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Rocket practice towards Daymer House (an Edwardian house built between 1901 and 1910)
Somewhere in my photo albums is a picture of me when I was about 19 years old atop this very post near Port Isaac. That would have been in the 1970’s! I always thought it was a lookout post of some sort and a fine challenge to climb.
The pictures here show an exploration geologist from Western Australia about to climb it so he could see where Doc Martin was filmed. Australians do love that series! Also a friend of mine in 2015 climbing it on a walk back to Polzeath from Port Isaac in the August sunshine.
Sadly, on my way to the Port Isaac Sea Shanty Festival a couple of weeks ago I noticed it was no more. Or as Monty Python might have said, it was pushing up the daisies. Literally.
The good folk at iWalk Cornwall explained in a comment on my 2017 post that it was not a look out post at all but a “Wreck Post”. They highlight features you’ll see on their wonderfully researched walk so they should know!
Apparently some poor fellow had to climb it to have a rocket fired at him with a line attached. All in the name of practicing to save those lost at sea.
If you are following, and I know some of you are, that brings me to the Trebetherick Rocket Apparatus which was fired from the golf course on occasions between 1880 until about 1930. The Rocket shed it was kept in is for sale at the moment and conveniently next to the Trebetherick stores if you want a home for your own rockets.
The apparatus at Trebetherick was used to practice the same thing although I don’t know if Daymer Bay ever had a Wreck Post. There’s a great photo of a practice session on the golf course in the days when there were only a very few houses there and so a great area to practice!
The idea of firing a line across a ship to pull in wrecked sailors (who often could not swim and had pretty useless and ugly cork life vests, if they were lucky) was a very good one and saved many lives. Not sure exactly how many but I suspect quite a few just in our small area of the coast.
Rockets of course were invented by the Chinese a long time ago but they kept it secret and it wasn’t until relatively recently that we’ve been able to use them usefully but it does take practice!
Regular readers of my posts will know about the rocket system they developed unsuccessfully at St Eval to put wire nets in the Cornish skies to stop German bombers in WW2 and how Newquay recently almost became the key rocket launching site for the UK. Perhaps with a bit more practice it will be.
Hopefully no one who sees the end paragraph will get so angry they share it on 67 other sites and we get reporters coming down from London hounding the locals for sensational stories! As happened when I mentioned Construction Sites in Daymer Bay!
Now I’m not from Port Isaac but I would think that this wreck post has important memories for many of its good folk. Would it not be a great idea to have another Wreck Post put up in its stead? I’ll happily contribute to any fund raising efforts to reinstate what many might consider an historically important part of the fields above this award winning village!
Aug 2015. A friend, John Arnold and I on our way back from Bangladesh. Sounds unlikely but actually true.
The fallen Rocket post above Port Isaac
Not only does this show the Rocket Apparatus House but also the shaft on the road out of Trebetherick towards Trewint. This I assume was the site of the engine house and the chimney of TREWISTON, "the next small lead mine to the south, there is little to record beyond the fact that on March 25 1875 a sett was granted here of three fields called Lower, Inner and Middle Hobby-house numbered 640-642 on the St Minver tithe map. The late Sir Arthur Russell informed the writer that the workings lay to the east of the road about midway between Trebetherick and Trewint (O.S.18 S.E)." From: Mines and Miners of Cornwall.
Interestingly this area today has many houses now built on it and one to the north of the footpath is called Middle Hobby and would be in the field where the "Shaft" is shown. A new house on the left as you go past Rest Harrow Caravans and Camping is simply called Hobby Field. It is just south of what is shown on this old OS map extract.
This manual capstan is just under Stepper Point. Iwalkcornwall notes that ""For ships sailing into the bay on the prevailing SW wind, a great hazard was caused by the immediate loss of power due to the shelter from the cliffs. Once becalmed, they would drift helplessly and run aground on the Doom Bar. Therefore rockets were fired from the cliffs, to place a line onboard, which could then be used to pull the ship to the shore. Along the coastal path, on the cliff top, is an abandoned manual capstan which was used to winch the ships towards the harbour."
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