09.06.08John Macadam / Earthwords, geologist & writer
Bought a guide and want to know more?
09.06.08
There are many guides to the geology and landscape of Britain. The quality - especially the readability - varies (some of the comments in the reviews of my guides imply this!). Guides for Cornwall are listed on the website of the Cornwall RIGS Group, and you can download a list from CSM's Geomincentre there's also a list of publications on Cornwall.
This geological map of Cornwall dates from before 1879. But you
can see a simplified, full colour,
modern geological map of Cornwall,
on
the RIGS website, produced by the British Geological Survey (BGS). For serious fieldwork you need
1:50,000 geological maps and you can buy these direct
from the BGS - they are listed on the BGS website. There
are many images and much geological information in
CSM's virtual museum - the
curator is
Simon Camm.
If you are in Cornwall there are some continuing education classes in geology and some one-off guided walks and lectures. These are listed in the events programme put out every six months by the RIGS Group. The best mineral collection in Cornwall - the Rashleigh Collection - is on display (and in drawers) in the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, but there are no images on the website as yet.
If you do not want to see further information about individual trails you can return to the top.
more on
Saltern Cove Local Nature Reserve
trail
more on
Explore the Landscape &
Rocks of the St Austell area
more on
Strangers on the
Shore? pebbles on Charlestown beach
more on
Bodmin Moor - 400 million
years in the making - treat with care!
more on
A Geological Guide to
South East Cornwall
more on
A Geology Guide to North
Cornwall
more on
A geological
trail between Pendower & Carne
more on Saltern Cove Local Nature Reserve
trail
The trail starts from the excellent Seashore
Centre (phone 01803 528841 for opening times), a fun, inter-active and free place where Shawn the Prawn is your guide. There are
10 stops on the trail, with the Centre as stop 1. The Centre contains a few
coral fossils - and a microscope to look at them (and sea creatures) with. As
you walk to stop 2 look for lots more corals in the sea wall as you step onto
the beach. At low water (stop 2) you may see a brown peaty layer in
the sand - this is the remains of a 10,000 year old forest, flooded as the
sea rose after the last Ice Age. Not many fossils in the 'fruit cake rock'
('conglomerate' to geologists) at stop 3, but you may find a coral or two in the limestones at
stop 4: please don't remove them if you do! Between stops 5
and 6 follow the layers of
the Devonian sandstones carefully. Suddenly they disappear and there is just
the beach backed by a cliff covered by vegetation. Then the fruit cake rock
appears: you have just walked over a fault. The fruit cake rock has been
dropped down to the level of the Devonian. There's a gulley running out to
sea. When the rock faulted - broke - there would have been an earthquake.
Fortunately Torbay is not bothered by earthquakes today so you can sleep
peacefully! Most earthquakes occur along plate boundaries and these are far
away today. But if you want to find out about
earthquakes in the UK the
British Geological Survey have an excellent
site. From stops 6 to 7 you should see some thick layers of red sandstone
in among the fruitcake rock: if the boulders were carried by a flash flood in a
river where would these sands have been deposited? Certainly in a quieter part
of the river - the inside of a bend maybe. From stops 8 to 10 the rocks are very
complicated. Lots of different rock types including some lava and volcanic ash. But
they are also cut by faults, and along these cracks various hot waters rich in
chemicals came up and changed the rocks. See which of the rocks you have
already seen you can find in Saltern Cove.
For more to do in the Torbay area visit the Torbay Coast & Countryside Trust website.
Torbay is easily reached by train or by National Express coach
more on Explore the Landscape & Rocks of the St Austell area
There should be extra on-site interpretation going up during 2005/6: there are already several panels put up by the Cornish Heathland Project. There are now cycling/walking/riding trails through the clay country - the Clay Trails. If you would like to see some images a local enthusiast has produced an unofficial clay trails website.
You can open the thumbnail to see an air-photo composite of the china clay area, courtesy of IMERYS. The image is 230+ KB - but the detail is superb, and if you download it it will help you follow the Pig's Egg Trail (a big loop starting from the Eden Project).
St Austell Bay just appears in the bottom right, with the yellowish curve of Par beach obvious. Further west the straight beach is Carlyon Bay, and just in the picture to the west is Charlestown beach (see below). The Eden Project now fills the isolated light blob (clay pit) to the north of the bay. The A30 road curves gently from centre top to centre left, across Goss Moor. The China Clay Country Park is on the southern side of the eastern mass of pits, on the edge of Wheal Martyn.
The St Austell Tourist Information Centre has downloadable information about accommodation and other things to do and see in the area, and a weather forecast. One of the locations for the latest James Bond film - Die Another Day - was one of the biomes in the Eden Project (all the shooting was done by artificial light after the visitors had gone home). Another Cornish location was the sand dunes and beach at Holywell Bay (near Newquay) which was turned into Korea! (Film buffs can pick up a leaflet from the Tourist Board about film locations in Cornwall).
To reach the St Austell area you can arrive at St Austell railway station which is on the London (Paddington) - Penzance mainline, but there are also direct trains to Glasgow and Edinburgh. You can find out about train times on the national rail website or phone 08457 48 49 50 in the UK. There are local trains to Newquay via Luxulyan (for the Rocking Trail). St Austell bus station is next to the train station, and there are buses to the Eden Project. There are also buses to Eden from Newquay, via Roche (good for the Pig's Egg Trail). You can buy a joint train+bus+Eden or bus+Eden ticket, and take the bus. St Austell Town Trail is just a short walk downhill from the train and bus station. Most of the buses in Cornwall are run by First Western National which has a customer helpline on 0845 600 1420 7 days a week, 0700 to 2100. But maybe a better source of information is Cornwall County Council's Passenger Transport Unit's website with an interactive map. There are also many community buses. Cornwall County Council publish free compendiums of public transport twice a year.
You can also reach St Austell bus station by National Express coach. TRAVELINE SOUTHWEST on 0870 608 2 608 (only in the UK) provides information on all public transport in the south west.
You can fly to Newquay by Ryanair from London Stansted, or by Air Southwest from London Gatwick.
more on Strangers on the Shore? pebbles on Charlestown beach
You don't need to buy this guide (it's free anyway): you can download it, and French, German and Spanish translations are downloadable free from this website as well. You can find out about the mines I mention from The Metalliferous Mining Region of South West England, by Dines, published by HMSO (and obtainable from the British Geological Survey). If Square Sail, which owns Charlestown, are using the area for filming you may not be able to go on the beach, but you may get other excitements! In Charlestown there is also the Shipwreck Rescue & Heritage Centre.
There's a bus (number 25) from St Austell train and bus station.
more on Bodmin Moor - 400 million years in the making - treat with care!
It's all free to download! As these are
all 
you will need a free
Acrobat Reader
to read them. There's a bookmark, a
leaflet with a granite tor to cut out and a very short text in 6 languages, a 20
page colour booklet in English, French, German,
Spanish and
Dutch,
and an A3 map for schools. The science for the
bookmark's cookery recipe (How to make a 'Colourful
Rock Slice') is on recipes. Two more bookmarks were
produced in 2005.
For more about the area - what to do, where to stay - try sites about Bodmin Moor, South East Cornwall and North Cornwall. You can reach Liskeard and Bodmin (Bodmin Parkway) by train, and Bodmin, Liskeard, Launceston and Camelford by National Express coach. There's a bus - 574 - from Liskeard and Callington - which goes up on the moor, and stops at Minions.
more on A Geological Guide to South East Cornwall
Cawsand figures in the The Plymouth Area (Geologists' Association Guide no. 38, by D.M. Hobson, 1978), but the description is far more technical than my Cawsand Bay Trail. Plymouth Museum, just over the River Tamar, has a few minerals of excellent quality on display (these were part of the Barstow collection). For information about granite working the expert is Peter Stanier: his South West Granite was published in 1999 and has an ISBN in paperback of 1 900147 13 0.
More information on South East Cornwall.
Plymouth (in Devon), Saltash and Liskeard are on the main railway line from London Paddington: train times are on the national rail website. There are three trails in the pack: the Cawsand Bay Trail is probably best reached by the ferry to Mount Edgcumbe Country Park from Plymouth; the Lantic Bay Trail is best reached by bus to Fowey from the train at Par or St Austell, and then the ferry to Polruan; and the Minions Trail is reached by bus from Liskeard (which is on the main railway line). The first two trails are on the coast so are ideal for walkers along the South West Coast Path. Most of the buses in Cornwall are run by First Western National which has a customer helpline on 0845 600 1420 7 days a week, 0700 to 2100. But maybe a better source of information is Cornwall County Council's Passenger Transport Unit's website with an interactive map. There are also many community buses. Cornwall County Council publish free compendiums of public transport twice a year. You can also reach Plymouth, Liskeard and St Austell by National Express coach. And you can reach Plymouth by Brittany Ferries from Roscoff (in Brittany) or by Air Southwestand British Airways from London Gatwick. TRAVELINE SOUTHWEST on 0870 608 2 608 (only in the UK) provides information on all public transport in the south west.
more on A Geology Guide to North Cornwall
Again, there is a fairly old guide to The North Coast of Cornwall from Bude to Tintagel (Geologists' Association Guide no. 10, by W.R. Dearman, E.C. Freshney, A.F. King, M. Williams, & M.C. McKeown, 1970) which has more detail about the coast at Bude, but of course the language is more technical than my Bude Trail. There have been many cliff falls and slips since 1970 so the access details are probably not reliable. For more information about granite working again see Stanier. There are geological specimens in Bodmin Museum, including an excellent 'Delabole Butterfly', a deformed shellfish (Spirifer verneuili) from Delabole Slate Quarry.
Information for visitors to North Cornwall.
Bodmin is connected to the mainline trains at Bodmin Parkway, from where there's a bus (555, run by Western Greyhound) into town and on to Wadebridge and Padstow (and even on to Trevone, via the coastal bus - 556 - to Newquay, for the Trevone Trail). You can get a bus (524) from Wadebridge to Polzeath (for the Pentire Trail). This bus goes on to Tintagel and Boscastle (spectacular geology!); this goes on through Crackington Haven (more good geology) to Bude on Sundays. Both Boscastle and Crackington Haven were badly affected by flash floods in August 2004: both lie at the seaward end of the short, steep streams which are characteristic of North Cornwall. (The situation was rather similar to the devastating floods in Lynmouth in August 1952: then 9 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, but the flood happened after dark and over a score of lives were lost). Buses will also get you to Bude (for the Bude Trail) either from Wadebridge (594/595) or from Exeter (X9/X90), on the main rail line. Most of the buses in Cornwall are run by First Western National which has a customer helpline on 0845 600 1420 7 days a week, 0700 to 2100. But maybe a better source of information is Cornwall County Council's Passenger Transport Unit's website with an interactive map. There are also many community buses. Cornwall County Council publish free compendiums of public transport twice a year. For steam buffs there's a train from Bodmin Parkway to Bodmin, but sometimes it's pulled by diesel. This line also links in with the Camel Trail, a cycle/foot/horse trail to Padstow in one direction, and onto Bodmin Moor in the other. This is part of the National Cycle network, and as it's on a disused track-bed it's nearly flat (but it gets very crowded on summer days so best enjoyed at 6 o'clock in the morning - when you may see otters in the River Camel - or after 6 o'clock in the evening).
You can reach Bodmin by National Express coach. TRAVELINE SOUTHWEST on 0870 608 2 608 (only in the UK) provides information on all public transport in the south west.
more on A geological trail between Pendower & Carne
For a period a year or two back the sand had built up on the east side of Carne beach so that the limestone at locality 7 was buried. Apologies if this caused you problems in following the trail then, or if it has recurred. I did not mention a superb area, near locality 5, where it was obvious that the rocks had been folded twice, as it was often covered with sand. If you hold a piece of paper horizontally, then fold it over so it is again horizontal, then fold it at 90 degrees to the first fold so it is again horizontal, you will have something vaguely resembling the folds on the beach - except they are in rock. The folding of the rock happened when the layers were far below the surface and were plastic. Also the folding would have happened over a considerable time (there's a bit of geological precision for you!).
The cafe at Melinsey Mill (up the valley from Pendower beach) not only has good food but you can sit either outside by the millpond, or inside and listen to the soothing sound of the turning wheel. I believe the cafe is shut out of season. They usually have copies of the trail to take away. There's a bus (number T51) from Truro (on the railway mainline) which goes close to the trail - especially in summer. Most of the buses in Cornwall are run by First Western National which has a customer helpline on 0845 600 1420 7 days a week, 0700 to 2100. But maybe a better source of information is Cornwall County Council's Passenger Transport Unit's website with an interactive map. There are also many community buses. Cornwall County Council publish free compendiums of public transport twice a year.
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