‘Going down west’ has become its own thing. The end of the land is its own place, its own definite part of Cornwall, itself a land apart. Its magnetism is its uniqueness, capricious and ubiquitous ocean, moor, glens, wells, ancient sites, stones and occult auras all converge in Penwith. To journey around this little nub […]
The Moor is an occult place in all senses of the word. Mostly bypassed, hidden in plain sight, it dominates the landscape yet it is diminutive in the scale of most uplands. It is a world given to juxtaposition. Alien and natural, wild yet tamed, secretive yet exposed, wandering up here is to be amongst […]
I have overlooked Pentewan, the small, quiet village on the south coast that grew up in. Taken it for granted, as we seem to do, purely because it has always been there for me. So I have been reading into it and in doing so uncovered quite a bit more than I anticipated. Pentewan has […]
If you’re going to write about home then perhaps the best time to do this is after a prolonged absence. This will likely be the last year I spend any real time here. The squat little whitewashed 1920’s bungalow perched on the hill that I grew up in is being sold and my parents are […]
I’m home. A year and half has passed. Going from winter to summer in 24 hours landed me in the humid air of Heathrow. Body clock shot, seasonally confused. I had forgotten the feel of England in summer and I have spent the subsequent week revelling in it. Lush and verdant. Despite the depressive homogeneity […]
When we started to drive with teenage abandon around the lanes that connect Polgooth, Sticker and St. Ewe, a story started to trickle down into our hot-boxed Peugeot 106. In between St. Ewe, Polgooth and Pengrugla there is a little triangle of woods, a copse really, that the road dog-legs around, which we called Nunnery […]
A few days ago I was reading of Norilsk, an unimaginably oppressive, filthy, cold, dank industrial city high in the Arctic Circle. Once known for its Soviet Gulag labour camps (in which tens of thousands of prisoners died), it is now a hub of mineral mining. Nickel primarily but also palladium, cobalt, arsenic and coal. […]
Just off the south side of the arterial A30 that cuts the Moor in two one can find Temple. A collection of farm houses and out of the way cottages, there is not much other than the small community that dwell here. Temple Church is the prime attraction. You see, if you blunder across anywhere […]
It used to confuse me that this little village nestled in the lee of Rame Head and facing the beginnings of Devon from across Plymouth Sound is nominally divided into two. Cawsand and Kingsand. The actual reason is that the border of Devon and Cornwall once ran though the village until they changed it to […]
That Cornwall was once ruled by a separate and unique lineage of Kings ignites a schoolboy-like excitement. It makes me think of Tolkien. It also highlights that this little chunk of land oozes with its own idiosyncratic history. Just the names of the Kings brings to mind a wild, fierce and proud people roaming a […]
