CORNWALL: Romans to Victorians

Working his way clockwise round Cornwall's stupendous coastline, the author crosses the Tamar Bridge from Devon and visits Saltash, a place where Neolithic flint arrowheads are two-a-penny and where William the Conqueror built a strategic fortification which later became the site of a key battle in the English Civil War. Nearby Launceston and Liskeard were Royalist towns, as was Fowey, where famous later residents of the area include Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca, the illustrator Mabel Lucie Attwell, and Kenneth Grahame who wrote The Wind in the Willows. West of St Austell is Falmouth, the most south-westerly harbour in Britain, and often the first place Royal Navy ships docked when returning from overseas. Truro, the county capital, was a stannary town, involved in the tin mining industry. Granted city status by Queen Victoria in 1877, its cathedral was built over the next 20 years. The rugged coastline of the Lizard peninsula was a notorious graveyard for ships, and continuing west, St Michael's Mount has a long history of strategic importance culminating in Hitler promising it to Ribbentrop should Germany win the war. Sennen is the first village in England travelling back from Land's End, followed by the bleak prehistoric settlement of St Just. St Ives, now Cornwall's most popular tourist destination, was a simple fishing village until the coming of the railway in 1877. The town of Bodmin is the only large Cornish settlement noted in the Domesday Book, though nearby Padstow also appears, now a renowned centre of gastronomy. 152pp, softback, numerous black and white photos.