20 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT CORNWALL

IT SITS quietly at the bottom of England. It’s full of cows, castles and old tin mines. It’s got lovely weather, decent hotels and warm, sunny beaches. It’s CORNWALL, and we all love to go there on holiday. But before we all jump in our cars and head for the A30, just think – how much do we actually know about this long, thin peninsula? Is it safe to travel there? Is it home to any venomous species of animals? Will your mobile phone work there? It’s time to answer some different questions to these. Here are…

CORNWALL is the only county in the United 1 Kingdom that borders only one other county. With 84 counties nationwide, that means there is just a 1.2% chance that this neighbouring county is Devon…

but it is! That is remarkable enough, but when you learn that Devon is also the only county in the UK to abut Cornwall, the odds of these two counties sharing a border drops to an unbelievably low 0.014%, or 1 chance in 6972!

CORNWALL has its own unique 2 cryptozoological creature – the BEAST OF BODMIN MOOR. This elusive creature is a black feline, a couple of inches larger than an average domestic black cat, which is occasionally spotted in the distance and photographed standing against an unusually small wall.

MANY Cornish place names begin with the 3 prefixes Tre-, Pol- or Pen-, examples including Trewint, Polperro and Pentewan. These names derive from olden times and probably mean something in Celtic or Welsh.

CORNWALL’S major source of income 4 comes from tourists who flock to the county during the summer months, and this visitor economy is worth around £2.4 billion each year. Entertainment, retail, and the hotel sector account for 50% of this revenue, with the other £1.2 billion being generated by a speed camera hidden behind a bridge at the bottom of a hill on the A30 near Bolventor.

CORNWALL does not 5 have any football teams in the first five divisions of the game. The highest ranked team in the county is Truro City FC, who compete in the Vanarama National League South. At time of going to press, the team – nicknamed ‘the White Tigers’ – were just three

points in hand, clear and of with the Dover relegation Athletic zone, and but Havant with two & games Waterlooville their spot in the fourteen sixth tier points of the adrift, FA pyramid. they will However, likely keep when it comes to crowd numbers, the 2006/07 FA Vase winners are firmly fixed at the foot of the table with an average of just 261 spectators at each match. 6 THE attendance HIGHEST for the White home Tigers this season came on 28th August last year, when 311 fans watched them take all three points in a comprehensive 3-1 win over Farnborough FC.

TRURO FC’s greatest 7 attendance of the last decade came on New Year’s Day 2019, when a staggering 2,760 hungover fans packed into their Treyew Road ground to watch them take on National League South rivals Torquay United. Although Truro lost 3-1, most fans went home happy; with Torquay regularly getting gates of over 3,000 it’s likely that the vast majority of those at the game were away supporters.

TO MAKE matters worse, Truro FC don’t 8 even play in Cornwall these days; rather they ground-share with their Devon-based neighbours Plymouth Parkway FC, and the 65-mile trip may go some way to explaining their unimpressive home game attendances. The highest ranked team to kick a ball on Cornish soil are Mousehole AFC, who play their eighth tier football at Trungle Parc, Penzance, in the Southern League Division One South.

MOUSEHOLE AFC get 250 9 supporters through their turnstiles on a good Saturday.

WERE you or I to decide to 10 stop paying income tax, we would quickly find ourselves on the wrong side of the law. However, the

DUKE OF CORNWALL – HRH PRINCE WILLIAM – can stop paying tax on his income from his Cornish estate any time he likes without any repercussions. Magnanimously, the heir to the throne chooses not to do so. However, his father is not so gracious. Taking advantage of a loophole in tax law which exempts foodstuffs from VAT, HM the King avoids the 20% levy on his Duchy Original

Oat Biscuits.

GO treasure-hunting on the 12 beach in Cornwall and you could end up getting hung, drawn and quartered. That’s because the use of metal detecting equipment is forbidden on Duchy of Cornwall land – around 135,000 acres of Cornish countryside, and almost all the beaches

in the county. To do so would constitute treason and in theory could result in the the historically bloodthirsty sentence being imposed. However, the grizzly punishment was last meted out in 1622 when Perkin Lambert was caught using a crude metal detector to look for Roman coins on the beach at Praa Sands. Most offenders these days will be let off with a caution, or at worst placed in an iron maiden for a couple of hours over a bonfire and fined £150, or stretched on the rack and given 200 hours community service.

BECAUSE of its 15 geographical position in the Gulf Stream, Cornwall enjoys a more temperate climate than anywhere else in the UK. With warm summers and cool, often frost-free winters, the Cornish Tourist Board make much of the county’s number 1 status when it comes to mild weather. However, they tend to keep a little more quiet when it comes to land area, where the county ranks 16th out of the 48 counties in England. And they keep quieter still about the population statistics, where the county sits 8th from the bottom of the table with a paltry half a million inhabitants.

WATER famously goes down the 14 plughole anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere, so you would expect it to go round anticlockwise in Cornwall too, since the county is in the south of England. But remarkably, if you pull the bath plug out in Bodmin, Boscastle or Botus Fleming, the water goes round clockwise, exactly like it does in the rest of the country.

WHEN it comes to 13 producing stars of the British music scene, Cornwall has proved fertile ground over the years. Fleetwood Mac frontman MICK FLEETWOOD was born in Redruth, and Roxy Music’s ANDY MACKAY hails from Lostwithiel. And as if that glittering array of stars wasn’t enough for one county, 1997 saw American singer songwriter TORI AMOS move to Bude.