4.5 out of 5 stars
The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.
I have been going to Cornwall for holidays for many years now. I think that it is quite a special place, with beautiful coasts and dramatic landscapes. The side I see has always been the tourist side. However, for those that live there, it is very different. Love the county, its landscape is bleak and dramatic or small and cosy – provided you know where to go.
They are overwhelmed with tourists for half the year, and when they all depart, the income dries up and they have to scratch a living until the next season. Even if you do manage to earn a living, the chances of being able to afford a home there now are very slim. The tsunami of second homeowners with plenty of cash to spare means that most properties have been priced out of the locals price range. This is a subject that has been written about in the excellent Undercurrent by Natasha Carthew.
The place is almost an island, the border of the Tamar rises in the north of the county leaving the peninsular to only be joined at the top and because of this it doesn’t quite feel like England. How we perceive it as outsiders has been fuelled by many things including writers who have given us the image of a wild land and people.
What the county is, is an enigma.
The people best placed to answer what the county now is are the Cornish. Tim Hannigan is a Cornish man who grew up and worked there, before heading off around the world to write guidebooks and who now lives in Ireland. This gives him a unique perspective on the place, seeing it from the outside with a travel writer’s eye and knowing what makes the place tick.
How we perceive the place is very much different from the reality, and he takes time to show that as he moves through the literary landscape as he zigzags across the county on his walk. Not only do you get a journal of what happens that day to him on his walk, but he digs through the history of the places that he walks, lifting gems from history and folklore to tell us about. I thought that the folklore stretched way into the past, but it seems that it was mostly invented by two gents in the 1800s!
Not quite English, always Cornish.
I thought that this was well worth reading. Hannigan manages to describe the modern enigma that is Cornwall perfectly. The writing is really good regardless of whether he is describing the walking, the places that he passes and the people that he meets or his own hinterland. This isn’t a romantic view of the county either, you can sense his pride in the county as he tells of the parts that he loves and is fiercely critical of some of the problems that the county finds itself in. You almost certainly have a view of what Cornwall is, but it is like a kaleidoscope, with different people seeing different things from their perspectives. And in some way, it is all of those things and not at the same time.
This sounds really good. I’ve just read Jonathan Cox’s The Cornwall Sabbatical which was a bit of an odd one but had its moments, centred on Falmouth, so this might be a bit similar to read soon but I’ll bear it in mind.
Apologies for the delay in replying, have been away for a couple of days. It really was worth reading. I will have to look the other one up