“You’re an emmet and I’m a blow-in,” says Sam Robinson, manager of the Godolphin Arms in Marazion, as she shows me the extraordinary view from my hotel bedroom. Never has a bay window been so aptly named, for mine is in touching distance of the sea wall. The magnificence of St Michael’s Mount and Chapel Rock fills the foreground while Mousehole, Newlyn and Penzance line up behind.
A “blow-in”, she explains, is someone who isn’t Cornish but has blown in on the wind and settled there. Sam used to manage a hotel in the Lake District but relocated to Marazion in October 2025.
“Emmet”, meanwhile, is the Cornish word for an ant, but it’s been adopted locally as a term for tourists, due to the swarming that can take place in corners of the county such as St Ives at certain times of year (the town receives more than half a million day trippers annually, many of them in the summer months).
I’d like to protest, however, against being classed as a bog-standard emmet. I’ve been coming to this area of Cornwall for decades, first as a teenager with a schoolfriend’s family, and many times since as a parent, hiker, art lover and swimmer.
The magnificence of St Michael’s Mount has drawn pilgrims and millions of visitors (Photo: John Gollop/Getty)
