The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey

By Tim Hannigan

Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year Award 2024

A fascinating, lyrical account of an east-west walk across Britain's westernmost and most mysterious region.

A distant and exotic Celtic land, domain of tin-miners, pirates, smugglers and evocatively named saints, somehow separate from the rest of our island...

Few regions of Britain are as holidayed in, as well-loved or as mythologized as Cornwall. From the woodlands of the Tamar Valley to the remote peninsula of Penwith – via the wilderness of Bodmin Moor and coastal villages where tourism and fishing find an uneasy coexistence – Tim Hannigan undertakes a zigzagging journey on foot across Britain's westernmost region to discover how the real Cornwall, its landscapes, histories, communities and sense of identity, intersect with the many projections and tropes that writers, artists and others have placed upon it.

Combining landscape and nature writing with deep cultural inquiry, The Granite Kingdom is a probing but highly accessible tour of one of Britain's most popular regions, juxtaposing history, myth, folklore and literary representation with the geographical and social reality of contemporary Cornwall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781801108829

Tim Hannigan

Tim Hannigan was born and brought up in the far west of Cornwall. After leaving school he worked as a chef for several years in busy Cornish restaurant kitchens. He escaped the catering industry via a degree in journalism and a move to Indonesia, where he taught English and worked as a journalist and guidebook writer. He is the author of several narrative history books, including A Brief History of Indonesia and the award-winning Raffles and the British Invasion of Java, as well as the critically acclaimed The Travel Writing Tribe. He's also an academic, with a research specialism in contemporary travel literature. He divides his time between Cornwall and the west of Ireland. He tweets @Tim_Hannigan.

Book preview

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THE

GRANITE

KINGDOM

THE

GRANITE

KINGDOM

A Cornish Journey

Tim Hannigan

cover.jpg

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the UK in 2023 by Head of Zeus Ltd,

part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Tim Hannigan, 2023

The moral right of Tim Hannigan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Lines from ‘Christ in the Claypit’ by Jack Clemo, from The Clay Verge (Chatto & Windus), reproduced by permission of the University of Exeter Special Collections.

Lines from ‘On the Border’, ‘Cornwall’ and ‘The Seasons in North Cornwall’ by Charles Causley, from Collected Poems 1951–2000 (Picador), reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates.

Lines from ‘To the Mermaid at Zennor’ by John Heath-Stubbs, from Collected Poems 1943–1987 (Carcanet Press), reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates.

Lines from Vanishing Cornwall by Daphne du Maurier reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London, on behalf of The Chichester Partnership. Copyright 1967 © The Chichester Partnership.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781801108843

ISBN (E): 9781801108829

Head of Zeus Ltd

First Floor East

5–8 Hardwick Street

London

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WWW

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HEADOFZEUS

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For Des and Pauline, and for Róise

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Prologue

Introduction

1. Bordering

2. Merlin’s Magic Land

3. A Hideous and a Wicked Country

4. Piskey-Led

5. False Lights

6. Coasting

7. Through the Portal

8. See Your Own Country First

9. The Passion

10. Western Approaches

11. Rebel Country

12. Looking for the Light

13. The Granite Kingdom

Epilogue

Plate Section

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

An Invitation from the Publisher

MAPS

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Prologue

THE SKY TIP

You are in a place that does not exist.

There are marsh orchids at your feet, sheep’s sorrel and purple moor grass. A moment ago a big roe deer buck erupted from its hidden couch and dolphined away over the scrub. Behind you, a stiff fence line. Ahead, a dome of ground with its own near horizon, like the surface of a small planet. And beyond, a view that runs from Roughtor to Goonhilly, from the dull pewter of St Austell Bay to the cold glitter of the Celtic Sea. But the map confirms it: this place does not exist.

When the cartographers of the Ordnance Survey started work on the first six-inch map of Cornwall in 1879, they took a Bronze Age round cairn called Hensbarrow as their origin point. It was the perfect place to begin: three and a half miles north-east of St Austell and a thousand feet above sea level, roughly halfway down the tapering length of the peninsula and with an unbroken outlook in all directions. On a clear day you could see fifty miles, all the way to Prawle Point in Devon. From Hensbarrow, the cartographers were able to cast their triangular mesh of calculations out across the land, fixing Cornwall to the map. The people who built the burial cairn 4,000 years earlier had worked with a very different purpose; but they shared an essential bond of experience with the nineteenth-century mapmakers. They’d have walked to the top of the same rise, looked out across the same contours, and nodded with the same absolute certainty: yes, this is it; this is the place.

The round cairn is still there (you’ve left your backpack under a gorse bush at its base). The Ordnance Survey trig point is still there too, built atop the cairn, neatly whitewashed. But that 4,000-year-old bond of experience has been broken. You cannot see what the Bronze Age cairn-builders or the Victorian cartographers saw. And now you are a quarter of a mile to the east and 150 feet higher up, in a place that does not exist.

In 1879, there were already china clay workings on the downs around Hensbarrow. The surveyors marked them on their map: North Bonny, South Caudledown, Higher and Lower Ninestones, Goonbarrow. But in the fourteen decades since, an entire massif of kaolinised granite has been disembowelled. Huge clay pits have been sunk into what was once unbroken moorland. And if you dig holes, you have to put the excavated matter somewhere. Here, in the China Clay Country of mid-Cornwall, they put it in the sky.

Inclined tramways carried the pallid rubble upwards and tipped it out to produce neat cones. As the pits grew deeper, the tramways were raised higher and the cones grew ever taller – for unlike sand or sugar, clay waste has a sticky quality that allows for an angle of repose somewhere close to forty-five degrees. By the mid-twentieth century there were dozens of these huge white ‘sky tips’, ribbed and scored by rainwater and visible from miles around. People called them ‘the Cornish Alps’. But new tipping practices were brought in after the 1966 Aberfan disaster in South Wales. The conical tips were remodelled, lowered, given layered profiles. And when a pit was worked out, the disused tip would be sprayed with seeds and left to grow over. The land lost its pale intensity, but retained something of its ruined strangeness.

The mapmakers couldn’t keep up. For the first few updates that followed the original 1879 survey, they sketched in a metastasising mayhem of pits and peaks to the east of the Hensbarrow trig point. But each new map was out of date before it was ever published, and eventually they gave up. The bottom-right corner of the modern OS Explorer Sheet 106 shows a series of strange voids lacking even contours, so that a hole half a mile across and 500 feet deep or a hulk of landscaped waste a thousand feet high might go completely unrecorded on the map.

You are standing in the middle of one of these blank spaces, and for the first time since you started – nine days earlier, at a poet’s doorstep with a view into Devon – you feel as though Cornwall has come into focus.

The map still marks the Hensbarrow trig point itself at 312 metres, as if it were the crown of the country. But it is hemmed in south and west now by the Great Longstone and Littlejohn’s clay works, and its view to the east is completely blocked by the unmapped bulk of the sky tip. But if the Bronze Age cairn-builders and Victorian mapmakers have lost their line of sight, up here the prospect is broader still.

It is late in the day, with bad weather in the offing. The sky is low, purplish. The southern horizon is very sharp, as if it has been marked in with ink. There is an ominous coolness in the midsummer air, and you know that tomorrow’s walk will be a sodden slog north towards Padstow. To the south lies the country you crossed in sunshine earlier in the day: the white tracks and flooded pits stretching down towards St Austell and the heavy farmland beyond, running out to Mevagissey and the Dodman. Inland to the east, the countryside rolls like a heavy groundswell to the foot of Bodmin Moor – the full sweep of it from Roughtor to Caradon Hill. But it’s what you can see in the west that catches you. You’d expected the shimmer of the Atlantic up near Newquay, the nub of St Agnes Beacon and the prow of Carn Brea, even the tiny dots of the turbines and satellite dishes on the Lizard. But what you hadn’t expected, this early in the journey, were those westernmost hills. They lie beyond everything, a good forty miles away across country and another couple of weeks’ walking by your own circuitous route. But they are unmistakable in their hunched and backlit profile. You can see your destination, the terminus of every journey. You can see Penwith.

And for a moment there, at the top of the sky tip, in a place that does not exist, you feel as though you can see Cornwall itself, see it as a bordered, discrete entity, a piece of charted territory containing certainties, containing a concrete idea of itself. But it is a passing illusion. A thin breeze stirs the moor grass, bends the orchids. You need to get moving, collect your backpack from the gorse bush, find a sheltered place to camp before the weather comes in. You turn away westward, back towards the fence line, and descend into pale and ambiguous terrain.

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Author’s photograph.

Introduction

EXPERIENCE THE DIFFERENCE

We had a single video cassette in the house when I was a child. It sat at the bottom of the bookshelf, an interloper amid the printed material. What we didn’t have was a video player – and that gave the cassette the quality of a locked treasure. But my mother was studying for her Open University degree at the time, and sometimes packages arrived in the post containing recorded lectures she needed to watch. When that happened, she’d borrow a player from a neighbour. There’d be an initial bout of confusion over the cables, and then, when Mum was done with her bearded biologists, I’d grab the video from the bookshelf, slot it into the machine and stretch out on the living-room floor to watch.

It was not a Disney movie or a home recording of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was a promotional film put out in a bout of extravagant spending by the tourism department of Penwith District Council. Its title was The West Cornwall Experience.

I’d watch wide-eyed as the scenes unfolded – each already memorised from previous viewings. There were lingering shots of prehistoric standing stones rising over tawny moorland. There was footage of a cove boat winched up the cobbles at Penberth and the fisherman gutting dogfish by the stream. There was an action sequence of surfers at Gwenver and lavish aerial footage of Cape Cornwall, the Minack Theatre and St Michael’s Mount. The video had a soundtrack of slightly woozy 1980s synth music and a narrator who spoke of ‘bright sunlight and mysterious shadow’, ‘echoes of pirates and smugglers’ and the all-pervading magic of a place that was like ‘a different country’. All this made me wriggle on the carpet in front of the TV. It was thrilling, but not entirely comfortable – something like being tickled. I couldn’t get enough of it. I’d watch with fierce attention, right through to the adverts for hotels in St Ives and Penzance that followed the credits. Then I’d hit the rewind button, listen impatiently to the tape rattling back, and when it reached its terminal clunk I’d press play and watch it all again.

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The West Cornwall Experience video.

Courtesy of the Newlyn Archive.

What makes this all so very weird, looking back, is that everything The West Cornwall Experience video showed lay just outside the door. It was, in fact, the only landscape I knew. Those standing stones were up on the moors a bare mile to the south-east; Cape Cornwall was four miles west along the coast; that fisherman gutting dogfish at Penberth was a friend of my dad. And the great shifting ocean that glittered around St Michael’s Mount and unloaded its groundswell on to the beach at Gwenver – I could see it from my bedroom window.

*  *  *

Cornwall is different. For a start, there’s simple geography: a long and tapering peninsula, almost entirely bounded by water, more discrete than any county elsewhere in mainland Britain, and straining westwards as if to break the final slender bond. Penzance, where I was born, is much closer to Cork or Brest than it is to London. Then there’s the landscape itself, markedly different in places from any English archetype, displaying a clear topographic kinship with coastal Brittany or the west of Ireland: the same ragged foreshore; the same bedrock bursting through the thin skin of the land.

But historically there was more to the difference than mere geography. Cornwall, like Wales, lay largely beyond the Roman network of roads and settlements, and beyond the reach of the subsequent Anglo-Saxon settlement. On the eve of the Norman Conquest it was still, for the most part, a place ethnically and linguistically distinct from the emergent ‘England’.

That distinction is revealed in the name itself – the name given to the place by the Anglo-Saxons: Corn-wall. The first syllable comes from an older, possibly local name for the region (the modern Cornish word for Cornwall is Kernow). But the second syllable shares an etymology with ‘Wales’: the Old English word Wēalas. This is often translated as ‘strangers’ or ‘foreigners’, but in its original sense it carried a particular implication: it meant, specifically, not English.

Something of Cornwall’s distinction – geographical and ethnolinguistic, if not political – endured well beyond 1066. But it was eaten away over the centuries. The formula ‘Anglia et Cornubia’, once used much as ‘England and Wales’ is today, gradually disappeared from Acts of Parliament. And spoken English crept west, the old Cornish language pushed back to the very edges of the western cliffs, then extinguished around the turn of the nineteenth century.

But some idea of separateness lingered. The travel literature of the Victorian era almost always spoke of Cornwall as a place apart, inhabited by mysterious Celts in tune with the ways of the piskeys and the spriggans and still telling stories of giants and mermaids over their pasties. The novelist Wilkie Collins, rambling through the peninsula on foot in the summer of 1850, claimed that in Cornwall ‘a man speaks of himself as Cornish in much the same spirit as a Welshman speaks of himself as Welsh’. Whether or not this was really true in the nineteenth century, it certainly is today, and yet Cornwall has none of Wales’s clear-cut political identity. Administratively, it is just another English county. But culturally and imaginatively, it is decidedly ambiguous, in a predicament even, as ‘a kind of halfway house between English county and Celtic nation’, as the historian Bernard Deacon puts it.¹ Within Cornwall there are those who ferociously insist that the place is utterly distinct from England, and those happy enough to hang a St George’s flag in their window whenever there’s an international rugby tournament. And from without come those convinced that they are travelling to a mystic Celtic otherworld, and those who scoff at Cornish claims of ancient otherness.

This ‘halfway house’ is where I am from.

*  *  *

My homeplace is a hamlet of a dozen grey barns and cottages in the stony parish of Morvah on the north coast of Penwith, Cornwall’s westernmost district, the final crooked forefinger that terminates at Land’s End. The houses huddle together where the northern slope of the moors levels out at the hundred-metre contour line, with a half-mile plateau of stone-stitched pasture stretching north-west to the ocean beyond. Penzance is four miles south across the moors. Ireland is 150 miles to the north. When the weather is clear, BBC Radio 4 vanishes from the airwaves in a swirl of Gaelic and fiddle music from across the Celtic Sea.

For all of my childhood and most of my teens, Penwith was the world. For sure, there were occasional journeys out of the district, out of Cornwall even. Once a year my grandmother would take us to Plymouth – a two-hour train ride from Penzance – to visit the aquarium, eat fish and chips, walk on the Hoe. There was a week in a borrowed campervan in Wales one wet summer, a few camping trips to Devon and Dorset and a long-haul fortnight in Scotland. But our annual family holiday was usually at a campsite in the only place between us and America, the Isles of Scilly. I visited London for the first time on a school trip when I was fifteen.

But there was no sense of limitation or enclosure in all of this. Penwith is an almost-island; head out from home in most directions and within seven miles you’ll reach the sea. But that gave us almost a hundred square miles to play with, and a certain sense of uncontested proprietorship in common with true islanders. By the time I was nine, I’d think nothing of setting out alone across the moors to visit a friend three miles away near St Just. A few years later I’d be cycling ten miles each way to a job in the hotel kitchen at Land’s End, or walking two hours across country to a rumoured party on the opposite coast. This was all perfectly normal.

But at the same time, I knew that my homeplace was different. From June to September, lumbering tour buses clogged the narrow coast road that passes through Morvah, and when I wandered the moors during the school holidays I’d run into guidebook-clutching hikers taking snapshots of the standing stones. Some years, my parents and my brother and I would squeeze into one damp downstairs room while we rented out our own bedrooms to guests. Most of these visitors were from other parts of the UK; but there were also people from Germany and Holland – and even a handful from America and Japan. They’d come all that way just to look at our place. As a child I found something gratifying about this, and I’m sure it heightened my own fierce appreciation of the landscape and its history. But there was also something very strange – beyond articulation at the age of nine, naturally enough – in the idea that the moors and cliffs that were my own first point of reference for what the world looked like were attractively unfamiliar to others – unfamiliar enough to impel an eight-hour car journey or a thirteen-hour flight.

This, I think, explains my obsessive childhood fascination with The West Cornwall Experience video. And it wasn’t just the video. If Judith Chalmers or Jill Dando ever turned up in Cornwall on Wish You Were Here…? or the Holiday programme, I’d be gripped by the same giddy excitement. And I spent hours poring over Penwith Council’s annual tourism brochures – those from the 1950s and 60s, which my grandmother had saved from her time running a guesthouse in Penzance, and the contemporary ones, posted out to prospective holidaymakers. The old brochures described ‘a Celtic land with place-names in what appear to be a foreign language’ (foreign to whom?) and which would provide the visitor with ‘the sense of having travelled abroad’ (abroad from where?). For the modern promotional material, someone had come up with a snazzy slogan: ‘West Cornwall: Experience the Difference’.

All this material really did give me the opportunity to experience the difference, a glimpse of home as outsiders saw it: framed, mediated, exoticised, different. It was an almost uncanny sensation, irresistible, gratifying, but not entirely pleasant.

*  *  *

Travellers from beyond the River Tamar have been writing about Cornwall, representing it, for centuries. From Daniel Defoe, on tour in the early eighteenth century, finding evidence that the natives were formerly ‘a kind of barbarians’, through to Victorian novelists conjuring up pirates and smugglers in their own fantasy of the Cornish ‘olden days’; from Daphne du Maurier’s gothic fiction to John Betjeman’s nostalgic tourist poems.

For sure, there are tensions and divergences within all that: an undisguised horror at Cornwall’s ‘dreary and barren wastes’ around 1800 giving way to paeans to the charms of the ‘Delectable Duchy’ a century later. But taken together, it all amounts to what one recent travel book calls ‘a collective folk image’ of Cornwall. ‘Many of us’, that book continues, ‘five million each year, visit and come away with our own vivid impressions of surf, sand and sky.’² But what about the half a million excluded by that seemingly inclusive ‘us’ – those who don’t ‘visit and come away’, but who are there all along?

I grew up during the second wave of Cornwall’s twentieth-century cultural revival. The first phase had come in the 1920s, a little over a century after the final demise of Cornish as an everyday spoken language. Its use was revived by a handful of middle-class enthusiasts, and various old festivals and ceremonies were re-established – or indeed invented. But in the 1980s and 90s the revival broadened, gathered a certain popular momentum. More old festivals were revived and embraced by a far wider demographic. Phrases of learnt Cornish entered the popular lexicon. Newly penned songs – ‘Song for Cornwall’, ‘Cornwall My Home’ – became traditional anthems overnight. And the black-and-white banner of St Piran appeared on every car bumper.

All of this was very much part of my own sense of identity and place. But even in my teens I think I had faintly conflicted feelings about it, an inkling that its relationship with that ‘collective folk image’ imposed from without was complex – and maybe even symbiotic.

When I finished school, like many other Cornish youngsters I went to work in the tourist industry – as a chef, in busy hotel and restaurant kitchens. For a decade I inhabited that frenetic environment of combined gratitude and resentment common to seasonal tourism workers the world over. Later, I went away to university, to study journalism. And then I became a travel writer, working on guidebooks and magazine articles about Southeast Asia. I always felt a slight awkwardness in this profession, a certain ethical unease, and eventually I turned to academia, to study travel writing, examining its patterns and discourses. What compelled all this uneasy interest, I think, was the knowledge that at the receiving end of any account of a place ‘foreign’ to its maker, there might well be a nine-year-old boy, stretched out on his belly, staring at an outsider’s representation of home.

Friends sometimes asked me, ‘When are you going to write about Cornwall?’ It was a reasonable question – Cornwall, after all, was the place I talked about most, enthusing in full-blown pub-bore mode about its history and its landscapes. But I’d always fob them off with a dismissive laugh, say that I was ‘still practising’. This wasn’t entirely a joke. Well used though I was to writing about other parts of the world, I couldn’t quite work out how I would write about the place that mattered most. It took me years to figure it out: if I wanted to write about Cornwall, I realised, I would also need to write and think about the way it had been represented.

I looked at the map. Nineteenth-century travelogues about Cornwall almost always followed a predictable itinerary. They began by crossing the Tamar from Plymouth, making a drama of this symbolic moment of arrival. Then they wove their way westwards, heading for a climax at the most distant, most exotic extremity: Penwith.

Perhaps I could follow a similar route, travelling on foot with a backpack and a small tent. I would begin on the banks of the Tamar, journeying upstream and checking to see if Cornwall’s physical frontiers were quite as concrete as I thought they were. Then I would make my way along the coast to Tintagel – receptacle for an almighty concentration of mythological projections. After that I’d head south, across the high ground of Bodmin Moor, and as I walked I’d consider the way perceptions of the Cornish landscape had shifted from revulsion in the eighteenth century to romantic appreciation by the end of the nineteenth – and how all that might have informed the gothic extravaganzas of Daphne du Maurier and her imitators. This crossing would bring me to the softer southern shore, to Looe and Polperro and Fowey, where a flotsam of maritime myth has accrued at the tideline. Next I’d work my way through the white ruins of the Clay Country, trying to work out why Cornwall – as much a post-industrial landscape as any Welsh or northern English colliery region – has ended up so widely perceived as ancient, untouched and rural. I’d emerge back on the north coast, among the buckets and spades and the century-old tropes of tourism. Then I’d cut south again, towards Falmouth and the Lizard, thinking about language and landscape, historical rebellions and modern identities. From there I’d move into the modern urban heartland of Camborne. After that there’d be only one place left to go: home. And in the final stage of the journey, I would need to consider the most awkward questions of all, the ones about myself, and what it actually means to be ‘Cornish’.

It would be a ticklish business, I knew. But I had no good reason to keep putting it off.

1

BORDERING

If you stand at the threshold of Number 2 Cyprus Well, you have a choice. It is the middle cottage of three in a little terrace facing a bank of sycamore saplings on a steep lane called Ridgegrove Hill. Above the single ground-floor window, a plaque records that ‘Charles Causley, Poet’ lived here from 1952 to 2003. They might have added the word ‘Cornish’ to the description, for that is the adjective most commonly associated with Causley. And indeed, he lived in Cornwall – right here in Launceston, in fact – not just for fifty-one years, but for almost his whole life.

But if you stand at the threshold of Cyprus Well and turn left, you can see Devon.

It shows beyond the point where the lane bends downhill: a gathering groundswell of trees and pasture. From the doorstep of Causley’s cottage, it seems natural to turn that way, to go with the flow. At the bottom of Ridgegrove Hill you’ll meet the little River Kensey. Within a mile, the Kensey will carry you to the Tamar, and the Tamar will bear you away south, between dark woods to the grey docks and end-of-terrace pubs of Plymouth, with the busy waters of the English Channel beyond. But if it’s Cornwall that you want, then you have to turn against gravity, against nature, pull steeply up Ridgegrove Hill then on up Angel Hill to pass, breathless, beneath the fortified arch on Southgate Street. And if it’s a decent prospect to the westward that you’re after, you’ll need to cross to the other side of Launceston and climb the motte of the castle.

On a midsummer morning, I stood on the pavement outside Number 2 Cyprus Well. It was early, and up the hill Launceston gave off the faint hum of a small town readying itself for the working day. To the east, the valleys were liquid with yellow mist. A few intersecting ridges rose above the flood, trees and hedges in dark profile. But it wasn’t clear to whom they belonged. I glanced left and right, fiddled with the straps of my backpack, looked at the map. Then I turned downhill, into the mist.

*  *  *

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The main Tamar crossing at Saltash, engraved from a painting by J. M. W. Turner around 1830.

Yale Center for British Art / Public domain.

The outer edge of the Cornish landmass is approximately 500 miles long. I say ‘approximately’ because, as the author and cartographer Tim Robinson has pointed out of Connemara’s convoluted littoral, the ‘fractal geography’ of any coastline, the way it becomes ever more intricate the more closely you examine it, makes its true length not merely unmeasurable, but effectively infinite. Still, though, 500 miles is a nice round number. Of that 500, some 422 are coastal, and by far the greater part of what remains is defined by the River Tamar. The Tamar rises near the coast north of Bude, but instead of taking the shortest route to salt water, it turns south and travels some sixty miles to Plymouth Sound. With a very few exceptions in the far north, you can’t get into Cornwall without crossing a body of water. It is, very nearly, an island.

For centuries, the crossing of the Tamar has allowed travel writers headed west to make a drama out of their moment of arrival on Cornish soil, as if this were the Rio Grande rather than a modest domestic watercourse. No one makes more of a meal of it than Wilkie Collins, who visited from London in the summer of 1850. He was a wealthy young man of twenty-six, studying law in rather desultory fashion but already committed to a career as a writer. He’d recently published his first novel, Antonia or, the Fall of Rome, and now he was planning a travel book.

At the time, there was no bridge across the Tamar from Plymouth, and Collins used that fact as an early opportunity to ramp up the exotic otherness of his destination: ‘Even the railway stops short at Plymouth, and shrinks from penetrating to the savage regions beyond!’

The book – Rambles Beyond Railways – begins with Collins and his artist companion, Henry Brandling, ‘sitting down in the stern-sheets’ as a local boatman strains against the evening tide to row them into Cornwall. Collins imbues the crossing with all the sinister mystery he can muster. Before they’re halfway across, ‘the houses of Devonport looked pale and indistinct’. Modernity, sophisticated Victorian town life is falling away. On the river itself, meanwhile, ‘nothing spoke now of life and action – save the lights which occasionally broke forth from houses on the hill at our side, or the small boats passing at intervals over the smooth water, and soon mysteriously lost to view behind the hull of a man-of-war, or in the deep shadows of the river’s distant banks’.¹

As darkness falls, the boatman struggles to make headway against the fierce current. The river itself seems to be driving the travellers back, and ‘the pale massy hulls of the old war-ships around and beyond us, assumed gradually a spectral and mysterious appearance, until they looked more like water-monsters in repose than the structures of mortal hands’. By this stage, the Tamar isn’t so much the Rio Grande as the River Styx.

By the time Collins visited, the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel had already made a preliminary survey of the river, and construction on the great Royal Albert railway bridge would begin in 1854. But even after it was complete, literary travellers did their best to retain the drama of arrival. In 1865 the French writer Alphonse Esquiros actually instructed would-be visitors to eschew the new bridge altogether, for ‘Old Cornwall should be approached by steamer’. Old Cornwall – crossing the Tamar, it seems, involved stepping on to another temporal plane. Devon belonged to modern, industrialised, imperial Britain; but not Cornwall…

Like Collins, Esquiros magnified the scale of the Tamar, gave it ‘all the majesty of a great river’. And having landed on its western shore, he claimed immediately to detect ‘a great change in the style of the landscape’. The ‘soft features of a fertile district are succeeded by a stern country, especially distinguished by the rudeness and grandeur of its lines’. Here at the riverbank, Cornwall ‘differs in so many striking and essential features from the usual character of an English landscape’.² Another travel writer of the same period, Walter White, made exactly the same claim: the moment you cross the Tamar ‘you are struck with the difference between the county you are in and the one you have left. It is obvious. The generally soft features of Devonshire are exchanged for a landscape of a stern and unfinished aspect.’³ This trope – for that is surely what it is – in which the Tamar marks the threshold of an exotic otherworld continues well beyond the Victorian era. In the 1950s, Ithell Colquhoun – and we’ll hear more from her later – declared that ‘a change of atmosphere is perceptible’ even from the train as it rattles across Brunel’s Tamar bridge: ‘The hoar lichen on apple branches, more twisted than they would be in Devon, or a glassy paleness of sky gleaming between torn clouds may hint that one has passed a borderline less palpable than that of the river.’⁴

But all of this is palpable nonsense. The south-easternmost corner of Cornwall – the bit that faces across the water to Plymouth; the bit that you first encounter whether crossing there by boat or bus or train – is pretty much indistinguishable from southern Devon. It has the same thickly wooded valleys, the same lush tidal creeks, the same fatted pasture. It certainly has the same weather. The ‘stern and unfinished’ stuff, the twisted branches, the wild weather – they don’t kick in until much further north and west. What exactly is going on here? Are White and Esquiros and Colquhoun deliberately making things up? Are they misremembering? Or are they acting under the influence of an idea – an idea of Cornwall as a place that should feel different the moment you arrive?

But it works for those heading the other way too, of course. For many Cornish people, I think, the presence of the Tamar as a natural frontier provides a reassuring territorial certainty. We too imagine some abrupt change of atmosphere the moment we cross it. We know exactly where our place begins and ends – or at least we think we do. I know I did before I set out from Charles Causley’s doorstep, to follow the Tamar upstream to its source.

I’d decided to begin my journey this way, walking towards Cornwall’s top right-hand corner instead of heading immediately west like the Victorian travel writers, because when I looked at the map, this area prompted a curious unease. Downstream from Launceston, the line of the Tamar, the border, is unequivocal. It snakes along a deepening valley, broadening all the way and tidal for a full nineteen miles below the last weir at Gunnislake. But north of Launceston the valley shallows, loses its distinction in a billowing landscape veined by other rivers with ringing West Country names: the Claw and the Carey; the Deer and the Ottery; the Torridge and the Walden. It is hard to pick out the thread of the dwindling Tamar among them, hard to work out where exactly Cornwall begins. I wanted to check for myself.

*  *  *

On the map, Launceston has the look of a frontier post. A Norman castle and a huddle of slate roofs atop a hill, a mile and a half from the point where the old trunk road into Cornwall crosses the Tamar at Polson Bridge. The fact that this place was once the local seat of the earldom – precursor of the modern Duchy of Cornwall – and long afterwards the de facto county town, the place where peripatetic circuit judges held their assizes, says something about Cornwall’s position in the English, and later British, state: its centre of government business as close to the threshold as possible, a place that officials from London could visit and be gone from, back across the border in double-quick time. Even from the very top of the castle, the widest prospect is to the north-east, into Devon. The view to the west is barred, seven miles off, by a long line of granite hills. If Cornwall were an Iron Age promontory fort, defended by the double ramparts of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor, then Launceston would be in the ditch. But it was here that the man sometimes called ‘Cornwall’s poet laureate’, ‘Cornwall’s native poet’, or even its ‘national poet’, was born and lived out most of his eighty-six years.

Charles Causley certainly has as good a claim to such titles as anyone. The iconography of Cornwall is there