Cornwall's Hidden History Blog
If you love finding art in the wild or enjoy wandering around an old graveyard, as I do, reading the headstones and admiring the craftsmanship, then there is one monument that you should definitely seek out. Tucked away behind St Andrew’s Church in Stratton you can discover a striking sculpture that looks like it belongs […]
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When the artist J. M. W. Turner was walking between the villages of Mousehole and Paul in the summer of 1811 he paused for just long enough to make a rough pencil sketch of a granite monument that had caught his eye beside the road. The monument had been placed there some eighteen years earlier […]
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How important is public art to community and society? What is it worth and can we really put a price on it? Should we be measuring the value of art in pounds or is its worth something unquantifiable? These seem to have been the sort of questions that were being asked back in 1965 when […]
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In the dark depths of the winter of 1870 the tiny Cornish fishing village of Cadgwith made the national newspapers when it became unwittingly embroiled in the ongoing Franco-Prussian war. The strange story of the lost balloon post brings to life a forgotten period of history, a time when the postal service (and a speedy […]
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Ann Boswell, better known as Granny Boswell, is one of Cornwall’s best known characters and an important figure for many in the gypsy community but who was the real woman who has inspired so much affection, so many stories and has even been depicted in one of the biggest TV shows of the past decade?! […]
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In September 1937 workmen digging the foundations of Truro’s new Telephone Exchange unearthed human bones. This macabre discovery in the heart of the city surprised everyone and would lead to rumours of a forgotten burial ground, while a curious carved head found nearby would give rise to tales of an ancient curse. Why those bodies […]
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A year or so ago an old Porthlevener asked me if I knew about the Moonstone. (I think that he might even have called it an asteroid at the time.) When I said I hadn’t he told me I couldn’t miss it, this rock that had supposedly fallen from space, if I went to cliffs […]
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In the 1920s Cornwall adopted Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges as one of their own and he in turn returned here again and again to relax, to write and to give lectures to rapt audiences. Always a controversial figure, Mitchell-Hedges was a traveller, an adventurer, a hunter of sea-monsters and is believed by many to have been […]
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I have always been fascinated by the odd and the obscure. And most especially the lost and forgotten. So when I learnt that there was a very unusual relic from the past hiding on the grounds of Falmouth Hospital I was determined to find out more. I first came across the Meridian Stone in a […]
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The narrow headland of Sharrow Point juts out into the waves that wash into Whitsand Bay on Cornwall’s far eastern coast. At first glance the most remarkable thing about the little promontory is the breath-taking views it affords, stretching from Rame Head to Dodman Point but this rocky outcrop also hides an unusual relic from […]
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