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| | | From Shetland to the Scilly Isles, Open Country travels the UK in search of the stories, the people and the wildlife that make our countryside such a vibrant place. Each week we visit a new area to hear how local people are growing the crops, protecting the environment, maintaining the traditions and cooking the food that makes their corner of rural Britain unique.
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Helen Mark visits Cornwall, or Kernow to give it its Celtic name. It has one of the mildest climates in Britain: perched in the south-West, Cornish summers seem to arrive earlier and leave later. It's a rugged county with a spectacular and breathtaking coastline, full of history and legend. King Arthur is supposed to have come from Cornwall and the county has traditionally made its living from fishing, agriculture and tin-mining.
Cornwall Online
Dave Bond still fishes for mackerel in the traditional way, using hand lines. His boat, The Mystique sails out of Looe. A line of feathered hooks is lowered into the shoal of fish and the mackerel, being hunters, are attracted to the hooks - thinking they're food. Dave says his method of fishing follows the migratory route of the fish and is more in line with present thinking on stock conservation. He also takes tourists fishing in the summer.
Fishing in Cornwall
Fishing Information
Helen travels just four miles from Looe around the coast to the picturesque fishing village of Polperro. Set in a narrow ravine and surrounded on three sides by steep hills and cliffs, it has historically made its living from pilchard fishing.
Helen meets Bill Cowan, a retired fisherman and museum curator at the Polperro Heritage Museum: a converted pilchard packing factory, which is now crammed full of artefacts devoted to the families and boats that created such a special place.
As well as fishing, Polperro is also famous for smuggling: in the late 18th century it seemed everyone in the village was involved. The fishing boats would sail to the Channel Islands, load up on highly-taxed goods such as brandy, tobacco - and even lace and coffee - then take them back to Cornwall and eventually sell them "duty free" in London. But as Helen discovers by talking to author and historian Jeremy Johns, whose ancestors were heavily involved in smuggling, it all ended in violence and recrimination.
Polperro Museum
Ten years ago a small band of enthusiasts started clearing away the brambles and undergrowth that had enveloped what turned out to be the Melon Yard at the heart of a 35 acre productive garden. Heligan is owned by the Tremaynes who occupied Heligan House from the late 16th century until the First World War.
They had not only developed an extraordinary garden displaying many of the exotic plant introductions and revolutionary horticultural technologies of the Victorian era, but also a model farm making the whole estate totally self-sufficient.
Helen meets Peter Stafford, Managing Director of the gardens, who told her of the sheer ingenuity of the people who worked there.
Heligan
Finally Helen goes south to the Lizard Peninsular and the largest earth satellite station in the world at Goonhilly downs. It is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest and an English Heritage site because of its neolithic standing stones.
Goonhilly has enough history as a satellite station in its own right, as Alan Bradley and site manager Kelvin Ball point out. Arthur is the first satellite built on the site and was created to track the first communications satellite Telstar as travelled briefly across the horizon in 1962. It was also responsible for the first television pictures sent across the Atlantic. There are in all 60 satellites on the site.
Competition
What is the diameter of the biggest satllite dish on the Goonhilly site? Submit your entry by Tuesday 26 March by emailing [email protected]
Last week's answer and winner
The question was: which monarch is associated with the green and white colours on the Welsh flag?
Answer: Henry VII.
And the winner is ... Mary Simpson of Nuneaton.
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