Wild Cornish Cliffs

     The four were still getting to know each other, with Ashley and Esme eager to show off their favourite haunts. They soon took Demelza Louise and Chloe to see the cliffs of the north coast. Although less than ten miles from the south coast, here ~ as often happens on the western tip of Cornwall ~ the weather was quite different. The sun kept disappearing behind clouds, while the horizon remained misty.

     The cliffs were dotted with sinister ruins of many buildings, abandoned engine houses and crumbling remains of granite walls. Long ago they had brimmed with activities of a prosperous tin mining industry.

     As the friends gazed down over the Crowns, engine houses that marked the entrance to amazing subterranean passages that extended some distance under the seabed, such stories they imagined.

At Porthgwarra          The next day the girls took a bus almost as far as Land's End, to visit a smugglers' cove where waves lapped over pale smooth sand. The cliffs rose high on either side of the cove.
     Imaginative Esme kept glancing up nervously, remembering that she had once been told that a ledge near the top was "Madgy Figgy's seat" where an evil witch used to cast spells to lure ships laden with treasure onto the rocky ledges just out to sea. A buoy marks the worst of these, the notorious Runnel Stone, and normally the dismal wail of its horn and the jangle of its bell would be audible from the beach, but the sea was so quiet today that these alarms were hushed. Still the water was racing in as the tide rose, and little rivulets ran down the sand to meet the splashing waves.

Chloe longed to paddle in a rivulet that ran through the sand. Demelza Louise, despite her best efforts at mild sweetness, felt cross and bossy (again!). Especially when she discovered that her sister's feet were already wet!

About these dolls and Story Notes . . .

The Bluebell Picnic