Tate St Ives and the Hepworth

Tuesday 24 July

Yet another 'scorcher' of a day greeted us this morning, how lucky we feel for such fantastic weather. We are defiantly starting to look like we have been in the sun and Kev has a few sore spots to contend with and is looking a bit on the pink side, more 'slip slap slop' for him.

One of the reasons we came to St Ives in the first place was to visit Tate St Ives and to the Barbara Hepworth museum. Today was the day we realised that ambition. We walked the mile and a half to the railway station from our camp site and caught the 09.55hrs train to St Ives. Already the sun was amazingly hot, not a cloud to be seen in the sky. The train was much busier than last Friday with holiday makers making their way to the sun, sand and surf.

On arrival we made the now made our way along the familiar route from the Station to the opposite bay and the modern building that is Tate St Ives. On show was the huge paintings of ....... Katz. Not an artist we are too familiar with but nevertheless appreciated the scale of the works. As much as we enjoyed the work we were especially interested to see the room containing paintings by Nicholson and Wallis. The only thing we didn't like about the Gallery is the echo in the galleries. We had a party of school children being shown around and they sort of dominated the building. Shame really. We enjoyed coffee and cake at the roof cafe which was well worth the effort and the cost.

Having spent the morning at the gallery we then made our way down to the beach for lunch. We sat on a bench and watched the world do by whilst eating out cheese and cucumber Sandwiches.

After lunch we were walking back to find the Hepworth museum and came across this in the window of a potter's shop. Warwick could this be one of the missing statues?

The Barbara Hepworth museum was everything we had hoped for and loved it so much we had to go round twice. The gardens are simply lovely and very cleverly landscaped considering it's size. We enjoyed a short talk from a member of staff from the Tate and he showed sculptures whilst going through her life history up to her untimely death from a fire in her bedroom.

Here are a few pic's

To recover from all the standing we decided to sit a while in a park (Trewyn) however, to get to it we had to climb a 1 in 4 hill.....we certainly were ready for a break but the climb was defiantly worth it.