porthemmet beach

August 2007 saw the creation of one of the most wonderful hoaxes in the county of Cornwall, and probably in the whole of the UK, in the last hundred years, if not ever. Have you ever heard of Porthemmet Beach? If so, you may have been misled, because it doesn’t exist.

Jonty Haywood, a Cambridge University graduate, started the hoax when he created the porthemmet.com website. The site details the various features of the fictional Porthemmet beach, labeled “the best beach in Cornwall” on the website, as well as offering visitors several Cornish phrases that are either mispronounced or made up entirely. They are also instructed to ignore the locals who claim not to know where the beach is as it is just a game they play to confuse tourists.

The website was then supported by billboards that were put up on the A30. Combined with the website’s instructions to “Head north on the A30 until you see the signs”, anyone attempting to reach the beach was herded back out of Cornwall. The purpose of this was to amuse the locals, who often see tourists as annoying and uneducated about the local area, as well as to genuinely mislead tourists for a joke.

The campaign generated both praise and criticism. Praise for being inventive, funny and clever, and criticism from people who had no sense of humor and saw it as a huge insult against tourists who contribute so much to the Cornish economy. The Cornwall tourist board, VisitCornwall, was one of the biggest critics, arguing that it was really harmful when people believed the hoax and then got confused by misleading directions or signs. The executive president of Turismo Sur Oeste, for his part, said that any publicity is good publicity.

The website also gives a false history of Porthemmet, claiming that his name is derived from Saint Emmet, a brother of the Cornish Saint, Saint Piran. In fact, ’emmet’ is a Cornish word for ant and is used as a general term for outsiders in Cornwall.

In July 2008 the signs reappeared, and Jonty Haywood suggested that Osama bin Laden may have put them up when interviewed by news sources about it. He then revealed that he was offering a prize to the first person to find all seven signs.