Compact but adorable, seaside apartment.

Remember me telling you about how all stonemasons are miserable misanthropes who cannot keep a relationship together without resorting to alcohol abuse and such like? Well it was to this salubrious, Cornish home that Daniel Gumb took his third wife, following their marriage in 1735. If they had blogging in those days, I would have definitely subscribed to his 'Lifestyle' posts.

His wife gave birth to 13 children in this place, but some of them died, so he is only credited with raising a mere 9. Many of the survivors emigrated to America, and I cannot say that I blame them.

This hole in the cliff is right on the pretty little beach of Carbis Bay, and the green and blue stains running down the rock show that it was once a small working for copper. Copper and tin seem to exist one on top of the other in Cornwall, and as well as Cognac, tea, tobacco, glass, candles and human hair (!), unstamped ingots of tin were also amongst the contraband of the infamous smugglers of the South West of England, but they were an export, not import.

The rough and rugged coastline made the detection of the smugglers difficult, and for most of the beginning of the activity of the 'Free Traders', they had purpose-built boats which were much faster than the government officer's. Eventually, the government excise men declared it illegal to build boats with a sail-area over a certain size, and row-boats with more than 4 oarsmen - the smugglers had skiffs with 20 oarsmen at a time! Foreign boats were not subject to these restrictions by law, so it was quite common for the townsfolk to be dealing with Dutch and Frenchmen who had suspiciously strong Irish accents.

These little caves were - of course - also used as drop-off and storage points by the smugglers, so served a dual-purpose for about 150 years.

Now, I was thinking, whilst sitting around reading about this stuff whilst I was down there, that this story has many of my favourite ingredients in it - alcohol, glass and candlesticks being three (maybe long human hair being a fourth), so I thought I might write a ripping yarn set in these times and in this location. I would do it as a separate fictional story in installments, with it's own dedicated blog site. I realise that it has been done many times before, but I really fancy doing it again myself - what do you think? Bad idea?

I saw this birdie on a hedge near our house, looking out over St. Ives whilst plucking up the courage to commit a seasonal sex-act on his wife, who was sitting beside him (she's cropped out of the picture). I'm beginning to realise the restrictions of my new camera, which is too clever for it's own good, but I am still impressed with the zoom facility.