#cleddau river

[mothmiso]

NZ 2019 (2) (3) by Alan Daniels

Via Flickr:

(1) Cleddau River at Milford (2) Milford Sound, waterfall centre of the universe. (3) Monkey Creek, a lovely spot on the road to Milford.     

[cycas]

Morning on the River Cleddau at Hazelbeach

[vintageslideshow]

The Homer Tunnel, New Zealand.  1968

The Homer Tunnel is a 1.2 km (0.75 miles) long road tunnel in the Fiordland region of the South Island of New Zealand, opened in 1953. New Zealand State Highway 94 passes through the tunnel, linking Milford Sound to Te Anau and Queenstown, by piercing the Darran Mountains at the Homer Saddle. It connects between the valley of the Hollyford River to the east and that of the Cleddau to the west.

[tseneipgam]

"It was across this terrain that those first travellers moved. Me don't know much about them other than that they came, that ther were probably nomadic and few in number, and that they reached the very furthest extremity of Cornwall, for they left behind a chert hand-axe - a crude, cream-coloured thing, which came up behind a plough in a field just off the Land's End road 10,000 years later, in 1959.

The 4.000-odd years that follow - the Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age - suggest a slightly thicker peopling of the peninsula That same terminal plateau where the hand-axe surfaced throws up many lithic scatters, concentrations of worked flint dating from the period between 8000 and 4000 BC. These might represent permanent settlements, sites of seasonal reoccupation or temporary campsites. But it's hard to be sure, for the people who scattered the flint built nothing that would last long enough for us to find is traces. But all that changes around 6,000 years ago with the dan of the Neolithic, for at that point the people living in what is now Cornwall began to move the rocks around.

It starts with subtle modifications to the natural landscape a slab on a granite hilltop in Penwith or Bodmin Moor, propped up on a smaller stone, perhaps to frame a particular prospect of sum or stars; a big boulder manhandled into a new orientation, perhaps in alignment with a nearby summit. But soon enough we start io find huge dolmens, the mushroom-shaped funerary monuments known as quoits in Cornwall. Then a little later chambered tombs appear, and then standing stones and stone circles as the Neolithic shades into the Bronze Age at around 2500 BC. Barrows like the one where I'd rested at Affaland pop up like pimples across the hills, then the stuff not just of death and ritual but of hearth and home- the roundhouses, the field systems. And from that point onwards, each period of human activity will leave its permanent stone-built traces in the Cornish landscape."

"In the late Bronze Age there was certainly plenty of actin on the Atlantic seaways, brought about, as one scholar pus t by the intensification in the volume of bronze moving throught the system" I love the image here - of a substance injected int a circulatory system, and the veins and arteries pulsing with ne energy in response. Tin and copper, the raw materials of bronze. could be found throughout the peninsulas of the Atlantic and especially in Cornwall."

"

From around the start of the fifth century - possibly under pressure from the westward encroachment of Anglo-Saxon Wessex; or possibly, in a revisionist assessment, as part of a late bout of Dumnonian expansionism - there was a migration from the Brythonic-speaking West Country. The emigrants took to boats, sailed south, and resettled in a region once called Armorica, but which quickly became known for its new inhabitants as Britannia minor (Little Britain; to distinguish it from neighbouring Great Britain) - or simply Brittany. The names given to its northern and southern regions directly echoed those back across the water: Domnonée and Cornouaille, Devon and Cornwall. But were not done yet. Instead of sailing south, let's have our Penwith traveller board another boat on the north coast, departing from the estuary at Hayle. This time she sails a hundred miles north, comes ashore at the mouth of the twin Cleddau rivers in Pembrokeshire, and inland finds familiar place names yet again - tre and pen and llan - and again a spoken language that she understands. So where does proto-Cornwall begin and end? Nowhere in particular. Depending how you look at it, it simply fades out somewhere around Exeter. Or it extends all the way to the shores of the Bay of Biscay and up to the heights of Snowdonia. What we can say with certainty is this: the sea - which we tend to see today as a barrier - provides an easy connection to places far less 'foreign'"

"As for what all those speakers of connected languages practitioners of connected cultures, across Western Europe on the eve of the Roman conquest might have called themselres! Any number of different things, much as today: Neapolitan or Italian; Portuguese or Lisboeta; British or Cornish. We do know that the literate Greeks, looking north-west with a mixture of fascination and alarm, spoke of the Keltoi - an indiscriminate term, probably encompassing a mass of peoples who all looked similarly "foreign' to the Greeks, but very different to each other We know that the Romans borrowed this term, Celtae, and sometimes used it interchangeably with Gaul!"

"Once a kind of barbarians - for Defoe, these people might be English now, more or less, but they hadn't always been. Later writers - more secure in their own national identity; less concerned about the coherence of a new British state - were inclined to allow the possibility that the Cornish were still not properly English, and a habit developed of spotting physiognomic evidence of exotic origins during visits to the west. Virtually every nineteenth-century travel writer who came to Cornwall managed - perhaps because they'd been primed to look out for them by previous authors - to spot a few Cornish men and women characterized by large black eyes, hair of the same colour, and swarthy complexions!" Various wild theories were raised to explain this decided marker of otherness: the Cornish, or at least some of them, were descended from the Phoenicians, from the ancient 'Cadizians, or, inevitably, from the Jews. This was all backed up by much historical theorising, and the detection of non-existent traces of Hebrew or Spanish in Cornish place names. In 1885, the ethnologist John Beddoe produced his bizarre and frequently grotesque treatise, The Races of Britain. The product of much enthusiastic skull measuring, the book deployed all the scientific racism of the imperial era on home ground to propose an 'index of nigrescence on which the Cornish were decidedly the darkest people in England proper. "

"In the 1720s, the antiquarian William Stukeley, having explored Avebury and Stonehenge, began to publish on the Temples of the Ancient Celts, starting a trend - which still hasn't entirely died - for misattributing Neolithic and Bronze Age ritual sites to Celtic druids (a term first recorded by Caesar for an apparent priestly caste in Gaul). To this heady brew of linguistics, antiquarianism and classics was added a vital contemporary component. Britain, France and various other European nations were already embarked on their own imperial adventures at this stage, and had already encountered Indigenous peoples in North America and elsewhere. They found something familiar in Greek and Roman responses to Celts and Gauls - the same mixture of contempt and fascination, fear and desire that typified their own notions of the Noble Savage"

"

In the murky period between the departure of the Romans from Britain and the consolidation of a new England under Athelstan, Cornwall, were sometimes told, had its own kings. But these are elusive royals, glimpsed only as ambiguous entries in later Welsh texts, or as names chiselled into granite. There's a slender stone column by the roadside at the edge of Fowey, with a Latin commemoration of a Drustanus, son of Cunomorus. There's a Doniert named on a broken cross-shaft on a hilltop above the River Fowey north of St Cleer. And on the moors of Penwith, a mile from my homeplace, stands the Mên Scryfa, the Writing Stone' - a rough, head-high standing stone, a little greasy and reddish around the middle where the cattle have rubbed against it. On its northern side, easiest to read when the sun is low in the west, are three rough- carved words: Rialobrani Cunovali fili - 'Rialobran, son of Cunoval? These stones, dating from somewhere between the fifth and eighth centuries, are Cornwall's oldest primary written sources. The elements cun ('hound' or 'chieftain') and ri ('royal') certainly indicate elevated status, but not necessarily kingship as we understand it. The post-Roman reality might have involved any number of under-kings or local lords, none necessarily identified exclusively with a discrete block of territory. At a higher level, there may have been some kind of peripatetic overlord or high king, or even a competing cluster of them, but again without the absolute control over a firmly bordered land familiar from our own modern conceptions of statehood."

"

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Cornwall was made up entirely of granite. It comes up so often as an adjective of place here: the granite cliffs and granite hills of a granite kingdom, as if the stone itself were sovereign. But if you look at a geological map, you'll be in for a surprise. Only a small part of Cornwall's surface is made of granite. It shows as irregular blotches, spaced down the length ofthe peninsula, each surrounded by the dark bands of what is sometimes called the country rock - the sediments and metamorphics that make up the great bulk of the surface area. Te explain all this, we need to dispense with centuries and millennia, and start counting our years in the hundreds of millions Around 400 million years ago, towards the end of the Silurel Period (which, for the sake of scale, was 10.000 times longer that the Mesolithic of our own prehistory), the patch of the Earth's

surface now occupied by Cornwall lay deep beneath the sea and somewhere close to the equator. To the north was a vast mountain range, the stumps of which survive today in Scotland and Scandinavia. The rivers that flowed down from those Caledonian peaks carried sediments southward to form deep layers of shale, mudstone and siltstone on the ocean bed. Then, around 300 million years ago, a new bout of mountain-building began. The collision of two vast landmasses, Laurasia and Gondwana, forced the petrified submarine sediments thousands of feet up into the sky. Bedding planes were bent and fractured, thrust into insane verticals, and a long line of peaks arose, sweeping from mainland Europe across what is now the West Country, South Wales and southernmost Ireland, and then curving down across Spain and into North Africa. There was no one around at the time to give this range a name, but we call it the Variscan Orogeny. The incredible forces involved in the creation of the orogeny were enough to transform the sedimentary rock. New slate, for example, was forged from old shale, its layers corresponding not to any ancient process of deposition, but formed afresh at right angles to a tremendous crushing force. In the roots of the mountains, meanwhile, far below the frozen summits, heat was added to Pressure as molten matter from the mantle pushed up through the Barths crust like a geological hernia."

"

Today, six granite bosses and sundry small outliers heare themselves above the surface, each separated from the next bya gap of ten or fifteen miles. The first and the biggest lies east of the Tamar: Dartmoor. Next comes Bodmin Moor, then the China Clay Country near St Austell, then the Carnmenellis region between Helton and Camborne, and then Penwith. The bosses decline in height from east to west, from 2,039 feet at High Willhays on Dartmoor to just 827 feet at the crown of Watch Croft in my home parish in Penwith. The sixth and final boss struggles even to make it above sea level, with a high point of just 167 feet, twenty-eight miles west of Land's End in the Isles of Scilly."

"

But what makes the surface archaeology here so imaginativel compelling is that we are not moving through an abandoned landscape. There has been a certain tidal quality to the human presence on the Cornish moors, an ebb and flow, periods of settlement and abandonment. But taken as a whole, it amounts to six millennia of continuing human activity - from the Neolithic propped stones to the lonely smallholdings of the nineteenth century, Behind me, I could see the embankments of the twentieth-century Stannon clay works, all of 300 feet from the 4,000-year-old stone circle of the same name. Ten miles away, at the southern edge of the moor near Minions, a complex of similar circles stands in a post-industria setting of nineteenth-century mine stacks, and a modern quarry eats its way right to the perimeter of an enclosing stone embankment on Stowe's Hill that probably belongs to the Neolithic. And then snaking across everything come the earth-cored, granite-faced field boundaries known as hedges in Cornwall - still in use, still being built afresh today, but incorporating elements or reiterating patterns that might have their origins in the Bronze Age. By some reckonings Cornish hedges are the oldest human-made structures still serving their original purpose in our own time. Archaeologists speak of the 'time-depth' palpable in the fabric of Penwith and Bodmin Moor'"

"

This road brought him back across another part of Bodmin Moor, through the same style of dreary landscape' he had encountered on the journey out. It was, he felt, all horribly 'undisciplined? This is the key to Gilpin's ideas about what made for attractive scenery - ideas that had a powerful impact on the landscape aesthetics of the emerging Romantic period, and that still linger today on a thousand biscuit tin lids. To be prettily appreciable, a landscape needed to conform. The fact that Gilpin actually liked the Scottish Highlands and the Lake District - places not typically admired by earlier generations of literary travellers - is sometimes seen as progressive, a first step towards a cultural embrace of wildness. But in his critique of Cornwall, he makes clear what made such places acceptable. Cornwall, he felt - from the little hed seen of it- was unremittingly heavy, unbroken, and unaccommodating. Bitt in Scotland, despite a similar dreariness, we had still a distance to make amends for the fore-grounds:"

"At King Arthur's Hall, a ferocity of larks overhead. This is one of the strangest of all the ancient monuments on the moor: a rectangular enclosure, banked up to head height, 160 feet by 66, and lined with granite posts like a mouthful of bad teeth. Theres nothing else like it hereabouts, and its age is unknown. It could be a Neolithic ritual site - possibly some kind of sacred tank that filled with water in the winter months. Or it could be a medieval pound for outsiders' cattle caught straying on the moorland commons. It certainly has nothing to do with King Arthur."

"Here's an image - a gothic one: A pool on a moor - the kind of moor that does not make a good picture. A louring sky and a cold wind ruffling the water; sheep on a scrubby slope in the distance, and the call of a bird - a curlew, perhaps. And at the edge of the pool, a kneeling figure, monstrously elongated, ragged of dress and with wild hair flying about a cadaverous face. He is bending and dipping, bending and dipping, reaching into the water with some tiny vessel then raising it sharply across his shoulder as if to fling its contents away into the valley of the River Fowey. But he can only ever flick a few droplets into the breeze, for he is trying to empty Dozmary Pool with only a holed limpet shell for a bailer. Every few moments, between the bending and the dipping, he throws back his head and roars into the wind. His name is Jan Tregagle; he is Cornwalls Faust, its Sisyphus with a dash of Heathcliff, an indigenous gothic character, far more potent than Joss Merlyn or Mrs Danvers. The Jan Tregagle story has its origins in oral tradition, so there is no single correct version."

"

By the 1770s, an estimated 469,000 gallons of brandy and 350,000 pounds of tea were being smuggled into Cornwall each year; and a 1783 government committee reported that vessels ofu to 300 tons were engaged in the illegal cross-Channel trade, Each was crewed by a hundred men, and could carry the enormous quantity of three thousand half-ankers |15,000 gallons| of spirits, and ten or twelve tons of tea? These ships were well armed. They sometimes travelled in convoy, offering their protection to fleets of smaller smuggling craft, and when they reached their terminus they often sailed straight into port in broad daylight. Not all of the operators were based in Cornwall; in another echo of those ancient 'Atlantic seaways, Irish sloops sometimes landed French cargoes in Cornish ports. And crucially, Cornwall was not the only place where smuggling happened. It went on to some degree around the entire coast of Britain, and was actually at its most intense not in Cornwall but in Sussex and Kent, for obvious reasons of proximity to the continent and the major London markets."

"Fiennes got the workers to cast her a piece for a souvenir ('Looks Like silver'). They also gave her a Cornish Diamond' - a quartz crystal 'as Long as halfe my finger."

"

Once the fish were brought to shore, the women and children went to work. Originally, pilchards were preserved by smoking. But by Carew's time, smoking had given way to the far more efficient process of salting. A legacy remained, however: the processed fish were known as fumados, Spanish for 'smoked", which in turn became "fair-maids', a Cornish dialect term for pilchards. Inside the cellars of the coastal villages, the fish were first 'bulked' packed with salt in deep layers and left for several weeks to draw off the blood and the oil (which was used for lighting, leather- and soap-making and fertiliser). They were then pressed into barrels using poles weighted with heavy granite boulders. The packed and preserved pilchards were shipped directly from Cornwall to France, Spain (hence fumados) and above all Italy, where strict Catholic observance of Lent and meat-free Fridays created a huge market for cheap salt fish. After making their delivery in Naples, Genoa or Venice, the boats often continued to the Black Sea and came home with cargoes of Russian grain.? The standard contemporary image of the Cornish fisherman, reiterated in countless TV documentaries and books, is of a fiercely independent hunter of the sea, untrammelled by the rules of the land and plainly suggestive of the smuggler and wrecker of romantic fiction. But this vision of hardy individualism is clearly at odds with the realities of Cornwall's most famous historical fishery. The pilchard industry was a collective practice, and from as early as the fifteenth century it was highly capitalised."

"

France, Stanhope Forbes.... travelled first to Falmouth, then moved westwards...Eventually, he reached Penzance and made his way west along the seafront towards the adjoining fishing port of Newlyn. "Little did I think that the cluster of grey-roofed houses which I saw before me against the hiliside would be my home for many years" he later wrote."

"

The Duchy is not, and never was, the same thing as the territorial entity known as Cornwall. It is a feudal institution made up of the lands and business interests of the heir to the British Crown (which pass automatically back to the Crown when there is no heir). In the beginning it included the seventeen 'antique manors' that had formed the core of the earldom, most of them in eastern Cornwall, plus various other lands inside and outside of Cornwall. It also claimed most of the Cornish foreshore, and the rights to any ships wrecked thereupon. Over the centuries the Duchy grew, taking in fifteen extra manors seized from local priories during the Reformation, for example. But only a relatively small proportion of the Cornish landmass ever belonged directly to the Duchy, and from an early stage most of its assets were outside of Cornwall. Meanwhile, Cornwall itself was also administered as an English county, divided into administrative hundreds and returning MPs to Parliament in London like anywhere else.? But the Duchy of Cornwall had ultimate control over the stannaries. The dukes Lord Warden had oversight, appointing stannary officials and summoning the stannary convocations.' And the duties gathered under the stannary system went straight into the Duchy coffers - as much as €10,000 a year by the mid-eighteenth century.? The Duchy was, in the words of one historian, a constant drain of wealth' from Cornwall, propping up the lifestyle of many an heir to the throne,'° and a 'long-continuing mark through the pages of history of its original condition as a conquered country!" There are a good few people today who insist that Cornwall must always be described as a duchy, and never a 'county' - as if being a feudal possession of the English royal family were the best manifestation of Celtic quasi-independence. But if we're talking about the Duchv and asking Where does Cornwall ?' then perhaps the answer is at Kensington Palace."

"this is what scholars sometimes call a 'denial of coevalness' among travel writers to view the people they meet on their journeys as trapped in some distant epoch, far removed from the sophisticated modernity of the author and their readers. And you find plenty of it in early twentieth-century books about Cornwall. But I need to make an admission here. The standard reaction to depictions like the one from C. E. Vulliamy is outrage. People share things like this on social media as examples of the 'racism' to which the Cornish are supposedly still subjected today. But there's something else beneath the umbrage, very seldom voiced: a certain thrill in the way that even the most derogatory description confirms the difference I want for myself. Most people who self- identify as Cornish' in the twenty-first century - and all Cornish nationalists - are keen to stress their own minority status, their own distinction. But no modern Cornish person was ever subjected to racist abuse as a Cornish person while sitting quietly on a train or walking down a city street (and that alone is a very good reason to think carefully before making glib claims about anti-Cornish racism). Far from the questioning of a person's Britishness that is such a feature of contemporary racism - 'Where are you really from?' - the standard Cornish grievance emerges from a dismissal of otherness, an unwillingness to take seriously claims that to be Cornish means to be other than English. Because of that, finding ones forebears denied coevalness and described as 'untainted aboriginals' can be wonderfully, dangerously validating: Look! We really are different! The risk here is that this response emerges from its own unchecked privilege (again: no modern Cornish person - as a Cornish person - was ever subjected to racism while sitting quietly on a train)."

"

This mixing of languages did not come to an abrupt end when the last of the Mousehole Cornish-speakers died. There are terms I've used my whole life - as a native English speaker - which I only discovered in adulthood were unique to Cornwall: the adjective 'teasy', meaning bad-tempered, supposedly from tesek (hot, as in hot-tempered); the noun 'stank for a long and energetic walk, typically over the moors or along the cliffs, from stankya, to stamp or trample. Recently, reading a nineteenth- century list of dialect words of Cornish-language origin, things forgotten since childhood flashed up at me from the page. When we scrambled down the cliffs below Pendeen to go fishing, we might decide to make up some browse (rhymes with grouse), a chum of chopped fish guts to tempt in a better catch (perhaps from bryws, for crumbs or fragments, or maybe from bros, a stew). And if the browse did its work, we might catch a mergy (from mor-ki, sea dog), a lesser-spotted dogfish. If we went to the moors instead of the sea, rabbiting with ferrets and terriers, and one of the dogs put up a rabbit from a gorse bush, she might coose it (thymes with puss, as in cat), pursue it closely. This is from koos, woodland, seemingly linked to the idea of Aushing quarry from cover, though by my childhood it had come to mean pursuit by a dog across open ground, perhaps having amalgamated with the English word course: Other words are less clear. We called the blennies and shannies we caught in the rock pools around Cape Cornwall bullers: Was this from bulgranack, meaning pool toad? And sometimes the entries on the list seem familiat, but memory fails. Did someone's nan in Pendeen complain of the bulhorns, the Cornish word for snails"

"

Language was not the only aspect of the Cornish revival movement that gathered pace in the early twentieth century. Henry Jenner sought to establish Cornwall's identity as a 'Celtic nation' in full, insisting that every Cornishman knows well enough, proud as he may be of belonging to the British Empire, that he is no more an Englishman than a Caithness man is, that he has as much right to a separate local patriotism to his little Motherland, which rightly understood is no bar, but rather an advantage to the greater British patriotism. Jenner's very careful language around Empire and Britishness probably had a lot to do with the rather different Celtic nationalism to be found in Ireland at the time. But his argument was successful nonetheless. In 1904 Jenner was made a Bard of the Welsh Gorsedd during an early pan-Celtic gathering, and Cornwall was later recognised as a full member of the Celtic Congress, founded in 1917 to promote the languages and identities of the 'Celtic nations! Into the 1920s, the revivalists gathered other symbols of nationhood. The white cross on a black background was established as a national flag. This had been mentioned in an early nineteenth- century history as 'formerly the banner of St. Perran, and the standard of Cornwall; probably with some allusion to the black ore and the white metal of tin'"' and had been used occasionally since. But few Cornish people would have recognised it before the twentieth century. A black kilt was adopted, on no real historical evidence, and a full Cornish tartan' was later invented. A strong emphasis was placed on folklore of the sort gathered by Robert Hunt and William Bottrell, while the Methodism, emigration Culture and industrial mining that had characterised the experience of thousands of working-class Cornish people for a hundred years of more were generally ignored. "

"

In 1814, while Raffles and Ran Dipura were still in Java, Sir Rose Price bought an estate at Trengwainton, just north of Penzance, with money from the slave economy of the Caribbean and began to fill its grounds with exotic plants shipped in through the global networks of trade and colonialism. Those networks carried people too. The Papuan child whom Raffles called Dick was certainly not the first enslaved person to disembark in Cornwall; Rose Price had enslaved people from his Caribbean estates working for him at Trengwainton. Others came ashore and settled of their own volition, and parish records throw up little glimpses of these lives.+ St Gluvias lies upriver from Falmouth, just beyond Penryn - the sort of place where a sailor might make a home after the ship he arrived on sailed away without him. On 28 June 1802, in the church there, one William Weymouth married a widow named Maria Blackall. The parish clerk recorded the groom as a negro and the bride as 'a black woman's Two years later in the same parish, the clerk described another groom with the same word. Samuel Steward, a mariner by profession, married Ann Yendale, a spinster of this parish? Is the baby called Elizabeth Stewart, registered at St Gluvias in March the following year as the child of Samuel and Anne, their daughter? It seems likely, for the spelling of names in nineteenth-century parish registers is wildly inconsistent. The little girl called Harriot Weymouth, registered in August 1803, was certainly William and Maria's child.& Here they are, seen faintly through the archival haze: black children born in Cornwall, growing up in parishes around the Fal more than two centuries ago, able to call themselves Cornish if they thought that was a good thing to be."

"Still sniffly after three weeks in New York, Hoskin boarded another schooner, the William Eaton, bound for Washington. Too or little vessel for three darwrite late, he discovered that the captain was a foul-tempered drunk, who, on their first afternoon at sea, brutally attacked the ship's cook, bulwarks. By the dine tie pal an elderly black man, having found fault with a boiled chicken he is had been smashed in, bernit had prepared. Still drunk two days later, and spouting racial abuse, he attacked the cook again, with pieces of trees cut to burn; some hey had lost their it bore hote time after with a rope; and after that with a fire shovel'. Hoskin was k, but more bad weather verte horrified, and tried to nurse the badly wounded cook: r three weeks, south as fur a les - far as Marthas Vineyad, dal bruary after seven webs tel I put the poor man to bed and gave him warm tea; I wept by the side of his bed; - what will you have cook said I? - I am very cold said he, and thirsty; - I covered him, and brought him some brandy and water, I could do nothing more. tavern that fames Hasten dies entertainment and accommis r of the Pence, and Treme He was delighted mith tele rued frais and hot tales al with moching of those pat oh traveller in Einglend New list coping dat out River that mas Font He tried to deflect the captain's rage by taking over the injured cook's duties, but the following afternoon the old man died. As witness to a violent killing, Hoskin realised that he was in a tricky situation. The captain hauled him up and pointedly asked what I thought was the cause of his death' - a question he managed to "turn off?. He must have been decidedly nervous until they reached Washington. He decided that he would have little chance of bringing the captain to justice, but took some small comfort in his belief that the case is known in another court of justice. The incident had been Hoskin's first experience of America's violently racialised society. "

"James Hoskin made his great journey from Cornwall for pleasure and knowledge. But most of those who left later in the century went for economic reasons. In the Victorian period, Cornwall was one of the major emigration regions of Europe, easily comparable to southern Italy or post-Famine Ireland. But there was an important difference. The people who left Ireland and Italy were mostly fleeing from rural poverty; those who went from Cornwall were escaping a collapsing mining economy. Theirs was, in fact, one of the first great post-industrial movements of people. That movement would eventually cast a web of Cornish connections around the world - to any place where tin, copper or gold was mined. But it began within Cornwall. "

"

Earlier in the century entire families left, never expecting to return. But by the 1870s the usual practice was for the men to go while wives and children stayed behind in Cornwall, living on remittances from the other side of the world. Others went with a clear plan: to make enough to come home and get into some business other than mining. Just over the brow of the hill from my homeplace there is a farm called Dakota, named by a local family who returned from America at the turn of the twentieth century with enough savings to buy a decent moorland acreage. In the 1850s, a correspondent for the Mining Journal reported that around Chacewater - where Raden Rana Dipuras companions had taken an underground tour in 1816 - 'Scarcely a family is to be found one member at least of whom has not been out either to Mexico, California, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, Africa, Spain' Some had been abroad for as long as fifteen years; others had done multiple stints overseas, and when they returned they put their money into a business of their own, with a public- house or beer-shop being the principal and favourite speculation. The correspondent also reported that Portuguese and Spanish is well and very generally spoken by them when conversing on the subject of their foreign experience.? Less than a century after the deaths of Dolly Pentreath and William Bodinar, Breton visitors to Cornwall would no longer be able to make themselves understood in their own language. But a monoglot Spanish-speaker asking for directions in the countryside near Truro would have had little trouble, and returned emigrants could be spotted sporting Mexican sombreros in Redruth market. "

"

The original receivers were built here by British Telecom in the 1960s, to pick up the first international satellite television broadcasts, and for a time it was the biggest satellite station in the world. You could see the dishes from the hills at home in Penwith, like a herd of elephants grazing the distant levels of the Lizard. We came here on school trips, at a time when giant satellite antennae still seemed to belong to a promised technological future. But now, as I got closer, I could see the streaks of rust. The place had been closed for over a decade, and the dishes - each named for an Arthurian character, Guinevere, Merlin, Arthur, Tristan and Isolde"

"She and her brother even had the black hair and olive complexion said to be a common feature of old Mount's Bay families. A nineteenth-century travel writer would no doubt have taken her as evidence of Cornish descent from Jews or Phoenicians, though locals would more likely have ascribed it to the 1595 Spanish raid on Penzance, Newlyn and Mousehole. "

"

The poem 'Delectable Duchy written in the early go when Betjeman was already established as Poet Laureate - late, Os old brand-name ironically, and bemoans the state of moder Cornwall, a pathetic sight, / Raddled and put upon and tired / And looking somewhat over-hired: What Betjeman had once known as open cliff was now hogged by villas; there were public toilets where once cattle had grazed and a smell of deep-fry haunted the shore around Polzeath. He ends up wishing for a tsunami to sweep it all away, leaving only the heights of Bodmin Moor as 'a second Silly. It's a textbook example of the strange self-loathing that so often emerges from within the literature of tourism: anti-tourism, visitors convinced that the place they love has been ruined by other visitors, a conviction that we are 'travellers and cosmopolitans, as Evelyn Waugh once put it, and that the tourist is the other fellow. When it came to Cornwall, John Betjeman performed anti- tourism perfectly. He was always turning back to childhood in his poetry and prose. When I was a boy, all this was open fields; he writes." But if you look carefully, you'll notice that his nostalgic vision is always, explicitly, of a tourist experience. In his verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, it's the journey down to Cornwall' that matters, and the anticipation of finding out who was down' - who else had made the trip from London for the summer. Might it be Roland with his golf clubs, or Kathleen with her Sealyhams? Could it be Mrs Hanks or Mrs Wilder in their holiday bungalows while Primsie and Prue frolic in the garden and little John himself scampers down the fennel-fringed lane on the first morning to make himself 'monarch of miles of sand'? The idea that these people themselves might have been ruining' Cornwall is never countenanced, and the locals get hardly a look-in (when they do, they are an iron age people who were discovered by the tourists in the last century'). " Where does Cornwall begin in Betjeman's tourist vision? Somewhere on the drive down from the city. And where does it end? In a rash of cliffside villas, apparently."

"When I'd dressed I pressed on along the coast path, with that deep loneliness that comes when you're walking late in the day and planning to sleep outdoors, the sense that you have been forgotten and that the rest of the world is gathered in warmth and company around televisions and kitchen tables."

"I hadn't really known why I'd ended up here - other than that it has always felt like a more natural terminus than Land's End, two and a half miles to the north, and that it is where the Cornubian Batholith finally bursts entirely through, naked of everything but lichen. But now I remembered: this was the place, six years earlier, where wed scattered my grandmother's ashes. I could see the very spot from where I lay, a boulder, dolphining through low furze a short way inland. My grandmother: the woman who had come to join her own mother in Penzance with her two small children in the 1950s and so ensured, seven decades later, that granite is my lodestone."

[bikepackinguk]

Day Eighty-three

I had the fortune of passing by a haybale cinema as the drenching rain came down yesterday evening, which wasn't currently in use and had a nice big event shelter up.

So, a night was had hunkering down from the weather in a field over the clifftops! Not too bad at all a night's sleep, and had a spectacular sunset to view across St Brides Bay.

I'd rather not dawdle when camped in a spot like this though, so it's a very early start today to get back onto Route 4 on the clifftops.

It's hills again to start the day as the road winds over the cliffs past some lovely scenery and at least one hobbit hole before nyooming back down to sea level at the pretty beach at Broad Haven.

It's a turn eastward here as the cycle route heads inland into the hills. The wind is again very blowy on another overcast morning, but for this leg it's finally at my back for a change, which helps with the long ride in to Haverfordwest.

A short stop is had here to resupply, before following on the route south. It's a stretch of nice off-traffic riding through some beautiful wooded lanes, though the rains do start to make themselves known as well.

After some rolling climbs, the trail goes on a lovely ride downriver past Westfield Pill and a beautiful heron at the nature reserve, before a steep zig-zag to get up yo the bridge and across the water.

It's onto the A477 now, but there is a spacious cycle path to the side meaning I get to keep out of the busy traffic.

Across the Cleddau Bridge and over the Cleddau Ddu, I cross into Pembroke Dock. Not before taking in the wonderful view from the bridge, as the sun is starting to clear a few of the clouds.

The A road is followed a little further yet, up another steep hill until an equally steep zoom back down to the lovely town of Pembroke.

The route veers off the A road to swing around the Pembroke River for a panoramic view of the beautiful castle.

Out from Pembroke and it's along some nice cycle paths before switching to more country lanes as Route 4 carries on eastwards. It's some long climbs as the trail heads up onto The Ridgeway, which gives some great sights across the Welsh countryside.

After a long damn ride up, it's a steep winding drop back down through Penally and through the holiday park into the busy town of Tenby.

It's a steep grind up to the path overlooking the beach here, but the view fown the coast to Caldey Island is a spectacular reward, and I have a break here to capitalise on it.

After navigating the thronging streets, it's out into another stiff climb through some back lanes before another zooming descent to the picturesque beach at Saundersfoot Beach.

I'm treated to a nice promenade ride here including some cool tunnels to head directly through the cliffs to reach Wisemans Bridge.

Once again, it's a heavy climb up over the cliffs, though the weather at least has finally started to brighten and the wind seems to be calming for the first time in ages.

Past Telpyn Beach the road climbs into a dense forest, before it's more slogging uphill into the coastal fields.

With the hedges by the roadside blocking most views, it's head down and working hard for a good while up as Route 4 cuts diagonally up across the hills. Another long swift ride back down along a bubbling river brings me down to New Mill, and a bit more slogging back up finally results in putting in to St Clears.

The hills have been relentless today, and whilst there's daylight awhile yet, I can feel my legs suffering from the effort of the day. I think a rest day is getting due!

With some wonderful fortune, the amazing Nerys has business down south so has managed to get our journeys to coincide, meaning I get some awesome campervan support rather than dealing with stealth camping.

So, I'm going to have a nice comfy lie down on a bed far softer than last nights'! I'll be back to it on Thursday.

TTFN!

[lovewales]

Cleddau River   |  by Gareth Thomas

[hellotomdyer]

If I’m not mistaken, I think someone actually lives in there! Next door to @jollysailorburton - wise choice! I caught this view staying at a @qualitycottages cottage for my mums birthday which had a swimming pool and games room. I still need to get that bullseye from round the clock at darts. My sister and I destroyed my nephew and his girlfriend at table tennis though! I love the alternative and break from the norm. Everything is so prescriptive and designed a certain way. I understand the merits of that system, but it really does not enhance individuality or real enjoyment of a space or person. #granddesigns #river #pier #rivercleddau #cleddau #cleddauriver #ontheriver #water #calm #alternativeliving #home #house #alternative #living #familytime #games #birthday #family #coastalliving #coast #pubs #holidays #getaways #hottub #swimmingpool #swimming #individuality (at Burton, Pembrokeshire)

[welshsparky]

Cleddau river from the bridge

[clausenhermann0-blog]

The World's Most Lovely National Parks

ational Parks are one particular of the prime adventures. Yellow Stone: Yellowstone Countrywide Park currently being three,500-sq.-mile, is a wilderness recreation region atop a volcanic sizzling spot. The park spreads into elements of Montana. It features extraordinary canyons, alpine rivers, scorching springs and gushing geysers, like its most popular. It is also property to hundreds of animal species, wolves, bison, elk and antelope. Grand Canyon: Grand Canyon Nationwide Park is residence to a lot of the large Grand Canyon, with its layered bands of crimson rock revealing tens of millions of years of environmental background. Views contain Mather Stage, Yavapai Observation Station and architect Mary Colter's Lookout Studio. Yosemite: Yosemite Countrywide Park is in California's Sierra Nevada foothills. America's National Parks for its giant, ancient sequoia trees, and for Tunnel See, the iconic vista of large Bridalveil Slide and the granite cliffs of El Capitan and Fifty percent Dome. In Yosemite Village are shops, dining establishments, lodging, the Yosemite Museum and the Ansel Adams Gallery. Kruger: Kruger National Park, in South Africa, is 1 of Africa's greatest sport belongings. Its higher thickness of wild animals contains the Huge 5: lions, rhinos, elephants and buffalos. Other mammals make their home here, as do assorted chicken species these kinds of as vultures, eagles and storks. Mountains, and tropical forests are all portion of the countryside. Torres del Paine: Torres del Paine Countrywide Park, in Chile's Patagonia area, is acknowledged for it is rising mountains, bright blue icebergs that slice from glaciers and golden pampas (grasslands) that housing exceptional wildlife this sort of as llama-like guanacos. Some of its biggest iconic sites are the three granite towers from which the park will take its name and the peaks referred to as Cuernos del Paine. Serengeti: Serengeti Countrywide Park is known for its huge once-a-year migration of wildebeest and zebra. Searching for new meadow, the mobs shift north from their qualifications grounds in the grassy southern plains. Quite a few cross the marshy western corridor's crocodile-infested Grumeti River. Other folks change northeast to the Lobo Hills, residence to black eagles. Black rhinos dwell the granite outcrops of the Moru Kopjes. Fiordland: Fiordland National Park is in the southwest of New Zealand's South Island. It truly is known for the glacier-carved fiords of Uncertain sounds. A seaside forest trail on the sandy Milford shore proposals sights of soaring Mitre Peak. Hooked up, the craggy Earl Mountains are mirrored in the sleek floor of Mirror Lakes. On the Cleddau River, the Chasm Walk passes above bridges with views of effective waterfalls. Zion: Zion National Park is a southwest Utah character maintain illustrious by Zion Canyon's steep purple cliffs. Zion Canyon Scenic Travel scratches through its principal area, major to forest tracks along the Virgin River. The river streams to the Emerald Pools, which have waterfalls and a droopy yard. Also alongside the river, partially by way of deep chasms, is Zion Narrows wading hike. Lakes Countrywide Park getting 295-sq.-km, is a forest reserve in central Croatia. It truly is regarded for a chain of 16 terraced lakes, blended by waterfalls, that lengthen into a limestone canyon. Walkways and mountaineering trails breeze about and throughout the h2o, and an electric boat hyperlinks the twelve higher and 4 minimal lakes. The later on are the site of Veliki Slap, a seventy eight meters tall waterfall. Glacier: Glacier Countrywide Park becoming one,583-sq.-miles, is a wilderness location in Montana's Rocky Mountains, with glacier-carved peaks and valleys operating to the Canadian border. It is traversed by the mountainous. Among added seven hundred miles of mountaineering trails, it has a route to attractive Concealed Lake. It has the actions of backpacking, cycling and tenting. Assorted wildlife ranges from mountain goats to grizzly bears.

[usnewsrank]

Fourth paddleboarder dies in drowning tragedy as woman arrested for manslaughter

Fourth paddleboarder dies in drowning tragedy as woman arrested for manslaughter

The first three drowning victims pictured (Picture: Athena Pictures/PA) A woman who was fighting for her life after paddleboarding in Wales has died, taking the death toll to four. The incident last Saturday saw a group of paddleboarders get into difficulty on the River Cleddau in Haverfordwest. Andrea Powers, 41, from Bridgend, was taken to hospital afterwards but has since died of her…

[alexalbert-blog-blog]

Haverfordwest: One in hospital after River Cleddau rescue operation

Haverfordwest: One in hospital after River Cleddau rescue operation

One person is confirmed to be in hospital after police reported people in distress in the water. Source link

[travelasdesired]

South Wales is home to some gorgeous scenery. I know I’ve said this a lot about Wales but it just keeps surprising me. With dramatic beach towns and narrow winding roads to get lost on it’s a great place to explore.

Most vacationers to Wales tend to head to the southern part of the country. Cardiff is the main and largest city, however, I decided that I was going to skip Cardiff on this trip and opt for the less populated towns. This portion of my trip was really up in the air. I really didn’t have a plan except that there were several specific places I wanted to visit such as St. David’s Cathedral and the Pembrokeshire coast. Both of which boast beautiful settings.

Once I left Portmerion I took a 3 hour trip south to Fishguard, it would be my home base for the next two nights while I explored the Pembrokeshire coast of South Wales. It was some of the most gorgeous country I have driven through. I ended up stopping for lunch on the way in Tre’r-ddol at a place called Cletwr. It was the first thing I saw but I’m so glad that I stopped.

Cletwr Cafe is a community-run shop and cafe. All the proceeds go back into the Tre’r-ddol community. If you happen to be in this part of the world get the chicken and cheese sandwich. You won’t be sorry. I think it was the best sandwich I’ve had…it could be because I was hungry…but I don’t think so. This is a great spot to pick up good, healthy food. I happened to sit at a table that was set aside for people who were on their own and didn’t mind if someone sat with them. It was called the Chatter & Natter table. I just loved that I happened to sit at this table.

Fishguard/Goodwick: Where I stayed

Fishguard itself is a coastal town in the northern part of Pembrokeshire. The town seemed relatively quiet. I stayed at the Ivy Bridge Guest House close to the port area. It was nicely located next to well-kept walking paths which lead you past the town Rugby complex and to the harbor. I was there on a weekend and it was still pretty quiet. My accommodations were nice and situated on the south side of town so it was easy to hop on the road down to St. David’s which took 30 minutes.

I didn’t do much in Fishguard itself. The Ivy Bridge had a wonderful full breakfast included in the stay, which I took full advantage of. There are several restaurants in the port area but I ended up eating at my hotel because the hotel restaurant, which is only open to guests, operates an authentic Chinese restaurant which Jamie Oliver approved of. It is awesome. The rooms were clean and comfortable.

What to do: St. David’s

St. David’s Cathedral was one of my must-visits. It’s one of those places that when you ask the locals, they all say to go there. I had a few detours on the way…namely the GPS brought me to the center of Haverfordwest which was a very commercial built-up area. However, it did have a great outdoor shopping area, Riverside Shopping, which straddled both sides of the Western Cleddau river. This area was littered with cute coffee shops, eateries, and everything from outdoor clothing shops to hair salons. Once I got some caffeine and a tasty snack I got back on the right road to St. David’s.

As you drive through Wales you’ll see a lot of options for things to do and you’ll have your pick of Woollen Mills, Arts Centers, and historically significant shops. The first place I stopped was Newgale. Newgale is home to two miles of pristine coast and is a favorite for water sport adventurers. The approach from either direction is stunning as you drive from almost 100 ft in elevation down to the coast.

From Newgale, my next stop was the Solva Woollen Mill. On Sundays, the mill is only open for a few short hours so plan your trip accordingly. When they are open, they have a gorgeous mill with beautiful woven products you can purchase for your home and closet. They are the oldest working woolen mill in Pembrokeshire. I stopped in for tea and a lovely lemon cake. They have a small tea room where you can enjoy a light snack. There is also seating outside if the weather is cooperating. When I was there, I was fortunate enough to see a real-life running, Delorian! Back to the future in South Wales.

Finally, I made it to St. David’s cathedral. Since it was a Sunday the cathedral was closed for Sunday services but you could still visit the Bishop’s Palace which the entrance fee is covered under your Cadw explorer’s pass. The Bishop’s palace is definitely worth the stop. Although it is mostly a shell you can still see how the rooms functioned and you could spend all day just walking the grounds.

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St. David’s Cathedral

Bishop’s Palace

There has been a church on site since the 6th century. The current cathedral’s construction began in 1181 and was completed shortly after. Over the years it has been restored by famous architects such as John Nash and George Gilbert Scott.

St. David’s itself is a beautiful town full of cute shops, cafes, and restaurants. Some of them to my taste such as Chapel Chocolates, with its wide variety of truffles and molded chocolate and some not so much.

One of the more interesting restaurants I came across was the Grub kitchen at the Bug Farm. If you can guess where I’m going with this… the menu, which I couldn’t bring myself to eat, offered edible insects! I know. If you can get past all of the creepy crawlies, this is a great place to bring kids or anyone who is interested in insects. Dr. Beynon’s Bug Farm is 100 acres of bug heaven. This farm not only grows insects but researches and provides educational tours for school groups and tourists. Even though I felt like things were constantly crawling on me I was pleasantly surprised by the facility and the educational programs offered. This is definitely a must stop, even if you don’t think it’s for you.

Things to know before you go

All of the roads are pretty steep in St. David’s so make sure you have good footwear.

If you are driving note that the parking facilities are all pay-to-park and you will need cash, they do not take credit cards or notes for that mater so make sure you have coins.

Bring a raincoat. It is the UK and subject to the unpredictable rain shower or two.

Stop as often as you can. Wales has so many breathtaking views and historical points of interest. Make sure you build in some time for things that you come upon and don’t plan for.

Are you planning for your next road trip? Would you visit Wales on your next trip? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time.

  Road Trip of South Wales Part 1: Pembrokeshire South Wales is home to some gorgeous scenery. I know I’ve said this a lot about Wales but it just keeps surprising me.

[carolmunro]

Pembroke Summer

Ah, just when Christmas is approaching, here is a throwback to summer in West Wales. This photo is in fact the back of the Watermen’s Arms in Pembroke. It is situated ion the Pembroke or Cleddau River which runs into the sea at Milford Haven. See my posts on West Wales, here and Pembroke Castle here. For more information on Wales check out MyBritTrip.com. Fun Fact: If you have ever wondered where…

[35elms]

Day 38b | The Spectacular Milford Sound: Shortly after leaving Lake Marian, we drove up to and through the Homer tunnel. The views were incredible (😭 that the gif just doesn’t do them justice)!

Last stop on the way to Milford Sound was The Chasm, a series of gushing waterfalls that have been formed from the Cleddau River being forced through a narrow rocky valley as it descends from the Darran Mountains. Looking straight down from the bridge across the falls was pretty scary but the views were fab!

After The Chasm, we drove down the final part of the Milford Road, as it descended into forest-carpeted canyons before delivering us to the Milford Sound Lodge. While the Lodge was the only accommodation option near Milford Sound, it was also lovely – providing an idyllic setting from which to enjoy the natural beauty of the area.

For dinner we booked into the Lodge’s Pio Pio restaurant – it was delicious! Claire enjoyed a tasty venison steak, while Matt absolutely loved his braised beef cheek. After dinner, we took our bottle of gin down to the foreshore (c.20 minute walk from the lodge) to take in the scenery as the sun set. It was stunning, but the sandflies proved to be too much... and before long we were running back towards the Lodge slapping at our legs and arms! Thankfully we managed to catch the sunset through the trees instead.

Claire managed to charm some ice and tonic water from the restaurant staff, and we retreated to the relative safety of our campervan. We enjoyed a few too many G&Ts while listening to Shantaram on Audible – it was an incredibly relaxing end to the evening.

[travellerfufi-blog]

The World's Most Beautiful National Parks

National Parks are one of the top experiences

Yellow Stone

Yellowstone National Park being 3500-sq- mile is a wild diversion region on a volcanic problem area The recreation center spreads into parts of Montana It highlights emotional gullies elevated waterways hot springs and spouting fountains including its generally renowned Its likewise home to several creature species wolves buffalo elk and impala

Terrific Canyon

Terrific Canyon National Park is home to a great part of the enormous Grand Canyon with its layered groups of red shake uncovering a large number of long stretches of natural history Perspectives incorporate Mather Point Yavapai Observation Station and engineer Mary Colters Lookout Studio

Yosemite

Yosemite National Park is in Californias Sierra Nevada lower regions Its well known for its goliath antiquated sequoia trees and for Tunnel View the notable vista of high Bridalveil Fall and the stone bluffs of El Capitan and Half Dome In Yosemite Village are shops cafés lodging the Yosemite Museum and the Ansel Adams Gallery

Kruger

Kruger National Park in South Africa is one of Africas biggest amusement resources Its high thickness of wild creatures incorporates the Big 5 lions rhinos elephants and bison Different warm blooded animals make their home here as do various flying creature species for example vultures falcons and storks Mountains and tropical timberlands are all piece of the farmland

Torres del Paine

Torres del Paine National Park in Chiles Patagonia territory is known for its rising mountains brilliant blue icy masses that cut from ice sheets and brilliant pampas (fields) that lodging uncommon natural life for example llama-like guanacos A portion of its most noteworthy notorious destinations are the 3 stone towers from which the recreation center takes its name and the pinnacles called Cuernos del Paine

Serengeti

Serengeti National Park is known for its colossal yearly relocation of wildebeest and zebra Looking for new knoll the hordes move north from their experience grounds in the verdant southern fields Various cross the muddy western passageways crocodile-swarmed Grumeti River Others swing upper east to the Lobo Hills home to dark falcons Dark rhinos live the rock outcrops of the Moru Kopjes

Fiordland

Fiordland National Park is in the southwest of New Zealands South Island Its known for the icy mass cut inlets of Uncertain sounds A shoreline timberland trail on the sandy Milford shore recommendations perspectives on taking off Miter Peak Connected the rugged Earl Mountains are reflected in the smooth surface of Mirror Lakes On the Cleddau River the Chasm Walk disregards spans with perspectives on incredible cascades

Zion

Zion National Park is a southwest Utah nature protect distinguished by Zion Canyons precarious red precipices Zion Canyon Scenic Drive scratches through its principle segment prompting timberland tracks along the Virgin River The waterway streams to the Emerald Pools which have cascades and a saggy garden Likewise along the waterway somewhat through profound abysses is Zion Narrows swimming climb related articles

Lakes National

Lakes National Park being 295-sq- km is a woods save in focal Croatia Its perceived for a chain of 16 terraced lakes consolidated by cascades that stretch out into a limestone ravine Walkways and climbing trails breeze around and over the water and an electric vessel connects the 12 upper and 4 minor lakes The later are the site of Veliki Slap a 78 meters tall cascade

Icy mass

Icy mass National Park being 1583-sq- miles is a wild region in Montanas Rocky Mountains with ice sheet cut pinnacles and valleys racing to the Canadian fringe Its crossed by the sloping Among extra 700 miles of mountaineering trails it has a course to appealing Hidden Lake It has the exercises of exploring cycling and outdoors Assorted untamed life ranges from mountain goats to wild bears previous articles