Walk: Trebarveth and Lowland Point, St Keverne with Charlie Johns

Saturday 26 September, Trebarveth and Lowland Point, St Keverne with Charlie Johns.

We will walk along the coast from Coverack to Trebarveth and Lowland Point, through Coverack’s eastern suburb first, but soon into coastal rough ground, with traces of prehistoric coaxial fields and roundhouses among the willows and the heath.

This is a land of continuity, in that later farmers picked up and reused the prehistoric field lines in their own hedges, and in the continued use of the rough ground for summer grazing until quite recently. Some of the prehistoric and then medieval fields are still worked, for hay and pasture.

But it is also a land of change, with the sea constantly nibbling at the low cliff, devouring farmland, and revealing and then destroying structures, spilling sherds and scatters of flints. One of the structures is a late prehistoric ovoid house sliced open by coastal erosion and opened up further by archaeological excavation back in 1969, directed by David Peacock. That showed it contained ovens used in reducing saltwater to pure salt, using flat-bottomed vessels whose sherds have been given the lovely name, briquetage. Charlie has memories of the excavations, his first, undertaken during his school’s Easter holidays.

Being a coast close to both the Lizard and the Manacles, there will also be stories of wrecks and defence, a Second World War radar station, and at the end, from Lowland Point, a view to the Dean Point quarries, where gabbro was turned into aggregate in the later 20th century.