Portreath is a coastal place on the route where seasonal visitors and everyday path-side details sit alongside a less visible history: the nearby former RAF Portreath airfield was used to produce the nerve agent Sarin B. In the narrative, the town’s valley is a passing landscape of green cabbages and arriving holidaymakers, while the surrounding military history gives the area a far darker layer.

The valley and the coast path

The account places Portreath in a valley reached during the walk. The morning after the preceding night, the cabbages were simply green and holidaymakers were already arriving. The scene is brief and unceremonious: the landscape’s ordinary colours and the start of the day return without fanfare, while the walkers continue through a route shaped by both open coast and nearby roads.

Along this stretch, the path runs beside the road and skirts the rims of deep, concealed coves, passing in and out of car parks. Its proximity to the road makes it popular with dog walkers. The account dwells on the practical obstacles they meet at stiles: some have sliding side openings suited to small dogs, while larger dogs may have to be lifted over; stone-slab stiles require walkers to climb one side, cross the wall, and descend the other. These details place Portreath within a lived-in, accessible coastal landscape rather than an uninhabited wilderness.

RAF Portreath and the nerve-agent plant

The military history associated with Portreath begins with an airfield built during the Second World War as RAF Portreath. By 1950 the airfield was no longer needed and had been returned to the government. The government then used equipment brought back from Nazi Germany to turn it into a chemical-weapons production plant, an offshoot of Porton Down. Sarin B was manufactured there for two or three years, alongside other chemical weapons.

The account describes serious consequences for the workforce. An investigation reported forty-one deaths and a high incidence of serious illness among workers involved in Sarin B production. A 1970 study found that those workers were 33 per cent more likely than average to suffer serious illness and 50 per cent more likely to suffer respiratory disease, identified as a classic consequence of nerve-gas exposure. The government initially denied errors, suppressed the report, and altered its conclusions, describing the record instead as a higher-than-expected level of absenteeism.

In 1971 the government admitted negligence and paid affected workers sums described as generous, in the region of £120 each. The history continued to surface decades later: in 2000 the government finally admitted that machinery used to produce Sarin B had been dumped in mine shafts on Nancekuke Common, and cleanup began in 2003. These details connect the coastal area to a history of official concealment as well as industrial and military use.

A layered coastal setting

Portreath’s place in the narrative is created by contrast. The walkers pass a green valley where holidaymakers are beginning their day, then follow a path threaded between coves, car parks, and the road; nearby, the former airfield’s history holds accounts of hazardous production, worker illness, and delayed disclosure. The walking narrative places these layers side by side without turning the town into a mere historical backdrop: Portreath is at once a lived coastal community and a landscape whose quieter surface does not reveal all that has happened there.