If you stand on the road that runs along the top of Cornwall’s Whitsand Bay, you wouldn’t even know it was there, but the Trenninow community of holiday huts have has been nestled to the cliffs since between the wars. It is wonderful and eccentric.
‘Westwinds’ represents a way of holidaying that is disappearing. The community sprang up in an ad hoc way from the 1920s. My great-great grandfather knew the farmer who grazed stock at the top of the cliff, and asked one day whether he could put a little hut on the cliff where he and his wife could come over for day trips. And that’s where the first hut was built."
At first, families from nearby Plymouth pitched bell tents in the holidays on this otherwise pretty useless drop of land, and then they upgraded to tea-huts, which the farmer was happy for them to leave there all year round for a peppercorn rent. There was a certain amount of development. The cliff is so steep most families had to more or less wedge their hut into the side, using the rubble to form a kind of rough patio in front.
By 1947, the Town and Country Planning act made any further building development illegal. But ideas for embellishments were tempered in any case by the fact that if you wanted a toilet, you’d have to carry it down. Even now, a proper flushing loo is a luxury. My Mother remembers as a young girl going down to the beach with a bucket to collect drinking water from the spring. Although we have plumbing now, in crucial ways the atmosphere of the community has remained largely unchanged.
Some visitors describe arriving on the first day of a holiday and automatically reaching for a light switch before remembering they have to strike a match and light a candle or a gas lamp. With no electricity, there’s no TV, and most of us owners wouldn’t want it anyway. They come to ‘Westwinds’ to get away from phones, e-mails, demands, rush. The huts on Trenninow are simple and relaxed, and so are the pleasures that go with them.
At ‘Westwinds’ you can sit and watch the sunlight dancing on the surface of the water for hours, the sunsets can be breathtaking, you can also observe the dive boats as they surround both the Scylla & The James Egan Layne. Neighbours often pop in for a glass of wine and an impromptu BBQ, of fresh bass on a fire made from driftwood and finish off with freshly picked blackberries for pudding. What more could you ask for!
Of course, there’s swimming, in a cove that’s not only safer in terms of tides than other beaches in the area, there are rock pools to explore and two beaches to our left is the added attraction of a bit of boat-wreck lodged in a corner of the beach (which we know as Boat House Beach). The rusting remains of the Chancellor, which ran aground in 1933, lends a distinctly romantic feel to Trenninow beach. And the wave- and weather-worn boiler serves as a piece of play equipment.
As children, we would play for so long down on the beach, that our mothers were so fed up at yelling "Tea-time!" down the cliff-side, that they developed a system of bells and whistles with a different tone for each family.
Most of the huts in the community have been passed down through families for three generations. Each parent knows that if they’re not on the beach with their children, an adult relative or long-standing family friend will be. Everyone looks out for each other.
One of my neighbours says that if you find you’re in trouble when you’re bringing your row boat in, suddenly, there’ll be half-a-dozen neighbours waist-deep, helping you. There is a freedom born of trust that would inevitably disintegrate if the make-up of the owners changed.
In these days of easy air travel, of package holidays with everything laid on at the swipe of a credit card, it’s hard for many people to see the appeal of staying somewhere like ‘’Westwinds.’ But for the majority of us the Cliffs are in our blood, and we would not want to be anyway else other than within our little spiritual havens set within ‘Cornwall’s Forgotten Corner’ known as Whitsand Bay
