I'm looking down from the cliffs to the sea below and you can see the waves crashing onto the rocks.

We're in Port Isaac, a picturesque and historic fishing village on the northern coast of Cornwall.

There are narrow winding streets of whitewashed cottages leading down to the harbour.

And looking around, I'm not surprised that filmmakers have often chosen Port Isaac as a setting.

Most recently, the TV series Doc Martin's been shot here.

But for this edition of Folk on Foot, we're here to meet two members of a singing group

who had an unlikely route to stardom.

Music Twenty years ago, a group of friends got together in Port Isaac to sing traditional local songs

to raise money for charity. They called themselves the fishermen's friends. Not all of them

were fishermen, but they all had local roots and were connected to the sea. And that might

have been the end of the story had it not been for a music business executive who heard them sing

while he was on holiday

in the area. He signed them to a record deal and the resulting album sold 150,000 copies

and made the top ten. Since then, they've sung for the Queen at her diamond jubilee,

appeared on the main stage at Glastonbury and are now the subject of a feature film.

Today I'm going to meet two of the founders of the fishermen's friends.

John Cleave is a former lifeboatman who runs a gift shop in Port Isaac now

and Billy Hawkins is a potter who's described as a master of all things stringed.

We're going for a cliff top walk and no doubt there'll be tales of shipwrecks,

de blooms and lovers lost at sea.

So we've come down a very steep road into a valley and there's only one house in the valley

and I think this is John Cleave's house so let's go in and see if we can find him

...