Coast (2005) s02e04 Episode Script
Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly
Cornwall is England's most coastal county.
It has over 400 miles of spectacular shoreline and it's almost entirely cut off from the rest of the country by this river, the Tamar.
Just four miles of land connect Cornwall to the mainland.
Without that, it would pretty much be an island.
It may not be an island like Tenerife or Ibiza but five million of us a year see Cornwall as THE holiday destination.
A place to kick off our shoes and relax.
But if all you take home are your holiday snaps, then you're missing the bigger picture.
We're not going to.
Zoologist Miranda Krestovnikoff is wreck diving at the Manacles visiting new residents, squatters, who've made themselves at home down under.
Anthropologist Alice Roberts investigates the mystery of the unique Cornish light that's lured artists to St Ives for centuries.
Mark Horton sees another side of the Isles of Scilly, known to some archaeologists as the Isles of the Dead.
And Nick Crane is discovering that the beauty of this beach isn't down to Mother Nature.
Welcome to the Cornish coast.
We'll be travelling around 260 miles from Saltash to the Isles of Scilly and then back up the north coast to Padstow.
This is a county that's isolated yet on our doorstep, it seems foreign, yet familiar.
As tourists, there's a character to Cornwall that we may miss out on - we're too busy having fun.
So sit back and enjoy.
I'm off to explore the Wild West of Cornwall.
My journey starts in Saltash where since Saxon times, the geographical borders split Devon and Cornwall across the banks of the River Tamar.
As the railroads were opening up the Wild West of America, the same was happening here in the Wild West of England.
In 1859, the year Billy the Kid was born, Brunel, the great railway pioneer, was opening the gateway to Cornwall with this magnificent bridge across the Tamar.
It was a huge engineering feat taking 13 years to complete.
No-one had seen a bridge like it, it was a glimpse of the future.
For the first time, Cornwall was connected to the mainline network.
Over the following decades, it brought trade and tourism.
Outsiders flocked to the newly fashionable "Cornish Riviera".
Look at this.
"Looe, for ideal homes and holidays.
" Can't miss that! On the way to Looe, it's classic Cornwall all the way.
Looe is built around its harbour and river estuary and divided into two halves.
It's always been the quintessential picture postcard on the Grand Tour of Cornwall and still is today.
It says here, in this 1960s brochure, "The new visitor, within 24 hours of arrival, seems to be subconsciously absorbed "into the atmosphere of holiday peacefulness, and England seems 1,000 miles away.
" Romantic idyll it may be, but there's more to Looe than tourist brochure banter.
It's Cornwall's second largest fishing port and according to top chef, Rick Stein, lands some of the freshest fish in the UK.
Dovers and monk mix! This is Looe fish auction.
First live to go! It's highly charged, using the latest auctioneering technology with buyers from all over Britain vying for today's catch.
And this quality doesn't come cheap.
Today, the most expensive one I've bought is extra large turbot.
ã170 for one fish.
Wow! Is that a typical price? It can go higher than that for turbot.
Why do you come to this market? Is it a good one? Purely for quality.
We buy in several other ports, Newlyn, Brixham and Plymouth, but this one is the best quality.
They go out in the morning, they land in the evening, we buy it and it's on the counter within 12 hours.
This market is one of the most competitive in the UK and its success is down to the fact that the boats here only go out for a day - dayboat fishing.
At other ports, the bigger boats can be out up to a week.
The freshness just can't compete with the quick turnaround of Looe.
It may be an accident of nature, but it's created a unique opportunity.
The port is so small and the harbour so shallow it can only accommodate dayboats, so it's the limitations of the harbour that have created Looe's greatest asset - super-fresh fish.
So how would I spot that this is truly fresh fish? Well, look at the haddock, I mean, how stiff if that? Look - slimy That's a good sign.
So slime's a good sign? Slime's a good sign.
So if it's really floppy does that mean it's gone Yes.
Unless it's pre-rigor mortis, which probably takes, to become rigor mortis, maybe five to six hours.
After it's been caught.
And then from stiff to really floppy is not good.
The herring - people buy them when their eyes are all red.
Well, it takes a day or so to become red.
I mean the mackerel Look at the mackerel.
Line caught, you can always tell because there's damage around the mouth.
Right, OK.
Why is line caught better than something out of a net? The fish is less stressed, the fish doesn't drown, so it makes the meat far superior.
The gills are lovely and red and clear.
Right - so there's still oxygenated blood near them? You sound as if you love these things.
Oh, it's a passion.
After the fish has been auctioned to the highest bidder, the next stage is distribution.
Steve Farrar is a fish merchant and middleman.
But trying to get a moment with him isn't easy.
No we haven't, Richard.
No, we've got no brill.
There's some nice turbot.
I've got turbot and monk.
D'you want any monk? 90% of the fish in Looe ends up going abroad.
I want to know why.
Why is so much of it being exported? The fishing industry's very simple.
It's simply supply and demand.
You've got to send it where you get the best price, or you're out of the game.
So the continent is prepared to spend more for the fish that we don't generally see? Yeah.
For fish you don't see in the shops, quite often it's because it's gone abroad.
Cuttlefish, squid, turbot - this is quality fish and we're letting it get away.
Next time you go away to foreign parts, remember, you and that fish are probably both on holiday! Here, as elsewhere on the coast, development and tourism are issues.
The Europeans are quite happy to eat Cornish fish at home, they don't come here to eat it.
In fact, only 1% of Cornish tourists are foreigners.
Further down the coast, they're planning a large beach complex with the aim of attracting new visitors to Carlyon Bay.
But the future of this beach has been in dispute for five years so the work has been put on hold.
Locals and developers have been fighting over the best way to enjoy Cornwall's natural beauty.
But this beautiful bay is not as natural as it seems.
The beach that everybody's fighting about doesn't belong here at all, because this is not ordinary sand.
You're probably not going to find another beach like this in the world.
Glynda Easterbrook has been examining its extraordinary make-up.
If I brought my children here, Glynda, I wouldn't give this stuff a second thought.
It looks like standard sand.
It does, doesn't it? But in this bottle I've got some sand from another beach, somewhere else in Cornwall and if you look at it closely, you can see how different it is.
This is very soft, almost smooth.
And this is hard and granular.
It's nice and soft because it's got lots of shell fragments in it.
This is nearly all quartz.
This is no average beach.
All other Cornish beaches are a mixture of eroded granite and crushed seashells.
But this one at Carlyon Bay is mostly made of quartz.
This is a typical Cornish granite.
Granite's made of three main minerals.
Quartz, which is this grey, glassy stuff here.
It's got big white crystals of a mineral called feldspar and it's got some little, black, shiny grains, which is mica.
The quartz and the mica are here, but where did the feldspar go? That's the secret to this beach - the feldspar has been removed, extracted by the china clay industry.
But they've been left with the quartz, and it's now found its way down onto this beach.
This beach is a strip of industrial garbage? That's right.
This beautiful beach is actually the waste product left over by the extraction of china clay from granite.
The mica and quartz that make up this unusual beach have been washed downriver from the clay processing plants inland.
These huge pits are where the clay is extracted from the granite generating the waste 'sand' that's collected at Carlyon Bay.
China clay might get its name from the Chinese potters who made it famous, but one quarter of the world's china clay comes from Cornish granite.
As the rock weathers over millions of years it softens, making this 'rotten' granite ripe for mining.
That high-pressure hose is blasting geologically rotten granite into a slurry that can be processed into china clay.
Once you've got the clay, which is the mineral component, it needs more processing before it becomes china clay.
These pits produce two million tonnes a year - that's a lot of tea cups.
But this is about much more than pottery.
Do a little research and you find china clay is in lots of things.
Bizarrely, it has over 500 different commercial uses.
Some of them quite unexpected.
Ivor knows his clay.
Hi, there.
How are you? So what exactly is china clay? In very simple terms, Nick, it's rotten granite.
See how that will break up? It feels like plasticine, doesn't it? It does and the white material in there has a whole range of uses - everything from manufacturing paper to paint.
So why do you need this stuff, rather than any other material, to put into car dashboards or paper or paint or toothpaste or pills or whatever? It's a hugely versatile mineral which can give gloss to paper Oh, the shine? It can give shine to paper.
It can give impact resistance in a fender on a car, it can be used in electrical installation wiring systems in a dashboard There are many, many uses.
And of course, many of us will take china clay in the form of medicine.
And why would I want to put this in medicine? Very simply because it's an inert carrier and it carries the other chemicals through the system.
It's a fluid you just attach your drugs to? To carry it through the body, yes.
And which of the products I've brought has the most china clay in? It may surprise a lot of people, in fact it's paper.
A magazine like the Radio Times would contain a third by weight china clay.
For every one tonne of china clay extracted there are nine tonnes of waste.
So spectacular were these mountains of waste that they were known locally as the Cornish Alps.
In the last decade, the industry has been trying to clean up its act by landscaping these man-made hills.
One disused china clay pit has been transformed into a tourist attraction - the Eden Project.
And a new use is being found for the waste - it's turned into aggregates.
This means there'll be no new sand washed down to Carlyon Bay.
So the beach won't be replenished.
While the developers and locals debate the future of this beach, they're actually losing it.
The china clay industry created this beach, property developers want to capitalise on it, but nature could snatch it away far faster than many people realise.
Let's face it, unless you live here, it takes a long time to get to Cornwall, which is why there's often the view that it's isolated and remote.
But that depends on your point of view.
We're on our way to Falmouth whose association with the sea made it more cosmopolitan than London in the 18th century.
Falmouth has been a major commercial and military port since the 1700s.
But it wasn't just a trade hub.
With 25 foreign consulates and nationalities from around the globe arriving daily, it was an international communications centre.
This is where the unbearable news of Nelson's death reached England.
They heard it here first.
200 years ago, Falmouth was the place to be.
But why Falmouth? By 1690, years of war with France had made getting news and supplies in and out of Britain difficult.
Falmouth, unlike Dover and Harwich, was far enough from the French coast to make it safe from their interference.
But ships were still vulnerable out at sea.
The solution was the packet ship, lightly armed brigs designed by the Royal Mail - they were small but they were fast.
They could outrun the notorious French privateers.
From 150 years, government mail, bullion and VIPs from every corner of the globe were picked up from and dropped off in Falmouth.
The shape of the port may not have changed much but at the time it was a melting pot of shipping agents, adventurers, merchants and refugees.
It was the main link to the Empire.
It wasn't unheard of for news to hit the local paper here before it was rushed up the road, what's now the A30, to London.
The headline might not be genuine, but the paper is - the Falmouth Packet.
It was the sea that brought prosperity to Falmouth, fish for the table, exotic imports from abroad.
But this came at a price.
The coastline is littered with thousands of wrecks.
The Manacles, just off the Lizard, with its submerged rocks has caught out even the saltiest sea dogs.
You might not spot it at first glance, but on the horizon, there's a marker, a spire that has come to the rescue of many a sailor.
Miranda Krestovnikoff takes a closer look.
There's been a church here for hundreds of years and it's been an important landmark for sailors trying to navigate a course through those notorious rocks down there.
In fact, the church has given its name to the infamous rocks below.
The Manacles Reef gets its name from the Cornish Maen Egloss, meaning church stones.
Unfortunately, even this divine landmark couldn't keep every passing boat safe.
This graveyard alone houses over 300 victims of shipwrecks.
Many of the lost souls buried here come from just a single tragedy - the sinking of a large passenger and cargo ship that was on her way to America in 1898.
It was called the Mohegan.
This memorial marks the spot where many victims of the Mohegan wreck were put to rest in one mass grave.
A wreck is a human tragedy and nature shows no mercy.
But what she takes with one hand, she gives with another.
The lost ship is slowly transformed into a new piece of the Cornish coast.
Paul Naylor, marine biologist and underwater photographer, has been exploring the remains of boats like the Mohegan for over 15 years.
This site that we're diving is a really popular site in the UK.
What makes the wreck of the Mohegan so special? Well, The Manacles are special anyway cos of the currents bringing in food for a wealth of animals, and the Mohegan, the wreck, gives even more habitat for the animals to live in, the animals to live on and attach to.
So it's just fantastic life.
So it's gonna be a good dive then? Should be wonderful.
The vast amounts of plankton here form the basis of the food chain sustaining many species and giving the water its distinctive green colour.
Over the last 100 years the combination of passing time and strong currents has stripped the boat bare.
All that remains are the large rusting metal plates which formed the basic structure.
There's so much wreckage lying around.
It's a big wreck - look at those huge boilers.
The ship is now covered with dead man's fingers - a rather morbid name for an eerie reminder of the boat's fate.
Hundreds of individual polyps make up the colony of the dead man's fingers and they have this gelatinous skeleton instead of the hard, stony skeleton of reef corals.
They're really pretty when they've got all their tentacles out, really feathery.
Soft corals like these are amongst the first long-term settlers on a wreck.
All these little nooks and crannies, every one has got something living in it.
It's like the posh coffee shop effect - once the sponges, soft corals and anemones move in, you know the neighbourhood is being gentrified.
The initial pioneers like keel worms, who pave the way for these more colourful inhabitants, are soon lost in the forest of fast-growing algae.
And all that's needed for the underwater city to start growing is a little rust, or a scratched surface for the different colonisers to attach themselves to.
Oh, look! Sea fans.
They're beautiful.
The pink sea fan is a protected species.
It grows at right angle to the current so each individual polyp that makes up the colony has the maximum potential to catch food.
These huge sea fans on the Mohegan show the wreck's age.
These corals can only grow 1cm a year so some of these colonies are over 50 years old.
Wrecks are such prime real estate for species like these.
This high-rise housing causes stronger currents and the enhanced flow helps these hangers-on to catch their food as it floats by.
As we move away from the wreck, other species start making an appearance.
The rocks are like the old, historic heart of a town.
This is where you find residents that have lived here forever.
Jewel anemones produce dozens of little clones of themselves, creating distinct blocks of colour.
Look at the crab.
You can see his mouthparts going.
I remember my first dive somebody put one of those on my head.
I was a bit scared! Divers in the Manacles attach great mystique to the wrecks here.
It's easy to understand why.
Nature has adopted and then adapted them to become an integral part of the underwater landscape.
It's Cornwall at its natural best.
Leaving the Manacles, we continue round the Lizard peninsula.
It's a remote place and until 50 years ago, was home to a rare bird.
These birds can be found on the Cornish coat of arms but, in the words of a Monty Python sketch, they are no more, they have gone to meet their maker.
The Cornish chough has been rendered extinct.
It has ceased to be.
It is not pining.
Or is it? There's been a resurrection.
Claire Mucklow from the RSPB explains.
So - they're back? Definitely.
You've just missed one.
The female's just gone into the cave.
Oh, no! So how's it happened? Well, they've been extinct in Cornwall for over 50 years, so they're back now and breeding.
Possibly they've come from Brittany, but it's a natural re-colonisation that's the most fantastic thing.
It's not a reintroduction, which has happened with kites and sea eagles in other parts of the country, they've come back naturally on their own.
Fantastic.
Any sign? Umm Just Just Remember Where, where? The cave with the arch, that dark arch, there's a little slope there and she's just perched.
Quite difficult to see at the moment.
Can you see? Yes! Just in the corner.
Got you! How did they come by the name? We don't really know.
When they call they make a sound which sounds like "Ciao", so Sort of Italian? No, no! Well, maybe.
She spends a lot of time looking after her feathers because she's been sitting.
The chicks are still quite young She's Italian - there's a lot of that going on.
No! She's Cornish.
The grass is nice and short here - ciao! I think it's my dodgy impression.
Ciao! Mike and Alix Lord and their dog William were the first to discover the choughs in 2002, and are now part of a loyal group called Chough Watch.
Hello.
Hello.
What is Chough Watch? Chough Watch is protecting the birds from possible egg collectors, 24 hours a day.
That's night and day.
And we have a fantastic band of loyal, wonderful, keen birdwatchers who will do it.
The RSPB put different coloured rings on the new choughs so they can keep track of their movements.
It's given rise to an interesting roll call.
First year, Mike named them after cricketers.
The first one that came out was white over green.
She became WG.
The second was brown over lime so he became Brian Lara.
And so on.
I regard them as my sort of grandchildren.
Grand choughs, really! But why have they come back? Farmers in the 19th century used to graze their cattle on the cliff side, keeping the vegetation short.
But then it became easier and more convenient to graze inland.
Choughs need access to very short grass.
So they can't feed in scrub.
Choughs are choosy? I suppose that's a good way of putting it.
They are specialists.
So, over the last 10 to 20 years, they have been putting animals back on to the cliff.
Ponies, cattle, some sheep, just to try and get that scrub bashed back really.
And it's worked, they're here.
These aren't just any choughs, these are Cornish choughs in Cornwall.
They are indeed.
And now for something completely different.
Just inland from the Lizard at Goonhilly, is the world's biggest earth station, a centre for satellite communication.
These unrestricted panoramic views make this the perfect place to site giant antennae.
Meet Arthur, named after King Arthur.
He received the first ever transatlantic TV pictures via a communications satellite in 1962.
This is the main control room at Goonhilly Down, the point at which Telstar's first signals across the Atlantic will be received in the British Isles.
Here we are.
There's a bar.
Now, we are anticipating That's a man's face.
Done it! There it is.
That's the picture.
It was a groundbreaking moment and puts Cornwall in a unique place in the history of modern communication.
But modern communication didn't start here.
Journey further round the coast, nearly 30 miles from the dishes of Goonhilly, you discover the enticing cove of Porthcurno.
Turquoise waters, pale, powdery sand a holiday-maker's dream.
Appearances can be deceptive.
That secluded little beach down there conceals a fantastic secret.
It's where, 130 years ago, Britain was wired up to the world.
A network of cables stretched from under this beach around the globe.
Mary Godwin knows the story.
Cables from here went to South America, Africa, through the Mediterranean to the Far East, Hong Kong, Australia.
The whole world.
And they all come in at this little beach? There are 14 cables coming in here, yes.
So, are we talking about telephone cables? No, we are not talking the telephone, but the telegraph.
The telephone hadn't even been invented in 1870.
These were telegraph cables whereby messages were sent in a version of Morse code, translated into letters of the alphabet at the other end, put on a telegram form which was then delivered by a messenger boy to its final recipient.
By the 1860s, they were looking to lay these long cables linking distant parts of the Empire, and Porthcurno and the cable to Bombay was the first link, the spine if you like, of the connections for the British Empire.
The imperial cables from Porthcurno linked Britain to the furthest outposts of the Empire, and beyond.
Communication before took weeks, now it was virtually instant.
But why here in the middle of nowhere? Originally they were going to lay the cable from Falmouth, they set up the Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company.
Falmouth was a natural place because that's where all the packet ships went out from, where international mail went from.
They soon realised it wasn't a good place to lay a cable, because of all the anchors dragging.
It one of the world's busiest harbours.
And it all comes to this? And it all comes into the cable house, yes.
This hut.
Yes, this plain-looking little building.
Oh, look at that! You can see them physically coming up through the floor.
Gibraltar.
Bilbao, Scillies, Newfoundland.
How fantastic.
Cables were big business and investment was huge.
It was the new information highway.
But just as Britain was busy wiring up the world, at the start of the 20th century, along came wire-less technology.
In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi was making history just a few miles from here, down the Cornish coast that way.
I'm going to backtrack 26 miles round the coast to Poldhu Point, on the Lizard, away from prying eyes, chosen for its remoteness.
This is where the first transatlantic wireless message was sent at 12.
30 on December 12th 1901, 1,800 miles across the Atlantic to Newfoundland.
I now felt, for the first time, absolutely certain that the day would come when mankind would be able to send messages, without wires, between the furthermost ends of the Earth.
With the simple series of three dots representing the letter "s" in Morse code, the age of wireless communication had arrived.
Not everyone was thrilled by Marconi's achievement.
If you do a little digging and look at the initial reports, you can spot a fascinating little footnote.
After the initial wireless transmission across the Atlantic, just four days later in a newspaper report, the President of the Commercial Cable Company, a Mr Ward, is quoted as saying he sees no cause for concern.
He pledges to continue new cable construction as though wireless had never been heard of! Now I'm no businessman, but you can bet if the cable companies were saying they weren't worried about Mr Marconi, they were REALLY worried about Marconi.
Without the huge costs of laying cables worldwide, wireless technology was potentially cheaper and quicker to install.
Marconi was on to something.
For the cable companies, it was time for drastic measures.
How did the cable companies respond to the wireless technology? They responded by spying on what Marconi was up to over there on the Lizard.
And this is the evidence that remains of that.
It's the base of a radio mast.
If you can imagine it standing upright, with a huge mast sitting in it which was held by guy ropes, and rings in the rocks around us.
So they were using Marconi's own technology to spy on him? They were.
There's evidence that the cable company tampered with Marconi's transmissions inserting derogatory comments to discredit this new, rival technology and to prove how insecure wireless was.
Wireless and cable technology competed for decades.
Cable's advantage over its rival was its security against interception.
By the Second World War, this reliability was worth protecting at any cost.
Porthcurno was one of Hitler's targets.
And given that it was all coming together on this beach, this must have been pretty important to the Allies? It was incredibly important.
And for that reason, gun emplacements were built, loads of security measures in the valley and a big flame-thrower system across the top of the beach here.
Cable's reliability has ensured its survival into the satellite era.
And our insatiable appetite to communicate has meant Britain is more cabled than ever before.
And it all started here at Porthcurno beach.
Today, the copper wire has been replaced by fibre optics.
Six million phone calls travel down a cable as thin as a strand of human hair.
It's the superhighway of the future.
Then as now, Cornwall is integral to our worldwide communications.
28 miles off the southwest tip of England lie the Isles of Scilly.
It's an archipelago of over 50 islands.
Only five are inhabited, and around 2,000 people live here.
Tourists swell the numbers drawn to the Scillies by the super-soft sand and the unspoilt beaches.
Just add a few palm trees and you could be in the Caribbean.
Yet for some archaeologists, this isn't just the isles of sun and sand.
They know it as the Isles of the Dead.
Mark Horton, our resident archaeologist, chose a less than balmy day to investigate.
The Isles of Scilly have an extraordinary claim to fame.
It has a greater concentration of burial chambers than anywhere else in Britain.
But who were the dead? Were they the ancient inhabitants of these sparsely-populated islands, or were they bought over from the mainland in some kind of bizarre burial practice? I'm here to find out.
Local archaeologist, Katharine Sawyer, lives close to the mystery of the Isles of the Dead.
So, here we are, this is St Mary's.
Yes, that's right.
This is the Bant's Carn burial chamber, one of the largest and best preserved in Scilly.
It's fantastic.
Has it been rebuilt? It has been partly consolidated and the end capstone was put back in place in the 1970s, but otherwise, this is how it was.
And Bronze Age? That's right.
2000 - 1500 BC as far as we know.
That's 4,000 years ago? This is what's called an entrance grave? That's right, entrance to the chamber at one end and stone-built chamber mound around it.
And how many are there on Scillies? There are 83 known burial chambers, others surely been destroyed without trace, so a huge concentration for such a small area.
For example, in Cornwall, how many are there? About seven in Cornwall.
So something really mad is going on here! There is something very strange going on, yes.
Let's have a look.
These are substantial structures.
Each capstone that forms the roof weighs up to 15 tonnes.
This is Bronze Age architecture.
But the question is, are these burial mounds built by locals or by visitors from the mainland? A short distance from St Mary's, the island of Gugh reveals important pieces in the puzzle.
Bronze Age artefacts found here give us a clue to the origin of these burial mounds.
On a day like this it does make you wonder if mainlanders really would have travelled the 28 miles out here to bury their dead.
In the Bronze Age, coastal navigation would have been easier I think than travelling distances overland, if you think that the land was mainly forested.
And these fantastic Bronze Age boats have been discovered.
Yes.
We know that sea-going journeys were made in the Bronze Age.
But the practicalities of a rotting body on this boat! Rough weather Presumably you could be stuck for three months waiting for this body to be taken over? The remains that have been found here are cremations Ah! .
.
and we don't know where the bodies were cremated.
It's perfectly possible that cremation took place soon after death and just the ashes were brought over.
Gugh is only accessible at low tide via a curving sandbar from St Agnes.
There are three burial sites here.
Excavation of one, Obadiah's Grave, in 1901, uncovered 12 cremations and one complete skeleton.
So this is the main chamber? Yes, that's right.
With the entrance at this end.
That's rather fun, I shall jump down.
What sort of things were found here? These are the kind of pottery from these Bronze Age monuments.
There's a base.
Amazing, that's 4,000 years old.
That's right.
And a decorated rim shard, you see the impressions there.
Isn't that fabulous, where it's been impressed with basketry or cloth, or something.
That really is prehistoric pottery.
Hand made.
Grotty, isn't it? So that would have been full of ashes of cremated bone? Actually, the ash and bone was on the floor of the chamber and the urns were upside-down, covering the cremated deposits.
Seeing something like this, this isn't great wealth, you're not sending commodities to the afterlife.
Presumably great leaders, great status.
But this is all our ancestors, isn't it? Yes, a community burying its dead in the landscape.
Very ordinary artefacts, the kind of pottery that is found in the settlements accompanying the ashes.
So this is no cemetery for the great and the good.
The finds suggest the burial chambers were the graves of ordinary people, locals probably, rather than important people brought over from the mainland.
The island of Samson is the final piece in our 'Puzzle of the Dead'.
It's got one of the major groupings of burial chambers.
Remote and unspoilt, it's also a good place to hunt for signs of a Bronze Age community.
We've heard enough of the dead, where are the living? The living are down there.
All this area of water here would have been dry land in the Bronze Age so people were living and farming on the low-lying areas and burying their dead on the hilltops.
Low tide reveals evidence for the Isles of the Living.
Field boundaries, hut circles, a thriving community 4,000 years ago.
Sea levels were then much lower.
This would have been a populated valley.
That whole landscape gives a whole different spin on it? That's right.
The population may have been several hundred and the burial chambers themselves may have been built over several hundred years.
I think the local population could have supplied the inhabitants of these burial chambers.
So the dead may well have been locals, looking down from on high, keeping an eye on the living.
Rising sea levels buried evidence of the living while preserving their dead in splendid isolation.
The remote life on the Scillies has put the only two football teams on the islands in a league of their own.
A league of two with only each other to play again and again and again.
My name is Chas Wood.
I am chairman of the smallest football league in the world the Isles of Scilly Football League.
We have just two teams.
We have the Woolpack Wanderers.
Woolpack Wanderers! And the Garrison Gunners.
Garrisons! BLOWS WHISTLE We play 16 league games each season.
We are of course affiliated to the Cornish FA and abide by all the rules of the Football Association.
At the beginning of the season we have a Charity Shield, whereby last year's league winners play last year's cup winners.
And if the same side won both, they play the runners-up.
Although we've only got two teams and we play against each other every week, it's very, very competitive.
There's no point in getting up on a Sunday morning if you wanna finish second.
There's a fairly substantial age range.
We've got some youngsters playing at the age of 15 and we've got one person who is 64 years of age.
That's me! We play to win, but we know our limitations.
I don't think you need to worry about us winning the FA Cup next year.
Isolation can bring its own problems.
In an emergency, the islanders rely on the sea and air rescue.
This Royal Navy squad operates around the South West peninsula, 200 miles out at sea.
They're specialists in search and rescue and are trained to hover at 40 feet above the sea.
They're on call 24/7 and can be airborne within 15 minutes.
Over the last five years they've saved over 1,000 lives, from shipwrecked fishermen to falls from cliff tops.
Back to dry land and we're on our way up the westerly coast of Cornwall.
Leaving the Scillies behind, we're approaching St Ives.
It's a small town with big ideas.
So big, in fact, it lured a major gallery to its shores.
The Tate St Ives has turned this tiny town from an artist's sanctuary to an international cultural centre.
What is it that draws artists here? Alice Roberts, a bit of a dabbler herself, is going to find out.
Artists' love affair with St Ives goes back nearly 200 years.
It was a 19th century fashion to paint the picture-postcard St Ives, a tradition that still continues today.
But there are also those like Barbara Hepworth and artists today who don't interpret St Ives quite so literally.
And it's not the scenery that attracts the artists here.
It's the special quality of the light.
Naomi Frears is one of many artists to have fallen prey to the charms of St Ives.
So, Naomi, as an artist, what drew you to St Ives? What drew me to St Ives is what's drawn artists here for a long time - the quality of the light, the landscape.
The artist Patrick Heron called the dazzling light "the sort of light that goes round corners".
You perceive it before you actually get round the corner and there's the sun, this incredible light.
And that's in your work as well? Is funny, because when I moved into the studio, an artist who'd been there a lot longer than me, met me and he said, "How are you settling in? "Is the outside starting to come into your work?" I said, "I don't know.
I don't think so.
Maybe the space.
" He said, "Beware of Naples yellow" which is what artists use to paint sand.
"And misty grey-greens.
" And I said, "What, misty grey greens like this?" I opened my hand and it was covered in misty grey-green.
So, even if you don't mean it to start coming in, that light and the light on the sea and the light in the sky starts to seep into your work.
It definitely feels as though there's something rather special about the light at St Ives but I don't know if I'm reacting to the rather beautiful scenery.
So, I'd like to try something a bit more scientific, a bit more objective to analyse the light here and see if the St Ives light really is special.
Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist at University College London.
He thinks he may be able to provide the answer as to why St Ives is such a lure for artists.
So, Beau, what do you do? What have you got here? What we have here is a vacuum pump.
We're basically using this to filter the air in Cornwall or St Ives.
So, right down here, what we have is the filter paper that I just took out from there.
Inside this little nozzle? Inside that little thing.
Right.
So, what you see is the filter paper in London.
That was actually filtered for three hours outside my lab.
Right.
And this is the filter paper that I just took out from there.
So this is now Cornish air.
So it really is much cleaner down here.
That means the quality of the light, the intensity of the light will be much brighter down here.
The sky is going to be much bluer, the sun's going to be much yellower.
All of that is going to increase the colour of the light off the surfaces - increase the contrast, the perceived difference between the colours.
So do you think this is it, do you think this is the explanation why the Cornish light is different? I think this is one of the main reasons.
It's not the only reason.
The other reason will be that the light coming from the sun, from the sky, will be bouncing off surfaces, bouncing off the sea, bouncing off the sand.
In particular with St Ives being surrounded by sea, much of the light will be coming from reflected light off the sea.
So let's try and analyse the light in St Ives under the watchful eyes of the holiday-makers.
By taking a photo of a white piece of card reflecting light from the sand and then another photograph of the card reflecting light from the sea, we can measure the light as it bounces off different surfaces.
I'm not sure you're dressed for this, Beau! Some people find our experiment interesting whilst others aren't remotely worried about the light of St Ives stopping play.
So what you can see, this is the one that's taken from the sea.
What you can see is that there is more blue than there is green or red.
And it's coming in in the blue part of the spectrum here.
So we actually have numbers to it.
Yeah.
Now we can sample the light coming from the card when it was held over the sand.
Right.
So, if I just click that colour, OK.
Now we can look here again at the amount of blue, green and red.
You see that again there is more blue light coming from the card than there is green or red.
I don't understand, because the sand is not blue.
It's true.
The reason is because the sand is quite whitish.
Yeah.
That's reflecting much of the sky light onto the card.
Because the sky light is blue and because St Ives is facing north so much of the light that's coming onto St Ives is from the blueness of the sky, that blueness is hitting the sand and reflected back up.
The point is that the light coming off the sea and the sand are both blue.
So it creates a sort of blueness in the air around St Ives? That's right.
The coastline is littered with clues to Cornwall's industrial past.
Moving up the northern coast to St Agnes, it's clear to see that for more than 2,000 years, Cornishmen and women have wrestled a living out of this landscape.
Tin mining was what they did.
It was the Cornish bread and butter.
When the industry began to wane over 150 years ago, they took their skills elsewhere, leaving this landscape behind.
You can imagine, as the miners looked out to sea and heard tales of warmer climates and the possibilities of a new life, why the New World might beckon.
These were the toughest miners in the world.
The New World wanted them and it needed them.
It wasn't just one or two, almost half a million left.
There are engine houses like this one in Peru, Mexico and even in Australia.
The whole community, women and children, were involved in tin mining.
Mortality rates were high in mining villages.
Many today blame toxins such as arsenic, lead and uranium that the workers were exposed to.
The story goes that the pasty owes its ingenious design to mining's toxic past.
By holding onto the tough crust, you could kept dirty arsenic-stained fingers away from your food.
Traditionally, they had meat and veg at one end and something sweet like jam or fruit at the other.
Eat the pasty, throw away the crust.
The ultimate finger food.
Very acceptable it is, too.
The mining might have disappeared from Cornwall but the common pasty, despite its humble origins, is now a global brand.
Over the last hundred years, Cornwall has had to rebrand itself too.
No longer a mining Mecca, tourism has filled the gap.
This rugged, Atlantic coastline has exploited its dramatic good looks to sell a lifestyle.
A glamorous world of wind and wave.
This uber-cool extreme sports paradise at Watergate Bay is home to Jamie Oliver's new restaurant, Fifteen, where a select group of young people are being given the chance to be the chefs of tomorrow.
My name's Michael Mallet.
I'm 21.
I'm a trainee chef at Fifteen.
I just did not think I'd get in at all.
I honestly still can't believe I'm here really.
I love cooking.
I like making it look really nice and seeing people's reactions to the food.
In a few years' time, I want to be being a famous chef, that would be great.
I can't remember the last time I had a night off.
When I've got nights off, all my friends are working.
It's nice looking out to sea.
It's a bit annoying when it's really hot and you're dripping with sweat and you're looking at everyone in the sea - damn it! If you're in the sea looking out over the sand, you can be anywhere in the world.
Even if it's raining, I still go in the sea.
Honestly, I love it.
Just a few miles away is Padstow, or should I call it "Padstein"? This is a fishing village dominated by the celebrity chef, Rick Stein.
A cookery school, four eateries and a deli.
This is reinvention taken to another level.
If you come to a smart restaurant like this you'd expect to see on the menu, Cornish oysters from the Helford River and, of course, Cornish lobster.
Our appetite for fresh seafood is threatening the local lobster stocks.
At least here in Padstow, they're doing something about it.
Neil Simpson's been a lobster fisherman for the last 15 years.
Since 1994, there have been strict guidelines on the size of lobster he's allowed to catch within six miles of the shoreline.
If the distance between the eye socket and the top of the tail is less than nine centimetres, it has to be thrown back.
Just on.
It's absolutely touching.
Right.
That is the smallest lobster we can keep.
Right.
So, that's for the pot, sadly.
Yep.
That's one's in the basket.
A very small lobster in that one.
Yeah, that's small.
Too small.
OK.
So he's not for the boat.
He's away.
Now, that big one there.
Yeah, a good female.
It's a beauty.
Ah! Buried female, one with eggs.
This female lobster won't be ending up in a restaurant.
She's taking part in a sustainability project.
Local fishermen are being paid to bring pregnant lobsters to the hatchery in Padstow.
Dom Boothroyd's in charge.
We've got a giant one under here.
I've seen the size of that claw.
That looks enormous! She's something like 50 years old.
Maybe even 60.
No! If I can get her out, she should be totally laden with eggs.
I'll turn her upside-down.
This one's actually spent now - all of her eggs have hatched.
50 years old! You just don't imagine a lobster can live that long.
They can live to 100 years old or so.
That's remarkable.
The females shed their eggs.
These hatch and the larvae are collected and moved into individual compartments.
Different cells because they're cannibalistic? Very cannibalistic.
They will eat each other if they're not separated.
One of the amazing things about lobsters is, at this age, nobody's ever sighted them in the wild.
Nobody's ever seen a juvenile lobster in the wild? No scientific sightings ever.
Wow.
It's time for Dom to say goodbye to the juveniles he's been raising.
He's released 1,000 baby lobsters already this year and is hoping to release a further 20,000 in the months to come.
Trevone beach near Padstow is an ideal location for the fond farewell.
What sort of conditions are you looking for? We're looking for good cover, for an area where they can get away from each other and water here all the time.
It's hard to have an emotional attachment to a baby lobster, but what thoughts are going through your head as you release them? Well, I feel very proud, obviously.
We've spent eight months raising these guys.
It's really good to feel you're contributing something in an active way to the environment.
What you want to do is hold your hands like that with your fingers spread out OK.
And pour the lobster into your hand.
So, it's back to where they belong! In the wild, only one in 2,000 eggs would reach adulthood.
With the hatchery's help, four out of five should make it to maturity.
That's good news for them, good news for the fishing industry and let's not forget, good news for us! I've come to the end of my Grand Tour of Cornwall, from the sheltered coves of the south to the surfers' paradise of the north.
I've not been the regular bucket and spade tourist - I've seen another side of this county that's not often explored.
So next time you're sitting on a beach in Cornwall, just think - round that corner there's a global cultural centre.
That harbour houses internationally renowned fish and you might just hear the lapping of waves but under your beach towel, 36 million calls may be connected.
Cornwall is England's most coastal county.
Maybe that's why so much of its story is outward looking, with an eye to the far horizon.
It certainly feels like a place that belongs much more to the sea than to the land.
It has over 400 miles of spectacular shoreline and it's almost entirely cut off from the rest of the country by this river, the Tamar.
Just four miles of land connect Cornwall to the mainland.
Without that, it would pretty much be an island.
It may not be an island like Tenerife or Ibiza but five million of us a year see Cornwall as THE holiday destination.
A place to kick off our shoes and relax.
But if all you take home are your holiday snaps, then you're missing the bigger picture.
We're not going to.
Zoologist Miranda Krestovnikoff is wreck diving at the Manacles visiting new residents, squatters, who've made themselves at home down under.
Anthropologist Alice Roberts investigates the mystery of the unique Cornish light that's lured artists to St Ives for centuries.
Mark Horton sees another side of the Isles of Scilly, known to some archaeologists as the Isles of the Dead.
And Nick Crane is discovering that the beauty of this beach isn't down to Mother Nature.
Welcome to the Cornish coast.
We'll be travelling around 260 miles from Saltash to the Isles of Scilly and then back up the north coast to Padstow.
This is a county that's isolated yet on our doorstep, it seems foreign, yet familiar.
As tourists, there's a character to Cornwall that we may miss out on - we're too busy having fun.
So sit back and enjoy.
I'm off to explore the Wild West of Cornwall.
My journey starts in Saltash where since Saxon times, the geographical borders split Devon and Cornwall across the banks of the River Tamar.
As the railroads were opening up the Wild West of America, the same was happening here in the Wild West of England.
In 1859, the year Billy the Kid was born, Brunel, the great railway pioneer, was opening the gateway to Cornwall with this magnificent bridge across the Tamar.
It was a huge engineering feat taking 13 years to complete.
No-one had seen a bridge like it, it was a glimpse of the future.
For the first time, Cornwall was connected to the mainline network.
Over the following decades, it brought trade and tourism.
Outsiders flocked to the newly fashionable "Cornish Riviera".
Look at this.
"Looe, for ideal homes and holidays.
" Can't miss that! On the way to Looe, it's classic Cornwall all the way.
Looe is built around its harbour and river estuary and divided into two halves.
It's always been the quintessential picture postcard on the Grand Tour of Cornwall and still is today.
It says here, in this 1960s brochure, "The new visitor, within 24 hours of arrival, seems to be subconsciously absorbed "into the atmosphere of holiday peacefulness, and England seems 1,000 miles away.
" Romantic idyll it may be, but there's more to Looe than tourist brochure banter.
It's Cornwall's second largest fishing port and according to top chef, Rick Stein, lands some of the freshest fish in the UK.
Dovers and monk mix! This is Looe fish auction.
First live to go! It's highly charged, using the latest auctioneering technology with buyers from all over Britain vying for today's catch.
And this quality doesn't come cheap.
Today, the most expensive one I've bought is extra large turbot.
ã170 for one fish.
Wow! Is that a typical price? It can go higher than that for turbot.
Why do you come to this market? Is it a good one? Purely for quality.
We buy in several other ports, Newlyn, Brixham and Plymouth, but this one is the best quality.
They go out in the morning, they land in the evening, we buy it and it's on the counter within 12 hours.
This market is one of the most competitive in the UK and its success is down to the fact that the boats here only go out for a day - dayboat fishing.
At other ports, the bigger boats can be out up to a week.
The freshness just can't compete with the quick turnaround of Looe.
It may be an accident of nature, but it's created a unique opportunity.
The port is so small and the harbour so shallow it can only accommodate dayboats, so it's the limitations of the harbour that have created Looe's greatest asset - super-fresh fish.
So how would I spot that this is truly fresh fish? Well, look at the haddock, I mean, how stiff if that? Look - slimy That's a good sign.
So slime's a good sign? Slime's a good sign.
So if it's really floppy does that mean it's gone Yes.
Unless it's pre-rigor mortis, which probably takes, to become rigor mortis, maybe five to six hours.
After it's been caught.
And then from stiff to really floppy is not good.
The herring - people buy them when their eyes are all red.
Well, it takes a day or so to become red.
I mean the mackerel Look at the mackerel.
Line caught, you can always tell because there's damage around the mouth.
Right, OK.
Why is line caught better than something out of a net? The fish is less stressed, the fish doesn't drown, so it makes the meat far superior.
The gills are lovely and red and clear.
Right - so there's still oxygenated blood near them? You sound as if you love these things.
Oh, it's a passion.
After the fish has been auctioned to the highest bidder, the next stage is distribution.
Steve Farrar is a fish merchant and middleman.
But trying to get a moment with him isn't easy.
No we haven't, Richard.
No, we've got no brill.
There's some nice turbot.
I've got turbot and monk.
D'you want any monk? 90% of the fish in Looe ends up going abroad.
I want to know why.
Why is so much of it being exported? The fishing industry's very simple.
It's simply supply and demand.
You've got to send it where you get the best price, or you're out of the game.
So the continent is prepared to spend more for the fish that we don't generally see? Yeah.
For fish you don't see in the shops, quite often it's because it's gone abroad.
Cuttlefish, squid, turbot - this is quality fish and we're letting it get away.
Next time you go away to foreign parts, remember, you and that fish are probably both on holiday! Here, as elsewhere on the coast, development and tourism are issues.
The Europeans are quite happy to eat Cornish fish at home, they don't come here to eat it.
In fact, only 1% of Cornish tourists are foreigners.
Further down the coast, they're planning a large beach complex with the aim of attracting new visitors to Carlyon Bay.
But the future of this beach has been in dispute for five years so the work has been put on hold.
Locals and developers have been fighting over the best way to enjoy Cornwall's natural beauty.
But this beautiful bay is not as natural as it seems.
The beach that everybody's fighting about doesn't belong here at all, because this is not ordinary sand.
You're probably not going to find another beach like this in the world.
Glynda Easterbrook has been examining its extraordinary make-up.
If I brought my children here, Glynda, I wouldn't give this stuff a second thought.
It looks like standard sand.
It does, doesn't it? But in this bottle I've got some sand from another beach, somewhere else in Cornwall and if you look at it closely, you can see how different it is.
This is very soft, almost smooth.
And this is hard and granular.
It's nice and soft because it's got lots of shell fragments in it.
This is nearly all quartz.
This is no average beach.
All other Cornish beaches are a mixture of eroded granite and crushed seashells.
But this one at Carlyon Bay is mostly made of quartz.
This is a typical Cornish granite.
Granite's made of three main minerals.
Quartz, which is this grey, glassy stuff here.
It's got big white crystals of a mineral called feldspar and it's got some little, black, shiny grains, which is mica.
The quartz and the mica are here, but where did the feldspar go? That's the secret to this beach - the feldspar has been removed, extracted by the china clay industry.
But they've been left with the quartz, and it's now found its way down onto this beach.
This beach is a strip of industrial garbage? That's right.
This beautiful beach is actually the waste product left over by the extraction of china clay from granite.
The mica and quartz that make up this unusual beach have been washed downriver from the clay processing plants inland.
These huge pits are where the clay is extracted from the granite generating the waste 'sand' that's collected at Carlyon Bay.
China clay might get its name from the Chinese potters who made it famous, but one quarter of the world's china clay comes from Cornish granite.
As the rock weathers over millions of years it softens, making this 'rotten' granite ripe for mining.
That high-pressure hose is blasting geologically rotten granite into a slurry that can be processed into china clay.
Once you've got the clay, which is the mineral component, it needs more processing before it becomes china clay.
These pits produce two million tonnes a year - that's a lot of tea cups.
But this is about much more than pottery.
Do a little research and you find china clay is in lots of things.
Bizarrely, it has over 500 different commercial uses.
Some of them quite unexpected.
Ivor knows his clay.
Hi, there.
How are you? So what exactly is china clay? In very simple terms, Nick, it's rotten granite.
See how that will break up? It feels like plasticine, doesn't it? It does and the white material in there has a whole range of uses - everything from manufacturing paper to paint.
So why do you need this stuff, rather than any other material, to put into car dashboards or paper or paint or toothpaste or pills or whatever? It's a hugely versatile mineral which can give gloss to paper Oh, the shine? It can give shine to paper.
It can give impact resistance in a fender on a car, it can be used in electrical installation wiring systems in a dashboard There are many, many uses.
And of course, many of us will take china clay in the form of medicine.
And why would I want to put this in medicine? Very simply because it's an inert carrier and it carries the other chemicals through the system.
It's a fluid you just attach your drugs to? To carry it through the body, yes.
And which of the products I've brought has the most china clay in? It may surprise a lot of people, in fact it's paper.
A magazine like the Radio Times would contain a third by weight china clay.
For every one tonne of china clay extracted there are nine tonnes of waste.
So spectacular were these mountains of waste that they were known locally as the Cornish Alps.
In the last decade, the industry has been trying to clean up its act by landscaping these man-made hills.
One disused china clay pit has been transformed into a tourist attraction - the Eden Project.
And a new use is being found for the waste - it's turned into aggregates.
This means there'll be no new sand washed down to Carlyon Bay.
So the beach won't be replenished.
While the developers and locals debate the future of this beach, they're actually losing it.
The china clay industry created this beach, property developers want to capitalise on it, but nature could snatch it away far faster than many people realise.
Let's face it, unless you live here, it takes a long time to get to Cornwall, which is why there's often the view that it's isolated and remote.
But that depends on your point of view.
We're on our way to Falmouth whose association with the sea made it more cosmopolitan than London in the 18th century.
Falmouth has been a major commercial and military port since the 1700s.
But it wasn't just a trade hub.
With 25 foreign consulates and nationalities from around the globe arriving daily, it was an international communications centre.
This is where the unbearable news of Nelson's death reached England.
They heard it here first.
200 years ago, Falmouth was the place to be.
But why Falmouth? By 1690, years of war with France had made getting news and supplies in and out of Britain difficult.
Falmouth, unlike Dover and Harwich, was far enough from the French coast to make it safe from their interference.
But ships were still vulnerable out at sea.
The solution was the packet ship, lightly armed brigs designed by the Royal Mail - they were small but they were fast.
They could outrun the notorious French privateers.
From 150 years, government mail, bullion and VIPs from every corner of the globe were picked up from and dropped off in Falmouth.
The shape of the port may not have changed much but at the time it was a melting pot of shipping agents, adventurers, merchants and refugees.
It was the main link to the Empire.
It wasn't unheard of for news to hit the local paper here before it was rushed up the road, what's now the A30, to London.
The headline might not be genuine, but the paper is - the Falmouth Packet.
It was the sea that brought prosperity to Falmouth, fish for the table, exotic imports from abroad.
But this came at a price.
The coastline is littered with thousands of wrecks.
The Manacles, just off the Lizard, with its submerged rocks has caught out even the saltiest sea dogs.
You might not spot it at first glance, but on the horizon, there's a marker, a spire that has come to the rescue of many a sailor.
Miranda Krestovnikoff takes a closer look.
There's been a church here for hundreds of years and it's been an important landmark for sailors trying to navigate a course through those notorious rocks down there.
In fact, the church has given its name to the infamous rocks below.
The Manacles Reef gets its name from the Cornish Maen Egloss, meaning church stones.
Unfortunately, even this divine landmark couldn't keep every passing boat safe.
This graveyard alone houses over 300 victims of shipwrecks.
Many of the lost souls buried here come from just a single tragedy - the sinking of a large passenger and cargo ship that was on her way to America in 1898.
It was called the Mohegan.
This memorial marks the spot where many victims of the Mohegan wreck were put to rest in one mass grave.
A wreck is a human tragedy and nature shows no mercy.
But what she takes with one hand, she gives with another.
The lost ship is slowly transformed into a new piece of the Cornish coast.
Paul Naylor, marine biologist and underwater photographer, has been exploring the remains of boats like the Mohegan for over 15 years.
This site that we're diving is a really popular site in the UK.
What makes the wreck of the Mohegan so special? Well, The Manacles are special anyway cos of the currents bringing in food for a wealth of animals, and the Mohegan, the wreck, gives even more habitat for the animals to live in, the animals to live on and attach to.
So it's just fantastic life.
So it's gonna be a good dive then? Should be wonderful.
The vast amounts of plankton here form the basis of the food chain sustaining many species and giving the water its distinctive green colour.
Over the last 100 years the combination of passing time and strong currents has stripped the boat bare.
All that remains are the large rusting metal plates which formed the basic structure.
There's so much wreckage lying around.
It's a big wreck - look at those huge boilers.
The ship is now covered with dead man's fingers - a rather morbid name for an eerie reminder of the boat's fate.
Hundreds of individual polyps make up the colony of the dead man's fingers and they have this gelatinous skeleton instead of the hard, stony skeleton of reef corals.
They're really pretty when they've got all their tentacles out, really feathery.
Soft corals like these are amongst the first long-term settlers on a wreck.
All these little nooks and crannies, every one has got something living in it.
It's like the posh coffee shop effect - once the sponges, soft corals and anemones move in, you know the neighbourhood is being gentrified.
The initial pioneers like keel worms, who pave the way for these more colourful inhabitants, are soon lost in the forest of fast-growing algae.
And all that's needed for the underwater city to start growing is a little rust, or a scratched surface for the different colonisers to attach themselves to.
Oh, look! Sea fans.
They're beautiful.
The pink sea fan is a protected species.
It grows at right angle to the current so each individual polyp that makes up the colony has the maximum potential to catch food.
These huge sea fans on the Mohegan show the wreck's age.
These corals can only grow 1cm a year so some of these colonies are over 50 years old.
Wrecks are such prime real estate for species like these.
This high-rise housing causes stronger currents and the enhanced flow helps these hangers-on to catch their food as it floats by.
As we move away from the wreck, other species start making an appearance.
The rocks are like the old, historic heart of a town.
This is where you find residents that have lived here forever.
Jewel anemones produce dozens of little clones of themselves, creating distinct blocks of colour.
Look at the crab.
You can see his mouthparts going.
I remember my first dive somebody put one of those on my head.
I was a bit scared! Divers in the Manacles attach great mystique to the wrecks here.
It's easy to understand why.
Nature has adopted and then adapted them to become an integral part of the underwater landscape.
It's Cornwall at its natural best.
Leaving the Manacles, we continue round the Lizard peninsula.
It's a remote place and until 50 years ago, was home to a rare bird.
These birds can be found on the Cornish coat of arms but, in the words of a Monty Python sketch, they are no more, they have gone to meet their maker.
The Cornish chough has been rendered extinct.
It has ceased to be.
It is not pining.
Or is it? There's been a resurrection.
Claire Mucklow from the RSPB explains.
So - they're back? Definitely.
You've just missed one.
The female's just gone into the cave.
Oh, no! So how's it happened? Well, they've been extinct in Cornwall for over 50 years, so they're back now and breeding.
Possibly they've come from Brittany, but it's a natural re-colonisation that's the most fantastic thing.
It's not a reintroduction, which has happened with kites and sea eagles in other parts of the country, they've come back naturally on their own.
Fantastic.
Any sign? Umm Just Just Remember Where, where? The cave with the arch, that dark arch, there's a little slope there and she's just perched.
Quite difficult to see at the moment.
Can you see? Yes! Just in the corner.
Got you! How did they come by the name? We don't really know.
When they call they make a sound which sounds like "Ciao", so Sort of Italian? No, no! Well, maybe.
She spends a lot of time looking after her feathers because she's been sitting.
The chicks are still quite young She's Italian - there's a lot of that going on.
No! She's Cornish.
The grass is nice and short here - ciao! I think it's my dodgy impression.
Ciao! Mike and Alix Lord and their dog William were the first to discover the choughs in 2002, and are now part of a loyal group called Chough Watch.
Hello.
Hello.
What is Chough Watch? Chough Watch is protecting the birds from possible egg collectors, 24 hours a day.
That's night and day.
And we have a fantastic band of loyal, wonderful, keen birdwatchers who will do it.
The RSPB put different coloured rings on the new choughs so they can keep track of their movements.
It's given rise to an interesting roll call.
First year, Mike named them after cricketers.
The first one that came out was white over green.
She became WG.
The second was brown over lime so he became Brian Lara.
And so on.
I regard them as my sort of grandchildren.
Grand choughs, really! But why have they come back? Farmers in the 19th century used to graze their cattle on the cliff side, keeping the vegetation short.
But then it became easier and more convenient to graze inland.
Choughs need access to very short grass.
So they can't feed in scrub.
Choughs are choosy? I suppose that's a good way of putting it.
They are specialists.
So, over the last 10 to 20 years, they have been putting animals back on to the cliff.
Ponies, cattle, some sheep, just to try and get that scrub bashed back really.
And it's worked, they're here.
These aren't just any choughs, these are Cornish choughs in Cornwall.
They are indeed.
And now for something completely different.
Just inland from the Lizard at Goonhilly, is the world's biggest earth station, a centre for satellite communication.
These unrestricted panoramic views make this the perfect place to site giant antennae.
Meet Arthur, named after King Arthur.
He received the first ever transatlantic TV pictures via a communications satellite in 1962.
This is the main control room at Goonhilly Down, the point at which Telstar's first signals across the Atlantic will be received in the British Isles.
Here we are.
There's a bar.
Now, we are anticipating That's a man's face.
Done it! There it is.
That's the picture.
It was a groundbreaking moment and puts Cornwall in a unique place in the history of modern communication.
But modern communication didn't start here.
Journey further round the coast, nearly 30 miles from the dishes of Goonhilly, you discover the enticing cove of Porthcurno.
Turquoise waters, pale, powdery sand a holiday-maker's dream.
Appearances can be deceptive.
That secluded little beach down there conceals a fantastic secret.
It's where, 130 years ago, Britain was wired up to the world.
A network of cables stretched from under this beach around the globe.
Mary Godwin knows the story.
Cables from here went to South America, Africa, through the Mediterranean to the Far East, Hong Kong, Australia.
The whole world.
And they all come in at this little beach? There are 14 cables coming in here, yes.
So, are we talking about telephone cables? No, we are not talking the telephone, but the telegraph.
The telephone hadn't even been invented in 1870.
These were telegraph cables whereby messages were sent in a version of Morse code, translated into letters of the alphabet at the other end, put on a telegram form which was then delivered by a messenger boy to its final recipient.
By the 1860s, they were looking to lay these long cables linking distant parts of the Empire, and Porthcurno and the cable to Bombay was the first link, the spine if you like, of the connections for the British Empire.
The imperial cables from Porthcurno linked Britain to the furthest outposts of the Empire, and beyond.
Communication before took weeks, now it was virtually instant.
But why here in the middle of nowhere? Originally they were going to lay the cable from Falmouth, they set up the Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company.
Falmouth was a natural place because that's where all the packet ships went out from, where international mail went from.
They soon realised it wasn't a good place to lay a cable, because of all the anchors dragging.
It one of the world's busiest harbours.
And it all comes to this? And it all comes into the cable house, yes.
This hut.
Yes, this plain-looking little building.
Oh, look at that! You can see them physically coming up through the floor.
Gibraltar.
Bilbao, Scillies, Newfoundland.
How fantastic.
Cables were big business and investment was huge.
It was the new information highway.
But just as Britain was busy wiring up the world, at the start of the 20th century, along came wire-less technology.
In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi was making history just a few miles from here, down the Cornish coast that way.
I'm going to backtrack 26 miles round the coast to Poldhu Point, on the Lizard, away from prying eyes, chosen for its remoteness.
This is where the first transatlantic wireless message was sent at 12.
30 on December 12th 1901, 1,800 miles across the Atlantic to Newfoundland.
I now felt, for the first time, absolutely certain that the day would come when mankind would be able to send messages, without wires, between the furthermost ends of the Earth.
With the simple series of three dots representing the letter "s" in Morse code, the age of wireless communication had arrived.
Not everyone was thrilled by Marconi's achievement.
If you do a little digging and look at the initial reports, you can spot a fascinating little footnote.
After the initial wireless transmission across the Atlantic, just four days later in a newspaper report, the President of the Commercial Cable Company, a Mr Ward, is quoted as saying he sees no cause for concern.
He pledges to continue new cable construction as though wireless had never been heard of! Now I'm no businessman, but you can bet if the cable companies were saying they weren't worried about Mr Marconi, they were REALLY worried about Marconi.
Without the huge costs of laying cables worldwide, wireless technology was potentially cheaper and quicker to install.
Marconi was on to something.
For the cable companies, it was time for drastic measures.
How did the cable companies respond to the wireless technology? They responded by spying on what Marconi was up to over there on the Lizard.
And this is the evidence that remains of that.
It's the base of a radio mast.
If you can imagine it standing upright, with a huge mast sitting in it which was held by guy ropes, and rings in the rocks around us.
So they were using Marconi's own technology to spy on him? They were.
There's evidence that the cable company tampered with Marconi's transmissions inserting derogatory comments to discredit this new, rival technology and to prove how insecure wireless was.
Wireless and cable technology competed for decades.
Cable's advantage over its rival was its security against interception.
By the Second World War, this reliability was worth protecting at any cost.
Porthcurno was one of Hitler's targets.
And given that it was all coming together on this beach, this must have been pretty important to the Allies? It was incredibly important.
And for that reason, gun emplacements were built, loads of security measures in the valley and a big flame-thrower system across the top of the beach here.
Cable's reliability has ensured its survival into the satellite era.
And our insatiable appetite to communicate has meant Britain is more cabled than ever before.
And it all started here at Porthcurno beach.
Today, the copper wire has been replaced by fibre optics.
Six million phone calls travel down a cable as thin as a strand of human hair.
It's the superhighway of the future.
Then as now, Cornwall is integral to our worldwide communications.
28 miles off the southwest tip of England lie the Isles of Scilly.
It's an archipelago of over 50 islands.
Only five are inhabited, and around 2,000 people live here.
Tourists swell the numbers drawn to the Scillies by the super-soft sand and the unspoilt beaches.
Just add a few palm trees and you could be in the Caribbean.
Yet for some archaeologists, this isn't just the isles of sun and sand.
They know it as the Isles of the Dead.
Mark Horton, our resident archaeologist, chose a less than balmy day to investigate.
The Isles of Scilly have an extraordinary claim to fame.
It has a greater concentration of burial chambers than anywhere else in Britain.
But who were the dead? Were they the ancient inhabitants of these sparsely-populated islands, or were they bought over from the mainland in some kind of bizarre burial practice? I'm here to find out.
Local archaeologist, Katharine Sawyer, lives close to the mystery of the Isles of the Dead.
So, here we are, this is St Mary's.
Yes, that's right.
This is the Bant's Carn burial chamber, one of the largest and best preserved in Scilly.
It's fantastic.
Has it been rebuilt? It has been partly consolidated and the end capstone was put back in place in the 1970s, but otherwise, this is how it was.
And Bronze Age? That's right.
2000 - 1500 BC as far as we know.
That's 4,000 years ago? This is what's called an entrance grave? That's right, entrance to the chamber at one end and stone-built chamber mound around it.
And how many are there on Scillies? There are 83 known burial chambers, others surely been destroyed without trace, so a huge concentration for such a small area.
For example, in Cornwall, how many are there? About seven in Cornwall.
So something really mad is going on here! There is something very strange going on, yes.
Let's have a look.
These are substantial structures.
Each capstone that forms the roof weighs up to 15 tonnes.
This is Bronze Age architecture.
But the question is, are these burial mounds built by locals or by visitors from the mainland? A short distance from St Mary's, the island of Gugh reveals important pieces in the puzzle.
Bronze Age artefacts found here give us a clue to the origin of these burial mounds.
On a day like this it does make you wonder if mainlanders really would have travelled the 28 miles out here to bury their dead.
In the Bronze Age, coastal navigation would have been easier I think than travelling distances overland, if you think that the land was mainly forested.
And these fantastic Bronze Age boats have been discovered.
Yes.
We know that sea-going journeys were made in the Bronze Age.
But the practicalities of a rotting body on this boat! Rough weather Presumably you could be stuck for three months waiting for this body to be taken over? The remains that have been found here are cremations Ah! .
.
and we don't know where the bodies were cremated.
It's perfectly possible that cremation took place soon after death and just the ashes were brought over.
Gugh is only accessible at low tide via a curving sandbar from St Agnes.
There are three burial sites here.
Excavation of one, Obadiah's Grave, in 1901, uncovered 12 cremations and one complete skeleton.
So this is the main chamber? Yes, that's right.
With the entrance at this end.
That's rather fun, I shall jump down.
What sort of things were found here? These are the kind of pottery from these Bronze Age monuments.
There's a base.
Amazing, that's 4,000 years old.
That's right.
And a decorated rim shard, you see the impressions there.
Isn't that fabulous, where it's been impressed with basketry or cloth, or something.
That really is prehistoric pottery.
Hand made.
Grotty, isn't it? So that would have been full of ashes of cremated bone? Actually, the ash and bone was on the floor of the chamber and the urns were upside-down, covering the cremated deposits.
Seeing something like this, this isn't great wealth, you're not sending commodities to the afterlife.
Presumably great leaders, great status.
But this is all our ancestors, isn't it? Yes, a community burying its dead in the landscape.
Very ordinary artefacts, the kind of pottery that is found in the settlements accompanying the ashes.
So this is no cemetery for the great and the good.
The finds suggest the burial chambers were the graves of ordinary people, locals probably, rather than important people brought over from the mainland.
The island of Samson is the final piece in our 'Puzzle of the Dead'.
It's got one of the major groupings of burial chambers.
Remote and unspoilt, it's also a good place to hunt for signs of a Bronze Age community.
We've heard enough of the dead, where are the living? The living are down there.
All this area of water here would have been dry land in the Bronze Age so people were living and farming on the low-lying areas and burying their dead on the hilltops.
Low tide reveals evidence for the Isles of the Living.
Field boundaries, hut circles, a thriving community 4,000 years ago.
Sea levels were then much lower.
This would have been a populated valley.
That whole landscape gives a whole different spin on it? That's right.
The population may have been several hundred and the burial chambers themselves may have been built over several hundred years.
I think the local population could have supplied the inhabitants of these burial chambers.
So the dead may well have been locals, looking down from on high, keeping an eye on the living.
Rising sea levels buried evidence of the living while preserving their dead in splendid isolation.
The remote life on the Scillies has put the only two football teams on the islands in a league of their own.
A league of two with only each other to play again and again and again.
My name is Chas Wood.
I am chairman of the smallest football league in the world the Isles of Scilly Football League.
We have just two teams.
We have the Woolpack Wanderers.
Woolpack Wanderers! And the Garrison Gunners.
Garrisons! BLOWS WHISTLE We play 16 league games each season.
We are of course affiliated to the Cornish FA and abide by all the rules of the Football Association.
At the beginning of the season we have a Charity Shield, whereby last year's league winners play last year's cup winners.
And if the same side won both, they play the runners-up.
Although we've only got two teams and we play against each other every week, it's very, very competitive.
There's no point in getting up on a Sunday morning if you wanna finish second.
There's a fairly substantial age range.
We've got some youngsters playing at the age of 15 and we've got one person who is 64 years of age.
That's me! We play to win, but we know our limitations.
I don't think you need to worry about us winning the FA Cup next year.
Isolation can bring its own problems.
In an emergency, the islanders rely on the sea and air rescue.
This Royal Navy squad operates around the South West peninsula, 200 miles out at sea.
They're specialists in search and rescue and are trained to hover at 40 feet above the sea.
They're on call 24/7 and can be airborne within 15 minutes.
Over the last five years they've saved over 1,000 lives, from shipwrecked fishermen to falls from cliff tops.
Back to dry land and we're on our way up the westerly coast of Cornwall.
Leaving the Scillies behind, we're approaching St Ives.
It's a small town with big ideas.
So big, in fact, it lured a major gallery to its shores.
The Tate St Ives has turned this tiny town from an artist's sanctuary to an international cultural centre.
What is it that draws artists here? Alice Roberts, a bit of a dabbler herself, is going to find out.
Artists' love affair with St Ives goes back nearly 200 years.
It was a 19th century fashion to paint the picture-postcard St Ives, a tradition that still continues today.
But there are also those like Barbara Hepworth and artists today who don't interpret St Ives quite so literally.
And it's not the scenery that attracts the artists here.
It's the special quality of the light.
Naomi Frears is one of many artists to have fallen prey to the charms of St Ives.
So, Naomi, as an artist, what drew you to St Ives? What drew me to St Ives is what's drawn artists here for a long time - the quality of the light, the landscape.
The artist Patrick Heron called the dazzling light "the sort of light that goes round corners".
You perceive it before you actually get round the corner and there's the sun, this incredible light.
And that's in your work as well? Is funny, because when I moved into the studio, an artist who'd been there a lot longer than me, met me and he said, "How are you settling in? "Is the outside starting to come into your work?" I said, "I don't know.
I don't think so.
Maybe the space.
" He said, "Beware of Naples yellow" which is what artists use to paint sand.
"And misty grey-greens.
" And I said, "What, misty grey greens like this?" I opened my hand and it was covered in misty grey-green.
So, even if you don't mean it to start coming in, that light and the light on the sea and the light in the sky starts to seep into your work.
It definitely feels as though there's something rather special about the light at St Ives but I don't know if I'm reacting to the rather beautiful scenery.
So, I'd like to try something a bit more scientific, a bit more objective to analyse the light here and see if the St Ives light really is special.
Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist at University College London.
He thinks he may be able to provide the answer as to why St Ives is such a lure for artists.
So, Beau, what do you do? What have you got here? What we have here is a vacuum pump.
We're basically using this to filter the air in Cornwall or St Ives.
So, right down here, what we have is the filter paper that I just took out from there.
Inside this little nozzle? Inside that little thing.
Right.
So, what you see is the filter paper in London.
That was actually filtered for three hours outside my lab.
Right.
And this is the filter paper that I just took out from there.
So this is now Cornish air.
So it really is much cleaner down here.
That means the quality of the light, the intensity of the light will be much brighter down here.
The sky is going to be much bluer, the sun's going to be much yellower.
All of that is going to increase the colour of the light off the surfaces - increase the contrast, the perceived difference between the colours.
So do you think this is it, do you think this is the explanation why the Cornish light is different? I think this is one of the main reasons.
It's not the only reason.
The other reason will be that the light coming from the sun, from the sky, will be bouncing off surfaces, bouncing off the sea, bouncing off the sand.
In particular with St Ives being surrounded by sea, much of the light will be coming from reflected light off the sea.
So let's try and analyse the light in St Ives under the watchful eyes of the holiday-makers.
By taking a photo of a white piece of card reflecting light from the sand and then another photograph of the card reflecting light from the sea, we can measure the light as it bounces off different surfaces.
I'm not sure you're dressed for this, Beau! Some people find our experiment interesting whilst others aren't remotely worried about the light of St Ives stopping play.
So what you can see, this is the one that's taken from the sea.
What you can see is that there is more blue than there is green or red.
And it's coming in in the blue part of the spectrum here.
So we actually have numbers to it.
Yeah.
Now we can sample the light coming from the card when it was held over the sand.
Right.
So, if I just click that colour, OK.
Now we can look here again at the amount of blue, green and red.
You see that again there is more blue light coming from the card than there is green or red.
I don't understand, because the sand is not blue.
It's true.
The reason is because the sand is quite whitish.
Yeah.
That's reflecting much of the sky light onto the card.
Because the sky light is blue and because St Ives is facing north so much of the light that's coming onto St Ives is from the blueness of the sky, that blueness is hitting the sand and reflected back up.
The point is that the light coming off the sea and the sand are both blue.
So it creates a sort of blueness in the air around St Ives? That's right.
The coastline is littered with clues to Cornwall's industrial past.
Moving up the northern coast to St Agnes, it's clear to see that for more than 2,000 years, Cornishmen and women have wrestled a living out of this landscape.
Tin mining was what they did.
It was the Cornish bread and butter.
When the industry began to wane over 150 years ago, they took their skills elsewhere, leaving this landscape behind.
You can imagine, as the miners looked out to sea and heard tales of warmer climates and the possibilities of a new life, why the New World might beckon.
These were the toughest miners in the world.
The New World wanted them and it needed them.
It wasn't just one or two, almost half a million left.
There are engine houses like this one in Peru, Mexico and even in Australia.
The whole community, women and children, were involved in tin mining.
Mortality rates were high in mining villages.
Many today blame toxins such as arsenic, lead and uranium that the workers were exposed to.
The story goes that the pasty owes its ingenious design to mining's toxic past.
By holding onto the tough crust, you could kept dirty arsenic-stained fingers away from your food.
Traditionally, they had meat and veg at one end and something sweet like jam or fruit at the other.
Eat the pasty, throw away the crust.
The ultimate finger food.
Very acceptable it is, too.
The mining might have disappeared from Cornwall but the common pasty, despite its humble origins, is now a global brand.
Over the last hundred years, Cornwall has had to rebrand itself too.
No longer a mining Mecca, tourism has filled the gap.
This rugged, Atlantic coastline has exploited its dramatic good looks to sell a lifestyle.
A glamorous world of wind and wave.
This uber-cool extreme sports paradise at Watergate Bay is home to Jamie Oliver's new restaurant, Fifteen, where a select group of young people are being given the chance to be the chefs of tomorrow.
My name's Michael Mallet.
I'm 21.
I'm a trainee chef at Fifteen.
I just did not think I'd get in at all.
I honestly still can't believe I'm here really.
I love cooking.
I like making it look really nice and seeing people's reactions to the food.
In a few years' time, I want to be being a famous chef, that would be great.
I can't remember the last time I had a night off.
When I've got nights off, all my friends are working.
It's nice looking out to sea.
It's a bit annoying when it's really hot and you're dripping with sweat and you're looking at everyone in the sea - damn it! If you're in the sea looking out over the sand, you can be anywhere in the world.
Even if it's raining, I still go in the sea.
Honestly, I love it.
Just a few miles away is Padstow, or should I call it "Padstein"? This is a fishing village dominated by the celebrity chef, Rick Stein.
A cookery school, four eateries and a deli.
This is reinvention taken to another level.
If you come to a smart restaurant like this you'd expect to see on the menu, Cornish oysters from the Helford River and, of course, Cornish lobster.
Our appetite for fresh seafood is threatening the local lobster stocks.
At least here in Padstow, they're doing something about it.
Neil Simpson's been a lobster fisherman for the last 15 years.
Since 1994, there have been strict guidelines on the size of lobster he's allowed to catch within six miles of the shoreline.
If the distance between the eye socket and the top of the tail is less than nine centimetres, it has to be thrown back.
Just on.
It's absolutely touching.
Right.
That is the smallest lobster we can keep.
Right.
So, that's for the pot, sadly.
Yep.
That's one's in the basket.
A very small lobster in that one.
Yeah, that's small.
Too small.
OK.
So he's not for the boat.
He's away.
Now, that big one there.
Yeah, a good female.
It's a beauty.
Ah! Buried female, one with eggs.
This female lobster won't be ending up in a restaurant.
She's taking part in a sustainability project.
Local fishermen are being paid to bring pregnant lobsters to the hatchery in Padstow.
Dom Boothroyd's in charge.
We've got a giant one under here.
I've seen the size of that claw.
That looks enormous! She's something like 50 years old.
Maybe even 60.
No! If I can get her out, she should be totally laden with eggs.
I'll turn her upside-down.
This one's actually spent now - all of her eggs have hatched.
50 years old! You just don't imagine a lobster can live that long.
They can live to 100 years old or so.
That's remarkable.
The females shed their eggs.
These hatch and the larvae are collected and moved into individual compartments.
Different cells because they're cannibalistic? Very cannibalistic.
They will eat each other if they're not separated.
One of the amazing things about lobsters is, at this age, nobody's ever sighted them in the wild.
Nobody's ever seen a juvenile lobster in the wild? No scientific sightings ever.
Wow.
It's time for Dom to say goodbye to the juveniles he's been raising.
He's released 1,000 baby lobsters already this year and is hoping to release a further 20,000 in the months to come.
Trevone beach near Padstow is an ideal location for the fond farewell.
What sort of conditions are you looking for? We're looking for good cover, for an area where they can get away from each other and water here all the time.
It's hard to have an emotional attachment to a baby lobster, but what thoughts are going through your head as you release them? Well, I feel very proud, obviously.
We've spent eight months raising these guys.
It's really good to feel you're contributing something in an active way to the environment.
What you want to do is hold your hands like that with your fingers spread out OK.
And pour the lobster into your hand.
So, it's back to where they belong! In the wild, only one in 2,000 eggs would reach adulthood.
With the hatchery's help, four out of five should make it to maturity.
That's good news for them, good news for the fishing industry and let's not forget, good news for us! I've come to the end of my Grand Tour of Cornwall, from the sheltered coves of the south to the surfers' paradise of the north.
I've not been the regular bucket and spade tourist - I've seen another side of this county that's not often explored.
So next time you're sitting on a beach in Cornwall, just think - round that corner there's a global cultural centre.
That harbour houses internationally renowned fish and you might just hear the lapping of waves but under your beach towel, 36 million calls may be connected.
Cornwall is England's most coastal county.
Maybe that's why so much of its story is outward looking, with an eye to the far horizon.
It certainly feels like a place that belongs much more to the sea than to the land.