LAMORNA COVE: a poem...

Lamenting Lamorna…

The dreary woodland sloped through the valley,

Parallel to its lively, fidgety stream,

Past the enigmatic ‘Lamorna Wink’,

As welcoming as an unsettling dream…

A dithering ancient stopped on the lane,

In a gap through which a large van had just steered;

But this bespectacled elderly froze then frowned,

Unable to manoeuvre and thus unnervingly leered… 

I angled my Mazda almost into a hedgerow,

Affording the old woman the width of a tank,

But still it was me who made all the moves,

For her spatial awareness totally stank…

As the narrowing roadway fell to the Cove,

I faced a scene of abject destruction;

Clusters of boulders, threats on the hillside,

Ocean spillage and organisational dysfunction…

Even the refreshment building was closed up and cold,

The row of old cottages squatted dull and neglected

In the wake of drizzle and a stiff sea-breeze, 

Yet even by sea-birds this place seemed rejected…

One vehicle lay rusting in the upper car-park,

Abandoned to the salt and the sand and the sea’s demands;

Tape clung to the fender and one tyre sank flat,

An unsightly blot, yet meek to a cruel tide’s commands…

Beyond the crazy beach of sharp granite blocks,

 Daunting, angular, historically mined

In this much vaunted haven for Victorian artists,

Was the relic I instinctively knew I would find…

The blocking arm of the old harbour-wall,

Dismantled by ferocious storms for some years, 

Lay asunder, derelict, like a building in Ypres,

Which a World War One bombardment had reduced to tears…

There’s no loading of boats these days to move the mined stone,

No need indeed for the arm to protect

The anchored vessels, their crews, or their freight,

No reason to rebuild then, I could easily detect… 

Thus the ocean continues its terrible barrage,

Hacking, lashing, renting in siege;

So each year my camera records further damage 

To Lamorna Cove’s forlorn and sad heritage…

Pete Ray

December 17th 2014

Getting down to Lamorna Cove past the local inn, the ‘Wink’, which never seems to be open when I go past and looking like the venue for a spooky thriller, is always a bind. An old woman, frightened to move between my car and one parked in a passing space, caused me real irritation, for a wide van had already breezed past, but she clammed up totally, leaving me to squeeze into a hedge… The car-park was desolate, a row-boat sat neatly in one space, the blocks of granite reduced the hillside to an ugly landscape, despite two or three cottages below them and the beach was a sharp, boulder-built protective shield for the sorry row of cottages in the Cove itself. The tea-rooms were shut. A car lay rusting and the harbour-wall had worn away even more from the time of my last visit…

What would the Newlyn artists have thought?