What with the eating, drinking, reading and fettling we only managed to get to the National Maritime Museum Cornwall.  £11 gets you an adult ticket which is valid for a year so if you’re intending to go back represents good value for money and supports the charity.  For a day trip it’s about what I’d expect to pay to get to any museum or gallery so, for me, it didn’t seem unreasonable.

The museum is set out over four main floors with a separate section on the history of Cornwall.  The ground floor hall is impressive display of boats suspended from the ceiling and on the ground floor.  You’re able to look at the boats from different levels as there’s a ramp that takes you around the exhibition up to the third floor.  All sorts of boats are on display:  there’s a small lifeboat, an early international 14 dingy, the earliest Firefly dingy, rowing boats and power boats along with newer boats such as Ben Ainslie’s Olympic winning Laser and Finn.

Also on the ground floor is the temporary exhibition space and this was given over to Search and Rescue including a Seaking Helicopter and RNLI inshore lifeboat.  Stories brought the exhibits to life but, unusually, where possible you were able to climb into and onto the exhibits.

We spent hours poking around the galleries and fatigue got to us before boredom set in.  I liked that it was set up to enable more hands on experiences than I’ve come to expect from some of the traditional large galleries.  There was even a boating lake where, for 50p you could sail your own boat across the lake.

One of my favourite sections was the ‘lighthouse’ tower.  Integrated into this new building it’s not such a climb.   Once reached it has excellent views over Falmouth town, the docks and the harbour.  There are binoculars provided so you can take a closer look at the ships coming in and out and the freight being loaded onto the commercial vessels.

The story that’s stayed with me was of the Robertson Family who managed to stay alive in their dingy Edna Mair for 38 days in the Pacific after their yacht was holed.  They did this by catching turtle and any fish they could, drinking rain water or turtle blood.  Three days in a ship passed about 4 miles from them but didn’t see their flares.  Lesser people would probably have given up but they didn’t.  Remarkable.

Other Sights and things to do – if we had the chance

Pendennis Castle – it was originally built in the Tudor period and fell in and out of repair and different uses.  I think it was one of the last Royal refuges before Charles I escaped to France.

Stand Up Paddleboarding at Swanpool Beach – one day…

Secret

Falmouth was a new town – of it’s period.  It was founded by the Killigrew family in the 1600s when they bought some land, moved from the interior of Cornwall and started to trade, and some say pirate, from the area.  The town of Penryn, further up the Fal, was the main town at the time.  The Killigrew’s dominated the town and it’s development for some four generations before they died out.  The last of the Killigrews was actually married-in as he married a Killigrew daughter.  However he felt loyalty with the family and in his later years he designed a monument to remember the Killigrews – a pyramid.  It was plain save the mortar to hold the masonry together standing about 6′ tall.  This monument was originally located at the Killigrew’s house Arwenack an area near what is now the docks.  Later, long after the house had fallen into disrepair, the locals found that the monument got in the way of what had turned from a lime tree avenue to a rope walk.  They moved it down the hill.  It then got in the way of the train line when that was created in the 1800s so the monument was moved again.  It’s now just on the edge of the car park that’s in front of the National Maritime Museum Cornwall.  Each time the monument was moved and rebuilt the masons hid momentos inside the monument.