Cornwall is one of the England's leading travel destinations, and for good reason. At the country's south-western extremity, its rugged moors, beautiful coastal landscapes and historical villages have not only attracted visitors for many decades, they have also inspired a long list of writers. It is an ideal place for literary tourists to trace the footsteps of fictional heroes, villains and lovers, and to explore the minds and lives of their creators.
Literary Connections
Cornwall’s literary connections are numerous, from travellers like Wilkie Collins in the 1850s and Paul Theroux in the 1980s, to literary giants like Thomas Hardy who set an early novel here, modern writers like John Le Carre and EV Thompson who have Cornish homes and native-born writers like Arthur Quiller-Couch and JC Tregarthen whose works provide authentic period descriptions of local life.
Du Maurier Country
But two “incomers” who settled in the county have done most to project a vision of Cornwall into the popular imagination, attracting visitors from far and wide.
Daphne du Maurier made her home in the beautiful little seaside town of Fowey on the southern coast, which modern road signs describe as Du Maurier Country. She set several novels in the area.
The shipyard depicted in her first novel “A Loving Spirit” still exists and occasionally works on a three-masted square rigger from the little port of Charlestown further along the coast. Her home at Menabilly became Manderley in her novel “Rebecca”. She spent the later years of her life in Kilmarth, two miles north of Fowey and the setting for “The House on the Strand” and “My Cousin Rachel”.
At the time of her birthday in May, the annual Du Maurier festival celebrates these and other locations with a ten-day programme of talks and walks, extending to the settings of Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor and Frenchman’s Creek in the Helford area.
Poldark’s Cornwall
Winston Graham came to the county as a teenager in 1925 and his World War II coastguard service experiences on the surrounding beaches and clifftops, allied with local and historical research, ensured what he called the essential geographical truth of his stories. Since his death in 2003 the “Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society” has maintained his memory, mainly for his series of 12 novels that make up the Poldark saga.
This monumental body of work describes life in north Cornwall in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the experiences of Ross Poldark and the increasingly complex web of his extended family. The novels are still in print and became the basis of two hugely popular television series broadcast in the 1970s and 1980s.
Graham lived in Perranporth near the area on which he projected much of the drama of his Poldark books. Crantock Beach, Porth Joke, West Pentire and the massive sandy expanse of Perran Beach inspired him and were used extensively in the filming. Nearby the Perranzabuloe Folk Museum commemorates his work and offers maps of Poldark’s Cornwall.
St Piran’s Society
Perranporth has other claims as a guardian of Cornish culture. In 2008 the St Piran’s Society is about to revive its two-thousand year old Celtic arena Perran Round as an open air venue for Cornish events.
But the Poldark stories and the locations used in the TV series left their mark all over the county, often intersecting other literary links. Wedding scenes were filmed at the beautiful little church of St Enedoc near Polzeath, where the poet laureate John Betjeman is buried, and at St Winnow on the River Fowey in the south, the last resting place of Daphne du Maurier’s older sister Angela.
The Poldark film crews transformed Port Quin on the craggy northern coast as the fictional village of Sawle. St Mawes Castle on the estuary of the River Fal became the French Fort Baton were prisoners from the Napoleonic wars were supposedly rescued. On his return from the wars to his fictional home at Nampara, Ross Poldark galloped across Porthcluney Beach adjoining Caerhays Castle near Dodman Point on the south coast. Ross and Demelza Poldark memorably graced the cameras on Porthcurno beach, near Land’s End.
Is Cornwall the most celebrated county in English fiction? It is no longer the “most untrodden ground” that Wilkie Collins described. But enough of its historic and scenic heritage remains to inspire modern writers and to satisfy the literary tourist.
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