CORNWALL
By Tim Hitchcock
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley – well, actually things became a blur of delights once my snoring conscience crossed the Tamar but it was Cornwall without doubt. As Daphne du Maurier knew, there is no better place for thoughts to roam, for Cornwall was the Eden Project long before those bio-domes erupted on its surface like secular stigmata.
The county has been a romantic place since the dawn of Western civilisation. This is the Tin Islands of Herodotus; it is where Tristram, Iseult and King Mark invented the love triangle, thereby providing French novelists and filmmakers with an inexhaustible supply of plots.The lost land of Lyonesse lies between Penzance and the Isles of Scilly. Above all, it is the birthplace of King Arthur.
Before you write in, I know. Yes, the nearest thing to Arthur was a bloke from Wiltshire who fought a battle in the suburbs of Bath, but see Tintagel and you will agree that the nation's hero of last resort should have been born there if he wanted to be big in the myth business. A castle perched above crashing waves is definitely what a proto-Max Clifford would have recommended.
Though the countryside is a kind of Greatest Hits of English Landscape, the coast is Cornwall's glory, partly for its variety. On the north it is rugged and stark, on the south mellow. Everywhere it is spectacular because the county is girt by a deep blue ocean, not that urchin in a grey hoodie, the North Sea. Pity Cornish fishermen, who face a daily struggle with a dark, merciless force that can destroy them with a casual flick of its mane. On top of the European Union, they have to contend with the ocean too.
Cornwall is the Angelina Jolie of counties, possessed of a beauty simultaneously obvious and mysteriously ineffable. Under Saint Piran's flag you can visit stately homes,Tate St Ives, the Minack theatre, eat fine food and stroll about beautiful gardens. Lest that seem too placid for some, it is also England's epicentre of adventure sports.
There's surfing at Newquay. That sentence should have ended 'dude', I'm told – after all, this is emotionally as well as geographically where Britain comes closest to California – but being over 23 I couldn't type it and keep a straight face.
Don't be sniffy about youngsters having fun in the Cornish sun. It's innocent and has history to it.When an Irish bard sang of Tir n'a N'og, the land of the ever young, you can bet your last pasty he was thinking of Cornwall.What adventure sports fans and surfers love is, says my youthful friend Sam, "People dancing, sunset amazing."
My mother's family loved Cornwall so much they lived there for centuries.They had such fun enjoying adventure sports like smuggling, piracy and being made to leap off cliffs by Henry VII that it took the threat of transportation for them to gather their, um, winnings and retired to Norfolk. That's another wonderful county but its delights are for another day.
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