WITH blade glinting in October’s watery sunshine, restaurateur Terry Barnes bore down upon his prey. With a single, deft twist of the knife, the deed was done. Here was another oyster successfully opened, or as they say in Cornwall, “shucked”.

“I always suggest a drop of champagne into the open shell,” said Terry, as visitors clustered round his stall on Falmouth waterfront. “The moment it fizzes, you take it into your mouth and it slips down a treat.”

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For more than 2,000 years, as the summer gives way to the shorter, misty days of autumn, Cornishmen have harvested the native oysters that flourish in the clear, unpolluted waters of Falmouth’s great natural harbour Carrick Roads.

The Falmouth Oyster Festival, now in its 15th year, celebrates a food, a culture and a heritage.

With a season that runs from now through to March, the species – Ostrea edulis – is the only marine life in Europe that continues to be hunted exclusively under sail and oar, as it was back in the Roman times. I fell upon Terry’s freshly shucked offering.

The Falmouth oyster turned out to be a pale beige-coloured, slightly chewy morsel that for me had a glorious taste that evoked a sense of rainwater tumbling off granite slopes to mingle with the incoming salt tides.

Lunchtime was still an hour or so away but curries and paellas already simmered in cauldrons. Peeled prawns twinkled on layers of crushed ice.

Within the adjoining complex of marquees and tents that covered the waterside piazza a folk band broke into a chorus of jigs and reels.

From somewhere over the heads of the crowd came the distant whiff of salt shaken on to hot chips. Then there were the oysters themselves, shucked and plated, still in their splayed, fan-shaped shells that caught and trapped the whiteness of the light.

Terry had 2,500 oysters to feed to the hordes. Across the whole festival site organisers were expecting up to 10 times that number to be slipped down a treat over the four days.

At the hub of the operation gangs of knife-wielding men went about their work in official festival T-shirts that advised us all to “Eat oysters – love longer”.

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My base for the two nights was the stylishly appointed Falmouth Hotel, standing like a cream-coloured chateau above the town and sea. Built in 1863, it was the town’s first hotel.

Early the next morning I pulled back the curtain of my room to see two juvenile swans gliding across a shimmering bay towards the 16th-century fortress of Pendennis Castle, squat and immovable on its black outcrop.

Falmouth runs like a ribbon along the waterfront, making it the perfect terrain for out-of-season mooching. As the Duchy’s largest port it has the look and feel of an intensely friendly, workaday Cornish community.

But the growth of craft shops, galleries and bistros, including the startling appearance of a £9 crab sandwich as a menu item, suggested a place that is now very much “up in the world”. I stuck with the pasty shop that snuggles in the pathway leading down to Custom House Quay.

Part of the success of Falmouth has been the arrival of the £30million National Maritime Museum Cornwall in 2002. Among its cathedral-like galleries I found an exhibition that tells the story of lighthouses and the astonishing people that manned them for 300 years until automation finally took over in 1998.

Visitors have until February 19 next year to enjoy the sweeping displays, recorded recollections and vividly reconstructed lighthouse keeper’s quarters, with its coal-fired stove and furniture curved to fit.

Outside at the oyster festival crowds were gathering around the displayed 15ft oyster punt Irene, while a screen showing black and white footage from the Fifties of fishermen bringing in the harvest flickered overhead.

“I’m 57 now,” said oysterman Les Angel. “When I was a boy there were 34 sailboats and 30 or 40 rowboats working the season. Now our fleet is just 15 sailboats and seven rowboats. But at least there will be oysters for people to fish in the future.”

On the demonstration stage Annie Sibert, who runs a fish cookery school at nearby Mawnan Smith, was making the business of fish filleting look easy but oysters are her favourite subject. “I sometimes do them with a Japanese sauce and ginger,” Annie told me. “But I like them with nothing on at all. That’s the oysters, I mean.”

On the way out I bought a short- bladed shucking knife from Vicky, who runs a kitchen shop in town. With or without champagne, or ginger, Falmouth native oysters are for life, not just for mid-October.

THE KNOWLEDGE
Falmouth Hotel (01326 312671/ www.falmouthhotel.com) offers a two-night Oyster Festival Break from £119 per night (two sharing), half board, including a Seafood Celebration Dinner. Offer valid for stays October 13 and 14, 2011. Falmouth Oyster Festival (07811 493 956/www.falmouthoysterfestival.co.uk) October 13-16, 2011, admission free. Cornwall Tourist Board: 0905 325 4534/www.visitcornwall.com