The hidden heart of Cornwall

“Are you walking the coast path?”

I’m packing up my tent at a campsite on the north Cornish coast, and the woman from the neighbouring pitch has wandered across to chat. Spotting my walking boots and trekking pole, she’s made the obvious assumption.

But I’m going against the grain. I explain my route — a three-day cross-country journey on foot, from Tintagel on the north coast to Looe on the south, itself part of a much longer walk from the banks of the River Tamar to my own family home near Land’s End. But she seems strangely unimpressed, and when I mention Bodmin Moor, she actually shudders, folds her arms across her chest and mutters, “Bleak!”

Mention “walking” and “Cornwall”, and most people think of the coast. This is hardly surprising, for the cliffs here are traversed by the South West Coast Path, Britain’s longest national trail. Most of Cornwall’s familiar cultural associations accrue close to the tideline too: Poldark, Doc Martin, Rick Stein and countless romantic novels of life in cosy fishing villages.

But sticking to a coastal route is like focusing on the frame and ignoring the picture within — a picture made up of wind-lashed granite moorland, thickly wooded valleys, farmland meshed with prehistoric field boundaries, the towns and villages where most Cornish people actually live. But as the reaction of the woman at the campsite suggests, inland Cornwall is still an ominously unknown place for some visitors. I want to travel deep into those inland landscapes and, along the way, to unravel some of the ideas and attitudes that have attached to Cornwall over the centuries.

A warm breeze from the north-east sets me on my way, along field paths from the coach parks and King Arthur-themed gift shops of Tintagel. After a couple of miles, I reach Condolden Barrow, a Bronze-Age burial mound on a high hilltop. Inland Cornwall stretches ahead. Twenty miles off to the south-west, I can make out the clay tips beyond Roche, and closer at hand a gathering groundswell of moorland rises to the granite outcrops of Roughtor and Brown Willy. To the west, the Celtic Sea is blue and glittering, but I turn my back on it and head inland.

In the 1770s, William Gilpin called Bodmin Moor a ‘coarse naked country, and in all respects as uninteresting as can well be conceived’

Beyond the little town of Camelford, a path follows the banks of the River Camel through shady stands of sycamore and beech, then bends uphill past the lonely little church of St Adwenna. The stone of the field boundaries changes from rusty slate to granite; cattle make way for bleating sheep, and the farms grow smaller, scruffier. And then, abruptly, I’m at the edge of the open moor.

Unlike Dartmoor and Exmoor, Bodmin Moor is seldom seen as a destination in its own right, despite its similar harsh beauty and despite the fact that it is prime walking territory, with most of its 80 square miles designated access land under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, giving visitors the right to roam away from footpaths.

Perhaps it is simply that Cornwall’s coastal attractions hog the limelight; perhaps people are put off by the relatively uninspiring views of the moor as they pass along the A30, or by old rumours of a cryptozoological “Beast of Bodmin” roaming the wilds. But I suspect the reaction of the woman at the campsite to my mention of the moor gives a clue to something older, something deeper-rooted.

Today’s standard response to Cornwall’s landscapes is admiration. But this has not always been the case. In the 1770s, William Gilpin, who popularised the concept of “the picturesque” in Britain, visited Bodmin Moor and found it a “coarse naked country, and in all respects as uninteresting as can well be conceived”. Having heard that the rest of Cornwall was similarly dominated by “deserts of dreariness”, he made an abrupt about-turn and headed back for the more gently pastoral landscapes of south Devon. Cornwall, he thought, was “without a single beauty to recommend it”.

A few decades later, Gilpin’s disciple Richard Warner made it all the way to Land’s End, but he also concluded that Cornwall could “offer no claim to the praise of the picturesque or beautiful”. He warned would-be visitors that “all above ground is desolate and dreary; and the only varieties I can promise you to these naked tracts of country, will be dark mines, horrid rocks, or dangerous precipices”.

This was very much the standard reaction at the time, and it wasn’t really until the second half of the 19th century that popular landscape aesthetics shifted and visiting writers starting singing the praises of Cornwall’s craggy geography. But even then, an occasional revulsion still surfaced. In the mid-20th century, poet John Heath-Stubbs described the area west of St Ives as “a hideous and wicked country” and Walter de la Mare detected “a brooding of evil” in the cliffs around Land’s End. Maybe a hint of that old landscape horror still lingers — particularly around the inland moors.

In ‘Jamaica Inn’, Daphne du Maurier tapped into old anxieties about the Cornish landscape and ensured that a frisson of gothic horror still lingers

On this sunlit afternoon, the moor seems anything but bleak. From the 420-metre summit of Brown Willy, Cornwall’s highest point, open ground rolls away in all directions. There are few people about, but the moor is thick with traces of past activity. I can see the 4,000-year-old Fernacre stone circle at the foot of Roughtor; the lower slopes are pockmarked with burial chambers, Bronze-Age hut circles and Iron-Age settlements, and meshed with medieval boundary walls interspersed with the ruins of 19th-century farmsteads and tin works.

And when I look at the map, I see another historical relic writ large on the landscape. The Cornish language — a close relative of Breton and Welsh — had probably already fallen out of everyday use in this eastern part of Cornwall around 500 years ago; but it survives in the place names: Garrow, Kerrow, Tresinney, Lanteglos and dozens more. “Brown Willy” is probably a corruption of Bronn Wennili, “Hill of Swallows” in Cornish.

That night, I find a place to camp behind a sheltering crag of granite. Unlike on Dartmoor, wild camping is not officially sanctioned here — though those who choose a discreet spot, stay only one night and follow the “leave no trace” ethos strictly will seldom run into difficulties. But there are plenty of other accommodation options for walkers, with organised campsites and guesthouses in many of the villages around the moor.

The next day I emerge from the wilds and find another clue to the lingering unease that sometimes attaches to Cornwall’s moorlands. It’s not yet midday, but the queue for the restaurant at Jamaica Inn already stretches into the car park. The crowds at this isolated mid-moor pub, just off the A30 in the tiny hamlet of Bolventor, are largely due to Daphne du Maurier, who made it the setting of her breakthrough fourth novel in 1936, a gothic extravaganza of smuggling, wrecking and general skulduggery.

In Jamaica Inn, du Maurier made the moorland landscape a sinister character in its own right. The novel’s heroine, Mary Yellan, suspects that the bleak surroundings have warped the minds of the locals, and that there is “something of the Devil left in them still”. Du Maurier tapped into old anxieties about the Cornish landscape and perhaps ensured that a frisson of gothic horror still lingers in its wilder places. Most of today’s visitors to the inn seem to hurry straight back to their cars after lunch.

The afternoon’s walk takes me south along a quiet lane, the hedges thick with foxgloves and sheep’s sorrel, past the wind-ruffled Dozmary Pool, to a campsite at Trenant in the southern lee of the moor. It’s a quiet spot, hemmed with trees.

There are only a couple of other campers, but when I speak to the owner, who lives in a converted Methodist chapel with gravestones in the garden, she seems strangely grateful for the lack of business and the distance from the coastal tourism hotspots. “We’re very lucky,” she says.

When you’re moving on foot through inland Cornwall, the abrupt changes of atmosphere can be discombobulating. I’ve grown accustomed to huge spaces over the past two days, but leaving the campsite the next morning I feel as though I’m in another country — another continent even. The path runs beside the River Fowey. Soft sunlight filters through a high canopy of trees and big trout hang motionless in the glass-clear water.

Beyond Dobwalls, I drop into another thickly wooded valley, the West Looe. This countryside seems ancient and untouched. But a glimpse of a tall chimney rising over the trees is a reminder that the scene would have been very different 150 years ago when the valley was home to important lead- and silver-mining enterprises. It’s also a reminder that Cornwall is a post-industrial place. As its mining declined in the late 19th century, it became one of Britain’s first deindustrialised regions. That deindustrialisation embedded a deprivation from which many Cornish communities have never properly emerged.

In mid-afternoon, I climb out of the valley to a sunny campsite between Looe and Polperro. I pitch my tent, then wander down a lane to the busy little beach at Talland. The empty fields, the wild moors, the deep woods all seem worlds away. I’m back in what the Cornish poet Jack Clemo — himself from another overlooked inland region, the St Austell Clay Country — scathingly dismissed as “the bland, beauty-haunted domain of Cornwall’s popular novelists”. But after three days of hard walking, I’m glad of the chance to wash off the dust of travel in the clear saltwater, to rest on the warm sand, and to treat myself to an ice cream from the beach café.

Back at the campsite, a couple from Plymouth have just arrived and are setting up at the next pitch. They wave a cheery hello as they wrestle with the tent poles. Then the woman spots my dusty boots, airing in the sun.

“Are you walking the coast path?” she says.

Tim Hannigan’s ‘The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey’ is published by Head of Zeus on 11 May

Cornish retreats away from the coast

Leskernick, Bodmin Moor Utterly alone on Bodmin Moor, a mile and a half from the summit of Brown Willy and close to the source of the River Fowey, Leskernick is a former miner’s cottage, now converted into a cosy refuge. It’s off-grid but with solar-powered electricity (and a back-up generator); access is via a 1.5-mile stone track so cars need reasonable ground clearance. Sleeps four adults or two adults and up to three children; from £795 per week; leskernick.com

Morwell, Tamar Valley A 17th-century farmhouse beside a bend in the River Tamar, Morwell is a luxurious home, with flagstone floors, large fireplaces and velvet sofas. Outside is a walled garden, private swimming pool, 50 acres of orchards and water meadows and more than a mile of private river frontage, where you can spot otters and kingfishers. Sleeps six, from £1,795 per week; uniquehomestays.com

Helford Farmhouse, Gweek At the head of the Helford River, and almost six miles from the open sea, Gweek was once a thriving port, exporting tin and copper from the nearby mines. But gradual silting up of the waterways (in part due to mining waste) left it only accessible to smaller vessels and at high tide, prompting a slow transformation into a sleepy riverside village (best known today for its sanctuary for rescued seals). Set back from the road near the centre of the village and the boatyards, Helford Farmhouse is a wisteria-clad Georgian home with big sash windows giving views over the river. Sleeps eight; from £1,700 per week; forevercornwall.co.uk

Little Inka, Bodmin Moor A hideaway just for two, Little Inka is on an alpaca farm near the village of St Breward on the west side of the moor. The living room and kitchen are in a stone cottage, the bedroom in a converted shepherd’s hut; both look out on to a secluded courtyard with a firepit, seating area and wooden hot tub. Sleeps two; from £1,350 per week; darkskyalpacas.com

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