Whilst writing about Philip Marsden's new book Summer Isles here a few days ago I went down into the scribbles basement to revisit my 2015 thoughts in his earlier book Rising Ground - A Search for the Spirit of Place and decided to bring it back into the light...
February 15th 2015...
One of the most immediate and surprising effects of reading Rising Ground by Philip Marsden is the whole notion of those landscapes of childhood...
'On to these blank places - known only as the 'hill' and the 'combe' - I sketched the map of my childhood... for years...whenever I heard the word' childhood' , it always brought to mind a picture of the hill and the combe...'
Though Cornwall is not the landscape of Philip Marsden's childhood, it is the place he now calls home and the subject of his wanderings in Rising Ground, and with that comes the debate about where exactly is home...
Is it the place where you were born...
Is it the house you grew up in...
Is it the house you make your own...
Home is certainly a shifting concept, and one that my recent reading of The Snow Geese by William Fiennes gave me much to think about, and as Philip Marsden made his way around the county it was fascinating to see what might attract his attention. As he proceeded to elaborate on that search for the spirit of place I found my own childhood landscape pictures appearing in my mind, conjuring up 'so much of a life,' and it all made me think how key those landscapes of the child's eye are.
It's true... apart from the daily accumulation of views of the Tamar Valley views from home, do I really remember any landscapes as vividly and as clearly as those I knew then?
And the reason I was going to love Rising Ground as much as I did, is that my most deeply embedded childhood landscapes, apart from those around our suburban home in Surrey...Mitcham Common, Seven Islands Pond, Coldblow Lane, Three Kings Pond, the Beehive bridge... yet the landscapes I remember with greatest sea-bright clarity are those of the north Cornish coast.
One of those 'aunts' and 'uncles', that so many of us gained after our parents made wartime friendships, lived in Tintagel where they ran a market garden, and we would go there for two week-long summer holidays in the early 1960s, in the days when there was just one gift shop (Camelot Crafts) and an old Land Rover to take us up and down to Merlin's Cove. Or us children (they had two sons of our age) all primary school age, would wander off on our own down to St Nectan's Glen, or walk through Rocky Valley to Boscastle, or maybe go on mass day-long family excursions to Bossiney Beach, or for twilight summer evening swims along the coast at Port Gaverne...and if I think of childhood and holidays these are the landscapes that conjure themselves up with very little effort , though that might be an age thing too...
Philip Marsden's own journey to Tintagel focuses largely on the sham of the castle and the equally dubious legacy of Arthurian legend with which the town is now awash, though thankfully the childhood landscape, blossoming and unfurling again in my imagination, withstands the onslaught and I cling onto that visit to see King Arthur's absolutely original Round Table where he of course sat in conference with his very genuine and courageous Knights. I suddenly remember, apropos of an odd connection, that it was whilst on one of these holidays that my 'aunt' , a teacher at nearby Delabole School, set me up with a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S.Lewis as my holiday reading and that was me sorted.
Philip Marsden writes about the recurring motif in idealised places: a sense of enclosure or encirclement. Well, my childhood landscape of Tintagel has the wagons circled protectively around it, and interestingly any number of return visits, and witnessing the horror of the changes, does nothing to dent the happy remembrance.
But there is a lot more of the county to explore in Rising Ground, and if you know Cornwall, or even if you have only read about it, then you may well see it with renewed eyes through these pages, I certainly have.
Bodmin Moor, if I am honest, has always been something to drive across to get to somewhere else in Cornwall. It doesn't fill me with that sense of well-being and peace and quiet that Dartmoor does, and for that I blame Daphne du Maurier (amongst others) for the bleak portrayal that seeped into my teenage consciousness as I lapped up the novels (Rebecca whilst sitting on the beach at St Ives). I react emotionally to the beauty of Dartmoor but objectively to the desolate, slightly spooky atmosphere of Bodmin...and we can see it rising in the distance from our garden here in the Tamar Valley, but still no allure, no sense of reverence. Philip Marsden succeeds where I fail as he walks out on the moor in search of, and discovering, that Neolithic spirit of place as he recalls the words of an archaeologist...
'Imagine how depleted your people would be after a harsh winter. Imagine the spirit of loss blowing across the moor.'
I can half see it now and I probably need to do a little more than just drive across Bodmin Moor in the future.
There are fascinating chapters about Quaker William Cookworthy and his 1768 recipe for porcelain, a very exact combination of ingredients, glaze, slip, kiln temperature and time, utilising the Cornish china clay, and that had us nipping into Plymouth Museum to check out the china cabinets that we always walk past to get to the more interesting things like a Dame Laura Knight exhibition.
Plymouth porcelain is robust but with the delicacy of lace, translucent to light, chimes when tapped (we didn't check that out) and very hard to copy. Apparently only Willam Cookworthy ever made true porcelain successfully in the UK, and only for a very brief period of time in the city of Plymouth, and how many times have we driven past the China House pub on Sutton Harbour without knowing that this is where Cookworthy's factory is thought to have been. Spode, Wedgwood and Minton swooped after Cookworthy's death but apparently never quite matched the perfection of his porcelain.. And William Cookworthy was an enterprising man in many other ways too...the desalination of seawater, discovering the cause of scurvy, helping Smeaton develop the lime that would be used to rebuild the Eddystone lighthouse (now on Plymouth Hoe)
Don't you just love books like this that take you on a journey of discovering new things, and remembering some old things too and even better when the places are on the doorstep. Rising Ground created connections in every direction and many more explorable characters and places that I haven't mentioned, poet Jack Clemo, tracing the River Fal, finding the magic in amongst the embarrassingly commercialised shambles that is Land's End. Land's End so dreadful that Bookhound couldn't face it, sitting outside while I went in just so that I could say I had been there.
If you have an interest in Cornwall, or sensing that spirit of place anywhere, then Rising Ground is the book for you and well worth a read, but meanwhile
...what thinkest thee all about this idea of childhood landscapes being firmly fixed in the imagination...
...can you see yours I wonder, and if so I'd love to know where it is because I reckon between us we could probably cover every continent.
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