Ithell Colquhoun was born in 1906 in British India. She had come to know this part of Cornwall during the Second World War and then, when the war ended, she fled a disastrous marriage to a Belgian surrealist husband (and there’s a combination of words guaranteed to bring disorientation and dismay), and found and settled in remote Lamorna, renting a small corrugated iron shed in the woods, next to the river that flows from the head of the valley to the rocky cove and the sea.
She was looking for seclusion and, as she writes in The Living Stones, her extraordinary memoir of her time here, it was ‘in Lamorna that I first saw the falling of dew, and it was at Penberth that the shifting of the landscape-veil first presented itself to my clear sight, disclosing – what?’ She cherished her solitude, here in the ‘valley of streams and moon leaves, wet scents and all that cries with the owl’s voice’, even though ‘any sign of introversion is, in a woman, particularly suspect’. ‘An introverted male’, she went on, may be acclaimed ‘a genius … but an introverted female? Society is slow to grant her a place at all.’
Lamorna valley may be horrible in the summer months, as Ithell once lamented, but on this weekend in April all is quiet. A tiny tarmac road leads down and through the wet, wooded valley, and at an even tinier fork in the road either continues along the coast to nothingness or drifts into a cul-de-sac and – Ithell would hate this – a large tarmac car park overlooking Lamorna Cove.
Ithell Colquhoun was one of the first prose writers to try and describe the deeper magic of a place. Not just to show what we think we see (the glory of the woods and the trees, and the songbirds she cherished, and the river that danced at the edge of her field), but through solitude and kaif – a direct experiencing of the moment – she opened herself to the shifting of the ‘landscape-veil’ and described, with as much accuracy as is possible, that sense we all get, the feeling we all know, that there is something else around and within us that is neither obvious nor apparent but is nonetheless present and vital, except it’s just out of reach or slipping past the corner of our eye, and even perhaps other-dimensional. It’s there, though, even if we keep on missing it. We just need to find – or remember – another way of seeing.
None of this would have occurred to young Wilkie, despite his love of sensation and drama, and with all his feeling for supernatural undercurrents. The rocks are the rocks. The Druids are strange – but gone. And the last of the ‘superstitions’ – folkloric festivals and holy wells – are ‘the best evidence of the low state of education among the people from whom they are produced’. That was not Ithell’s belief. She knew that ‘certain places need people as much as certain people need places’ and Lamorna became her life: ‘I am identified with every leaf and pebble.’ She was told that Lamorna Cove was where ‘the Atlanteans, fleeing from cataclysm, first landed’ and she described the spirits and emanations of her valley and the force (‘the Michael-force’) that flowed through everything. But most of the time she is transfixed by what she can see right in front of her: the birds, she says, have a brighter plumage here, the sky has its own tone of silver, and ‘the hedgetops in summer are bright with the tiny pink stars of stonecrop’. She writes with poetry and grace and humour – sometimes anger – and I promise you will find yourself sharing and transformed by her visions.
We couldn’t find any kind of memorial to Ithell, even though the valley is littered with plaques commemorating the artists and writers who have shared her love of this magical valley, but we do find the site of her corrugated iron shack, now rebuilt as a trim little hut with Velux windows and well-scrubbed stone walls. It is the primrose time of year and the patchy ground around the house (what she called her ‘Irish garden’, but is really just a thinning of the woods) has clumps of primula, narcissi and anemone growing among the sycamore and birch. Beyond is ‘her’ field, green in a clinging mist, and the stream where she would sometimes sunbathe naked, hidden from the road, and watch the dragonflies making love, ‘emerald and black, or turquoise and black’. The valley is damp, from the mist and the streams that run to the nearby cove and from last year’s leaf mould in the woods, now being forced aside by a rising tide of bluebells. It’s not raining – away from this valley we have left behind a sunny day – but everything here is slick and slippery to touch, including the soft spring leaves of the lime trees that crowd close to the narrow road and the top of the new wooden gate that blocks the way to Ithell’s old home.
Ithell was certainly not the first or last to make her way to Cornwall looking for a deeper connection to an ancient land. She was followed by countless others (artists, of course, but also academics and antiquarians, magicians and witches, neo-pagans, bards, mystics, Druids, occultists, weekend hippies …), all on the trail of standing stones, stone circles, pulse spots, ley lines, Gaia, Arthur and Merlin, Celtic crosses, the White Goddess, petroglyphs, runes, crop circles, UFOs, labyrinths, Wicca, Elysium, Camelot, Atlantis, and so on. It’s a long list. And as Ithell said, ‘Cornwall has an attraction for the seeker, bearing as it does traces of those sunken countries Lyonesse and Atlantis … people, irresistibly drawn, will jettison their prospects and come down here to find not only a living but a life worth living.’ There has also been a resurgence of the old beliefs and customs from within Cornwall, perhaps starting in 1928 with the re-energizing of the ‘Cornish Gorsedh’, the gathering of the Cornish people and their robed bards. Wilkie, on the other hand, would have told them all to go back to school.
Not far from Ithell’s home, on the other side of the valley, there’s a hotel described in the Time Out Guide to Devon and Cornwall as ‘bringing a sprinkling of glitz to Britain’s furthest reaches’. A sign on the road is advertising cocktails and views over Lamorna Cove, and so – with the light fading and the magic hour upon us – we climb some sweaty wooden steps through a neglected hillside garden and push the door open into a white, minimalist reception area. Despite Time Out’s excitement, the place seems utterly unsuited to this valley and in fact some kind of process of uneasy osmosis is already taking place: an atmosphere of decay from the surrounding woods has been drawn inside and is possibly even now seeping up the walls. There’s no one around. My mind is filled with Ithell and her belief that this valley is especially haunted by ghosts, poltergeists and spirits – none of them ever hurt her, she said, but still – and as we poke around the empty white corridors and peer through some French windows at the deserted, windblown terrace, a feeling of distress, of something being unpleasantly wrong, creeps up on us. Neither of us wants to say anything. We just walk back fast towards the reception – and we’re almost there, with the long corridor behind us, when a family emerges from the far end. They have a large dog with them. Now, I’m not brave about these things – aged seventeen I had to walk out of The Shining – but there’s something about deserted hotels that is horrifying, and I whip round to seek solace from Anna only to find she has already fled out of the door and down the hill back to Ithell. I turn around again and the people and their dog – a Rottweiler, as it happens – are almost upon me and they haven’t said a word – not a word! – but why would they? – and I want to say something about cocktails or cream teas but before I can do that one of the women looks into my eyes with such fathomless despair that I find myself lurching back against the reception desk unable to move or speak until they are clear of the hotel and – I see this now – heading up the hill to their large black MPV in the car park.
And that is Lamorna Cove: disturbingly empty off-season; but rammed, they all tell us, in the summer. Ithell left for a more isolated part of Cornwall in the late 1950s, exiled by the traffic and the noise, before returning, years later, to die. People were becoming disorientated, she felt, and unable to concentrate on anything because of their addiction to the clamour of modern life, especially the ceaseless background drone of the radio. The radio, bless her.
Anna and I go and stand in the cove. There’s a café behind us, opened in 1952 (Ithell would have taken her tea here), but now closed and n
eglected. Apparently, as I write this, the little cove, its buildings, rocky beach, deserted quarries and shoreline, are all up for sale (for a handsome price) – and of course I dread the thought that someone will see an opportunity here for something irrevocably destructive. Even though I could absolutely murder a cup of tea. Ithell would have agreed, but then she ends The Living Stones with this thought, that despite ‘the forces ravaging the valley today … there is that which resists the encroachments of man’. She mentions the quarries, abandoned for no good reason, and now lying derelict and ‘so’, she says, ‘vanish all who would profane Lamorna’s precincts!’ I would only add, for any prospective buyer, that there’s a very unpleasant smell coming from the seaweed on the (utterly inaccessible) beach. I really wouldn’t bother if I were you.
I’m sorry, that was a distracting detour, but we are now back on our way to Land’s End. Wilkie was more than a little excited.
Something like what Jerusalem was to the pilgrim in the Holy Land, the Land’s End is … to the tourist in Cornwall. It is the Ultima Thule where his progress stops – the shrine towards which his face has been set, from the first day when he started on his travels – the main vent, through which all the pent-up enthusiasm accumulated along the line of route is to burst its way out, in one long flow of admiration and delight.
Yes, yes, YES! The Land’s End.
It suggests even to the most prosaically constituted people, ideas of tremendous storms, of flakes of foam flying over the land before the wind, of billows in convulsion, of rocks shaken to their centre, of caves where smugglers lurk in ambush, of wrecks and hurricanes, desolation, danger, and death.
The Land’s End! When Wilkie finally got there, hiking up from the south-east (through some of the most magnificent scenery in Cornwall, he tells us), traipsing past the pub that is the First and Last Inn in England (it still is), he had to ask a guide to lead him to the actual Land’s End because there was no way of telling where it was. It was the same when Celia Fiennes visited in 1698 (although ‘the people here are very ill guides’). The land, she said, terminates in a ‘peak of great rocks which runs a good way into the sea’ and, having drunk some ‘very good bottled ale’ (but only, she stresses, ‘for curiosity sake’), ‘I clamber’d over them as farre as safety permitted me.’
Today, it is easy to find Land’s End without a guide. You can just drive up to the car park entrance and a heavyset, middle-aged man with copious tattoos, death’s head finger rings and armloads of silver bracelets will take your £6 and suggest in a voice of East End gravel that, ‘not to worry’, what you are about to experience ‘offers all sorts of retail delights’. The car park is huge but, on this grey April day, it is actually depressing to find it so empty. We get out and there’s an argument going on nearby between a very young boy and his parents: ‘You won’t get to play with the dinosaurs if you behave like this.’ ‘Sorry, daddy.’ ‘Get in the car please.’ ‘I’m sorry, mum.’ The boy climbs into the back of the car and sits there, gulping down his tears behind the rain-smeared window. A dark tang of tragedy settles on the day.
A low complex of grey-white buildings now provides frame and flavour to the Land’s End: the place, Wilkie tells us, that ‘fills the minds of imaginative people with visions of barrenness and solitude’. There are places to eat (and who doesn’t love a pasty?). Places to drink (Celia would have appreciated the Land’s End Bar and its array of bottled beers). A place to sleep (the Land’s End Hotel). There’s ‘Arthur’s Quest’ – ‘experience the legend’ – and an ‘interactive experience’ from the film company Aardman, featuring all our favourite characters (fun, it says on the sign, for all ages). Wallace. Gromit. Shaun the Sheep. There’s a West Country Shopping Village and a Trading Company and a Clothing Company and an exhibition space where we can hear all about the ‘End to Enders’, the people who have hiked or cycled or otherwise propelled themselves from John o’ Groats to Land’s End. There’s a 300-foot-high statue of a Cornish Bard, wearing midnight blue robes woven from the feathers of local seagulls, in one hand holding aloft a precise replica of the Horn of the Nation and in the other an unsheathed Excalibur. Except, no, there isn’t. In fact, as I stand outside the portals of Arthur’s Quest, I catch myself thinking that all of this could have been a whole lot worse, which of course is true, and after all there are at least three young families here and they seem to be having fun – or at least none of the children are actually sitting on the tarmac and screaming. That would be their parents. Although if you are already thinking like this – that someone could have found a way to make the most iconic landscape in England even more jarringly commercial than it already is – then it is probably time to leave. But only once you have battled through a bitter wind and taken a selfie at the signpost that marks the furthest point of your long journey westwards.
The walk back from Land’s End took Wilkie and Henry past ‘some of the dreariest’ views in Cornwall and into ‘the large sea-port town of St. Ives’, where he spent a couple of days drooling over the pilchard industry. The sight of the Cornish fishermen provoked Wilkie into some of his best writing in Rambles Beyond Railways, especially the moment when a great pilchard shoal was sighted from the clifftop (by a frantic man waving a bush, known as a ‘huer’), and the boats rushed out to encircle the shoal with nets, and the pilchards were trapped and dragged from the churning sea in baskets and whisked to shore, where dozens of men were waiting with shovels:
standing up to their knees in pilchards, working energetically; the crowd stretching down from the salting-house, all along the beach, and hemming in the boat all round; the uninterrupted succession of men hurrying backwards and forwards with their barrows, through a narrow way kept clear for them in the throng; the glare of the lanterns giving light to the workmen, and throwing red flashes on the fish as they fly incessantly from the shovels over the side of the boat …
It is a scene of wild industry. It seems like the whole town is there – men, women, children – all working frantically to a plan. Wilkie is awestruck by the sheer quantity of fish being caught: in 1850, the year he was in St Ives, 22,000 hogsheads of fish were exported, mostly to Spain and Italy; at about 3,000 pilchards per hogshead, that’s over 66 million fish pulled from the Cornish seas and dispatched to the griddles of the Mediterranean. Despite what Wilkie witnessed, the vigour of the fishing fleets and the apparently limitless abundance of their prey, the pilchard industry withered and almost died in the 1920s: overfishing, a collapse in demand, foreign competition, new offshore fishing methods … take your pick. There’s been a very minor revival of late, although the days when the people of St Ives would gather together as one to pull their wealth from the sea are long gone. Nowadays they’re more likely to be working alone, harrying the tourist shoals, or servicing the second homes.
Enid Blyton came to St Ives in 1943, on honeymoon with her second husband Dr Kenneth Darrell Waters, who years later destroyed any letters and diaries from this happy time. They were drawn, presumably, by the romance of the place and its wondrous light. Enid, wasting nothing, inserted a salty St Ives seadog into at least one of her Famous Five adventures. The unearthly, aquamarine light is certainly what attracted the artists (Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Leach, Patrick Heron and many others), which in turn led to the opening of Tate St Ives in 1993, which now powers the art-tourism industry. From pilchards to postcards. On the day Anna and I visit there’s an exhibition about the response of artists to the words of Virginia Woolf, and I am delighted to find at least one Ithell Colquhoun on display, which is especially pleasing because she was never much welcomed by the art establishment: too esoteric, perhaps, and never quite abstract enough for the St Ives hardliners of her time. I spend a happy few moments standing in front of one of her nakedly suggestive works, called, I thought, Come into My Cave, although right now I can find no record of any such title.
We wander through rooms decorated with the art of Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Gwen John and Laura Knight. It’s interesting, o
ur enduring reverence for these 1930s artists and writers. It must (perhaps!) be because of their sense of certainty, which probably sounds odd, given how restless and unhappy many of them were. But they shared a culture, however much they railed against it. Virginia Woolf said that the world had fractured in 1914, cutting us loose from everything that had gone before – farewell, Wilkie – but I think it’s obvious that the artists in these rooms have inherited, and are reacting to, a common set of Victorian sensibilities. So perhaps it is only now, 100 years down the line, that we can truly say we are adrift from the past.
I leave Anna in St Ives, pondering the replacement bus service back to London, and make haste after Wilkie, who by now is walking much faster ‘than the reader may have perceived’. We arrive at Tintagel, one of the places, Wilkie tells us, ‘associated with the quaint fancies of the olden time … and romantically, if not historically, reputed as the birthplace of King Arthur’. Not that the citizens of Tintagel care about any foolish historical doubts: their long single street is buttressed with shops selling Arthur cakes and scones and sweets, Merlin pasties, jewellery and wands, plastic Excaliburs and knights’ helmets and goblins and the skulls of dragons, and tarot cards and crystals and of course the Holy Grail itself (and why didn’t the questing knights think of that, for goodness’ sake? You can buy one here for a tenner). The shops are closed now (the light is failing), so I am saved from buying any pewter, or Celtic pipes, and instead find myself staring with mounting distress at a mug decorated with the suddenly very personal message ‘You Sir are a Knob’.
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