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Overview
A new edition of Philip Payton's modern classic Cornwall: A History, published now by University of Exeter Press, telling the story of Cornwall from earliest times to the present day. This edition incorporates the latest research and brings the story of Cornwall right up to date, examining the events and debates of the early twenty-first century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780859890212 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Exeter Press |
| Publication date: | 12/31/2017 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 394 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.94(w) x 9.02(h) x (d) |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ANCIENT STONES
As we shall see as the story of Cornwall unfolds in this book, this Cornish land is many things to many people, its history so often contradictory and paradoxical. Cornwall is a far-flung half-forgotten remnant of the Celtic world; or maybe it is the limelit stage upon which the global, earth-shattering acts of the Industrial Revolution were first performed. The Cornish are the last of an ancient race, their moribund way of life fast disappearing in response to the homogenising pressures of international Western culture. Or perhaps, like other ethnic groups across the Continent, the Cornish have at last the self-confidence to express a vibrant separate identity that will ensure their place in the rich regional mosaic of twenty-first century Europe. For outsiders, Cornwall is peace and tranquillity, a haven to which one might retire from the mad rush of modern life; for insiders, Cornwall is often poverty and poor housing and a struggle to make ends meet in a low-wage economy.
But behind this fluidity of interpretation there are certainties, and none more so than the bedrock of the land itself. On cliffs and moors, in architecture, in mines and quarries, in the fabric of the landscape, geology is in Cornwall (for even the most casual of observers) a powerful determinant of territorial character and identity. Thus Cornwall is The Granite Kingdom for the contemporary Cornish poet and novelist, D.M. Thomas, while for writer James Turner the essential defining feature of Cornwall is that it is The Stone Peninsula. For the romantic fancy of popular fiction, the stones of Cornwall are old, as old as time itself, and this is something with which the scientist will readily concur. The stones of Cornwall are old. The oldest rocks are on the Lizard peninsula, a veritable mecca for geologists, but most of Cornwall consists geologically of strongly deformed sediments which were intruded by granites in the late Carboniferous or early Permian periods, about 300 million years ago.
Throughout the preceding Carboniferous and Devonian periods, most of what is now Cornwall lay beneath the sea. In a complex series of geological events sedimentary material was laid down on the sea-bed while, at the end of the Carboniferous period, the cataclysmic collision of two landmasses — one southern, one northern — threw this material up into a mountain range. The process is known to geologists as the Variscan orogeny, and its consequences for the physical creation of Cornwall have been described in detail by Colin Bristow. Briefly, the story is this. Some of the seabed caught up in the early phases of this collision was thrust up to the surface to become the Lizard peninsula, known today for its distinctive geological and topographical features. Elsewhere, huge volumes of debris slipped down from the colliding northern landmass and are detected now in the geology of the southern Cornish coast — in the Roseland peninsula and westwards along the southern side of the Helford River towards Mullion. As Colin Bristow has remarked, the geology of these areas has more in common with that of Brittany than any other part of Britain — a fascinating echo of the cultural bonds that were for so long to tie Brittany and Cornwall together, and which in recent years have been re-affirmed in contexts such as inter-Celtic wrestling contests and the twinning of Cornish and Breton towns and villages.
About 10 million years after the Variscan collision had reached its climax (a mere bat of the eyelid in geological time) came the granitic intrusion. A great mass of molten granite welled up in a line from what is now the Isles of Scilly to Dartmoor so that, in Colin Bristow's memorable phrase, 'we may truthfully say that Cornwall is formed of hardened mud buoyed up by granite'. Over the subsequent passage of some 300 million years, erosion has laid bare the granite (the Cornubian batholith, as it is called by geologists), forming the distinctive landscape we know today. Dartmoor is in Devon (albeit part of the possession of the Duchy of Cornwall) but, running east to west from the River Tamar border which divides Cornwall from the rest of Britain, we encounter first the granite of Kit Hill and Hingston Down near Callington. Further west is Bodmin Moor (or, to give it its historic and more picturesque name, Foweymore), the most extensive of the Cornish moors. Further west still is the granitic intrusion known variously as Blackmore, St Austell Moor, Hensbarrow or today, the china clay country. Beyond Truro, north of the modern road from Penryn to Helston, are the Carnmenellis or Wendron Moors (with the detached mass of Carn Brea overshadowing the mining towns of Camborne and Redruth), and in the far-west in the Land's End peninsula (ancient Belerion) are the moors of West Penwith. Out to sea, amongst what Charles Thomas has so eloquently described as the 'drowned landscape', are the Scillies — the 'Fortunate Isles'.
Other, smaller granitic outcrops of this Cornubian batholith include St Agnes Beacon, Carn Marth near Redruth, Tregonning and Godolphin Hills near Helston, and the exotic island of St Michael's Mount. Each of these intrusions dominates its locality, but the tops of the granite masses become ever lower the further west one travels. Across the border on Dartmoor, High Willhays is some 627m (2039 ft) above sea level. Brown Willy on Bodmin Moor, at 423m (1375 ft), is the highest hill (technically a mountain) in Cornwall. The Isles of Scilly at their highest point are only 51m (166 ft) above the sea. Erosion has capped these Cornish outcrops with often fantastic shapes, from the familiar twin peaks of Rough Tor and the razorback edge of Kilmar Tor, both on Bodmin Moor, to the eerie eminences of the Cheesewring and Carn Kenidjack — the one in East Cornwall, the other in the far west. Here and there the horizontal weathering of outcrops has led to the creation of delicately balanced rocking or logan stones, the most famous of which is at Treryn Dinas near Land's End. Similarly, strange rock basins — such as those encountered at Carn Brea — have been created as a result of the reaction over very many centuries of acidic rain on granite.
It is not surprising that in earlier times folk seeking explanations for these often weird, and sometimes frightening and forbidding, natural rock formations should have turned to superstition and folklore for their interpretations. In the nineteenth century antiquarians such as Robert Hunt and William Bottrell set about recording the myths and legends of old Cornwall, putting down on paper — often for the first time — stories that then still enjoyed popular currency amongst the ordinary Cornish people. An oral tradition of droll-telling that stretched back across the centuries had perpetuated these stories into modern times, ensuring their preservation but also attesting to the enduring relevance of ancient stones in the cultural make-up of Cornwall.
Typically, natural rock formations were seen to have inherent supernatural powers of their own, or were otherwise the work of giants. A more sinister overlay intimated dark Druidical rites amongst the rock basins, with lurid tales of human sacrifice persisting so strongly that even the Rev William Borlase, the eighteenth-century antiquarian who was in many ways the father of modern Cornish geological and archaeological studies, readily attributed natural monuments to the work of Druids. The curious rockpile that is the Cheesewring has attracted various tales, the best known of which is that recorded by Hunt in which the topmost stone turned three times at the sound of a cock crowing. Similar properties were attributed to the cock-crow stone, a rock of 'white marble' (probably quartz) said to lie in Looe harbour, uncovered at low tide.
Carn Kenidjack (or Kenidzhek, as Robert Hunt preferred to spell it) was known as the hooting carn, so-called because of its mysterious ability to emit sounds that ranged from a low muttering to a shrill hoot, in reality the effect of winds swirling amongst the rockpiles but in popular imagination evidence of the carn's reputed satanic hauntings. The bizarre attributes of logan stones attracted much attention. At Nancledra was such a stone, thought locally to have been created by super-natural power, which would rock like a cradle on the stroke of midnight and was thus known as the twelve-o'clock stone. If placed naked on the stone at exactly that hour, a child suffering from rickets would receive a miracle cure. The alleged healing power of ancient stones was also manifest in the 'crick stone' near Morvah, where to pass through the natural fork in the rock was to find a cure for a bad back. The Giant's Rock near Zennor Churchtown had more sinister powers, for anyone climbing upon it nine times without rocking it would become a witch. Indeed, a widespread belief in Cornwall was that: 'Touch a Logan stone nine times at midnight, and any woman will become a witch'.
Hunt wrote of the Treryn logan stone that 'A more sublime spot could not have been chosen by the Bardic priesthood for any ordeal connected with their worship', and that 'every kind of mischief which can befall man or beast was once brewed by the St Levan witches'. Madgy Figgy, one of the most celebrated witches of St Levan and St Buryan, was said to have her own chair in the cliffs nearby, formed miraculously in stone amongst the rockpiles, where she commanded the spirits of the storm. At Trewa, on the downs between Nancledra and Zennor, was the 'Witches' Rock', where all the witches of Penwith 'assembled at midnight to carry on their wicked deeds', although, curiously, 'Any one touching this rock nine times at midnight was insured against bad luck'.
Amongst the many giant legends collected by the nineteenth-century antiquarians are those of the giants of St Michael's Mount. Perhaps more than any other rock formation in Cornwall, the Mount invites the theory that it was the work of giants. One tale insists that it was built by the giant Cormoran and his wife Cormelian. An interesting detail here is that the small greenstone Chapel Rock that lies between the Mount and the shore at Marazion is said to have dropped from Cormelian's apron as she carried the building materials to and fro. On Trencrom Hill (or Trecobben, as it was sometimes known) lived another family of giants, and their pastime was to engage in energetic games with their neighbours on St Michael's Mount. As Hunt observed, 'In several parts of Cornwall there are evidences that these Titans were a sportive race. Huge rocks are preserved to show where they played at trap-ball, hurling, and other athletic games'.
The giants of Trencrom and the Mount specialised in the game of 'bob-buttons'. The Mount was the 'bob', on which flat slabs of granite were placed to act as buttons, and Trencrom Hill was the 'mit' from which the throw was made. The rocky debris surrounding both outcrops today shows the intensity with which the giants played. In another story, the huge mass of granite boulders strewn near Castle-an-Dinas (in West Penwith) were pieces of rock that had been carried by a local giant to protect himself against his enemies, those giants of Trencrom. In yet another, the giant Bolster — who would in one stride span the distance from St Agnes Beacon to Carn Brea — forced his luckless wife to pick up rocks from the country surrounding St Agnes and then carry them in her apron to the summit of the Beacon.
Thus folklore conveniently explained the origins of geological features, noting (or inventing) their raison d'être and accounting for the profusion (or otherwise) of rocks and boulders in the Cornish landscape. In so doing, the imagery of ancient stones became an essential ingredient in representations of Cornwall, a trend re-emphasised in modern times when the Romantic movement effectively rehabilitated the wild grandeur of moor and mountain in literary appreciation (for example, Wordsworth's Lake District, or Scott's Highlands and Borders). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the evocation of Cornish rocks has become de rigueur for any writer attempting a depiction or analysis of Cornwall. The poets D.M. Thomas and Peter Redgrove have penned, respectively, their 'Logan-Stone' and 'Minerals of Cornwall, Stones of Cornwall', while Dr A.L. Rowse writes of the timelessness of 'Helman Tor': 'Kingdoms are lost and empires fall,/States decay. But this remains'. For John Heath-Stubbs:
This is a hideous and wicked country, Sloping to hateful sunsets and the end of time, Hollow with mine-shafts, naked with granite, fanatic With sorrow. Abortions of the past Hop through these bogs; black-faced, the villagers Remember burnings by the hewn stones.
Denys Val Baker's A View from Land's End returns time and again to the relationship between geology, landscape and the creative impulse. Gerald Priestland has emphasised 'The metaphysical dimension of Penwith', with its 'cheesewrings and citadels of weathered moorstone'. It hell Colquhoun's The Living Stones of Cornwall, written in the mid- 1950s, exemplifies this genre. 'The life of a region depends ultimately on its geologic substratum', she declared, 'for this sets up a chain-reaction which passes, determining their character, in turn through its streams and wells, its vegetation and the animal life that feeds on this, and finally through the type of human being attracted to live there. In a profound sense also the structure of its rocks gives rise to the psychic life of the land.'
As Colquhoun added, 'Stones that whisper, stones that dance, that play on pipe or fiddle, that tremble at cock-crow, that eat and drink, stones that march as an army — these unhewn slabs of granite hold the secret of the country's inner life'. Today, this approach is echoed in the New Age movement, not least in the periodical Meyn Mamvro (Cornish for 'stones of the motherland') which sees in the ancient stones a thread of continuity linking modern Cornwall to earliest times. This heritage has prompted the powerful explanatory phenomenon of myth and legend, transformed in modern times into literary evocation and into spiritual and psychic meaning. But in more practical ways it has also powerfully influenced the material culture of Cornwall. For example, granite moorstone, the rocky debris that still litters much of moorland Cornwall, has for centuries been used for a multiplicity of domestic and monumental purposes — from constructing churches to setting up the ubiquitous Cornish hedges — and quarried granite has been much sought after for private and public building in Cornwall and in Britain as a whole. Major granite-quarrying areas have included St Breward and Cheesewring on Bodmin Moor, Luxulyan in mid-Cornwall, and the Penryn-Constantine district in the west.
Although Nicklaus Pevsner decided that in the realms of architecture 'Cornwall possesses little of the highest aesthetic quality', a distinctive and self-respecting, if modest, tradition can be detected in Cornish building, related in Frank and Veronica Chesher's book The Cornishman's House. And while much is plain and simple, as the hardness of the rock dictates, even Cornish granite has on occasion been the subject of detailed and painstaking attention by craftsmen, especially in church architecture. As John Betjeman wrote, 'Only a Cornishman would have the endurance to carve intractable granite as he has done at St Mary Magdalene, Launceston and Probus towers'. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, granite lent itself especially well to the Georgian and neo-classical buildings that were then emerging. Early Cornish public buildings of note constructed of dressed granite included the town halls at Lostwithiel (1740) and Fowey (1790), the Market (1827) and Assize Court (1838) at Bodmin, Redruth Clock Tower (1828), and St Just-in-Penwith Market House (1840).
The architecture of much of Cornwall has a granite face but other Cornish stone has also been important as building material. From Polyphant in the parish of Lewannick, near Launceston, comes the distinctive grey picrite known as Polyphant stone, used in the construction of Launceston's medieval castle and in many churches in East Cornwall, and in mid-Cornwall is the buff-coloured elvan called Pentewan stone — most noted for its use in the construction of the facade of the eighteenth-century Antony House near Torpoint. From Catacleuse on the north coast, near Trevose, comes the famous Catacleuse stone which was used in churches for fonts, tomb chests and arcades, the raw material for the enigmatic 'Master of Endellion' who was responsible for much of the ecclesiastical stone carving in North Cornwall in the mid-fifteenth century. At St Neot, and even more famously at Delabole, near Camelford, slates have been quarried since medieval times for use as floor flags, sills, chests and cisterns as well as the traditional 'belling' (roofing) slates. Dressed slate ('Cornish marble') has been used for monumental purposes, from the extraordinary slate figure memorials of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (the surviving sixty or so examples of which were so painstakingly recorded by the late Alice Bizley and subject more recently to rigorous analysis by Paul Cockerham) to the work of the noted Neville Northey Burnard whose efforts included the Richard Lander memorial in Truro and the carving of John Wesley at Trewint.
(Continues…)
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