My wife loved the "Minack Chronicles" and wanted to see the house where they were written. It was a cold and miserable day, but we loved the hike and she got to see the house, alas only from a distance.

During the 1940s Derek and Jean Tangye lived in London. Derek was a Fleet Street journalist and Jean was Public Relations Officer for the Savoy Hotel. In 1950 they turned their backs on a lifestyle which, although sophisticated, they were finding increasingly shallow, and became the tenants of Dorminack, a run-down cottage and flower farm, in the far west of Cornwall.
Here, from 1961, Derek wrote the autobiographical books, which became known as the Minack Chronicles. In these 20 volumes he shared with his readers stories of nature, donkeys, cats, the vagaries of the weather as they eked out a precarious living from the farm, and his philosophy of life.
In 1979 Derek and Jeannie bought about 20 acres of wild cliff land adjacent to their tenanted farm. They called it "Oliver Land" (after a cat in one of his books) and this became "The Minack Chronicles Nature Reserve - A Place For Solitude".
Jeannie passed away in 1986 and Derek in 1996. Derek died at Minack. Both his and Jeannie’s ashes were scattered in the Honeysuckle Meadow in the Nature Reserve.