Cornwall's Hidden History Blog
Celia Fiennes was born in 1662 in Wiltshire but she had very different ideas about what a woman of her time should be and how they should behave. The daughter of a wealthy politician Celia refused to be bound by convention and she never married. At a time when making a journey for its own sake […]
Read More
I find researching and writing about an ordinary person from the past fascinating (perhaps it is my natural nosiness).  At times it is captivating, at others, difficult to comprehend. After all these folks aren’t around to explain their actions or to defend themselves.  Records for the regular person on the street are scant, we often left with small […]
Read More
There are some women in history that I really wish I could meet and Granny Boswell, Gypsy Queen, would be one of them. Granny Boswell was of course not always a granny, Ann Boswell was born in 1813. She and her husband, Ephraim, locally known as the King of the Gypsies, are said to have come from Tipperary, […]
Read MoreThere are many tales of giants in Cornwall, look up them in a book of legends and they seem to spend quite a lot of their time throwing massive boulders about and striding great distances. But there was one giant who we known truly existed and by all accounts he was a giant of a […]
Read More
When Charlotte Dymond’s body was found on the lonely moors near Camelford in April 1844 Cornwall was overcome with shock snd horror. But strangely there was something else too – a kind of unsavoury excitement. This was the stuff of Penny Dreadful fiction, and to be frank the public was loving it. The story had […]
Read More
We often think of saints as somehow ethereal beings who did miraculous, unbelievable things in far-away lands and in times so distant from our own. And let’s face it some of them very much live up to that reputation. But we shouldn’t forget that they were actually real people. The Real Saint Keyne Saint Keyne […]
Read More
What happens when the truth turns out to be far duller than the legend? Do you try to get the facts to fit the exciting story that you would like to believe? Or do you acknowledge that history and time can sometimes make fools of us, but in a fun way? And then of course […]
Read More