In conversation with the author of this book, I once described my early impressions of Cornwall as a kind of ramshackle Eden. My first two visits were in the late 1970s, long before the second home boom and the great chef invasion, and as a working-class student on a shoe-string budget with no literary or artistic leanings, I was simply delighted if the sun shone, the sea was blue and the cheap pastie only had one of the café proprietor’s hairs in it. I can still boast that I have never been there in August, but I now have the pictures, pottery, books, and memories that were witness to many weeks spent there on holiday over the decades since- the majority being in Penwith, near Tim Hannigan’s home in the far west of the county.
The title ‘The Granite Kingdom’ is taken from a poem by Charles Causley who, possibly, being a much better poet than he was a geologist has provided a perfect illustration of one of the book’s principal themes. How myths and impressions about Cornwall, while not being strictly true and at times being dangerously false, and in the main generated by creative writers and artists, usually from elsewhere, have weaved an enchantment over the county. Creating a great attraction but also many distortions. Most of the surface of Cornwall is in fact shale, slate, sandstone and killas- although under the surface it is indeed granite.
The author introduces the writers who ‘discovered’ folklore and generated tales of wreckers and Arthurian legend. The Victorian vicar of Morwenstow, Robert Hawker, whose fertile, and drug-addled mind, came up with much more than just the Harvest Festival, and Daphne Du Maurier who threw a gothic sensibility over the county and filled it with smugglers and pirates, represent just a fraction of the escapists and dreamers who have conspired to make Cornwall mysterious. The extravagantly eccentric surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun believed that a preternatural emanation spread across the land from near her studio in Lamorna! But the author also exposes the toxic side of this othering of Cornwall and the Cornish- from the Victorian travellers who described the inhabitants as primitives and savages to D H Lawrence, who in one outburst described his neighbours as ‘like insects gone cold’.
Essentially this book is an account of a walk, literally from the Tamar, the boundary in the east, which turns out not to be quite the boundary most visitors imagine it is, to the far West and home, and another into the complex and actual history of the county. Frequently avoiding the coastal areas beloved by tourists, the writer ventures inland and across country and digs into the archaeology of the Neolithic age, the revolutionary pedigree of the county, the profound impact of Methodism and the rural and urban poverty and inequalities of today. The clay, copper and tin industries and the contribution of Cornish miners across the world, from South America to Australia, are given a hearing.
It is also in turns sharp and funny but unfailingly open-hearted; even about the contemporary romances set in imaginary Cornish places like’ Penwazzock’. This is a book which will delight and inform anyone who has an interest in Cornwall and will pop many a bubble of wishful thinking about the county.
- The Granite Kingdom by Tim Hannigan is out now, published by Apollo Books (£27.99). To order a copy go to Head of Zeus Books
Ian Tattum
Ian Tattum is a priest in the Church of England who writes occasional pieces about the people who shaped the history of science and human and animal travel-real and fictional.
Excellent review from someone who loves the county