The Best Of Holidays

A Memory of Calstock.

It is the 1960s, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are the music everyone is listening to and three young eighteen year old boys with a tent and a boat and some basic camping equipment set off from Saltash Passage where they live to have their first holiday (without their parents) in Calstock, Cornwall.
After a limited degree of preparation and strictly minimal organisation they cast off from their home turf - the passage and head upriver.

The Tamar has always been a beautifull if perhaps sometimes daunting river at its widest point, and rowing against the tide was always a challenge even for a young man with friends to take over if you got too tired - of course you could always start up the seagull!

We came up the river in our dinghy with a little seagull outboard motor and a sail and oars just in case. Sometimes it was more fun to sail or row if you wanted a quiet journey without disturbing the wildlife. You get to see more of nature that way.

When we arrived, we moored on the quay and visited the local pub for a quick drink of shandy to cool down, it was a hot summers day and putting a 6d into the one armed bandit won the cash jackpot - - yippee a good start to a holiday, but hanging around having won the jackpot didn't seem like a good idea as most of the people who had generated the jackpot were locals.

So we continued upriver and stopped to camp at some lime kilns which we discovered on the outskirts of Calstock. This was our first visit so we didn't have any prior knowledge as to where was a good place to pitch a tent. These kilns were brilliant for our purpose, even if it rained we would still be dry, not that it did, we had a fantastic time, the weather was so hot we got sunburnt and grew to love Calstock and its friendly inhabitants, particularly some of the female ones of our own age!

In the two weeks that we were camping in the lime kilns, we didn't see any other people on that part of the river bank, it was almost as if it was our area for the time we were visiting.

The lime kilns were perfect for camping, you could cook without having the wind blowing the primus out and this was the perfect spot, but we didn't have a supply of fresh water and this was something of a problem, however we spoke to a lady on our way into Calstock and she gave us a regular supply of fresh water from her outside tap, for free - near her bungalow was a sign which was made up of a series of highly polished metal discs in silver and blue, which rattled in the wind but I can't remember what was on the sign.

When I visited Calstock again some years later, I wanted to go and see the lime kilns but unfortunately the area had been sold off and fenced off so there was no longer any access to the area.

We had a really wonderful time, utterly innocent by todays standards - we visited all the local areas of interest, and dreamed about restoring a 1930's speed boat which had been left on the way to Cotehele House clearly for a long time and was rotting away. This boat would be worth an absolute fortune nowadays, no doubt it ended up being scrapped!!

We had a guided tour of Cotehele House for free, I don't know if you usually had to pay, but the eloquent lady who was kind enough to show us around and tell us the history etc did not require any payment.

We got to know the lady in the local shop who kept us supplied with the necessary food items which we required, this was a really friendly village atmosphere, and the local young people knew we were camping in the lime kilns almost as soon as we arrived.

The beauty of getting to know some of the local young people was that they would soon show you around the area and people were so much friendlier in those days and didn't feel threatened by strangers quite so much. Some of the people we met came to visit us where we lived at a later date to continue the friendship we had struck up.

After a really enjoyable couple of weeks we knew we had to go back to our normal work and reluctantly set off back down river back to Saltash Passage with some happy memories which are still quite vivid after almost fifty years.

It seems odd now to think how close Saltash Passage is to Calstock in real terms on the river and how much of an adventure it was for three young men with their lives ahead of them, and how simple our pleasures were without ipods or mobile phones or even sleeping bags!

And what would health and safety think about three young men in a pram dinghy with a little retractable keel and collapsible mast going up the river in what were clearly quite risky situations, when there was any kind of swell we had to bale as fast as we could to keep from sinking - still, youth has always been quite foolhardy and why should the youth of the 1960's be any different.

Since that time I have always felt a great affinity with Calstock and have returned many times as an adult to enjoy folk singing sessions in the Boot and Cornish hospitality.

Many years later, I decided to trace my family history and was really happy to discover that I did indeed have a good reason to feel an affinity with Calstock, my ancestors came from Calstock in the days of the Cornish mining boom and had moved to St Austell and then onward to Saltash Passage.

Thank you Calstock for some wonderful memories and hopefully the minimum of modernisation.

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