Look down. Cut into the very granite of the cliff below you, terrace upon terrace of grey stone seats descend towards a stage, and behind that stage there is nothing at all but the open, turquoise sea. This is the Minack Theatre, one of the most extraordinary open-air stages in the world. And in the cove beneath it curves a beach of dazzling white sand above water the colour of the Mediterranean. High art and, once, high technology, side by side above the Atlantic.
The Minack was the work of one remarkable woman, Rowena Cade, who began carving it out of the rock in 1931 and went on shaping its terraces and seats by hand, with her gardeners, over decades.
It still hosts a full season of plays through the summer, audiences watching with the sea as a backdrop and the sound of the waves beneath their feet, gulls crossing the stage and, now and then, a fishing boat drifting through the wings far below. Below lies Porthcurno, and its story is just as improbable. This peaceful cove was once the nerve-centre of the British Empire's communications.
In 1870 the first submarine telegraph cable to India was landed here, and Porthcurno grew into the hub of a worldwide network, cables snaking out across the seabed to every corner of the globe. For decades this small valley was among the most important communications stations on earth, so vital that in wartime it was defended and even tunnelled into the hillside for safety. That history is now told in the Telegraph Museum in the valley behind the beach.
As you stand on the cliff path, look for several things in turn. First, the Minack itself, its terraced stone seats and its stage seeming to grow out of the living rock; note how the granite, the seats and the sea run into one another so that you can barely tell where the theatre ends.
Second, the sweep of Porthcurno beach below, its coarse, pale granite sand giving the shallows that astonishing turquoise glow, most vivid in bright light. Third, look along the coast to the great headland of Treryn Dinas and its famous Logan Rock, an enormous granite boulder once so finely balanced it could be rocked by hand.
Fourth, watch the clifftops and ledges for wildlife: choughs and fulmars on the wing, stonechats in the scrub, and in early summer the granite blooming pink with sea thrift. And fifth, look out over the water, where seals and dolphins are often seen. Take care on the steep cliffs and steps as you go, and watch the tide if you go down to the beach.
The story to carry with you is Rowena Cade's. In the early nineteen-thirties, when a local company wanted to stage The Tempest, Cade offered her own cliff garden and set about making a theatre there. What began as a modest terrace became a lifetime's work.
With her gardener and a few helpers, she hauled sand up from the beach, mixed concrete, and carved seats and steps from the granite, decorating them with her own hand, working on into her old age, through winter storms that damaged what summer had built. She died in 1983, having made from a bare Cornish cliff one of the loveliest theatres on earth. Every performance held there now is her monument.
From here the South West Coast Path climbs on around the cliffs, past Treen and the Logan Rock towards Lamorna, one glorious cove opening after another. Turn back once for a last look at the Minack, its grey terraces stepping down to that impossible blue, and think of the woman who carved it, and of the cables that once ran out from the beach below to bind a whole world together. Walk safe.
