Cornwall's Hidden History Blog
“The two seas, the waters of St Ives Bay separated only by a narrow stretch of land from the ocean where St Michael’s Mount guards Marazion. Cut a canal and western Cornwall is an island.” Claud Williamson shaw, The Cornishman, 20th September 1906 For a number of years during the late 19th and early 20th […]
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This autumn something really rather special is happening down west. A trilogy of six hundred year old Cornish ‘Mystery Plays’, known as The Ordinalia, will be performed in St Just in Penwith. These three powerful, biblical plays are the oldest surviving plays in Britain and will appropriately be performed in arguably the country’s oldest working […]
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The legendary headland now known as Land’s End is probably Cornwall’s most famous landmark. Whether you love or hate the recent development there no visit to the area is complete without standing on that towering cliff top at the very tip of mainland Britain. For hundreds of years ‘Pilgrims’ have flocked to here for the […]
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A strange thing happened to me a couple of years ago, I bought a secondhand book exactly 110 years to the day that a man mentioned in it had died – the 23rd March. The book was The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles, published in 1977. I had started leafing through it in […]
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You can find Mulfra Quoit in ‘the land of granite and gorse’, high up on a hill overlooking the wide sweep of Mounts Bay. On a clear, bright day a finer location would be hard to imagine. Of the quoits found in Penwith this is one of the smallest but what it lacks in size […]
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Having so many prehistoric monuments in such a relatively small area as the Penwith can mean that sometimes something rather special gets overlooked. I was sitting beside Bosiliack Cairn recently, eating my picnic and enjoying the last bit of sun. In the distance Lanyon Quoit was attracting a steady stream of visitors, as was Men […]
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Tater Du, not far from Lamorna Cove, is Cornwall’s most recently built lighthouse. Isolated and always unmanned, this lighthouse sits on its rocky platform, a silent sentinel to a wide sweep of unforgiving sea. But on a warm summer’s day wildflowers, nesting birds, bees and butterflies thrive beside the coastal path that passes this lonely […]
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“I doubt if anyone could find a warmer spot in England during the winter than this little St Loy Cove . . . it is a regular suntrap where even in the severest winter the warm sea water keeps Jack Frost at bay.” Folliott-Stokes, 1928. The boulderous bay between Merthen Point and Boscawen Point, is […]
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Chun Quoit, one of Cornwall’s best preserved prehistoric monuments, is spectacularly located high on a hill in West Penwith. Leaning with your back against it’s sun-warmed stones you can see for miles, expansive views across moorland, farmland and out to sea. But what was this structure for and what did it represent to the people […]
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We are very used to hearing about the Cornish taking advantage of bounty brought to its shores by the ferocious sea. Tales of crowds of the opportunistic, greedy, and probably at times desperate, inhabitants swarming over a beached vessel and plundering all they can. Stripping a ship, and sometimes its crew bare, before the arrival […]
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