Boscastle

Cobwebs and Coaching-Inn Ghosts

The Cobweb Inn is named after the cobwebs. When it was an off-licence in the 1700s, the thick webs in the basement were said to keep flies off the beer, and when it became a pub in 1947 the name stuck. It's a tall five-floor free house by the harbour that usually keeps four real ales, mostly West Country — St Austell, Sharp's, Tintagel Brewery — plus a guest or two. The pizzas run from a £12.95 margarita to a Cobweb BBQ chicken at £14.50, the burgers come in brioche buns with chips and coleslaw, and the Sunday carvery has a following. Food stops at half two and starts again at six.

Up the road is the Wellington Hotel, a sixteenth-century coaching inn doing Cornish ales and home-cooked food. It was the Bos Castle Hotel until 1852, then renamed after the Duke of Wellington had died. It is reputedly haunted — guests report a coachman, a little girl and an old lady, with Room 9 the worst of it.

Provisions and the Harbour

For provisions there's the Boscastle Farm Shop and Café, up the hill on the B3263 at Hillsborough Farm, open daily nine to five: a bakery, a deli, artisan cheeses and homemade preserves, and a café doing breakfast and lunch.

The harbour is an S-shaped natural inlet where the Valency and the Jordan meet and run to the sea, the only real harbour for twenty miles of coast. Its walls were built in 1584 by Sir Richard Grenville. Near the entrance is the Boscastle Blowhole, also called the Devil's Bellows: on a good swell an hour or two either side of low tide, the sea forces air through a fissure and fires a jet of white spray halfway across the harbour mouth, with a boom.

Headlands, Stitches and the Norman Font

The walking is the main reason to stay a week. The Willapark headland, a 317-foot promontory topped by a whitewashed lookout tower, now a coastguard station, guards the mouth. The National Trust circular route climbs the cliffs and drops inland through oak woodland along the Valency, where summer meadows draw the rare pearl-bordered fritillary. Above the village sit the Forrabury Stitches, a medieval field system of long strips still farmed the old way, rare in England. The coast path runs about three miles to Tintagel.

The Church of St Symphorian stands on Forrabury Hill overlooking the sea, largely rebuilt in 1867 but keeping its Norman font, shaped like a chalice. The village takes its name from the Bottreaux family, whose castle here has dwindled to earthworks.

Magic, Flood and Rebuilding

The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic has been here since 1960 — over 3,000 objects, the largest anywhere, among them the skeleton of Joan Wytte, the Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin.

In August 2004 eight hours of rain sent a flash flood through the village; seven helicopters lifted about 150 people to safety and roughly fifty cars went into the harbour. Nobody died. The National Trust, which owns the harbour and much of the land, rebuilt the village. Bodmin Parkway is the nearest station; the 95 bus stops at Boscastle Bridge between Bude and Wadebridge.

Two Views of Boscastle

One visitor called it "like stepping into the picture of one of those old chocolate or fudge boxes." John Leland, the sixteenth-century antiquary, called it "a very filthy town and il kept." Both are on record.