A baleful tale of the snails in Hayle

If you really squint at a map and spin up your full kindergarten imagination, Great Britain looks like a little cartoon dinosaur roaring at Europe, its tail pointing back across the Atlantic ocean. Zoom in on the tip of that squat tail: this is Cornwall, home of clotted cream and dramatic coastal walks. Don’t judge me, I didn’t use AI Right at the end you’ll find a shaggy little town called Hayle. Hayle’s defining feature is an exceptionally enormous beach, but that’s also pretty much its only feature. That was exactly what we were after. For a few days this summer, we escaped the heat and crowd and stench of London for a settlement of little one-story hobbit houses pressed into the dunes. The path from our particular hobbit house to the beach wound along barely existent paths through dry, sharp grasses and brambles that nipped at our ankles and calves. I started to notice that some of these grasses bloomed with an intriguing flower I had never seen, whose pale white whorls looked…