Qualla: Gwennap Head https://qualla.com/gwennap-head en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:10 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/u/gwennap-head-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Gwennap Head https://qualla.com/gwennap-head Gwennap Head: Introduction https://qualla.com/gwennap-head/ Photo credit Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 3.0. If you walk to the seaward edge of Gwennap Head on the right kind of August day, you may find a row of people who have not moved for hours. They have flasks of tea and battered tripods and old waterproofs the colour of granite. They are looking at empty sea. Then someone says, quietly, 'great shear, off the Runnel, just left of the cones,' and everyone shifts at once. A bird the colour of pencil shading skims across the swell three miles out, banks once and disappears. The watchers exhale. The Cornish name for this headland was Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the holed headland of Penwith, after the vertical blowhole that drops from the clifftop into a sea cave below. The English renamed it Gwennap Head in 1888. Local people kept calling it Tol-Pedn until the 1970s.

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Image: Jim Champion | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/u/gwennap-head-wp/gbgu-gwennap-head-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Gwennap Head: Two Cones and a Reef https://qualla.com/gwennap-head/ Photo credit Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Stand on the cliff edge facing west and you will see them: two cone-shaped daymarks, one painted red and the other striped black and white. They are not decorative. About a kilometre offshore lies the Runnel Stone, a partly submerged reef that has wrecked ships for as long as the...

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Image: Jim Champion | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/u/gwennap-head-wp/gbgu-gwennap-head-two-cones-and-a-reef.mp3 0:06 2 full Gwennap Head: The Lookout That Refused to Close https://qualla.com/gwennap-head/ Photo credit Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 3.0. The squat building on the headland began life around 1905 as a single-storey Coastguard lookout, in service by 1910. A second storey was added later, after a French trawler was wrecked at the foot of Wireless Point at Porthcurno in March 1956 and the watchers concluded they neede...

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Image: Jim Champion | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/u/gwennap-head-wp/gbgu-gwennap-head-the-lookout-that-refused-to-close.mp3 0:06 3 full Gwennap Head: The Bird-Watching Capital https://qualla.com/gwennap-head/ Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. Gwennap Head is one of the great seawatching stations of Britain. Its position at the south-western tip of Cornwall, jutting into the migration corridor for North Atlantic seabirds, brings to its cliffs an annual cast of gannets, Manx shearwaters, fulmars, guillemots, razorbills,...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/u/gwennap-head-wp/gbgu-gwennap-head-the-bird-watching-capital.mp3 0:06 4 full Gwennap Head: The Vanishing Wreck Beneath Porth Loe https://qualla.com/gwennap-head/ Photo credit Row17, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the north flank of Gwennap Head a small stream drains into the boulder-strewn cove of Porth Loe. On the morning of 15 March 1905 the barque Khyber, sighted from the Wolf Rock the previous night, came ashore on those boulders and broke apart within fifteen minutes. The men stil...

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Image: Row17 | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/u/gwennap-head-wp/gbgu-gwennap-head-the-vanishing-wreck-beneath-porth-loe.mp3 0:06 5 full Gwennap Head: A Flower Lost and Found https://qualla.com/gwennap-head/ Photo credit Benutzer:Chef, Public domain. In 2010, two botanists named Helen and Laurie Oakes were poking around the maritime grassland near the cliff edge when they found perennial centaury, Centaurium scilloides, a small pink flower that had not been seen in Cornwall, or indeed anywhere in England, since 1962. It had s...

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Image: Benutzer:Chef | Public domain

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/g/u/gwennap-head-wp/gbgu-gwennap-head-a-flower-lost-and-found.mp3 0:06 6 full