through such stuff as that awful 0-0 draw with Algeria back in 2010, to be five up at half time was very heaven). Even the defenders have been scoring in addition to Harry Kane. Out came the replica heavy-cotton red shirt with the three lions badge.

For the knock-out stage, there was the small matter of winning a penalty shoot-out, another thing that England have never previously managed to do at a World Cup (following which I hugged three complete strangers, one of whom had just completed a victory dance on a table), and all of a sudden we were into the last eight, in addition to which Germany, Argentina and Portugal were already out and all that stood between England and the World Cup final were Sweden, followed by Croatia or Russia.

How can one not dare to dream in such circumstances?

The Sweden game, billed in advance as a tough one, was class, a game in which England never looked like losing (not that that’s stopped us before, and it required some good defending and goalkeeping as well as those two goals at the other end). Optimism and hope surge to the surface; there is a very real sense that, wonderful though it’s been so far, the best is yet to come. When was the last time that I was this optimistic about England at a World Cup, or any tournament for that matter? Probably after the second-round demolition of Denmark in 2002, even though we had Brazil next, back then. Now it’s Croatia in the semi-final. 

The semi-final of a World Cup! This hasn’t happened since I was in primary school, and we are now at the point where there are Internet memes involving ‘Three Lions’ being incorporated into everything from The Matrix to Only Fools and Horses. I’ve even played that song (the original Euro ’96 version, not the 1998 re-write) to a minibus full of tourists from overseas. More than once. One of them sang along. Did I think that this would be happening when the tournament started, less than a month ago? No I did not.

Watching the football aside, I’ve just finished reading a book about the England team. It’s called Fifty Years of Hurt and it’s by the football journalist Henry Winter, a writer of much experience who I’ve always found to be one worth reading (he did twenty-odd years at The Daily Telegraph before getting snapped up by The Times in 2015, which you could say provides more evidence for what Private Eye’s been saying about the Torygraph for a few years now with regard to it getting rid of its decent journos). The book’s title should be enough to tell you that it was published in 2016, just before the European Championships to be precise (the run-up to a major international tournament is always a good time to bring out a new book about football); I, for what it’s worth, picked up the hardback copy in a charity shop for a couple of quid, a bargain given the undoubted quality of the author and the fact that the original retail price is given on the dust-jacket as £20.

Worth reading? Oh yes. On picking it up, I assumed that it would be a chronological account of England’s post-1966 woes, but it’s not that. It’s more a thematic study, taking in many interviews with players (Alan Mullery, Steven Gerrard, Ian Wright, Jack Charlton, Alan Shearer, etc, etc) as he looks at diverse aspects that seek to explain why England haven’t won anything since 1966 (expect Le Tournoi, the France ’98 warm-up tournament which doesn’t really count). There are penalty shoot-outs, of course (“Fifty years of hurt are pockmarked by 12 yards of hurt. Names and shoot-out dates hang like tattered regimental flags over the battlefield of tournament football”), along with discussions about academies, the ‘bubble’ in which England players become ensconced (a source of much ridicule; “I think of players’ past failures to open their eyes to the world outside the Bubble, embarrassing episodes” – like at the 2010 World Cup, which the squad mainly spent in “a retreat surrounded by high-wire fences … so cut off from the tournament in South Africa it could be South Mimms … England want seclusion, to be able to train in peace, but they miss out on the World Cup party”), ‘flair’ players both of the English and foreign varieties (“analysis of the fifty years of hurt must pay due homage to the merchants of menace who wreck English ambitions … Maradona, [Cristiano] Ronaldo, Pirlo and Suárez provide a painful reminder to English football of an obligation to breed world-class performers who spread sustained distress among opponents … England’s inability to deal with that special quartet also underscores the importance of adopting a more sophisticated game-plan to stifle them”) and of course the pervading importance of what Winter calls ‘the Show’, by which he means the Premier League which dominates all as far as English football is concerned.

Much of the emphasis is from the Nineties onwards, which ties in with the years in which Winter himself has been following England. He seems to skip effortlessly through the years, back and forth as required. the chapter on the mistrust or mis-use of English ‘flair’ players goes directly from Glenn Hoddle as a player to Glenn Hoddle as the England manager at France ’98. My one quibble is his constant use of the present tense which can get a little confusing when he’s digressing from present (2016) to past, but other than that it is worth a read, one of those book that anyone with an interest in the England football team should take a look at.

He touches a bit on something that we’ve been hearing a lot of at this World Cup, about teams being ‘streetwise’. That’s the notion of not breaking the rules but bending or stretching them; for example, if you’re down after a challenge, stay down while the ref appraises the situation, and while he’s doing that several of your team-mates will be on at him to point out that a foul has been committed and ask what he intends to do about it. It’s not outright cheating but it certainly seems to be a way-point on the road to it; there is a fine line between a team being ‘streetwise’ and a team being just plain ‘dirty’. Nevertheless, some teams are very good at this sort of behaviour. England are not (“Although not averse to milking contact in the area to obtain penalties, England tend not to react theatrically outside the box”) and it has often worked against us. In Winter’s book, Michael Owen has some interesting things to say on this (with particular regards to the Beckham sending-off against Argentina in 1998), while Roy Hodgson has some wise words on it as well. Having been brought up on English football, I’m torn. I don’t really like this sort of behaviour (being ‘streetwise’ really is just gamesmanship by another name), but I’m enough of a realist to know that it is a part of the modern game that isn’t going to go away, and teams that have this streetwise streak to them do tend to do better.

What really surprised me about Winter’s book is how much this bloke actually cares. When switching the focus from the players to the supporters – not the armchair/pub ones like me but the ones (often supporters of lower-division clubs, tellingly) who part with more money than they probably have in order to travel the world to watch England – he writes of his pride in having “attended 250 England games on the spin, including six as a supporter when placed on gardening leave by the Telegraph. The thought of missing a game induces palpitations … I’ve been spat at by a fan outside Wembley for daring to criticize the team I admire most. I’ve had players’ parents vilifying me to my face, on the phone and via email for slating their offspring for underperforming for England. It’s all worth it. It’s a privilege to cover England, to travel the world from Sapporo to Rio and see them play, and to appreciate the passion they still inspire.” The passion comes out, and I like the writer all the more for that. Funny really, the fans don’t usually get to see the journalists as fellow-fans but in a sense that’s what they are, for the most part. However this World Cup pans out, I would love it if Henry Winter were to bring out a follow-up to Fifty Years of Hurt about Gareth Southgate’s England at Russia 2018.

One last point, that is not about Henry Winter’s book: the England-Croatia semi-final will also be a deciding match in the Unofficial Football World Championship (UFWC). This competition, which is not sanctioned by FIFA in any way, shape or form, uses a boxing-style method of deciding which team is the best in the world (ie. you have to defeat the reigning champion to become the champion). It was created in 2003 but has been back-dated all the way back to the birth of international football in the 1870s. Peru held the title going into the World Cup, only to lose the title to Denmark in the first round; as Denmark were subsequently knocked out by Croatia in the second round, they are currently the unofficial world champions although such is the nature of knock-out tournaments that whoever wins the World Cup on Sunday will (perhaps unknowingly) leave Russia as the unofficial as well as the official world champions.

Come on England. It’s coming home.

Looking out for seabirds off Tenby

To Tenby, where the weather was glorious last week and where I was very keen to go on one of the various boat trips. You can go on one to Caldey Island, which is just over half a mile south of the mainland and which is home to a monastic community (thus making it one of Britain’s holy islands, for there has been a monastery there since the sixth century; admittedly it was closed down during the Dissolution, but an abbey on the island was rebuilt in 1910, originally for Anglican Benedictines although it’s now occupied by Cistercians). You can go mackerel-fishing or seal-watching. Or you can go on an island cruise which lasts for about an hour and doesn’t land at Caldey, although it does take you to see the bird sanctuary on the smaller, neighbouring St Margaret’s Island which has no public access.

I chose the latter as I was very keen to see the seabirds; the Puffins especially appealed, mainly because I think they’re fascinating birds but also because there was a big feature on them in the most recent issue of the RSPB members’ magazine Nature’s Home. Also, it has to be said, Allison had seen loads of them on a boat trip when she went to Newfoundland recently and yes, I was feeling a little bit jealous about that (what we in Britain know of as a Puffin – which, as it happens, is the provincial bird of Newfoundland & Labrador – is known internationally as the Atlantic Puffin, for there are two other species of this diminutive yet very distinctive seabird that can be found in the northern Pacific Ocean).

I bought my ticket from one of the wooden booths by the Harbour that sells the tickets for the variety of boat trips on offer. I was advised that, as the tide was low, the trip would be setting off not from the Harbour but from the nearby Castle Beach which has a mobile jetty which is used by the various boat trip operators at low tide, and which is manoeuvred into position by a tractor. The boat was due to sail from there at 3:30pm but the booth-lady reckoned I should be there ten minutes beforehand. Castle Beach is one of the four golden-coloured beaches that adorn Tenby and which are key to this walled Pembrokeshire town being a very popular holiday destination. There’s a tidal island there, St Catherine’s, which you can walk out to at low tide although it’s closed to the public. On it is a fort, one of the Palmerston Follies that were built in the 1860s when there was a war threat with the French; never used for its intended purpose, it has at various times been a private house and even a zoo. Nowadays it is apparently open to the public on a very occasional basis (according to a series of posters that can be seen on the walls of several of the town’s hotels and B&Bs) and two years ago it appeared on TV as the high-security ‘Sherrinford’ prison in Sherlock. But I digress.

Anyway, at the appointed hour of 3:20pm I and a couple-of-dozen others who’d paid their £14 were there on the beach, forming a reasonably orderly queue by the tractor amid the holiday-makers who were simply there to catch the sun and occasionally go and cool off in the sea, and very nice weather it was for that. Come 3:35 I was wondering if our boat was going to actually show up, for the only vessels that had come along to the jetty had done so to unload passengers and none of them even remotely resembled the yellow catamaran that had adorned the Tenby Boat Trips board that I’d seen when I’d bought my ticket. Then, said yellow catamaran (“designed especially to cruise the beautiful coastal water around Tenby … unique shape makes for a very comfortable, stable ride”) hove into view and we passengers dutifully trooped on board.

After the safety announcements we were off, heading out into Carmarthen Bay. While we weren’t going to be landing at Caldey Island, we did go past the jetty on our way to St Margaret’s Island, which is where the main seabird colony is located. Although it’s uninhabited by people now, St Margaret’s Island bears the evidence of human activity in the form of some disused housing for workers who quarried limestone on the island until 1851. Nowadays it’s a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) as well as being a part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park (as is Tenby, for that matter). 

As we approached it, we saw plenty of gulls (three types of those – Herring, Lesser Black-backed and Greater Black-backed) circling and calling ahead, quite a few Cormorants and some low-flying birds, dark on top and white underneath, which it took me a minute or so to realise were either Guillemots or Razorbills, depending on what their beaks looked like!

The boat hove to underneath the cliffs so we could all get a good view of the birds. Atop the cliffs were the Cormorants, St Margaret’s being home to one of the largest Cormorant nesting-sites in England and Wales. Below them, perches on the ledges on the cliff-face, were the Guillemots and Razorbills – both members of the auk family and thus related to the Puffins although they are larger; the Guillemots are the largest with their slender heads and pointed beaks, whereas the Razorbills (black rather than brown) are more stocky-looking with thick, blunt beaks that have a white line on them. They and the Puffins have similar lifestyles – they spend much of their time at sea and only come to land in order to nest.

Alas, despite much looking with the binoculars I didn’t see any Puffins (I’m reminded of an old postcard which has a drawing of a Puffin on top of a cliff next to a drawing of the same cliff-top without the Puffin, captioned ‘nuffin’). They nest at the top of the cliffs in burrows, and their numbers at St Margaret’s are much smaller than those of the other birds (no more than a couple-of-dozen nesting pairs) because of the rats. St Margaret’s can be accessed from Caldey at low tide, and the rats on Caldey make their way across and eat Puffin eggs and chicks. Apparently there are plans afoot for dealing with Caldey’s rats, which is good news for the Puffins’ future.

And they need some good news. At the moment, their numbers are in decline in Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes and Norway as well as the British Isles. They are currently designated as ‘vulnerable’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) while my RSPB field guide has them as an amber species. Getting rid of the rats on Caldey Island to help the Puffins on St Margaret’s may be a small step but it’s a step in the right direction; they managed it on Lundy Island, which is some thirty-odd miles due south of Caldey.

As well as two out of the three possible auk sightings, there were plenty of gulls. As well as the usual species – Herring, Lesser Black-backed, Greater Black-backed – I was delighted with a much rarer sighting, that of a Kittiwake. Much more of a marine bird, this one is hardly ever seen on land except when it’s nesting. When did I last see one of those? To be honest, I’m not sure if I ever have for most of my seabird-watching is done from the land. I really should do these boat trips more often! Down by the sea, a small Cormorant turned out to be a Shag (cue the jokes; sometimes bird names do birdwatchers no favours!).

Cruising along by Caldey, after seeing plenty of Cormorants fishing out at sea, we stopped by a rocky outcrop which is home to a Herring Gull colony, where we were able to see the chicks, almost but not quite ready to start flying, wandering around. Oystercatchers also abounded, but in between them I noticed a small brown bird, similar-looking to a thrush but smaller, which I was happy to identify as a Rock Pipit (“breeds along the rocky shorelines and on small islands around the coasts of Britain and Ireland … avoids sandy beaches … rare inland”). I saw a couple more before we moved on.

It’s possible to see seals in the sea off Tenby, but today wasn’t our day for that. We did see a few jellyfish towards the surface, though; later, while walking along the beach, I saw one that had quite literally been left high and dry by the tide. As the boat made its way back to Castle Beach and the old fort on St Catherine’s (home to quite a few Jackdaws if nothing else), I scanned the surrounding area with my binoculars once more, and was rewarded for my efforts with the sight of a Gannet diving head-first into the sea.

Even though I didn’t get to see any Puffins, I found the trip to be most enjoyable and was able to add a fair few species to my ‘seen in 2018’ list.