Penzance; Sunday, 03 October, 2021

I had breakfast in the hotel and then checked-out and headed, once more, over to the bus station to pick up the first bus heading up the coast to the neighbouring town of Marazion.

From there I headed out across the beach and onto the causeway out to St Michael’s Mount. The small tidal island located just off the coast at Marazion has a causeway link for a couple of hours either side of high tide. I arrived at about 10:15 which meant I had an hour to make the 15-minute walk before the causeway closed for the rest of the day.

Safely across to the island I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat in the garden of the café watching the tide slowly starting to come in and lap at the edge of the causeway. What was almost more interesting was watching the number of people who wanted to risk walking along the route, despite it now being closed – though several discovered the error of their ways as they made it up to the island with wet feet, with the final few having to admit defeat and return back to the mainland and await the start of the ferry service (there’s about a 40 minute gap between the causeway becoming impassable and the tide being high enough for the small ferries to operate)

I headed on into the island and climbed up the steep slope to the castle that sits on the highest point. Whilst the castle is still the family home of the St Aubyn family – they have a 999 year lease from the National Trust – most of the site is open to explore and I had a long wander round the different parts of the castle that were open, and from the roof was able to take in the stunning views of the Cornish coast, and a now completely submerged causeway.

Having wandered round the island for some time I headed back down to the harbour and joined the queue to get a ferry back to the mainland. Whilst the service runs pretty much non-stop, and the journey only takes about 5 minutes each way, the boats are small only taking about a dozen people, so it took nearly 30 minutes to get to the front of the queue and onto a boat back into Marazion harbour.

Back in Marazion I quickly grabbed some lunch from a little café before heading down to the bus stop and catching the Coaster back into Penzance and then on round to Lands End, where I went for a wander down to the Land End sign – famous for all the photos people take at the start or end of their walk/cycle/drive from one end of Britain to the other – and then a further 200 yards or so on to where the actual most South Westerly point of Britain is, which had far less people milling around.

After taking in Lands End I headed back to the bus stop and picked up the next Coaster to continue on it’s journey back round the loop in the opposite direction to Friday, heading back through Sennen, St Just, Zennor and St Ives before returning to Penzance. With the sunlight starting to fade we arrived back into Penzance, with the bus overtaking the sleeper train that was slowly being shunted down into the station.

I popped back over to the hotel to pick up my luggage and to have a quick drink, but not a bit to eat as I’d assumed that there would be food on the train. This turned out to be a bit of an error.

About 40 minutes before the train was due to leave I wandered back over to the station and shortly after we were able to board and get access to our cabins for the night. After dropping my stuff into my sleeper cabin I headed down to the lounge car, which is where I found out that there was no proper food available on board, so instead I had to rely on a mix of nuts, crisps and flapjacks to make a passable dinner – washed down with a small bottle of prosecco!

I ate in the lounge car whilst the train prepared for departure and watched as we left Penzance and headed along the coast towards Marazion. As the train turned inland away from the coast I finished the last of my prosecco and headed back to my cabin to turn in for the night.