Forgotten

The UK is home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, but if you’re looking for a quieter spot to soak up the sun, these twin villages are hidden gems well worth a visit

When the sun makes an appearance across the UK, the nation boasts plenty of remarkable attractions, from beautiful white sandy shores kissed by sparkling waters to quaint cobblestone lanes and idyllic villages. The summer break provides the perfect opportunity to explore some of Britain’s most popular seaside towns and countryside escapes.

Whether you’re drawn to the enduring allure of the Cotswolds or the seaside appeal of places like Weymouth, Scarborough, St Ives or Whitby, one thing is certain – these well-loved destinations will be packed with visitors.

However, if you’d prefer to enjoy the splendour of the British Isles without wrestling through crowds of tourists and social media fans, there’s a secret gem in Cornwall that offers breathtaking views, tranquil shores and a completely peaceful environment.

Nestled on the South-east coastline, the twin villages of Cawsand and Kingsand have everything you could want for a fantastic staycation and more.

Located on the less busy Rame Peninsula, often called Cornwall’s ‘forgotten corner’, these delightful villages are officially recognised as areas of outstanding natural beauty (AONB).

This pristine part of the country serves as a natural sanctuary that somehow avoids the summer throngs.

The scenic villages have maintained their peaceful atmosphere despite being encircled by bustling tourist hotspots. These delightful fishing settlements, with their winding lanes and sandy beaches, remain a well-kept secret away from the usual tourist trail.

And they’re steeped in heritage that encompasses the ancestral homes of Mount Edgcumbe, Port Eliot, and Antony House. Intriguingly, these two villages once formed part of different counties, renowned for their historic rivalry and as a refuge for smugglers.

Today, Cawsand Bay provides a sanctuary for families, walkers, swimmers, and kayakers, with its east-facing shingle-and-sand shore peppered with rock pools and inlets. Its sheltered waters make it a safe and stunning spot for all.

Tourists coming to enjoy the beaches are always close to authentic Cornish cuisine, with local pubs and shops just moments from the sandy expanse.

Kingsand, the adjacent village, is a concealed gem with cottage-lined lanes that rival the charm of Polperro and Port Isaac. Retaining much of its genuine character, Kingsand was formerly a flourishing fishing village, and traces of the old pilchard cellars and boat stores can still be discovered along the seafront.

This peaceful part of the peninsula, nestled beneath the coastal path, is a popular spot for walkers and birdwatchers, stretching all the way to the striking Rame Head, topped with a 14th-century chapel. Seafood lovers should make a beeline for the Devonport Inn in Kingsand, while The Bay Bar in Cawsand provides a peaceful setting for a drink, boasting a view that simply can’t be beaten.

The trip to these twin villages is a delightful experience in itself. As you wind your way for miles alongside sand and sea, the breathtaking views across Whitsand Bay offer a glimpse of the spectacular scenery that awaits.

The Blue Peter presenter was a familiar face on our TV screens in the 90s and early 2000s

A Blue Peter icon has carved out an entirely new career path away from kids’ TV.

Katy Hill shot to fame in the late 90s across some of the biggest TV and radio programmes around.

She fronted much-loved children’s show CBBC Blue Peter from 1995 to 2000 and spent five years taking on incredible stunts, including flying with the RAF’s Red Arrows team, a feat no civilian had achieved before.

Riding high on her success and widespread popularity, she moved across to BBC One’s Live and Kicking until 2001. The star then presented Top of the Pops, Football Fever, BBC’s Holiday and her very own weekend show on Capital FM.

Katy was also a regular contributor to glossy publications such as Cosmopolitan Hair and Beauty, Hello! and Closer.

In 2004, she claimed second place on Channel 4’s The Games. As her career progressed, she hosted programmes for Heart Radio, penned weekly blogs and stepped in as a stand-in presenter on ITV’s Daybreak.

During an appearance on Good Morning Britain last year, Katy shared her lifelong passion for presenting, saying: “I wanted to present that show since I was five.

“It was because this was the ’70s, right, you guys know this? There had been no girl power. That was the place I saw girls jumping out of planes, flying fast jets and fast cars. Generally, it’s pretty cool. I was like: ‘That’s the job for me!'”

However, nowadays, Katy, 55, is far less visible on our television screens, having transitioned into life coaching after establishing her own business.

Describing herself as an ‘Internationally Certified Success and Confidence Coach’, she regularly shares motivational content across social media. Katy also runs her own newsletter, The Limitless List, which delivers inspiring quotes and uplifting messages.

Alongside her television work, she now provides programmes, live groups and one-to-one coaching sessions to support her members.

Katy’s Instagram bio reads: “The shy kid who refused to play small and spent 30 years on TV! Now empowering women like YOU to UNLOCK your CONFIDENCE and CLAIM the SUCCESS you deserve!”

Katy is happily married to Trey Farley, her former co-presenter on Live and Kicking. The couple have been blissfully married for over two decades and share two children, daughter Kaya and son Akira.

In July 2023, Katy and Trey celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary, with the former television presenter sharing a touching tribute to her husband on social media.

She posted photographs from their wedding day and wrote: “20 Years of US! 20 Years of Mr and Mrs Farley! What a ride we’re on @rocaflix … nobody else I’d rather be doing LIFE with! Happy 20 babe! Let’s make more amazing memories! X (Ours was the Hans Zimmer version – obvs!)”

Prior to marrying Trey, Katy was previously wed to her childhood sweetheart, Andrew Frampton. They tied the knot in 1999 but separated in 2001.

Many years on, thousands of visitors have cherished memories of its thrilling rides and attractions

When it comes to theme parks in Wales, most people would immediately associate the region with the now-sadly defunct Oakwood Park in Pembrokeshire. The Narberth attraction, which shut its doors in 2015, was a cherished part of many childhoods, with trips on Megafobia and Snake River Falls over the years becoming the stuff of legend.

However, it wasn’t the only theme park that once created treasured memories for many, and for some, it was a rival to its more celebrated neighbour.

Back in 1994, another attraction was opening its gates for the very first time. The £1 million Grove Land Leisure Park was constructed in St Clears in Carmarthenshire, transformed from a working dairy farm.

And it offered something for everyone, with unforgettable rollercoasters such as Thunderbolt, Cyclone and Cyber Space. There was also the ‘Dance Master’ waltzer, twist rides like the iconic ‘Rodeo Rider’, the Snake Slide, dodgems and go-karts, reports Wales Online.

There was also a pirate ship, laser clay pigeon shooting and pedalo boats.

Barmy Barny served as the park’s mascot, and appeared on its emblem. It was especially appropriate given the herd of pedigree Freisians, which had been bred at the dairy farm by the Williams family across four generations, earning recognition throughout the agricultural world.

It was their herd that inspired John and Janet Williams to transform 30 acres of their 210-acre Grove Farm into a theme park.

At the time, the couple explained how the enjoyment and experience they had gained from showcasing their herd and hosting large crowds, combined with a passion for sport and leisure, had driven the park’s creation — along with their recognition of “the pressing need to impede any further decline in the local rural economy.”

When it opened on a seasonal basis, the theme park was expected to give tourism a significant boost and create up to 70 jobs in its first year alone, rising to 300 over the following three years.

It was also anticipated that 75,000 visitors would pass through its gates in the opening season, eager to experience what was promised to be a “country show ground atmosphere”, complete with calf parades, animal showmanship, and a range of rides and attractions specifically chosen for their interactive appeal and suitability for the whole family.

The park was remarkably affordable, with adult tickets priced at £7.50 and children’s tickets at £5.60. Visitors paid at the gate, and once inside, all rides and shows were included at no extra cost.

Takeaways, burger bars and a picnic area were all on hand for families looking to take a breather from the excitement of the rides.

Jade Walsh worked at the park for two to three seasons from the age of 16, taking it on as a summer job. Miss Walsh, now 40, who worked as a ride operator, said: “I worked a lot on the bumper boats and the pedalos which I enjoyed. I remember people would often get stuck in the reeds and things so you would often have to go out and rescue them.

“The boats would also have to be tested in the morning, and it was all young people who would work there seasonally and we’d all enjoy that. Mr Williams who ran it was lovely, and was such a nice guy.

“Thunderbolt was a gravity rollercoaster and how fast it went would depend on how heavy you were. Sometimes we would have to load it with sandbags if there was only a couple of kids in it. If it got stuck at the top, you’d have to climb up it, run across the tracks, push it, then get down to the bottom so you could stop it at the end. Health and safety wasn’t a thing then, but I loved it!

“My favourite part of working there was the people. It was a nice environment to work in. If you can imagine a nice seventies movie with children working at a funfair, it was like that.

“We had a lot of people who would come over and over again. Some people would visit a couple of times in the summer and come back every year. It was better for smaller children than Oakwood and there was less queues and things like that. It was just a much more relaxed atmosphere. It felt very safe. You could literally see everything from one place so parents could relax and let their children run from ride to ride.

“Everyone was really sad when it went, because there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do around here. Everybody missed it.”

Gemma Daniels has treasured childhood recollections of visiting the park on frequent end-of-year school outings between the ages of six and nine when she was a pupil at Ysgol Llwyn Yr Eos School in Penparcau, Aberystwyth.

Miss Daniels, now aged 36, said: “Trips to Grove Land are a core childhood memory for me. One ride that sticks out for me the most was rodeo-themed and it had a big mechanical horse in the middle with a cowboy on it. Basically, it was a sizzler ride. They also had a rollercoaster where the carriage you were in, it looked like a gold mine.

“The ride that we all avoided was a slide, it was like a big dipper, and it was the first time I had ever seen a ride like that. I remember kids coming off it with friction burns! They had a protector mat but you would bounce off it, because it was really fast.”

She added: “I remember that it was never crowded like you see at theme parks these days, and you didn’t have to queue long for rides. You’d have a chance to go on everything and see everything. When we were on school trips they would let us go off and we’d have to meet at a picnic table to have our packed lunch at lunchtime. It was really safe.

“I remember the little shop they had there where people used to get those water worms, that was the fascination at the time, and kids would also used to get snap bangs and use them on the bus on the way home.

“If it was open now, it’s a place I’d take my son to. It’s somewhere that I’m pretty gutted my kids won’t get to go.”

Sadly, in 2005, it closed its doors for good, with its rides relocated, including Thunderbolt, which was transported to Loudoun Castle, and Cyclone, which found a new home at Killarney Springs Family Park.

In 2008, it emerged that the site was on the market for £3.3 million.

By April 2014, we reported how plans for a “massive development” at the site had been given the go-ahead by Carmarthenshire Council, which would create 32 new-build holiday cottages, 26 holiday accommodation units and supporting leisure facilities.

In 2018, we reported how the planned accommodation project had yet to materialise, though it’s believed that it eventually launched at the start of the year, taking the form of a static caravan park.

It’s now been 21 years since Grove Land welcomed its last visitors. Yet for the thousands who spent their summers visiting or working at the attraction, it has left behind memories that they continue to cherish fondly.

The war film, which follows a young British soldier’s journey to the D-Day landings, is being praised by viewers as a more authentic and moving portrayal of WWII than Saving Private Ryan — and it’s currently available to stream in the UK

A “moving” and largely forgotten film from the 1970s depicting the D-Day landings is being hailed as “more realistic” than modern representations of the historic battle.

Overlord (1975) charts the experience of Thomas Beddows (Brian Stirner), a young British serviceman from his enlistment into the East Yorkshire Regiment, through initial training and ultimate participation in the Allies’ landmark amphibious invasion of German-held Normandy in June 1944 (codenamed Operation Overlord).

The picture, directed and co-written by Stuart Cooper, blends authentic archive material of the momentous military operation with sequences of Tom reflecting on his own death and the horrors awaiting him.

Screenrant writer Tommy Lethbridge observed that while it lacks the brutal, visceral intensity of the D-Day scenes featured in Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking 1998 picture Saving Private Ryan, Overlord ultimately provides a more “authentic” depiction of the clash between Allied and German troops.

This, he argued, stems from Overlord’s deployment of archival footage, combined with the incorporation of “extensive detail from real soldiers’ diaries, clips from British Army training missions”, and seized German material, all of which grant the work “unrivalled authenticity”.

Fans have flocked to IMDb to lavish praise on the lesser-known war epic, with one saying: “The archival footage which makes up much of the film’s most stunning imagery is meticulously chosen and edited.

“It frequently becomes Tom’s dreams and visions of the War as it unfolds, and for the viewer, it is a vision of what WWII was, seen from both German and British sides.”, reports the Express.

“Cooper so masterfully situates Tom, an everyman, in visions of the surrounding war, that by the end of this surprisingly short, yet incredibly rich film, the magnitude of the toll the war took on the individuals fighting it becomes overwhelmingly moving.”

Another added: “If you watched Saving Private Ryan, go and see this film too. It’s totally different, but it deals with the personal feelings of a private much better, no battle scenes, just the perfect backdrop about a normal soldier going off to war, knowing what will happen.”

A third described it as “not your average war film”, noting: “There’s very little in the way of dramatised battle scenes as it shows one soldier’s path to one of the most important, pivotal battles of all time: his farewells with family, his journey to his unit, his training, his preparation for Overlord.

“No heroics, no jingoism, just the reality of what soldiers go through in becoming soldiers and how they handle the fact that eventually they’ll need to use this training in deadly earnest.”

A fourth viewer said: “It’s a sad tale, one of the forgotten men in a conflict long ago, but its universality still stands strong.”

Overlord, which carries a 15 certificate, is available to buy or rent on both Amazon Prime and Apple TV.

Twenty pages into “There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood” by bestselling Pasadena author Rasheed Newson, I had to stop reading. Not because the story and characters were anything less than gripping —I was utterly transfixed. Not because I was unmoved by the setting, the 1950s version of the iconic landmarks where today’s Angelenos, myself included, work, play, eat and drink: Griffith Park, the L.A. Central Library, the Paramount Pictures lot, the Roosevelt Hotel, the Tam O’Shanter in Atwater Village and the Black Cat in Silver Lake, site of America’s first queer riot, also depicted in the book.

No, it was writerly admiration — OK, envy — that stopped me. As I turned the pages, I kept scribbling the same question in the margins. “How did Newson do this?”

How did Newson, author of the 2022 bestseller “My Government Means to Kill Me” and a producer/writer on such popular TV series as “The Chi” and “Bel-Air,” craft a novel populated with a seamless mix of real and invented characters, each with their own true or fictional backstory, personality, career vicissitudes, sartorial style and sexual proclivities, adhering simultaneously to both his novelistic timeline and historically accurate events?

How did Newson seat his fictional protagonist — Aaron Touissant, a Black, closeted gay Hollywood “fixer” employed by Skyline Studios to keep queer actors’ secrets secret — at the same Beverly Hilton ballroom table with Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, James Edwards, Eartha Kitt and Xavier Barlow, Newson’s invented Black gay movie star who is Skyline’s greatest hope and Touissant’s principal client?

I couldn’t read another page without knowing, and those unread pages were calling to me. So I called Rasheed Newson, whom I’d seen around the L.A. lit scene but had never met, and asked how he’d made the magic of his novel happen.

“I wanted to do a deep dive into Black queer history during the Golden Age of cinema,” Newson said. “The first thing that came to me was Xavier’s character. I decided to make him the 10-years-younger, queer rival of Sidney Poitier, to highlight the acceptable versus unacceptable — meaning, straight versus gay — 1950s Black movie star.

“I read a lot of books on Hollywood’s golden era,” Newson said. “But I was trying to get closer to what people were thinking at the moment, rather than what they reflected back on later. Only newspapers give you that. So I spent hours and hours in the downtown L.A. public library, poring over microfiche, reading the newspapers of the time.”

Author Rasheed Newsom.

(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

I asked Newson about the titular “one sin in Hollywood.”

“That sin is disobedience,” he said. “Particularly when your disobedience threatens to upend how the business makes money. In Hollywood you can be an addict, be a philanderer, be outspoken. But don’t disrupt the cash flow.”

Newson’s plot and characters serve the novel’s thesis well. We meet Aaron Touissaint as a brutally bullied “sissy” in a small, small-minded Ohio town. Aaron escapes his torturers, first by rooting himself in the town’s only movie theater open to Black people, and then by lying about his age and enlisting in the Navy at 16. On the Korean battle front, Aaron becomes the aide and the lover of superstar fighter pilot and “model Negro” Horace Dixon. When the war ends and Skyline Studios buys the screen rights to Horace’s life story, Aaron follows Horace to Hollywood.

The movie is canceled. Horace leaves Hollywood and a heartbroken but determined Aaron behind. Hired as a Skyline security guard, Aaron is promoted to fixer, keeping himself and Skyline’s A-listers closeted by any means necessary. To that end, Aaron marries Kimberly, who becomes his poised, self-contained “beard.”

At the top of Aaron’s client roster is Xavier Barlow, Skyline’s new, hot rising star and Aaron’s new, hot crush. “The bond between us was never conventional,” narrator Aaron tells us. “Off and on for nearly a decade, it was my duty to keep [Xavier’s] nose clean. … He challenged me to admit who and what I am. And I fell in love with him.”

As secret same-sex love stories all too often do, Aaron’s love for Xavier, and Xavier’s one-man campaign to mitigate Hollywood’s homophobia, come to a tragic and suspicious end. Soon after Xavier publicly protests the studio’s homophobic rewrite of a movie script he intended to serve as his coming-out announcement, a truck crashes into his car on Wilshire.

“This was no accident,” Aaron realizes. “Xavier was hunted down.” With his best friend, Diahann Carroll, and a sizable contribution from Sidney Poitier, Aaron organizes the funeral, attempting to redeem the reputation he was hired to protect. “The news reports following Xavier’s death impeached his character,” Aaron says. “The implication was that gay men naturally had messy lives and untimely deaths. … Confidential magazine went as far as to print that “the driver of the truck [that killed Xavier] could well have been one of Xavier’s spurned male lovers.”

“Furious at the coverage,” Aaron narrates the story, “Diahann asked me, ‘Why don’t they print the lovely things I have to say about Xavier?’ ”

“I said, “They never will. Xavier fought the studio, and everything you’re reading is part of his punishment.”

The erasure of gay Black Hollywood is really the point of this imaginatively crafted, stunningly tense, historically significant sophomore novel. Newson’s impressive gifts for story, for writing the erotic and the noir, and for rooting himself in his adopted city are on magnificent display here. By smoothly merging the true and the invented stories and characters of 1950s Hollywood, Newson alerts us to the increase in racism and homophobia evident in the entertainment business, and in the U.S., today.

Rasheed Newson will talk with novelist Laura Warrell at Octavia’s Bookshelf at 6 p.m. Monday, and with writer Manuel Betancourt at Skylight Books. at 7 p.m. June 24.

Maran, a Silver Lake-based author, has written “The New Old Me” and other books.

The video is horrifying, though it is the kind of horror now synonymous with the behavior of Israel, its military, its armed settlers, and society that has been conditioned to see the ‘other’ as subhuman.

Yet, this was not the typical viral video that emerges almost daily from occupied Palestine. The victim, this time, was not a Palestinian. She was an elderly French nun.  

On May 1, footage surfaced from Jerusalem showing a 36-year-old Israeli man running behind a French nun—a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research—and shoving her violently to the ground. 

In a chilling display of cruelty, the assailant did not simply hit and run. He walked away a few paces, then returned to the fallen woman to kick her repeatedly and mercilessly as she lay helpless.  

What was most astonishing was the sense of normalcy that followed. The assailant remained on the scene, conversing with another man who appeared entirely unperturbed by what should have been a devastating event in any other context. 

The video briefly imposed itself on the mainstream media scene, garnering perfunctory condemnations. Many explained the event as part of the larger landscape of Israeli violence, highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza as the most obvious example of this unchecked aggression.

But even the context of general violence does not fully explain why a French nun was targeted. She is not dark-skinned, she is European, she is Christian, and she holds no historical or territorial claims that would typically trigger the ‘security’ paranoia of the Zionist state. 

READ: Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem files complaint over Israeli occupiers’ encroachments on church-owned lands in West Bank

Still, the incident was anything but ‘isolated,’ despite the rush by Israeli officials to label it a ‘shameful’ exception. To the contrary, the nun was attacked specifically because she is Christian. 

This raises the question: why? 

To answer this, we must acknowledge how Palestinian Christians have been systematically written out of the history of their own land.  

Palestinian Christians are not merely present in the land; they are among the most historically rooted communities in Palestine. They are anything but ‘foreigners’ or ‘bystanders’ caught in a supposed religious conflict between Jews and Muslims. 

In fact, the Christian Arab presence in Palestine predates the Islamic era by centuries. They are the descendants of historic tribes who shaped the region’s identity long before the advent of modern political labels.  

The marginalization of Palestinian Christians is a relatively new phenomenon, deeply linked to Western colonialism. For centuries, European powers used the pretense of ‘protecting’ Christian communities to justify their own imperial interventions. 

Consequently, this framed the native Christian not as a sovereign Arab with agency, but as a ward of the West—a narrative that effectively stripped them of their indigenous status and alienated them from their own national fabric in the eyes of the world.

Zionism added a lethal layer to this erasure. It has often projected itself as a ‘protector’ of Christians to avoid raising the ire of its Western backers. 

In reality, Palestinian Christians have been subjected to the same policies of ethnic cleansing, racism, and military occupation as their Muslim brothers and sisters. How else can we explain the catastrophic dwindling of the Christian population? 

Before the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian Christians made up roughly 12% of the population. Today, that number has plummeted to a mere 1%. During the Nakba alone, tens of thousands were expelled from their homes in West Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa, their properties looted and their communities dismantled.  

A quick look at the map of Jerusalem and Bethlehem today tells the story of an ongoing erasure. Jerusalem is being systematically emptied of its native population, both Christian and Muslim. Christian properties and houses of worship are restricted, and the ‘Little Town’ of Bethlehem has been swallowed by a ring of illegal settlements and an 8-meter-high Apartheid Wall that has transformed the birthplace of Christ into an open-air prison. 

Yet, despite this, we rarely hear about the struggle for survival of Palestinian Christians. Instead, the world occasionally glimpses ‘incidents’—like the common habit of Jewish extremists spitting on foreign pilgrims and clergy in Jerusalem. This behavior has become so normalized that Israeli ministers, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, have previously defended the act as an “ancient custom” that should not be criminalized.  

The reason the Palestinian Christian story is rarely told is that it fails to factor neatly into the convenient narratives used by Western governments. They are keen on presenting the ‘conflict’ as a Jewish state fighting for its identity against a monolithic ‘Islamic’ threat. Israel is heavily invested in this same ‘Clash of Civilizations’ trope, positioning itself as the vanguard of “Western civilization” against Arab extremism.

READ: Israeli army demolishes Christian monastery, nuns’ school in southern Lebanon

But some Palestinians—Muslim and Christian alike—are, to a lesser degree, also guilty of falling into this trap. The former often frame the Palestinian resistance as an exclusively Muslim struggle; meanwhile, some Christians participate in the very discourse that led to their marginalization in the first place. 

The Gaza genocide, however, has proven this logic not only erroneous but unsustainable. Throughout the slaughter, Israel has destroyed over 800 mosques, but it has not spared the Christian sanctuaries. 

On October 19, 2023, an Israeli airstrike targeted a building within the compound of the Church of Saint Porphyrius—one of the oldest churches in the world. 

In that massacre, 18 Palestinian Christians were killed, their blood mixing with the dust of a sanctuary that had stood for 1,600 years. It was a devastating reminder that the Israeli missile does not distinguish between a mosque and a church, nor between the blood of a Muslim and a Christian. 

The story of the French nun is worth every bit of the attention it received, as is the targeting of pilgrims. But as the headlines move on, we must remember that Palestinian Christians endure a suffering that is collective and rooted in the very soil of Palestine. They are now an endangered community, and Israel is the culprit. Without them, Palestine is not the same. 

The Palestinian homeland is only whole when it is the cradle of religious coexistence, and Palestinian Christians sit at the very heart of that history, dating back two millennia. Their survival is not a ‘minority issue’—it is the survival of Palestine itself.  

OPINION: Subjects of empire: Breaking the cycle of Arab dependency on US elections

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

The long-forgotten adventure park was once ‘always busy’ and loved by thousands and Brits are recalling childhood memories from time spent there — now it’s completely unrecognisable.

Some places are built to spark immeasurable joy and excitement within humans and it’s safe to say theme parks rank fairly high on that list. Many theme parks around the world have given individuals core memories they hold on to dearly, even decades later, with cherished visits to funfairs forming the building blocks of countless childhoods.

One such theme park existed in the UK, specifically in Cornwall, and people who visited the funfair in its heyday recall having some of the best moments of their lives there. It’s a pity then, that this beloved theme park now lies forgotten, completely unrecognisable in its current form, a mere shell of its former glory.

Dobwalls Adventure Park in Cornwall’s Liskeard was a family-run theme park established in the 1970s which brought incalculable joy to thousands.

Founded by John Southern, the funfair commenced operations in 1970 and held the title of being Cornwall’s top visitor attraction for years.

The theme park’s highlights were its two miniature railway locomotive networks, which were complemented by recreational grounds and large play areas, both indoors and outdoors, as well as an art gallery and stunning woodland walks.

John established himself as a pioneer in tourism after he transformed his modest pig farm into one of the South West’s most loved (and earliest established) attractions.

Dobwalls Adventure Park’s hallowed grounds saw locomotives chugging along its two-mile tracks for over 35 years, and the funfair quickly established itself as a school-favourite destination for days out.

With one admission ticket, visitors could enjoy the Krazee Kavern play barn, take unlimited rides on the locomotives in the park, step into the Rocky Ridge water and sand play area, have fun with Mr Blobby, wander through the locomotive shed, and take in the wonders of the Steam Back in Time exhibition.

The steam and diesel trains however, remained the funfair’s star attractions through the decades.

There was a choice of two tracks for visitors to indulge — the Rio Grande and the Union Pacific Railroad.

The Rio Grande line became operational in 1970 itself, and famously featured a four per cent or 1:25 gradient, earning it the title of the world’s steepest ascent on any passenger-carrying miniature railway.

Tunnels and steep climbs only added to its undeniable charm, with the line weaving in and out of a forest in a bid to recreate the Colorado railroads.

The Rio Grande’s success spread like wildfire, leading to the addition of the Pacific track in 1979, which closely resembled the Union Pacific Sherman Hill line in Wyoming, USA, and had a ruling gradient of 1.51 per cent (1:66).

Whisking into canyons and over bridges and trestles, the locomotive lines gave visitors the kind of thrill one could only dream of in those days.

The adventure park’s theme itself was modelled on successful American funfairs, complete with ‘cowboys and Indians’.

Unfortunately, the beloved theme park began to see a decline in numbers and popularity, facing stiff competition from newer, bigger and better funfairs that were coming up across the UK.

Older cherished attractions like the Go Kart track also became defunct and added to the park’s decline.

By the end of 2006, the theme park began closing down its railway lines, and by June 2007, it was announced that Dobwalls Adventure Park’s redevelopment projects had been stalled, and the funfair would not be reopening in its original form.

All of the adventure park’s locomotives were put up for sale, and by early 2008, eight of them had been sold to a man in Dorset and were to be run at Dorset’s Plowman’s Railroad near Ferndown.

The locomotives have since been exported all the way over to Australia, with some users on social media claiming to have seen them in the Land Down Under.

The 22-acre site upon which Dobwalls once sat proudly was put up for sale in 2012 with a guide price of £400,000 in a sealed bid auction.

Now, Charteroak runs a popular holiday cottages accommodation, Southern Halt, from the site where the adventure park once functioned.

Abandoned but never forgotten

Scores of Brits still remember their time at Dobwalls Adventure Park, with several social media users taking to Facebook to reminisce over the theme park’s glory days and recall the countless cherished memories they made at the famous South West funfair.

In a post on the public group 7 1/4″ Railways , one Facebook user recalled: “It was always busy when we went. I remember my 1st visit and all the steam locos were in steam.”

While another visitor emotionally shared: “Loved my visit there as a kid in the summer of 1982. Fascinating place to visit. Never had that many holidays in Cornwall.

“Intended to return around ten years later to try and take some photos of the trains in operation, but found that much of the routes had been built over, so never bothered in the end. Just watched the Big Boy depart from outside the fence!”

Another user wrote, “Was a fantastic place when I visited in the mid 1980’s,” while one fondly recalled, “Only managed one visit but enjoyed every minute.”

One visitor who hoped to take their grandkids to the funfair wrote: “We went there many times when holidaying in Devon and Cornwall. Bought the t-shirts and other memorabilia. I had hoped to take my grandchildren there, but sadly that’s now not to be.”

Some even shared seeing the beloved locomotives in Australia, with one individual writing, “Saw one of the big diesels at Diamond Valley Railroad near Melbourne about 10 years ago,” while another shared, “Quite a few of them are in Victoria Australia.”

One user fondly wrote, “This was a fantastic place spent a lot of time in Cornwall and visited a lot,” while another shared, “Went there every year for probably ten years when we were going to vacation to Cornwall.”