Grand Staircase

I d never noticed the pleasing symmetry of these steps before; what a loss to the town if they re allowed to collapse.

The skill and selection is something to wonder at as well, each stone is different from its neighbour in length, they all have to fit and be coursed, along with the angled lozenges of the steps. Quite a piece of work, and the fact of the matter is that much of the shore is now down to the clay base, areas up to 5 inches in height are now visible at the base of the walls; this after a qualified and incorrect report prepared in 2002. Complete waste of taxpayers money. The tide was out long enough for me to get a complete run of pictures, but it was running fast inwards, as the sand is now quite level. Another time, I will try and get more detailed pictures.

I have just been informed that Cornwall Council have a monitoring policy in hand, for the Promenade stonework. They are now making penetration tests to ascertain the depth of voids behind the Promenade wall, as I explained it was no good pointing the wall (as it never was when built) as all that does is to contain water penetration and allow swirling away of the undersoil. They have now been informed (by myself) that the Promenade is built on a sand and clay neck (which they did not know before), and that it was built at two different stages, and that the railing extant is not the original. They now are monitoring the movement of shingle and the exposure of fresh sand beds, and now will be monitoring exposure of clay bed. It is unclear as to how much funding will be made available for repair. It is also a policy to ignore the use of the space formed as the promenade suface as that is a bonus on top of the fact of the sea wall. However they are not advising additional surcharging of the suface, thereby weakening the whole structure ( a comment upon recent proposals for a bandstand). They had tried plastic replacement railing (near the Pool), only to discover that the old ones were so firmly fixed that it was decided to leave the posts alone and to only attend to the railing as required.

Sounds as though you may have saved our shoreline, until the global warming kicks in big time that is.