Our most westerly Food Adventure starts close to the historic market town of Penzance on Mounts Bay, the departure point for the passenger ferry and the helicopter to the beautiful Isles of Scilly. Penzance is a bustling town filled with small independent shops. Make sure you call in at a Warrens Bakery and pick up some of their traditional Cornish saffron cake, made just a few miles away to a time-honored recipe.
The long seafront promenade leading to Newlyn is ideal for a summer stroll complete with a Cornish ice cream in hand. The fishing port of Newlyn is still one of the most active ports in the UK, famous for its fish market and August fish festival and scattered with fresh fish shops selling the catch of the day. If your mission is to find the freshest, tastiest crab for your picnic basket or plump shiny mackerel, this is the place to come.
Venturing back again along the coast towards the Lizard peninsula the spectacular St. Michaels Mount cannot be missed. This ancestral home was once granted to the Benedictine Abbey of Mont St Michel (France) and has seen the action as a port for Cornwall’s historic tin trade, civil wars, and even the Armada. Marazion, the pretty village perched above the beach opposite the impressive Mount, offers a great starting point for a foraging trip.
Rachel Lambert, of Wild Walks South West, leads walks discovering what this magnificent location has to offer the keen scavenger. From peppery Sea Sandwort, Sea Radish, Black Mustard, Scurvy Grass gathered from sandbanks and hedgerows to Common Sorrel, Sea Spinach and Seaweed straight from the Atlantic Ocean, Rachel will teach you how to find and identify edible plants and, importantly, how to make sure your foraging will not harm natural habitats.
Some of Rachel’s walks include cooking and eating your foraged bounty and she will even help you organize your own bespoke foraging trip with her.
For the successful forager who wants to complete their DIY Day, there can be few things more satisfying than lighting a barbeque and cooking freshly landed Newlyn mackerel to accompany your salad of wild leaves, sitting on the beach enjoying a perfect Cornish sunset with a pint of Skinner’s Betty Stogs or a glass of Polgoon fizz!!
But if that’s not up to your street, and you’d rather leave the cooking to the professionals, the Falmouth Packet Inn, Rosudgeon, and Victoria Inn, Perranuthnoe, are both situated just a stone’s throw from Marazion, on the A394 coastal road to Helston.
The Falmouth Packet Inn serves organic beef and vegetables from nearby Rospeath Farm alongside locally sourced seafood, cheeses, and real ales from the Penzance Brewing Company, a new microbrewery operating from The Crown at Crowlas. Award–winning chef and owner Stewart Eddy, of The Victoria Inn, offers a warm welcome to children and dogs (and their owners of course), with roaring fires in winter and a south-facing garden for the summer. Using fantastic produce simply cooked, Stewart offers customers his trademark contemporary dishes using local food
