The novelist Wilkie Collins walked around Cornwall in 1850 and his vivid descriptions can still guide the modern visitor.

In 1850 the 26-year-old Wilkie Collins took a walking tour of Cornwall, accompanied by the illustrator Henry Brandling. His observations, recorded in “Rambles Beyond Railways,” tell us much about how Cornwall was then and provide a fascinating backdrop to a modern tour of the county.

Primitive Cornwall

When Collins visited, Cornwall was not yet connected with the rest of England by a railway, hence the title of the book, and he makes numerous comments about the remote and primitive nature of the place. Cornwall was England’s “most untrodden ground,” and Looe, an early stopping place, “one of the prettiest and most primitive places in England.”

Collins started by hiring a rowing boat from Plymouth across the Tamar to Saltash and up the River Lynher to the village of St. Germans, which modern motorists will miss but the railway station, opened in 1859, still functions.

Walking from Looe inland to Liskeard he will have followed the canal that served the copper mines in the Caradon area of Bodmin Moor, which were still working in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1860 the canal was superseded by the Looe Valley railway line which still exists and is one of England’s most picturesque routes.

Coastal Footpath

Collins’ visit long pre-dated the Cornwall coastal footpath, the main attraction for modern walkers, and from his account he seems to have taken mostly inland routes although it is difficult to reconstruct exactly how he got from place to place. Oddly, he described walking on top of the stone hedges that still serve as field boundaries, not a recommended practice now.

Some of the sites Collins visited have since become iconic images of the county. The strange granite structures of the Cheesewring and the Hurlers on Bodmin Moor, the conical island of St Michael’s Mount near Penzance, Tintagel Castle with its Arthurian legends, the Loggan Stone not far from the modern Minack Theatre with its stunning seaward outlook, and Kynance Cove on the Lizard Peninsula where the coastal scenery “arrives at its climax.”

Cornish Myth and Legend

He attended a theatrical performance in the Piran Round, an outdoor amphitheatre near Perranporth, still a prominent local feature and in 2008 set to be revived as a centre for Cornish arts. And he describes myths and legends that feature in the twenty-first century tourist marketers’ Cornish brand.

The changes since 1850 are as striking as the similarities with modern Cornwall. In St. Ives, famous as an artists’ colony since the late nineteenth century, the main attraction for Collins was the pilchard industry. Fishing boats still defy the winter storms there and in other ports around the coast, but are everywhere greatly diminished and outnumbered by pleasure craft.

Cornwall’s Industrial Heritage

Collins visited near the peak period of Cornwall’s mining and industrial age. At the Caraton (Caradon) Copper Mine “all about us monstrous wheels were turning slowly; machinery was clanking and groaning in the hoarsest discords,” a scene far removed from the today’s peaceful wilderness, although the granite sleepers of the tramway are still embedded in the moorland turf.

The Botallack copper mine, just at the western tip of the county, was then a going concern and is now a relic from a bygone age. Collins describes descending into its underground passages and the “unearthly” sound of the surf crashing on the shore hundreds of feet above.

Truro was a small town and Collins could not admire its cathedral, which was started in 1880 and not completed until 1911. It now attracts 200,000 visitors each year. He does not mention Bodmin, the county town, Padstow or Newquay, now the county’s most popular tourist destination and a Mecca for surfers.

Coastal Landscapes

But it was Cornwall’s raw beauty that most firmly captured Collins' imagination. Describing the view from the cliffs over the green fields of Looe Island Collins says: “If Michael Angelo had painted landscape, he would have represented such a scene as we now beheld.”

And on the Lizzard peninsula “you wander along the summits of the cliffs; and looking down, through the hedges of tamarisk and myrtle that skirt the ends of the fields, see the rocks suddenly broken away beneath you into an immense shelving amphitheatre, on the floor of which the sea boils in fury, rushing through natural archways and narrow rifts.”

You could walk there now and write the same sentence.