Port Isaac: Where We Stayed, Everything We Ate and the Things We Regretted.
A record number of you pressed the heart button on my recent Perfect Holiday post, which can only mean - seeing as I instructed you all to press the heart button if you wanted a run-down of my mini-break to Port Isaac - that you all want a run-down of my mini-break to Port Isaac. That happened in April.
I have to say that since I published that post, about how my holiday to Port Isaac ticked all the boxes, I’ve had a slight change of heart about the whole thing. In that post (you can read it here if you need to get up to speed) I talked about why I thought this particular mini break worked so well and that, basically, it was because: a) we didn’t have to fly anywhere, b) we had visited the area many times before and so it was all completely familiar and c) we had gone into it with relatively low expectations.
WHAT AN EARTH HAS HAPPENED TO ME?
WHERE HAS MY SENSE OF ADVENTURE GONE?
IS THIS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TRYING TO JUGGLE LIFE, KIDS AND MULTIPLE INCOME STREAMS FOR OVER A DECADE JUST COMPLETELY DRAINS YOU OF ALL LIFE FORCE AND ENTHUSIASM?
I don’t know why I’m shouting in caps. I suppose to underline how surprised I am in myself. Usually so keen to explore new places and to work out the best itinerary and research the ferry times and try to find flights on Easyjet that actually depart during the hours that normal humans are awake in. (04.25 from LGW, anyone? With a 2am check-in time? No? No takers?)
I feel as though my post about Port Isaac was one step away from buying a travel kettle and a couple of fold up chairs and spending the summer sat beneath a caravan awning. Not so much because of the mini break itself, which was really quite glorious, (watching Doc Martin for eight hours straight, eating lobster, watching the stormy sea out of the cottage windows), but because of the general air of beaten-down defeat that my post gives off.
I’ve realised since then, because I’ve spend approximately fifteen work days researching summer holidays abroad instead of meeting deadlines, that although it’s bliss to not have to travel anywhere by plane, or pay forty euros for a sun lounger on a packed beach where the family next to you are playing The Venga Bus Is Coming on repeat through their waterproof bluetooth beach speaker, it is still vaguely necessary - for me, at least - to stretch my legs a bit, geographically and experience something different once a year.
Say things like Kalimera! at the top of my voice and look very pleased with myself. Worry that I’ve used the Grazie instead of Gracias because I can never remember which one is Italian and which one is Spanish. (Ask me to curse in Spanish and I can give you four options, minimum (thank you Narcos!) but hand me the bill and I will not know how to show my gratitude appropriately.)
No lingual issues such as this in Port Isaac, no issues with sun loungers, either, you’d look an absolute tool if you rocked up at the harbour freshly Piz Buin-ed and carrying a deckchair. Though saying that, I’ve never actually been when the sun has been blazing - perhaps it turns into a Club Med style lounger-fest, amongst the coils of rope and bits of net and the flotsam and jetsam that’s washed in by the sea.
Have you been to Port Isaac? It’s very lovely. We’ve touched on this before, but to give you a sweeping overview, the sort of thing a seagull might get were it passing over the top but not stopping in for a chat, it’s a small, remote fishing village on a hugely picturesque section of the Cornish coast, a part that has dramatic cliffs and tiny bays and in general the sort of scenery that makes you want to down tools, buy a stone cottage and start a new life writing children’s books about ancient pirate treasure.
In Port Isaac there’s a harbour, surrounded by stone houses and cottages along impossibly narrow lanes and alleyways, and you can imagine that in the olden days it was very insular and cut off. I feel as though we very much romanticise rural and coastal living in the UK - I certainly have an idealised view of it, probably thanks to the insane cottagecore conditioning we had as kids in the eighties. Victoria Plum. Bramley Cottage. Sylvanian Families. Postman Pat, driving his little red van over those impossibly perfect humpback bridges. It’s no wonder I’ve always yearned for the country life, despite being scared of the dark and not that keen on livestock, big dogs or having to put my car into reverse. (I spend my life reversing along tiny lanes trying to get to a suitable passing point. Tractors will not reverse even if they are right next to a passing point. Lorries absolutely won’t reverse ever, which does make sense. Vans might reverse, if you’re lucky, but not often. So if you’re in a single track lane and there’s any one of these vehicles facing you, you’re shafted. Get used to having eyes in the back of your head and dealing with stress level spikes that are on a par with, I don’t know, skydiving strapped to an instructor who has just told you he often forgets to check the parachute lines, to keep things interesting.)
Anyway I have a great love for Port Isaac and feel as though I know it inside out. This is because it’s the setting for one of my favourite TV series, Doc Martin, about a morose London surgeon with a blood phobia who has a traumatic career episode and flees from his job to start again somewhere smaller and easier.
We haven’t discussed this, I don’t think, Doc Martin is one of the reasons Rich and I ended up leaving London. I had never actually planned to live in London in the first place, but I moved there when I was a model (2001), and then I met Rich (2003) and he was a die-hard Londoner, and then the concept of being anywhere except London seemed alien and incomprehensible.
We both had work that was based in London and all of our friends were in London, the idea of being anywhere else was never mooted.
Until we started watching Doc Martin. If you haven’t given it a go then you must: it is proper comfort TV, except also absolutely brilliant, with funny acting and amazing comic timing but also some heart-wrenching bits.
And - be still my heart - the frequent panoramic camera shots of Port Isaac, sweeping across the bay and down into the harbour, and taking in all of the wonky little smuggler’s cottages and the tiny lanes… I had always wanted to live in the proper countryside when I was growing up - the whole “rose cottage” fantasy - but something about the easy way of life in the fictional version of Port Isaac made me want to immediately up sticks and get out of the city.
It didn’t help that we used to watch Doc Martin on my work computer, which was in the spare bedroom at the back of our place in Leytonstone, and just over the garden wall there used to be drug deals going on and people stopping their vans to have a wee against the fence and all sorts of other stuff. None of that did much for the “let’s stay in London” side of the argument, I’ll admit; but it was the easy, slow way of life in this fictional Cornish village that totally bewitched me.
I can’t believe it took almost twenty years for us to go and stay there! We visited, a lot, but I have to declare that sleeping there, watching the sun go down and Doc Martin’s house fade into the gloom across the other side of the bay, listening to the seagulls wheeling and screeching, we were living the absolute dream.
I found the cottage we stayed in at Boutique Retreats. They have a very curated selection of holiday cottages on their website, all with beautiful photography, and everything that came up for our selected dates, in North Cornwall, looked really lovely. But when I scrolled to a cottage called Mount Pleasant and realised that it was right there on the cliffs in Port Isaac, overlooking Doc Martin’s actual house, there wasn’t really a lot to mull over. Location perfection.
As a little crash pad it was perfect: dining room and small kitchen on the ground floor, sitting room on the first (to take in the exceptional views) and bedroom on the top.
We spent hours in the sitting room, watching episodes of Doc Martin back-to-back, a splendid rainy Saturday, but we also used the cottage as a base to go off here and there to get food, to wander around the village, to pop to the pub for a pint.
Before I go off on a little tangent for paid subscribers, detailing everything I ate in Port Isaac and whether or not I regretted it, I want to give you my top three things that must be done if you’re visiting. I mean, MUST. I know I said I’d give you a full itinerary of the trip, but I’ve just realised that I’ve pretty much covered it with the Doc Martin Viewing Marathon, forays out of the cottage for food and these, my three top things:
1. Lobster at Fresh from the Sea.
This is a tiny cafe selling fresh seafood that has been caught that day, and hauled in just a couple of hundred metres away down at the harbour. You could not get fresher. The menu is short, but the lobster here needs no special adornment. Either have a half lobster with some salad and mayo and slices of buttered bread, or have it ready-made into a sandwich - same with the crab. Good God, I dream of this meal at least once a week in between visits. And I only really manage one visit a year. Which means 51 daydreams to work myself into a frenzy about it.
Check opening times here.
2. Port Isaac to Port Quin Circular Walk
To see Port Isaac properly, you must venture up to the top of the cliff behind Doc Martin’s house. This is good, because you can walk past Doc Martin’s house on the way, and shake your head at all of the people who rudely stand at the front door and pretend to knock on it, for photos, even though the people inside are blatantly trying to enjoy their holiday behind those venetian blinds. I suppose they must know what they are in for when they book…
Anyway. Hike up to the top and then continuez a droit to Port Quin for a good old leg stretch. Mind the cows on the clifftop fields. I have bad memories of those cows chasing us when Dexter the dog was a puppy. Would they be the same cows? Surely not. Evil cows. Don’t run over the edge of the cliffs to avoid them, as I almost did: death by cliff fall seemed much nicer than death by cow goring, at the time, but I’m pretty sure my ability to make sensible decisions was compromised due to stress.
3 Ice Cream at The Ice Cream Parlour
I like this spot because you can watch everyone walking down into the village and there’s a bench at the front of the parlour that is a) a sun trap and b) has the perfect people-watching angle. There’s just something very holiday maker-ish about it. Is the ice cream special ice cream you can’t get elsewhere in Cornwall? No. But a good array of flavours and it is creamy and superb - it’s difficult to be disappointed in it. I’m just saying that it’s the location and the bench you want to be reaching for. Get that bench. Get it.
So, that’s where we stayed and what we did, which seems very thin on the ground, now. But I’m not trying to say that Port Isaac gives you a full three-day non-stop action-packed time of it, if you’re sticking to the confines of the place, but it’s the wandering and dondering that is the beauty of it. And eating. Which I am now going to move on to.
All the things I ate in Port Isaac and whether I regretted them:
