The twin villages of Cawsand and Kingsand lie on the western shore of Cawsand Bay. The bay is flanked to the south by the wooded slopes of Penlee whilst on the northern side is the more open parkland of Mount Edgcumbe, a legacy of generations of landscaping and garden design undertaken by the Edgcumbe family during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Until Tudor times there was very little settlement around the shores of the bay. Most people lived in scattered farmsteads around the ancient parish churches at Maker and Rame. The only sizeable settlement was at Millbrook which until 1869 had been in the parish of Maker. The Tudors maintained a navy thereby gaining a degree of control of the seas which up until that time had been plagued with pirates; Vikings, Bretons, Corsairs and sundry other maritime hooligans. It simply was not safe to live by a beach, especially if that beach was sheltered and had a stream flowing over it. By contrast, neighbouring Millbrook, at the head of its tidal creek was relatively secure. As the navy grew during the 18th century Cawsand’s potential as a fishing centre could be realised and replaced Millbrook in this role. Subsequently Millbrook, due to its proximity to the burgeoning Royal Dockyard and the port of Plymouth, became a centre of industry.

Fishing on a grand scale came to Cawsand Bay in the mid 16th century when a group of Plymouth fish exporters, in an attempt to evade Sir Francis Drake’s attempts to levy taxes to defend Sutton Pool, decamped to set up shop on its shores. The fish that they were interested in was the humble pilchard, a mature sardine. Pilchards regularly arrived off the Cornish coast in immense shoals every autumn. The fish were encircled in enormously long seine nets, landed, cured and shipped off in barrels, mainly to Italy, where they were eaten on Fridays and during Lent. It must have been an enormous enterprise. The cellars where the curing took place were so big that the locals called them palaces and the ruins of at least six are still visible today, along with associated excavations in the rock.

The security provided by the navy enabled fishermen to venture further out to sea in bigger boats, and by 1800 there was a sizeable fleet of ‘hookers’ (long-liners) operating out of Cawsand Bay. But it was not to last. The pilchard shoals, once so plentiful, had by the 1820s ceased to appear so far east with any regularity and in 1850 the last seine net, plus equipment, was sold to a Mevagissey combine. The number of hookers also declined, unable to compete with the drifters and steam trawlers which latterly had appeared on the scene. The final nail in the coffin happened in March 1891 when a blizzard swept in from the south-east and sank all but one of the hookers at their moorings.

Fishing was not the only local enterprise which went through a cycle of ‘boom and bust’. During the 18th century Britain was almost constantly at war with either France or Spain, or both, and to pay for these wars the government put taxes on hundreds of imports. Consequently smuggling, or free-trading, as it was known was rife, especially in bulk goods which were easy to obtain and where demand was high. Brandy, rum, tea and tobacco came into this category, and Cawsand, with Plymouth on its doorstep, was ideally situated to benefit.

The heyday of the smuggling was the period from 1700 to 1820 when there were fortunes to be made and, curiously enough, the decline in smuggling closely coincided with the decline in fishing. Following the defeat of the French in 1815 the government, strapped for cash as always, turned its attention to remedying the colossal loss of revenue it was suffering at the hands of the smugglers passed some draconian anti-smuggling laws and established the Coastguard. By 1840 the combined effect of these measures was the virtual extinction of smuggling, at least on the scale which had existed previously.

Proximity to Plymouth was to have other consequences for the Rame Peninsula. Its geographical location overlooking the seaward approaches is of great strategic significance and there are fortifications dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries.. Among those remaining are the 18th century redoubts at Maker, the Garretts in Cawsand, Palmerstonian forts at Picklecombe, Cawsand Polhawn and Tregantle and the early 20th century big gun emplacements at Maker, Penlee and Tregonhawke.

Today the beach at Cawsand presents a vastly different scene to that of yesteryear.* One hundred years ago it was a hive of industry with pilot and fishing boats, sailing barges, nets and crab pots, even washer-women, hanging their washing out to dry. Men, horses and donkeys would be at work on the Bound where the Coastguard boathouse was situated and where a blacksmith and stone-mason had their workshops. In 2010 the old fish palace that once housed a boat-builder and a fishermen’s store is now part of a hotel and the fishing boats and barges have given way to catamarans and kayaks and the fishermen by tourists and holidaymakers. A place of work has become a place of recreation.

Cornwall’s Forgotten Corner is bounded by the South West Coast Path, few sections of which can offer more varied scenic beauty. From the broad expanse of beach along Whitsand Bay, around the rugged cliffs of Rame Head and Penlee Point, then passing through the vernacular architecture of a Cornish fishing village and finally to wend its way through the ordered landscapes and gardens of Mount Edgcumbe with views overlooking Plymouth Sound and finally arriving at Cremyll with the City of Plymouth just across the river. Other walks can match the splendour of the scenery but very few can offer the contrasts to be encountered between Whitsand Bay and Cremyll.

Tony Carne, April 2010.