Today was the last day of Fowey literary festival (nothing too exciting to entice us), and there was a secret garden trail as part of the festival. What could be nicer than looking at other people’s gardens? On hitting town we made for the festival office to pick up a trail map. This, with the bookshop (Waterstones, why not the local Indie?), was located in the Royal Fowey Yacht Club. Never having been there before, we were delighted to discover you could have a drink and sit on the terrace, which we duly did.

Suitably refreshed, we set out and visited roughly eight of the dozen or so private gardens that were open. The pics show that a large part of their attraction was the views of Fowey and its estuary which opened them out to a larger canvas…

We also discovered the public ‘grammar school’ gardens which we had noted before but never entered..they were a true delight…we had an enjoyable 10 minutes just sitting there and admiring them.

Garden visiting can be quite tiring however (!), and we made at last for the haven of the Yacht Club Terrace where we had lunch…quite a privilege to sit there on a hot day we thought. Whilst having lunch we were treated to a series of yacht races. It seemed to me that chaos reigned, but we discovered that that was just the warming-up. When the races actually got under way F. was at an advantage as she could tune in to the club member who was sitting behind her and explaining the finer points to a visiting Australian couple. Quite exciting really!