One of my earliest memory of St Ives was eating a jacket potato with cheese and beans, sitting on the edge of the harbour beach, while on holiday with my Mum, Dad and brother back in the late Seventies.  I also remember having a pasty inside a restaurant on Fore Street – I think that restaurant is now the Seafood Cafe.

My strongest memory of St Ives, and actually one of the most scariest moments of my life to date, was when my Mum and I went for a walk around the Island in St Ives. I must have been about 7 or 8 years old at the time so it was 1980 or there abouts.  This was back in the days before Health & Safety regulations came in. Mum and I had been walking along a small path that was winding us round the Island and before we knew it, the path had disappeared and we found ourselves scrabbling on loose grit looking for something to hold on to to stop ourselves falling down an almost sheer drop down onto to the rocks below (some 30ft drop). All I can remember is holding on very tightly to a large rusty sewerage pipe that was sticking out of the cliff and Mum shouting ‘don’t look down!’. I have no memory of how we got out of that scrape, but we did and I’m here to tell the tale.

Some 30 years later I went back to have a look at the scene.  The whole area is now quite different with a viewing platform now built just above where we got stuck. The rusty old pipe is still there though, albeit, much more eroded. The path now looks more established but ends at the viewing platform and is these days impossible to get to unless you want to do some rock climbing!

Red circle shows the rusty pipe

The path around the island no longer there and inset showing pathway now completely blocked

The photo below, courtesy of GoogleMaps, shows where we got stuck (red circle). Interestingly, on the left of the photo, I think you can just see the beginnings of what was the old path. The island has obviously eroded away a lot during the last 30 years!