Rocks of nation: The imagination of Celtic Cornwall 9781784996819

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Rocks of nation I J

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Rocks of nation I J

The imagination of Celtic Cornwall

Shelley Trower

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Shelley Trower 2015

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The right of Shelley Trower to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 0 7190 9096 7  hardback First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

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Contents I J Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Primitive rocks: Humphry Davy, Cornwall’s Geological Society and sublime mineral landscapes 2 Rocks and race: geological folklore and Celtic literature, from Cornwall to Scotland 3 On the cliff edge of England: trembling rocks in sensation fiction and empire Gothic 4 Haunted houses and prehistoric stones: savage vibrations in ghost stories and D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo 5 Living stones and the earth: dreams of belonging in Cornish nationalist and New Age environmental writing 6 Clayscapes: decomposed granite in Jack Clemo’s anti-nationalist writing Conclusion

page vi 1 26 57 100 135 163 199 225

References 234 Index253

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Acknowledgements I J Arts & Humanities Research Council funding enabled me to carry out the research for this book, as part of the Mysticism, Myth, and ‘Celtic’ Nationalism project. I am also grateful to Marion Gibson, Garry Tregidga, Sam Rayne and Jo Esra, for their valuable input into the project as part of the team at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus. Many others in Cornwall also contributed greatly to my research  – more than can be acknowledged  – but I  want especially here to thank Adrian Rodda, who accompanied me on many a trip to places discussed in this book and was a valuable source of knowledge and inspiration, long after being my English teacher at school. Any objectionable ideas in this book, however, are all mine; Adrian has helped to give me skills and the confidence to be an independent thinker and writer. I am grateful for archives including those held at the Cornish Studies Library, and The Royal Institution, where thanks goes especially to Kim Cooper and Tristan Berry, Jane Harrison and Wahida Amin, who directed me to valuable research materials. As ever, I  am grateful to Nicholas Ridout for his generosity in reading and rereading these chapters, and for his exceptionally astute observations at all stages which enabled this book to take shape. For their great help at different stages of the project, I wish to thank Steven Connor, Tim Fulford, Jesse Harasta, William Hughes, Dafydd Moore, Hilary Orange, Mary Lindsey, Asma Yasmin Mohiuddin, Justin Sausman, George Stuchbery, Wendy Stuchbery, Peter Trower, Joanie Willett and my colleagues at Roehampton, especially Jane Carroll, Jane Kingsley-Smith, Laura Peters and Alison Waller. Thanks to Chris Stuchbery for his support throughout the project.

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I am indebted to Cam Kernewek, and to the community at Allet. This book has been a difficult one to complete, because Cornwall has given me so much. Its criticism of one aspect of Cornish nationalism, as I see it, leaves much to be said about a Cornish culture that has long welcomed me. Previous versions of some of the chapters have been published elsewhere, and I  am grateful for permission to reuse material:  a version of Chapter  1 is published in the Journal of Literature and Science (2014); part of Chapter  2 is published in Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity, edited by Marion Gibson, Shelley Trower and Garry Tregidga (Routledge, 2012); part of Chapter 3 is published in Victorian Literature and Culture (2012); and an early version of Chapter 5 is published in Written on Stone: The Cultural History of British Prehistoric Monuments, edited by Joanne Parker (Cambridge Scholars, 2009).

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Introduction

White cliffs Chalk white cliffs form an edge of Britain: a starting, and finishing point. The edge of the land is exposed at Dover, on the coastline in the far south-east of the country, and is clearly visible from and continuously eroded by the sea. These cliffs provide one of the most renowned images of the British nation, and it is in part the striking whiteness, and the softness, of chalk that makes them serve so well. As an image of the nation, these cliffs mark out a distinctive, but vulnerable border, highlighting the division between Britain and the rest of Europe. The white cliffs provide a memorable example of how the imagination of nations is grounded in rocks, serving as a useful introduction to the concerns of this book. The close relation between concepts of nation and landscapes is well-established in cultural and literary studies;1 this book considers how the geological substance of national territory itself is used to support ideas of nationhood. As a case study, it examines the gradual formation of a cultural consciousness of Cornwall as a nation (the region located at the far south-west of Britain), a consciousness fuelled by geology, literature and economic conditions. In this introductory section the white cliffs will provide an illustration of how the material aspects of rocks – their situation in this case at the land’s boundary, their chalkiness and whiteness – support ideas of Britain and the British, providing some context for the later discussion of ‘Celtic’ Cornwall. The cliffs survive as a potent image of the nation, although they are no longer the arrival point for most homecomers and

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visitors, who, rather than entering the country by boat from the south-east, are most likely to enter at airports and Eurostar stations. They survive as an image of an island nation whose borders should be guarded, and whose vulnerable purity should be protected against intruding foreigners. Their redundancy as the common entry point has not prevented their use to support nationalist claims that the best interests of Britain depend on exclusion. For the UK Independence Party (UKIP), founded on its opposition to the European Union and immigration, Britain has lost control of ‘her’ cliffs: ‘Britain no longer has control over her borders. This is driving unemployment up and wages down … Britain’s borders are now effectively North Africa, Russia and Turkey; not the White Cliffs of Dover.’2 By evoking this long-established national image, UKIP is suggesting that Britain’s territory has been subjected to new kinds of threats and that it no longer belongs to her. The idea that Britain is female simultaneously draws on a long tradition of imagining the nation as motherland, which, as Kate Soper observes, ties in with the imagination of nature as woman, to invoke ‘nationality in its supposedly eternal territorial fixity as land or earth’.3 The idea of the nation as woman also typically identifies the national territory as being in need of defence or as female victim,4 who in this case seems to have lost control of her own body, of her boundaries or skin. No longer intact, Britain’s borders are apparently scattered to the far reaches of Europe. The British National Party (BNP) has similarly described British borders as vulnerable and feminine in its account of immigrants invading ‘Soft Touch Britain’. As Sara Ahmed points out, ‘the metaphor of “soft touch” suggests that the nation’s borders and defences are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others’. Such attributes are gendered: ‘the soft national body is a feminised body, which is “penetrated” or “invaded” by others’.5 The chalk white cliffs can provide an image of such softness: compared to other forms of limestone, chalk is relatively soft to the touch, and the south-east border erodes at the average rate of between five and ten centimetres per year, a rate of erosion that helps to keep the cliffs white as it prevents vegetation from growing on it.6 Britain’s ‘soft’ vulnerability could be one reason why the cliffs served as the backdrop for the BNP’s election broadcast in 1997. Standing with the cliffs behind him, the party’s leader, John Tyndall,

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described how we need to undo the ruin of the country, a country whose shores have required much defending: ‘For a thousand years, these shores have symbolised the identity of this nation and its freedom. Millions have died to defend them. In just fifty years those millions have been betrayed. The floodgates have been opened.’7 Tyndall’s rhetoric deploys large numbers to invoke the temporality of the nation as an aged one, and the vast scale of the sacrifice required to defend its shores, which have now – so quickly – been invaded. Whether the shores have actually symbolised national identity for ‘a thousand years’ is hardly the point; Tyndall’s point is that it has been a long time. As Tim Edensor observes, national landscapes ‘are imagined as enduring spaces, spaces forged over millennia through the sacrifice of blood and toil … believed to have been an essential part of national identity from time immemorial’.8 If the cliffs can figure the susceptibility of the nation’s skin, however, what is more significant to national identity is their whiteness. At the heart of this book is an interest in how humans identify with nations, or more specifically with national territory in its material form as rocks. Rocks, in turn, can seem human and bodily, figuring as soft, female skin, for instance, and as white skin. The white cliffs of Dover do more than provide an image of the nation; they are imagined as the body of natives who live on it. Referring to how the cliffs have ‘symbolised the identity of this nation’, the BNP leader implies that such an identity is a white one, as the cliff scene changes just before the alleged opening of the ‘floodgates’ to city streets with black people. ‘This is Britain in the 1990s’, says Tyndall.9 To make the link between the body of the nation and those who live on it, and to point up an apparent resemblance between territory and race, is to stake out a claim that certain people naturally belong to the nation, are even part of it, while others absolutely do not and should be excluded. It is to blur the distinction between, or even to conflate nation and ‘race’. Paul Gilroy has observed how images such as the white cliffs of Dover and the British bulldog breed vividly convey how the nation is represented in racial terms, and how such images are used not only by the more extremist groups like the BNP but far more widely, as by New Labour for example for their 1997 election party broadcasts. Tony Blair posed in front of the cliffs ‘in a similarly leaderly and grave manner’ to that of John Tyndall, observes Gilroy, ‘trying to tune into the same atavistic intuition’.10 If nationalism is banal,

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unthinking and unexceptional rather than anything extraordinary, as Michael Billig has so convincingly argued, then so are its conceptions of race.11 This book looks not only at what might be considered extremist nationalist views but at a diverse range of texts through which conceptions of nation and race circulate, including specialist nineteenth-century geological journals and folklore (with contributions from Humphry Davy and Robert Hunt, for example), popular sensation and gothic novels (Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker), detective stories and ghost stories (Arthur Conan Doyle, L. T. C. Rolt, E. F. Benson), relatively canonical modernist writing (D. H. Lawrence) and barely known Cornish nationalist fiction (Donald Rawe, Michael Williams, and the better known Daphne du Maurier, for example). Any resemblance between rocks and race, or nation and natives, is of course imagined. Jamaica Kincaid has commented that the white cliffs, for one thing, are not white: ‘The white cliffs of Dover, when finally I  saw them, were cliffs, but they were not white; you would only call them that if the word “white” meant something special to you; they were dirty’.12 The notion of racial purity is also contested by Helen Oyeyemi’s gothic novel White Is for Witching through its description of an extreme case of attempted identity with the cliffs. The haunted guesthouse of this novel, set in Dover, is one of the four narrators of the book, a xenophobic character whose racism is illustrated by her description of Ore, a black character, as having ‘the squashed nose, the pillow lips, fist-sized breasts … The skin. The skin’.13 The house wants to harm Ore, and in contrast wants to possess Miranda, who feels compelled to eat chalk. As Helen Cousins observes, ‘Miranda’s impulse to eat chalk might be an attempt to ingest Englishness both in terms of the whiteness that describes a traditional English ethnicity, and in its association with the chalk cliffs at Dover, which represent the borders of English territory’. She fails, however, to establish herself as purely English, partly owing to her family heritage, which, although ‘white’, ‘has an immigrant in each generation’. Miranda is also increasingly associated with Yoruba (West African) beliefs, through ‘her manifestations as a soucouyant and abiku spirit’ – a form of vampire.14 The cliffs of Dover seem similarly to struggle to be white, to ward off an encroaching blackness:

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Across the cliffs, Dover Castle was black. The sun was rising and the sea was changing colour, but the castle stayed within its lines, hunched in a black mess of shapes, and the vast bank of chalk it stood on seemed to stir in the water as if fighting the darkness that tried to climb down it.15

Like the cliffs, inhabitants of Dover and England more generally attempt to fight off ‘darkness’ in the form of immigrants, who are either damaged, die or are driven out of the town. The Dover Post reports the ‘stabbing of the fourth Kosovan refugee in three weeks; the radio tells of fifty-eight Chinese people ‘found dead in the back of a truck’; inmates of the Immigration Removal Centre hang themselves; a woman staying in the guest house comes downstairs with an armful of anti-immigrant BNP leaflets, and Ore later finds numerous leaflets in the room she has been staying in.16 The image of chalk ‘fighting the darkness’, much like the guest house, Miranda and other characters, exemplifies this book’s interest in how rocks are imagined to have a ghostly life of their own, strengthening the identification between so-called natives and nations. The first chapter establishes how rocks provide a foundation for ideas of a regional kind of national territory – introducing the case of Cornwall – while later chapters consider various forms of human identification with rocks (especially Chapters 2 and 5). The ‘Celts’ are said to be a ‘primitive race’ like the ‘primitive rocks’ on which they live, for example, and thus to belong essentially to their national territory, while the ghostly lives of rocks themselves appear to be actively hostile to non-Celtic strangers.

‘Celtic’ Britain It may be more accurate to say that the White Cliffs of Dover are an image of England, rather than Britain. UKIP’s description of the cliffs as ‘Britain’s border’ makes the common assumption that England can stand for the whole.17 Their perceived Englishness can be illustrated by the reaction to a sculpture of the cliffs in a Welsh household. For a project based at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2002, six contemporary sculptures – including Tania Kovats’s ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ – were rotated around six households, each for a month at a time. The householders were then asked for their responses to each sculpture. One of the

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householders, Mari, explained: ‘In a predominantly Welsh household it’s very English – a foreign body’.18 As a territorial border, the cliffs operate as an image of an island nation defined through its exclusion of the foreign, as we have seen, but their very Englishness makes them foreign to others within Britain. Another response to the sculpture, from Michael, indicates that the cliffs are an even more specifically regional image of south-east England:  ‘It looks good but, as a Yorkshire man, I don’t like the fact that I  think it represents the White Cliffs of Dover … People say when they reach the white cliffs they’re back in England. I just think I’m 250 miles from home.’19 South-east England is geologically distinct from northern and western regions and nations of Britain  – including Yorkshire, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland  – and such differences underpin claims of regional and national distinctiveness, as this book will consider. The focus of much of the book, as I have mentioned, is on Cornwall and its rocks as an in-depth case study in the context of ‘Celtic’ Britain. Cornwall is a revealing case as it is part of England but has a long history of being perceived as distinctively Celtic, occupying an interesting position between region and nation. So it is telling to explore the role of its rocks – rocks that differ dramatically from the chalk and other sedimentary rocks of the south-east – in the imagination of a nation and of a Cornish race. The White Cliffs will operate as a refrain in this book, as an image of the English nation and of what Celtic Britain is defined against. What were known as ‘primitive’ rocks, found mostly in north and west Britain, and considered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be the oldest of all rocks, contrast to the ‘secondary’ or sedimentary rocks  – of which chalk is a form  – found in the south-east, which tends also to underlie that other classic English landscape of gently rolling green hills, the ‘green and pleasant land’ of England.20 Another well-known national image is that of Scotland’s Edinburgh Castle, situated on the steep height of the darker, rockier prominence of a long extinct volcano.21 Although strikingly different to the White Cliffs of Dover, guidebooks and websites for both the cliffs and the castle describe these sites in terms of their geological origins millions of years ago, and as places of national defence against intruders.22 Both sites also function for nationalist party-political purposes. Edinburgh Castle was used in 2012 by

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Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), for a press conference to announce his plans for the independence referendum. Although the BNP seems far more preoccupied with exclusion than the far more left-wing SNP, for both leaders the national image serves to provide a backdrop of history to support the sense of the nation as ancient. Salmond describes the castle, just as Tyndall described the cliffs, as standing for ‘a thousand years’: ‘this place has been around for a thousand years and it ain’t going anywhere’.23 Salmond’s manner is more light-hearted than Tyndall’s, as he jokes here that the strong winds buffeting the fortification at the time of the conference will not blow it down (whereas Tyndall was emphasising the vulnerability of the cliffs to invasion), but he similarly evokes a sense of national history, referring to the castle as ‘first recorded venue of the old Scots parliament’, for instance, thereby stressing the ‘continuity of Scotland as an ancient, historic nation stretching back over a 1,000 years of independence before the Act of Union of 1707’.24 Many historians and critics have argued that the nation is in fact a modern construction, while nationalists tend to evoke the antiquity of their nations, as Tyndall’s and Salmond’s claims illustrate.This book will consider how rocks are used to support such claims, as nations are imagined to be as old as the land on which they are founded. Along with the focus on Cornwall, this book’s discussions of England, Scotland and Brittany, for example, can help to indicate the important role of geology for other nations and regions and how its analyses may be applied elsewhere.While this book considers how geological differences between England and ‘Celtic’ regions (especially Cornwall) help to support claims of national difference, geology clearly has a role in other nations beyond Britain. Dramatic geological differences between China and Tibet, for ­example – the Tibetan plateau often being described as the ‘roof of the world’, as it is the highest and most extensive plateau on earth – have helped to support perceptions of its distinctiveness from China, along with other differences such as religion (the best known image of which is probably the figure of the Dalai Lama). As Per Kvaerne observes, Western scholars of Tibet have often resorted to a long-standing notion that its mountainous landscape and religion are deeply connected, that Tibetan religion is ‘based on emotions of awe and insignificance caused by the overwhelming grandeur of the Tibetan landscape and the harshness of its climate’.25 There are, of course,

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vast political, geographical and cultural differences between China/ Tibet and Celtic Britain, but there are also points of comparison between how these places are perceived. The romanticisation of Tibet as an especially spiritual, as well as mountainous, place, has contributed to the sense of its difference from China, in a comparable way to how ‘Celtic’ regions have at times been perceived as distinctly supernatural or haunted. Such perceptions of spiritual rocky lands are often primarily imposed on these regions from outside and rejected by inhabitants themselves, such as the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who is critical of the ‘Tibetization of the Hebrides’, the ‘myth that represents the islanders as all some sort of spiritual sportsmen, specializing in weird and wonderful soul states’.26 Others, however, have attempted to benefit from such mysticism, including some Tibetans who, as Alex McKay shows, used the image of ‘ “mystic Tibet” … to promote the idea of Tibet as a separate state’.27 It is beyond the scope of this study to analyse nationalist or separatist claims in other places beyond Britain, but its micro-scale analysis of Cornwall and Cornishness in the context of ‘Celtic’ Britain (considering descriptions of the White Cliffs of Dover and of the Scottish Highlands, for example) may at least help to sensitise us to how rocks can be used to ground ideas of national difference more widely. A difficulty shared by theories of nation (and globalisation) is the tension between observations based in the detailed reality of specific locations and the need to seek generalisations, without which our individual, localised studies may fail to connect, or may even themselves play into ideas of nationalist difference.28 This tension may be exacerbated by the pull towards academic sub-disciplinary expertise which can become so specialised that it is hard to make connections beyond a specific area of study. By presenting Cornwall as in part a case study this book attempts to point towards comparisons without too tenuously over-generalising. In so far as Cornwall’s writers use rocks to support a sense of racial difference from the English, they may chime with the very people to whom the Cornish feel opposed; English nationalists’ deployment of rocks as an image of racial purity is comparable. Attempts to construct geological foundations for regional and national difference may conceal points of similarity, and this study attempts to resist the pull towards disciplinary specialism that may inadvertently play into nationalist ideals of separation.

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My area of expertise for this book is mainly in the literature on Cornwall, however, and as such it contributes to the literary field of ‘four nations’ or ‘archipelagic’ studies, an area of research that has emphasised the multiple nations and regions of Britain in its resistance to a relatively unified Anglo- or London-centric perspective of literary tradition and culture. This book is an attempt, then, on the one hand to retain a perspective in which similarities between places can be acknowledged, while also recognising that places can be unique or at least different in some ways, contributing to the complex diversity within Britain. Early work in archipelagic criticism focused on the ‘Celtic fringe’  – Ireland, Scotland and, to a lesser extent, Wales – but recent years have seen a surge of interest in the regions of England.29 Cornwall, occupying a space between region and nation, is ripe for examination in these terms, while work in Cornish studies has so far tended to promote an uncritical agenda of cultural assertion, if not nationalism.30 In this context my study presents a critical view of literature about Cornwall that moves beyond any established category of English literature, through its analyses of the work of canonical authors alongside obscure regional texts (including scientific), all of which identify Cornwall as a distinctive location within, or even beyond, England, disturbing ideas of the English nation as a unified whole. In doing so, this study also engages with other literary critical fields, notably the interface of literature and science, postcolonial gothic and ecocriticism. The risk in presenting this book as a literary study of Cornwall is a lack of applicability beyond such a minute part of the world, and beyond English studies. By focusing on a form of materiality, making interdisciplinary connections by tracing the circulation of rocks through a diverse range of texts from geological journals to gothic and modernist novels, this book presents a methodology that may be applied elsewhere. As I have explained in my previous study, a cultural history of vibration, the decision to start from the material object rather than to work from the textual discourse that supposedly constructs it is likely to result in different kinds of understanding compared to the critical framework of ‘discourse’.31 Adelene Buckland points out that while literary criticism has focused on nineteenth-century geology’s production of narratives of the history of the earth, and on the related development of evolutionary narratives, practitioners of the science (with an interest in

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its economic uses, for example in locating valuable minerals) were most centrally concerned with stratigraphy: the study of the order and structure of the layers of rocks and fossils. The project of stratigraphy focused ‘on the material structure of the earth, rather than its story’, and was rooted in material objects: in minerals, museums, collections and exhibitions.32 In this case, the focus on rocks leads to an understanding of a material, economic foundation for Cornish nationalism along with intertwined ways in which rocks are discursively constructed and imaginatively identified with. While literary and historical studies have tended to examine the narrative construction of nations, including the use of folklore traditions from Romanticism onwards to establish an apparently ancient national past,33 this book is equally interested in how the material properties of rocks matter to the imagination of a nation. Cornwall’s rocks not only support the imagination of the nation as grounded in antiquity, but also provide a basis for the region’s mining industry and tourist industry, thereby contributing to a set of economic conditions that have helped to fuel the development of a nationalist movement. To help consider the place of ‘Celtic’ regions and nations within the context of British geology, we can turn to the work of the geographer Halford Mackinder, who provided an influential account of the differences between the types of rocks typically found in western and northern regions and those in the south-east. While there is a longer history of interest in a supposed division between these two parts of Britain, it was in the twentieth century that this began to be sharply delineated and described as pivotal to British history and politics, following Mackinder’s Britain and the British Seas (1902). Mackinder divided Britain into two parts according to whether outcropping rocks were younger or older than 280 million years. To the south and east the rocks consist of younger and softer sedimentary types  – such as the chalk found at Dover – whereas the rocks to the west and north are generally older and more resistant, forming ‘Highland Britain’.34 The opening paragraph of Mackinder’s book describes a pre-Columbian era when ‘the known lands’ were mostly spread across the Eurasian land mass, ‘from the shores of Spain to those of Cathay’, and when Britain’s ‘white cliffs’ faced the ‘mainland’. It presents Highland Britain as ‘Celtic’, which in contrast to the ‘white cliffs’ has ‘dark rocks’: ‘Britain then was at the end of the

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world – almost out of the world. At one point her white cliffs might be seen from the mainland, and from this she stretched, northward and westward, away from the life of Europe, to the dark rocks and bird-haunted skerries where the Celt listened to the waves rolling in from the unknown.’35 Again, here, Britain is described as female, ‘her white cliffs’ being contrasted to ‘the dark rocks’, which do not seem to belong to the rest of the nation in the same way. While her cliffs are visible from the European ‘mainland’, the dark rocks are ‘almost out of the world’, seeming mystical or other-worldly. Mackinder propounded a form of determinism according to which geographical aspects, such as distance, terrain and climate, shape a whole range of features of particular nations from their apparent racial characteristics to international relations. The idea that there are close connections between physical environments, especially landscapes, and national character is prominent in much geographical writing of the period, influential examples of which include Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie (vols 1 and 2; 1882 and 1891)  in Germany, Ellen Semple’s Influences of Geographic Environment (1911) in the United States, and Vidal de la Blache’s Principes de Géographie Humaine (1922) in France, along with Mackinder’s work.36 Mackinder’s imperialist vision of Britain’s central place in the world as a sea-faring island nation (following the ‘great geographical discoveries’ such as Columbus’s) makes way in his later work, his most influential essay ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ (1904), for his theory that a new age is dawning when global power would rest again on the central Eurasian land mass. But in this earlier work Mackinder is focused on Britain, and presents the division between the newer sedimentary rocks in the south-east, and the older rocks in the north and west, as the basis of much more general differences between the two parts of Britain, including different kinds of racial characteristics:  ‘The contrast between the south-east and the north-west of Britain, between the plains and low coasts towards the continent, and the cliff-edged uplands of the oceanic border, with all the resultant differences – agricultural, industrial, racial, and historical – depends on a fundamental distinction in rock structure.’37 Mackinder goes on in a later chapter to claim that racial characteristics differ between the two parts of Britain because the south-east has historically been more accessible to invaders from the European ‘mainland’, being both closer to and more hospitable

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than the relatively mountainous and infertile Highlands. Hence inhabitants of the Lowlands tend to originate from ‘a Scandinavian or Teutonic strain’, according to Mackinder, which modified the ‘aboriginal population’ of ‘Mediterranean origin’  – characterised by ‘dark’ hair and eye colour.38 (By this contradictory reference to an ‘aboriginal population’ originating elsewhere, Mackinder presumably means that the Mediterranean people were the first humans ever to settle in these areas.) There are exceptions, but generally inhabitants of the south-eastern areas are thus characterised as blonde with blue eyes. Mackinder is here picking up on older ideas about racial differences between the ‘English’ and ‘Celts’, who have been characterised respectively as civilised and primitive, light and dark, for example, throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earliest scholarly accounts of Celticism in the nineteenth century took the form of ‘race theory’, according to which the Celts were an ‘aboriginal’ British type, often considered to be less civilised than the ‘Anglo-Saxon’.39 Figures like John Beddoes in his The Races of Britain (1885) frequently made comparisons of ‘the Celt’ and the ‘African Negro’, both imagined to be lower on the evolutionary scale.40 Cornwall, along with Scotland and west Ireland, contained the highest proportion of ‘nigrescence’, claimed Beddoes, a term echoed by Mackinder in his map depicting ‘The relative nigrescence of the British population’, where the areas coloured black tend to overlap with the northern and western ‘Highland’ areas depicted on his geological map.41 This book will discuss such ideas about race further (especially in Chapter 2), but what I want to draw attention to here is that Mackinder is presenting a kind of geological determinism, according to which different kinds of rock structure apparently cause racial and many other differences, but also that this in turn leads to an apparent similarity between certain rocks and races, not least between the ‘dark rocks’ and the dark-eyed ‘aboriginal population’ that live on them. Mackinder does not himself explicitly make this connection, but the presence of both the causal explanation and the potential comparison between rocks and race allows me to distinguish between these kinds of relation and to return to the question of identification between nations and natives. This book observes both kinds of relation in play in nationalist narratives, but especially modes of identification between rocks and race, nations and natives, which

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I want next to consider more fully and precisely in terms of theories of nation.

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Theories of nation The imagination of a nation is of a bounded territory, with borders that mark it off from other nations. Many theorists have commented on how nations tend to be defined against others beyond their borders, or how national identity depends on exclusion.42 Bound up with the sense of what is outside the nation are feelings of inclusion or belonging. For Anthony D. Smith, the connection between a ‘homeland’ and people who live on it is crucial: [M]‌ odern nations and nationalism involve many more elements than a heightened concern for monitored boundaries and the exclusion of ‘foreigners’. What is crucial for nationalists is the sense of a ‘homeland’ and of historic, even sacred territory, not just boundaries. It is not just in the shape, but in the content of what lies within, that we need to seek an explanation. It is the relationship, emotional as well as political, between land and people, history and territory, that provides one of the main motive forces for national mobilization.43

Smith is critical of what he classifies as the modernist strand of theories of nations, especially their argument that nations are modern constructions, and their focus on nation-states as political. State-focused modernists, Smith claims, neglect to account for enduring and emotional qualities of national identity. He argues that nations draw on ethnicities whose histories extend beyond modernity, and elaborates further on the importance of an ethnic ‘homeland’ in his essay ‘Nation and Ethnoscape’. In this essay Smith considers how populations are associated with and attached to particular territories, which he terms ‘ethnoscapes’. He observes three ways in which this can happen: the landscape is felt to provide a ‘unique and indispensable setting’ for events that shape a population; it is felt to actively ‘influence events and contribute to the experiences and memories’ of a population; and it is felt to be a ‘witness to ethnic survival’, not least as a final resting place for ancestors.44 For Smith, a close association thereby develops between a landscape

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and a community, ‘such that a people is felt to belong to a specific territory and a territory to a particular people’.45 The association between territory and people is crucial to this book’s consideration of nation and nationalism, as I have indicated. Landscape as setting, as influence, and as witness will feature, but of most importance to this book is how feelings of belonging – and not belonging – are grounded, made to seem natural, primordial, and material, through the identification between people and the land itself. There is nothing older than the rocks, it seems, so to identify with those rocks is to identify with what is imagined to be a nation’s essential, core being. This is not to say that the connections between national territory and a community have no material basis. The geological properties of a nation or region can of course shape and be shaped by those who live on it, who mine or quarry or farm it, for example. Mineral and other natural resources may support the formation of nations both in view of their perceived “ancientness” as part of the land, of the substance of the nation itself, and as a means of generating wealth, of making the enterprise seem economically viable and advantageous.46 Cornwall’s rocks contribute to economic conditions – shaped by the mining industry and also the tourist industry – that have helped fuel the development of a nationalist movement, as this book will consider. There are real geological differences between different regions and nations of Britain, while rocks also have an exemplary role in how ‘nationalism works, in part, because national identities and the whole rhetoric of nationalism appear commonly to people as though they were always already there, ancient, or even natural’, as Craig Calhoun puts it.47 Other theorists than Smith have observed how nationalist thinking involves the connection between a place and a community, but are more interested in how national territory is imagined to be ancient or natural, which my work can help to substantiate through its concrete case study of ‘Celtic’ Britain and its rocks. Michael Billig, for example, expanding on the well-worn idea of the ‘imagined community’, writes:  ‘A nation is more than an imagined community of people, for a place – a homeland – also has to be imagined … Nationhood … involves a distinctive imagining of a particular sort of community rooted in a particular sort of place’.48 He goes on to refer to Ernest Gellner’s claim that national identity is felt to be ‘as natural as having a nose and two ears’, giving a

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sense of how an ‘imagined homeland’ can be felt to be part of one’s bodily self: ‘Losing a part of the imagined homeland is worse than merely losing an ear:  in the case of territory, the lost ear always turns up on someone else’s face. Something beyond utility – some part of ‘our’ home, ‘our’ selves – has been illegitimately taken by another.’49 A number of critics, like Billig, observe how national borders are contested and changeable rather than natural or given. Borders are made to seem real and sharply delineated by maps, which as Geoffrey Cubitt observes ‘show nations as self-contained spatial entities’, disguising ‘the often conflictual processes by which the boundaries of nations have been arrived at, and their still often contested nature’.50 Such an understanding of borders goes back to Ernest Renan, whose renowned essay ‘What Is a Nation?’ questioned the idea that ‘the boundaries of a nation are inscribed upon the map; and that this nation has a right to judge what is necessary, to round off certain contours, to reach some mountain or river, to which a species of a priori faculty of limitation is ascribed’.51 Such a doctrine, he goes on to say, is arbitrary (for example, why should one river be picked over another?) and disastrous (for it justifies violence). Nations are historical rather than racial or geographical: ‘it is no more the land than the race that makes a nation … A nation is a spiritual principle, the result of profound historical complications; a spiritual family, not a group determined by the configuration of the soil’.52 It is Renan’s discussion of nation that prefigures the work of more recent theorists like Benedict Anderson, who similarly argues against the idea that nations are eternal entities grounded in the unchangeable geography of territory or the biology of race, instead emphasising the historical creation of nations. As well as being fought over or contested, borders are themselves materially unstable. The cliffs of Dover, for example, form what appears to be a natural, even eternal border between England and France, but, unlike the line on a map, the coastline is of course far more irregular and subject to erosion and collapse. It is indeed frequent rockfalls that help to keep the cliffs white. As Julian Baggini has observed, the apparent permanence or ‘rock-solidity’ of the cliffs makes them an especially apt symbol of national identity, but it is an illusion. When walking along the cliffs, he explains, for example, ‘I came across a section that was much purer white than the rest. Looking down, it soon became clear why: there had been a

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massive rockfall.’ The boundary between land and sea is a hazy one, as the land’s whiteness slips away into the sea: ‘At the foot of the Cliffs there was a temporary protrusion of broken chalk, the waves lapping around it creating a milky halo.’53 The chalk cliffs may be particularly prone to erosion, in contrast to the harder, older rocks of west and north Britain. The early chapters of this book discuss the ‘primitive’ rocks found in these regions and nations, and how these seemed to provide an immutable basis for imagining Cornwall to be an exceptional, distinctive region or even nation, especially in terms of valuable minerals, its sublime landscapes, and its ‘primitive’ Celtic people. Cliffs, however, reappear later in this book, in Chapter 3, in sensation and Gothic fiction where they are depicted as perilous, trembling spaces that become physically dislocated from the English nation, but this time the focus is on the cliffs of Cornwall. Cliff tops are invaded and even replaced by foreign territories such as Egypt and West Africa, while the ‘primitive’ Cornish apparently resemble African races. In a postcolonial context, the Cornish coastline thus becomes an exemplary manifestation of insecure national borders and the dangers of empire, posing a threat to the English tourist. In a similar way, the final chapter focuses on another relatively soft kind of rock, like chalk, namely clay. As even such a hard rock as granite is subject to chemical alteration that transforms it into this very different kind of material – one that is mined in vast quantities and shipped away to other parts of the world, transforming the landscape in the process – the ground on which national fantasies rest seems inherently unstable. In contrast to the writers considered in previous chapters who describe the land as ‘primitive’ or even timeless, Jack Clemo, whose novels are the focus of this chapter, describes it as constantly changing and rejects certain notions of Celticity. Through its discussions of cliffs and of clay, especially, this book thus illustrates that geology can be used not only to support ideas of nation, as grounded especially in territory and race, but also to critique or undermine them.

Territory, identity, history and ghosts Nations are not simply territorial. It is, of course, difficult to devise a conclusive definition of what nations always consist of or to establish their crucial ingredients.54 Cornwall shares certain features

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with many nations, such as a language, albeit one that died out in the nineteenth century, but Cornwall is of course part of England and has no political state of its own. The Cornish language was resurrected in the twentieth century, however, and has contributed to a Celtic revivalist movement that has at times pursued political powers for Cornwall as a region, or even a nation – however unrealistically – that is seen to have been unfairly denied autonomy or independence. In so far as territory matters to the national imagination, this book has something to say about how that imagination can be grounded in (and destabilised by) rocks. Territory is also bound up with identity and history. According to Umut Özkirimli, ‘nationalist discourse makes three sets of interrelated claims’, these being identity claims, temporal claims, and spatial claims.55 The first divide the world into “us” and “them”, positing a ‘fixed identity on either side and stressing the characteristics that differentiate “us” from “them” ’.56 Temporal claims are made to establish a sense of continuity, to establish links to a past that can help make the current nation seem heroic, authentic, rooted deeply in history. Spatial claims are fixated on ‘territory, the quest for a “home”, actual or imagined’, writes Özkirimli.57 Nationalist discourse, he continues, ‘presumes an inextricable link between the nation and its natural environment; the landscape, the physical and built environment of entire areas are often seen as formative of the national character or soul’.58 We can see how these sets of claims are interrelated: spatial claims here could support identity claims and temporal claims, as the link between the physical environment and national character supports a sense of an essential, unchanging ‘us’ that extends back indefinitely through time and differs irrevocably from those who live in other environments, or on other rocks. The theme of ghosts, which emerges in Chapter  4, helps in articulating further these links between identity, territory and history. I  have already suggested how the ghostly lives of rocks can help to support identification with national territory:  people are rock-like, whereas rocks are imagined to possess some kind of life, to have a human-like aspect rather than being solely inert matter. A striking association between rocks and ghosts arises in part because both are perceived as survivals from an earlier time, in their very different forms: it is the hard, durable solidity of rocks that allows them to persist through the ages, while it is the alleged

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ability of ghosts to transcend the material, mortal world that allows them to return after death. Rocks are felt to exist out there in the world, whereas ghosts are more usually understood as imaginary, existing only in the human mind, but it is the very hardness of rocks that seems to make them the form of material that is closest to the spiritual, a virtually immortal substance that provides the key to an ancient past. By conceiving of natives as rock-like, they seem endowed with that ancient quality that binds them forever to the nation; by conceiving of rocks as ghostly it becomes possible to identify further with their past. These are ways of identifying with a national history as well as territory, of imagining human survival in ghostly form, which becomes a spatial and spiritual embodiment of the past. As ghosts, natives are imagined to retain ownership of a particular stretch of territory, of a haunted ruin or castle or house, to return from the dead to reclaim what is rightfully theirs, and thereby to exclude any usurpers. The first three chapters of this book focus primarily on an emerging consciousness of Cornwall as a distinctively rocky territory as depicted in nineteenth-century geological journals, poetry, folklore, travel narratives, gothic and detective fiction, while ghosts take on a prominent, complementary role to rocks in the final three chapters, which look mainly at twentieth-century ghost stories, Cornish nationalist and New Age writing, and modernist and romance novels.The first chapters reflect how the categories of science and literature were only beginning to take shape in the nineteenth century, building on well-established connections between these fields to show how geology and poetry together engage with rocks as a basis for perceiving Celtic nations and native races as distinct from England. The later chapters take on a more distinctly fictional engagement with the Cornish nationalist imagination and its ghosts. Ghosts are part of an imaginative response in fiction to conditions created by geology and economics. Along with the shift from an intertwined literary–scientific engagement with rocks to a more exclusively literary engagement with the ghostly, a connected pattern that emerges through this book is the historical development of Cornwall’s economy and its nationalism. Chapters 1 and 2 consider Cornwall’s mining industry and how it contributed to an early proto-nationalism that can be traced through scientific and poetic writing. The mining industry helped to create a sense of Cornwall’s difference and even

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independence from England.This industry thrived until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the tourist industry began to take on increasing economic and cultural importance, as documented in Chapters 3 and 4. Like the mining industry, the tourist industry utilised Cornwall’s rocks, but while both industries helped to motivate the development of the science of geology, a science that could serve economic interests by understanding and locating Cornwall’s minerals, and by promoting an interest in its landscapes, the tourist industry tended increasingly to invest in the more mystical qualities of Cornwall’s rocky, sublime landscapes. The tourist industry sold Cornwall’s haunted landscapes to visitors, in part to enhance perceptions of its exotic difference from England:  it is apparently a more spiritual as well as a rockier place, a place that is steeped in material and spiritual manifestations of an ancient past. The mining and tourist industries together became important to twentieth-century Cornish nationalists, both contributing to the sense of Cornwall’s difference from England. As the final two chapters show, however, Cornish writers also deploy ghosts as part of their reaction against tourists and other incomers. Rocks and ghosts in this context are depicted as a threat to the English visitor, who can be driven away or even killed by dangerous and haunted landscapes. Geology is a basis for economic conditions that have contributed to a Cornish resentment and dislike of incomers, and ghosts are a way of reclaiming an identification with the territory. The collapse of the Cornish mining industry combined with the growth of the tourist industry helped to create a situation in Cornwall in which many local people could no longer afford to own property: it became one of the poorest regions of Britain (and Europe), but with expensive house prices as a result of the influx of tourists, second-home owners and incomers attracted to this romanticised holiday destination. The Cornish, then, haunt rocks in order to retain exclusive possession of a land that seems to be sold increasingly to outsiders, but once promised great riches to its natives. Economic conditions help to drive the human, nationalist identification with rocks.

Notes 1 Stephen Daniels’s foundational work considers how landscapes become national icons, in Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity

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(Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1993). Other examples that discuss the intertwining of landscapes and nation include David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London:  Reaktion, 1998); David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell (eds), The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002). 2 UKIP’s Web pages seem to frequently change and become inaccessible, but these sentences were previously included on many local party websites, including www.ukiplocal.co.uk/page/the-truth-about-the-eu (under heading ‘We have no control over immigration’) (accessed 21 September 2013); www.ukipwestdorset.co.uk/branch (accessed 21 September 2013); www.ukipsurrey.org/the-euro-is-finished/ (accessed 10 March 2014). 3 Kate Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 108. Feminist historians have specifically looked at how women were used to personify the nation during the French Revolution, for example, becoming ‘the symbol of that which was immortal and unchanging in the nation’, as noted by Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford:  Berg, 2000), pp.  43–4. For discussion of the various ways Britannia has figured as a female image of Britain  – including as mother nature  – see Madge Dresser, ‘Britannia’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism:  The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London:  Routledge, 1989), pp.  26–49. For an example of how nature is depicted as female, see the quotation from Hunt’s poem ‘On Michael’s Mount’ in Chapter 2 (p. 57), and for more general associations between nature and woman, and also between nations and family/ancestry, see Chapter 5 (p. 163). 4 Soper, What Is Nature? pp. 108–9. Also see Paul Ward, Britishness since 1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 38 (Britain) and p.  43 (Ireland); Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation:  Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia, PA:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Madge Dresser notes that one of the various ways in which Britannia has figured as a national image is as ‘innocent virtue outraged’ and in danger of violation (see especially pp. 34–6, 38–9). 5 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New  York:  Routledge, 2004), p. 2. 6 See National Trust,‘What are the Dover cliffs made from?’, www.nationaltrust.org.uk/article-1355790829532/ (accessed 16 December 2013).

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7 See ‘British National Party Election Broadcast, 1997’, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=kMznu63mGdI (accessed 16 December 2013). 8 Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p. 66. 9 BNP Election Broadcast, 1997. Vron Ware also discusses this broadcast and its relation to the whiteness of the cliffs, ‘Perfidious Albion:  Whiteness and the International Imagination’, in Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica and Matt Wray (eds), The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 184–213 (197–8). 10 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 2002), p. xxxi (Gilroy also notes that New Labour included only one image of a black man in their manifesto). See also Gilroy’s ­chapter 2 for a discussion of race and nation, pp. 41–83. 11 Michael Billig’s concept of everyday or routine nationalism in Banal Nationalism has of course been very influential (London: Sage Publications, 1995). See also Gilroy, ‘Race Is Ordinary’, introduction to 2002 edition of There Ain’t No Black, pp. xi–xxxix. 12 Jamaica Kincaid, ‘On Seeing England for the First Time’, Transition 51 (1991), 32–40 (40). 13 Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching (London: Picador, 2010), p. 194. 14 Helen Cousins, ‘Helen Oyeyemi and the Yoruba Gothic: White Is for Witching’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47 (2012), 47–58 (53). 15 Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching, p. 80. 16 Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching, p. 29 (stabbing); p. 107 (dead in truck); p. 114 (inmates hang themselves); p. 204 (BNP leaflets); p. 227 (Ore finds leaflets). 17 For observations about how the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ are used interchangeably by many in England, see Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity: Englishness and Britishness in Comparative and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 1; Michael Skey, National Belonging and Everyday Life: The Significance of Nationhood in an Uncertain World (London and New York: Palgrave, 2011), p. 43.Walker Connor observes that this ‘tendency to perceive the state as an extension of one’s own national group’, ‘to equate the entire country with their own ethnic homeland’, is a common characteristic of multinational states in general, in ‘Beyond reason: the nature of the ethnonational bond’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (1993), 373–89 (375). 18 Tania Kovats, Close Encounters of the Art Kind: The White Cliffs of Dover (London:  Victoria and Albert Museum, 2013), www.vam.ac.uk/ content/articles/c/close-encounter-tania-kovats-the-white-cliffs-ofdover/ (accessed 20 December 2013).

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19 Kovats, Close Encounters. 20 See, for example, Daniels, Fields of Vision, p. 213ff.; Christine Berberich, ‘This Green and Pleasant Land: Cultural Constructions of Englishness’, in Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl (eds), Landscape and Englishness (Amsterdam and New  York:  Rodopi, 2006), pp.  207–24; David Lowenthal, ‘British National Identity and the English Landscape’, Rural History 2 (1991), 205–30. 21 Edinburgh Castle is repeatedly referred to as ‘a national icon’ in the guidebook sold on the site, by Chris Tabraham, Edinburgh Castle: The Official Souvenir Guide (Edinburgh: Historic Scotland, 2008). 22 See National Trust, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, www.nationaltrust. org.uk/article-1355790829532/ (geological origins) and www.nationaltrust.org.uk/white-cliffs-dover/ (defence) (accessed 23 November 2013); Tabraham, Edinburgh Castle, pp.  46–7. The first information board for visitors to the site states that ‘The Rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands was formed 70 million years ago, during a period of violent volcanic activity …’. The interest in national geological origins is found also in Edinburgh Museum, which explains, for example, on a film clip that millions of millions of years ago ‘Scotland was part of one continent, England was part of another’ (visited 2009). 23 Tom Peterkin, ‘Scottish Independence Referendum:  Alex Salmond Takes to the World Stage to Sell Scotland’s Story’, Scotsman (26 January 2012), www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/ scottish-independence-referendum-alex-salmond-takes-tothe-world-stage-to-sell-scotland-s-story-1-2077799 (accessed 23 November 2013). 24 Peterkin, ‘Scottish Independence Referendum’. Edinburgh Castle has a complex, ambiguous history. It was the site of the declaration of Arbroath, the fourteenth-century manifesto asserting Scottish independence, for example, but it also held out against the Jacobites in 1745. Salmond weaves together various historical resonances in his narrative of progress toward Scottish independence. 25 Per Kvaerne, ‘Tibet Images among Researchers on Tibet’, in Thierry Dodin and Heinz Rather (eds), Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections, and Fantasies (Boston, MA: Wisdom, 2001), pp. 47–63 (49). 26 Hugh MacDiarmid, quoted in Loren Cruden, Walking the Maze: The Enduring Presence of Celtic Spirit (Vermont: Destiny, 1998), p. 49. See also discussions of the Tibetan mountains, spirituality, and politics, in Dodin and Räther (eds), Imagining Tibet, especially the chapters by Kvaerne, ‘Tibet Images among Researchers on Tibet’, pp. 47–63, and Alex C.  McKay, ‘ “Truth,” Perception, and Politics:  The British Construction of an Image of Tibet’, pp. 67–89.

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27 Alex C. McKay, ‘  “Truth,” Perception, and Politics:  The British Construction of an Image of Tibet’, in Dodin and Räther (eds), Imagining Tibet, pp. 67–89 (p. 83). See also discussions of the Tibetan mountains and spirituality in the chapter by Kvaerne, ‘Tibet Images among Researchers on Tibet’, pp.  47–63. See also Malcolm Chapman’s argument that distant cultures created and romanticised the idea of the ‘Celtic’, which ‘the Celts’ then appropriated for themselves, The Celts:  The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 1992). 28 I discuss this issue in the introduction to Shelley Trower, Place,Writing, and Voice in Oral History (New York: Palgrave, 2011), especially pp. 13–14. 29 See, for example, David Duff and Catherine Jones (eds), Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Dafydd Moore, ‘Devolving Romanticism:  Nation, Region and the case of Devon and Cornwall’, Literature Compass 5 (2008), 949–63; Nicholas Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country (London: Palgrave, 2010). 30 Professor of Cornish Studies Philip Payton, for example, in his Cornwall:  A  History (Fowey:  Cornwall Editions, 2004), notes from the outset that one of the ways the Cornish are perceived is as ‘the last of an ancient race’, which seems matched by the geology of Cornwall, which he uses to assert its distinctiveness, not least as especially ancient. ‘For the romantic fancy of popular fiction, the stones of Cornwall are old, as old as time itself ’, writes Payton, ‘and this is something with which the scientist will readily concur.The stones of Cornwall are old’, p. 1. It would not have been difficult to rephrase in order to avoid the uncritical implication that Cornwall’s stones are in fact ‘as old as time itself ’. By beginning with the ancient rocks of Cornwall Payton attempts to lay out how Cornwall is essentially different from England. The preoccupation of Cornish Studies with Cornwall’s difference is indicated by the title of another of Philip Payton’s books, The Making of Modern Cornwall: Historical Experience and the Persistence of ‘Difference’ (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1992), and Alan M. Kent’s The Literature of Cornwall:  Continuity Identity Difference 1000–2000 (Bristol:  Redcliffe, 2000). Payton also refers to Cornwall in nationalist terms as ‘her’ (as discussed in the Introduction), for example in The Making of Modern Cornwall, p. 24; as do Bernard Deacon, Dick Cole and Garry Tregidga (Deacon and Tregidga have also been members of the Institute of Cornish Studies) in Mebyon Kernow and Cornish Nationalism (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2003), p. 7.

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31 Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 6. 32 Adelene Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology, and the Material Imagination’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008), http://19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/viewFile/469/329 (accessed 11 July 2014). 33 Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich’s collection considers the Romantic interest in national folklore in Europe, Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1988), for example. Eric Hobsbawm discusses the new use since the Romantic period of (apparently old) folklore for nationalist purposes, in Nations and Nationalism since 1780:  Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.  103–4. See also the final section of Chapter 2. 34 Halford Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford Unviersity Press, 1915), p. 63. 35 Mackinder, Britain, p. 1. 36 See Geoffrey Cubit, ‘Introduction’, Imagining Nations (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 1–20 (11); Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 207–11, 237–42. 37 Mackinder, Britain, p. 63. 38 Mackinder, Britain, pp. 181–3. 39 For a discussion of this see David C. Harvey, Rhys Jones, Neil McInroy and Chrstine Milligan (eds), Celtic Geographies: Old Culture, New Times (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 5–6. 40 See James Vernon, ‘Cornwall and the English Imagi(nation)’, in Geoffrey Cubit (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 156–7. 41 Mackinder, Britain, p. 182 (for the geological map see p. 64). 42 See, for example, Michael Skey, National Belonging and Everyday Life: The Significance of Nationhood in an Uncertain World (London and New York: Palgrave, 2011). 43 Antony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism:  A  Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (New  York:  Routledge, 1998), p. 83. 44 Antony D. Smith, ‘Nation and Ethnoscape’, reprinted in Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 149–59 (150–1). 45 Smith, ‘Nation and Ethnoscape’, p. 151. 46 Tom Nairn points out in his The Break-up of Britain that the oil industry provoked a ‘new’ Scottish nationalism (London: New Left Books,

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1977), pp. 126–95. MacDiarmid has also considered how Scotland’s raw materials can play a key role in an independent Scotland’s economy, ‘Scotland’, in Edwards, Evans, Rhys and MacDiarmid, Celtic Nationalism, pp.  301–58. The debate around Scotland’s independence continues to centre around its oil. See, for example, Rowena Mason and Severin Carrell, ‘Scottish Independence:  Cameron to Promise North Sea Oil Revolution’, Guardian (23 February 2014); Rowena Mason, ‘Alex Salmond Defends Scotland’s Ability to Manage North Sea Oil and Gas’, Guardian (24 February 2014). 47 Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham:  Open University Press, 1997), p. 12. 48 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), p. 74. 49 Billig, Banal Nationalism, p. 75. 50 Cubitt, Imagining Nations, p. 10. 51 Ernest Renan, ‘What Is a Nation’, in Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Essays by Ernest Renan, trans. William G. Hutchison (London and New York: Walter Scott: n.d. [1896]), pp. 61–83 (p. 79). 52 Renan, ‘What Is a Nation’, p. 80. 53 Julian Baggini, ‘A Home on the Rock’ (Swindon: National Trust, 2012) http://whitecliffsofdoverwriter.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/a-home-on -the-rock-low-res.pdf (accessed 30 December 2013), p. 12. 54 For a discussion of difficulties of defining the nation, see, for example, Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 5–9. 55 Umut Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism:  A  Critical Introduction, 2nd edn (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 208–9. 56 Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism, p. 208. 57 Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism, p. 209. 58 Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism.

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Primitive rocks: Humphry Davy, Cornwall’s Geological Society and sublime mineral landscapes The newly established Geological Society of London, formed in 1807, set out as a primary purpose its ambition to produce a geological map of Britain. The editors of the first issue of the Society’s journal, Transactions of the Geological Society (1811), stated their hope that its members will continue to donate mineral specimens that will lay the foundations of such a map.1 A few years later, in 1814, a similar society was formed in Cornwall, which then produced its own journal, Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall (1818), the first issue of which echoed the London version of Transactions, though on a smaller scale:  ‘In the construction of a geological map of Cornwall, the Society has made considerable progress, and the Council trust that from the zealous and united exertion of its members, its completion may be confidently anticipated’.2 At this point the president of the London Society, George Bellas Greenough, was about to publish his Geological Map of England and Wales, the result of a cooperative collaboration between the society’s members who sent in rock specimens from various localities throughout much of Britain. What such maps clearly highlighted were regional differences in geology, differences which formed a basis for understanding how particular regions were not only composed of certain kinds of rocks but also exhibited other properties. Of much interest, at least initially, was that some regions contained large quantities of metals and other valuable resources suitable for mining. Thus the first geological map of England ever to be produced, in 1815, was by William Smith, whose work as a land surveyor (landowners’ incomes depended on the exploitation of natural resources) provided him

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with the necessary experience in observing the geology of a wide range of areas across England and Wales.3 Greenough then drew extensively on Smith’s map for his more collaborative Geological Map, and London’s Transactions refer to the practical uses of such a map, but it was Cornwall’s version of the journal that most heavily emphasised, from the outset, the purpose of the society and its prospective map as being to serve mining interests: to contribute ‘to the advancement of the mining resources of the County of Cornwall’ as well as ‘to the progress of geological knowledge’.4 But while rock-mapping had a clear economic function, it was also motivated by a flowering interest in travel and landscape aesthetics, and it is these curiously distinct yet overlapping interests in mining and landscape that this chapter will consider in combination.5 In different ways the interests in both mining and landscapes produced an intensified focus on ‘primitive’ rocks, such as granite  – rocks found mostly in northern and western regions of Britain  – largely because these rocks both contain some of the most valuable mining materials6 and underpin some of the most dramatic, sublime mountainous landscapes. Focusing on the ‘primitive’ region of Cornwall, this chapter will explore how members of its Geological Society, including the ‘Romantic scientist’ Humphry Davy,7 mapped out geological regions as distinctive in the early nineteenth century. Davy observed these regional qualities in his poetry and his scientific writing, and contributed to claims of local distinctiveness and expertise, which developed in opposition to a growing professionalism centred in London. This chapter will, in other words, consider how scientific and poetic descriptions of the mineral value and the aesthetic qualities of landscapes support the claims of Cornwall’s Geological Society to regional difference and expertise. With their interests in mining as well as landscape aesthetics, Davy and the Cornish geologists provide a different angle from the more usual focus on the aesthetic interests of the canonical Romantic poets (of whom Wordsworth is representative in this chapter) and of travel writers, who typically engaged only minimally with industrial concerns. Through its focus on the case of Cornwall, this chapter can contribute to the strand of Romantic studies that has continued to develop a critique of the canonical, unified “centre” of English poets by establishing a devolved plurality of Romanticisms, registering the complexities of national and

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regional contexts across the British Isles.8 Since the 1980s critics have considered the complexities of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Romanticisms and have turned attention more recently to ‘the provincial diversity of English Romantic writing’, as Nicholas Roe puts it.9 By turning to the West Country, Roe relocates the roots of English Romanticism, focusing on a region that offers a convincing alternative to the Lake District. Roe’s collection, however, has little to say about Cornwall,10 a county that is of particular interest here as it is part of England but also began to develop a distinct regional or even national identity. By taking Cornwall as its focus, this chapter will identify how a regionally based version of Romantic science stakes out a specific territorial claim, which is grounded in both the aesthetics and the mineral value of primitive rocks. Cornwall’s geologists emphasise the distinctiveness of Cornwall through its ancient, sublime rocks and its exceptionally valuable minerals, in other words, over which they stake out claims of expertise and ownership. They present an alternative version of Romantic geology that engages with the economic conditions in which a proto-nationalism begins to emerge.

Primitive rocks and the sublime Historians of geology frequently observe that the study of rocks and fossils began to open up a new perspective of earth history in the late eighteenth century. The emerging discipline of geology showed that the history of the earth extended back immeasurably, far beyond the appearance of humankind, and beyond what the Bible had accounted for.11 ‘Primitive’ rocks were usually considered the oldest, containing no fossils and thus appearing to pre-date the existence of all living beings. Historians and critics have mostly focused, however, on the role of sedimentary rocks and the fossils found in them, which, by providing evidence of the existence of species that over millions of years had become extinct, were so crucial to the establishment of theories of evolution.12 Fossils also became important to the process of mapping out rocks in terms of their age, a taxonomic enterprise known as ‘stratigraphy’, which was a core driver of nineteenth-century geology.13 But in the early decades of the century geologists largely ignored fossils, which is evident in the first few volumes of Transactions, which placed by far the most emphasis on minerals and rocks. As Simon Knell points

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out, for example, only one of the eighteen articles in the first volume of London’s Transactions concerns fossils.14 In the first volume of Cornwall’s issue there are none, while over half of the articles discuss granite, at that time considered the first among the primary rocks since it so often seemed to underlie all other primary rock masses.15 There was much debate between the theory proposed by Abraham Gottlob Werner, that granite was the first of all rocks to form in the primordial sea, and the theory proposed by James Hutton, which understood it to have an ‘igneous’ origin, to be formed by the earth’s internal heat, for example through volcanic action. According to Hutton’s theory, which gained increasing ground in the nineteenth century, granite could erupt or ‘intrude’ into previously formed sedimentary rocks, and was not therefore in all cases the most primitive formation. But at this stage granite was still widely thought to be the oldest of rocks, and geologists including Davy, as well as poets including Wordsworth and Goethe, used the aesthetics of sublimity in their descriptions of geological formations and landscapes – especially those formed of primitive rocks – which were thus apprehended as vast, potentially infinite and incomprehensibly ancient.16 Marjorie Hope Nicolson discusses how natural philosophers among others developed the concept of ‘geological time’ as indefinite in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which helped to generate the Romantics’ interest in mountains in general as sublime, while they were previously considered ugly disfigurations of nature, the result of God’s wrath.17 Poets including Wordsworth were also well acquainted with contemporary geological theories such as Werner’s, building on the sense of primitive rocks in particular as ancient or even eternal, and thus sublime.18 Wordsworth’s travel narratives contain many geological observations. His An Unpublished Tour (1811–12), for instance, describes his impressions when looking down into the depth of a chasm in the Lake District, cut through by a brook over ages, and contrasts the fragile slate rocks and earth, which are here on the verge of collapse against the sublimity of the ‘ever-lasting granite’ and ‘basaltic columns’ belonging to another scene: ‘Among sensations of sublimity, there is one class produced by images of duration, [or] impassiveness, by the sight of rocks of ever-lasting granite, or basaltic columns, a barrier upon which the furious winds or the devouring sea are

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without injury resisted.’19 This sense of sublimity is characteristic of Wordsworth’s wider treatment of the sublime as involving great temporal durability or even eternity along with great spatial depths or heights. In ‘The Prelude’ the ‘disappearing line’ of a road is perceived as extending into infinite space, or into eternity, across a hilly landscape with its rocky, ‘bare steep’:     a disappearing line Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep Beyond the limits which my feet had trod Was like a guide into eternity, At least to things unknown and without bound. (Book 12, 148–52)20

Despite the usual focus on the sublime as a psychological category, we can identify a ‘natural sublime’  – to refer to sublime objects rather than subjective experiences of the sublime – considering its manifestations in scientific as well as aesthetic contexts. As Noah Heringman comments, ‘Outside aesthetic theory, the word “sublime” is generally used in eighteenth-century Britain to describe physical objects’ such as rocks and land forms, a usage that continues in the early nineteenth century.21 Employing this sense of the natural sublime, in his public lectures on geology delivered in 1805, Davy referred to granite as one of the commonest types of ‘primitive’ rock and described its landforms as having special qualities of sublimity both in its spatial ‘magnitude’ and, he implied, in its temporal continuity, its ability to survive, to endure, to withstand the waves. Like Wordsworth, with whom he exchanged ideas about poetry and science, Davy describes how granite is able to ‘resist’ the waves of the sea. It is found, he goes on to observe, at the ‘extremity of our land’, in the ‘primitive country’ of Cornwall: No rock is grander in form nor more sublime in structure. Placed at the last extremity of our land, it seems well adapted from its magnitude, solidity, and strength to resist the force of the waves of the Atlantic and to prevent the encroachment of the ocean upon the land … Thus in Cornwall, which is most distinctly a primitive country, the granite and micaceous and siliceous schist meet and form the principal rocky basis of the land.22

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Maurice Hindle has considered the mutual influence between Wordsworth and Davy with particular attention to Lyrical Ballads. Their shared sense of the ‘natural sublime’, manifest in the temporal and spatial vastness of rocky landscapes, could contribute to this project of demonstrating the exchanges between these writers.23 The distinctiveness of Davy’s work can also be emphasised, however, in the context of Cornwall’s geological network. Like the Cornish geologists whose work will shortly be discussed, Davy mixes scientific observations with aesthetic judgements about the sublime Cornish landscape, moving on from the sublimity of granite to the technical description of ‘the granite and micaceous and siliceous schist’ that constitutes the basis of the land of Cornwall (‘schist’ referring to a rock consisting of layers of different minerals). As Hindle observes, it was Davy’s dual interests in poetry and science that encouraged Wordsworth to see the imaginative qualities of science, and to compare the poet and scientist as observers of nature.24 Davy’s interest in landscapes is not only bound up with aesthetic and scientific observations, however, but also, and in contrast to Wordsworth, with their mineral potential, as will be shown. The links between geological and literary forms of writing and activity are well documented, geology being a popular emerging discipline of the time that was highly compatible with the Romantic attraction to nature, mountaineering and the sublime.25 Romantic concepts such as the sublime thus circulate through scientific as well as poetic writing, as can be seen in the work of Davy. Davy’s ‘Extract from an Unfinished Poem on Mount’s Bay’ provides a commentary on his dual interest in granite rocks as both scientist and poet. Again, Davy first describes the rocks as stable, as strong, surviving over vast stretches of time. He describes the ‘granite feet’ of the Mount, ‘whose base, / Beat by the storm of ages, stands unmoved / Amidst the wreck of things, the change of time’.26 He then moves on to the cliffs of Land’s End (here referred to as ‘Bolerium’), with their spatial vastness or ‘awful height’, and how they are sought out by the scientific seeker of ‘great laws’ or by the poetic soul who is sensitive to the beautiful and sublime: Thy awful height Bolerium is not loved By busy Man, and no one wanders there Save He who follows Nature: He who seeks Amidst thy crags and storm-beat rocks to find

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The marks of changes teaching the great laws That raised the globe from Chaos. Or He whose soul Is warm with fire poetic, He who feels When Nature smiles in beauty, or sublime Rises in majesty …27

The ‘great laws’ are universal, but their manifestations are grounded in specific places. The laws that ‘raised the globe from chaos’ can only be worked out by attending to local manifestations, in this case in Mount’s Bay. The domain of geology, in other words, is primarily in the field rather than the supposedly neutral, rational, universal space of the laboratory, and its findings based on observation rather than experimentation. As Roy Porter has pointed out, local histories and county surveys were a great contributing factor to geology, and it was only from detailed local observations that more general theories could be built, or indeed questioned and new theories developed. Porter provides the example of William Borlase, who, in his Natural History of Cornwall, upheld the conventional religious view of the Creation and flood, but whose ‘familiarity with the devastations of tides and weather on the Cornish coast-line’, along with his ‘expertise in Cornish mining’ and the complexities of veins, lodes and faults, led him almost despite himself to an awareness of denudation and of the operation of other events subsequent to the catastrophic flood.28 Individual observations of the details of local rocks and strata made by provincial members of the London Geological Society from all over Britain also contributed to that more general, centralised system of knowledge provided by Greenough’s geological map. The focusing of attention on specific localities was just as likely, however, to involve observations about their distinctiveness, about their particular characteristics, and even claims as to the ‘specialness’ of individual places. Hence contributors to Cornwall’s Transactions observed that the region’s landscapes are especially sublime, and repeatedly proposed that it is especially rich in minerals – perhaps containing more mineral veins than anywhere else in the world.We have already seen Davy’s suggestion in his geological lectures and poetry that the ‘primitive country’ of Cornwall in general, and also specific places within it (Mount’s Bay, Land’s End), are especially sublime. For Davy, the rocks of Cornwall are not only of interest

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to the poet and scientist; they are also important to the ‘practical miner’.

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Minerals and maps In his article published in the first issue of the local Transactions Davy refers to Cornwall’s superior mineral wealth, both in terms of economic value and its contribution to scientific theory: Cornwall may be regarded ... as the Country of Veins. It is in veins that the most useful as well as the most valuable minerals generally exist; that the pure specimens are found which serve to determine the mineralogical species, and that the appearances seem most interesting in their connexion with geological theory. Thus veins, which now may be considered in the light of the most valuable cabinets of nature, were once her most active laboratories; and they are equally important to the practical miner, and to the mineralogical philosopher.29

Davy’s metaphorical language here helps to emphasise further the exceptional worth of Cornwall’s geology. Echoing his reference to how veins contain the ‘most valuable minerals’, Davy then compares veins to ‘the most valuable cabinets’ and to the ‘most active laboratories’, underlining how their value to science is as rich as they are to mining interests. The image of veins both as cabinets and laboratories points to their capacity to make things apparent or evident, while the former in particular suggests that veins may also contribute to landscape aesthetics. Cabinets are not only for storing but for visible, even showy display of their valuable contents (such as those ‘cabinets of wonder’, the museum-like rooms that exhibited objects from natural history, geology, classical history, and so on).30 Davy’s notebooks similarly emphasise the unique qualities of Cornwall, including its scenic display of veins and rocks, where he drafts his Introduction for Sketches of the Geology and Mineralogy of Cornwall (unpublished). The first indication of his idea for such a project is in an early notebook where he notes a series of chapter titles under the heading ‘Sketch of a book to be entitled observations in Cornwall’.31 His interest both in landscapes and in minerals is apparent in the first two chapter titles, ‘Scenery’ and ‘Mineralogical outline’, while the rest of the titles go on to point to other aspects

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of Cornwall’s distinctiveness, such as the ‘Manners of the People’.32 Later versions of the book are more focused on geology, and his fullest draft is his ‘Introduction to the Geology of Cornwall’ in a notebook written in 1806. It is here, in the opening paragraph, that Davy refers to Cornwall’s unique geological qualities, not least in its display of its rocks, this time alluding to the county’s especially long-standing mining industry, and using the metaphorical image of the county’s naked body: It is wholly impossible to give a complete and accurate geological and mineralogical history of any considerable district. Cornwall offers some objects which can, however, scarcely be attained elsewhere. Mines have been opened in it from the earliest times, and an immense number are still worked. The materials of the interior have been largely spread upon the surface, and not a few excavations are still open to the light of day. Its hilly aspect likewise favours the research of the geologist; for as nature has been unkind as to clothing the face of the country, the bare rocks, the bones, and, as it were, the sinews of the earth, are more perfectly disclosed. The sea likewise has intersected upon a great scale the strata of the country, and the Atlantic has displayed, in a series of bold, majestic, and diversified cliffs, the general arrangements of the rocks of the district.33

This paragraph distinguishes Cornwall in terms of its long mining history and its amenability to scientific observation as well as to the observer of the natural sublime. Mining has contributed to the exposure of Cornwall’s rocks and minerals, as has the sparsity of vegetation and the action of the sea upon its sublime cliffs. We thereby see the naked body of the country, its ‘bare … bones’ and its ‘sinews’. Davy’s descriptive language here echoes his ‘Extract from an Unfinished Poem on Mount’s Bay’ in its personification of the country and in its language used to evoke the sublime. In the poem, the Mount, like the cliffs here, is ‘majestic’ and bodily, although clothed: it has ‘granite feet’, as we have seen, and also a ‘brow … crown’d with castles’ and ‘rocky sides … clad with dusky ivy.34 Land’s End also has a ‘frowning brow’, and ‘sublime / Rises in majesty’.35 This paragraph from Davy’s unpublished ‘Introduction to the Geology of Cornwall’, then, develops a familiar metaphorical image of the country as bodily. Here it is possible to discern a threefold foundation for a Cornish proto-nationalism:  in the scientific and poetic perceptions of

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Cornwall’s rocks as ‘primitive’ (and thus sublime), in the economic interests in their mineral resources, and in their personification. That the country is exceptionally old, that it could provide financial benefits, and that it is potentially alive, can begin to ground a nationalist imagination. By imaginatively endowing an ancient, or even timeless Cornish land with a body or even life it could begin to be identified with its ‘natives’, who may have claims to its valuable resources. This chapter is most focused on the establishment of Cornwall’s version of Romantic geology (with its interest in mineral resources and the mining industry along with the aesthetic conception of Cornwall’s rocks as ancient) as a grounding for economic conditions in which nationalist ideas will begin to emerge, but we can also begin to discern here another strand that will become important later in the book: the identification of rocks as human. As the Introduction to this book has discussed, such images of rocks can contribute to nationalist identification with the land: later chapters will reveal how a sense of rocks as bodily, as human and living, is complemented by perceptions of humans as rock-like, or as ghostly haunters of rocks, tying in with claims that certain natives naturally belong to their nations and have special claims of ownership. While the Introduction to this book discussed the imagination of the White Cliffs of Dover as human skin, the rocks and earth of Cornwall figure as the bones and sinews. The cliffs help to define England in terms of its borders, while Cornwall seems in this case to be defined from within, almost as though it consists itself of ancestral bones. Davy distinguishes Cornwall in its geological qualities from other areas of Britain and Ireland, including chalk cliffs: ‘Under such favourable circumstances, Cornwall presents a wonderful geological and mineral aspect; it is not like the cliffs of the south of England, composed of layers of limestone, sandstone, or chalk, or like North Wales and the south of Ireland.’36 Cornwall’s rugged, ‘bony’ landscapes are of course strikingly different from the White Cliffs of Dover, and from the rolling green fields of south-eastern and middle England, which geographers and other commentators frequently observe were crucial to the idea of England from the eighteenth century onwards. Romantic writers saw new value in such orderly rural landscapes – in ‘England’s green & pleasant Land’ – at the point when these seemed threatened by industrialisation and urbanisation.37 But Romantics also turned to rockier landscapes. Noah

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Heringman considers how the primitive landscapes of the Lake and Peak Districts functioned as representative national landscapes. The Peak District in particular combines a ‘ “primitive” or disorderly’ topography with ‘increasing economic productivity’, presenting an authentically natural, wild and yet cultivated, productive national landscape.38 Cornwall provides another location for such primitive productivity, though at the same time as containing a wealth of mineral resources, it is depicted as uniquely different from the rest of England. Davy’s emphasis on Cornwall’s special value to mining as well as to science echoes the preface to the first issue of the local Transactions, in which his only published essay in geology appears (as mentioned earlier). The preface introduces the importance of the Society in terms of the ‘rich’ variety of Cornwall’s minerals and the availability of its geology for observation, which can benefit both the economy and scientific knowledge: The establishment of a scientific Society for cultivating and diffusing a knowledge of Mineralogy and Geology, in a district so inexhaustibly rich in all the varied treasures of the mineral kingdom, and so singularly adapted, both from its natural structure and artificial excavations, for the examination of subterranean phenomena, must be hailed as an event of high importance, as well to the progress of geological knowledge, as to the advancement of the mining resources of the County of Cornwall; for the benefits which such an Institution is capable of importing to our local interests, by defining and multiplying the objects of economical industry, are not less numerous and substantial than those which it will necessarily confer upon Science, by collecting, arranging, and generalising instructive facts.39

The preface here not only distinguishes the ‘singularly adapted’ Cornwall in terms of its special contribution to scientific knowledge, but makes it clear that the purpose of the Society is to bring about an increase in economic wealth for those within the county, referring to ‘the benefits which such an Institution is capable of importing to our local interests’. The terms used to refer to Cornwall’s minerals also allude to the great financial benefits they might bring: Cornwall is ‘rich’ in mineral ‘treasures’. The particular claims of knowledge of and relationship to Cornwall’s rocks made by the local geologists, which will be discussed shortly, are more

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than assertions of expertise; they are also possessive assertions of ownership of the land’s economic riches. Mining interests underpinned an increasing number of provincial scientific societies in England, but Cornwall’s Society was the first to be set up outside of London, at least partly as a result of the rapid expansion of the copper and tin industries in this region in the early decades of the nineteenth century.40 As well as asserting the economic along with the scientific importance of their own Society and county, the local geologists put up some degree of resistance to the centralised professionalism of the London Society, which could explain Davy’s careful, respectful framing of his own expertise in terms of the assertions of the Cornish Society. Davy was, from their inception, a member of both Societies, but his own interest in economic, industrial geology aligned him more closely with the concerns of Cornwall’s Society. He had come into conflict with Greenough, partly as a result of the latter’s ‘gentlemanly’ opposition to the application of science to mining, and had resigned from the London Society in 1809.41 The establishment within Cornwall of its own Geological Society may be considered, at least in part, to have been an attempt to resist encroachment from outside the territory. The turn in the history of science towards studying particular social situations for scientific research has helped to unearth numerous controversies between the proponents of rival approaches and theories, and the field of geology seems to have been especially riddled with controversy. Simon Knell, for example, discusses the conflicts and rivalries that developed between participants within the London-based Geological Survey who sought to map out regions such as Cornwall, but there also seems to have been a more general discord between the London Society and other, provincial Societies, including Cornwall’s, with its own competing map.42 As several geographers have observed, maps are often used as a means of maintaining or establishing power over or ownership of particular territories. Stephen Daniels considers how they operate as instruments for the consolidation and expansion of central government, for instance, aiding ‘the internal colonisation of the nation-state as well as the incorporation of its overseas territories’.43 Maps could be useful not only for conceptualising but for conquering or securing national territory, as in the case of the Ordnance Survey with its origins in the military mapping of Scotland.44 Wales did not establish its own

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geological institutions and could therefore be represented as ‘territory to be conquered’ by the London-based geologist and imperialist Roderick Murchison.45 The establishment within Cornwall of its own Geological Society may therefore be considered, at least in part, to have been an attempt to resist such ‘colonisation’, and even to have been itself a kind of proto-nationalist formation. A founding member of Cornwall’s Society, John Hawkins, expressed a sense of regional or even national pride in Cornwall. In the second volume of the Transactions, published in 1822, he observed that the German state of Saxony took the lead in the science of geology largely because of its mineral resources, but that Cornwall is even better situated to become a ‘country’ of geological importance. Like Davy, he notes that Cornwall lends itself to observation: it exhibits its mineral deposits ‘in a still more striking point of view’, ‘while the facilities for observation are, upon the whole, much greater than they can be in any inland country’.46 (Hawkins is presumably referring here to how the coastline surrounding most of Cornwall allows more rocks and strata formations to be visible to the naked eye than in a landlocked region like Saxony.) Hawkins’s use of the word ‘country’ here is interesting, as its meaning seems to slip between its different senses:  between its earliest meaning (as Latin contrata) of ‘a tract of land spread out before an observer’ and its later meaning of ‘native land’ (from the thirteenth century onwards). In its general use as native land, ‘country’ includes the people who live in it, and became comparable to, and even interchangeable with ‘nation’, as Raymond Williams indicates. ‘Nation’ referred originally to a racial group and later to a politically organized grouping, and although it began to be used in a clearly political sense from the sixteenth century onwards, ‘country’ remained more common in referring to the political unit of people until the eighteenth century.47 What is striking about the frequent use of the word by geologists in the early nineteenth century – as where Davy refers to Cornwall as ‘a primitive country’ and as the ‘Country of Veins’ in the quotations above – is how it slips from the sense of a tract of land to a more political suggestion that Cornwall is a nation in its own right, distinct from England; a nation among nations. Davy’s personification of the land may even indicate a shift towards this view of Cornwall as a country: no longer simply an inanimate stretch of land, it could have some kind of relationship or resemblance to the natives who live on it. But it is Hawkins who

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goes on most clearly to suggest that Cornwall could be a nation, proposing that its claims ‘to be ranked among the primitive countries of the globe, as far as our patriotic feelings are concerned, will be readily admitted’.48 Contributors to Cornwall’s Transactions thus emphasised the importance of their own Society in terms of the county’s distinctive, uniquely rich minerals with their benefits to the economy and to science, as we have seen, while they also asserted the importance of their being local, of being familiar with its geology, unlike visiting geologists whose ignorance disqualified them from anything more than superficial knowledge. The fourth volume of Cornwall’s Transactions opens with a pull-out of the promised geological map of Cornwall (1832) (there were previous maps, but not of the whole region), and contains an article by the map’s creator and secretary of the Society, Henry Boase, in which he reiterates the uniquely primary nature of the region. Cornwall, he writes, affords ‘more ample opportunities for studying the nature of primary rocks, than any other portion of the globe’.49 Further, again like Davy and Hawkins, he goes on to describe the scenery, including the ‘fantastic forms’ of heaps of granite blocks, the ‘very grand’ cliffs of a cove.50 Boase also describes his extensive labours in producing the map, which only a local man could carry out. He spent two years, he explains, walking over 1,200 miles, ‘sparing neither personal toil nor expense, in endeavouring to gain a more perfect knowledge of the geology of Cornwall, than could be obtained by strangers, however well qualified for the task, in their hasty and partial excursions’.51 John Hawkins, in the opening article of this same volume, similarly asserts that ‘native geologists’ are the best researchers because they can easily revisit and revise their labours. Hawkins’s article is framed by the narrator taking up the role of a guide to the interested ‘traveller’, thereby setting up his position as local expert. Like Boase, and as was typical for both local and visiting geologists, the article zooms in first of all on the ‘great chain of granite hills, which runs through the peninsula’, then moving on to their relation to the strata of clay–slate surrounding them, an understanding of which ‘Cornish Geologists … alone possess the means of accomplishing’.52 This assertion of local knowledge is made in the face of new kinds of incursions, by visitors for whom both landscape and geology have become subjects of genuine interest.

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As Roy Porter, among others, observes, travel literature was very popular in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, reflecting the surge of interest in topography along with ‘geographical works, local natural history, antiquarian studies, guide-books, maps, scenic prints, landscape painting’.53 Porter goes on to point out that influential travel writers displayed much proficiency in discussion of rock formations and landscape. Much as travel writers could become geological experts, then, it seems geologists blend their observations with an understanding of the expectations of travel narrative.54 Like Boase, Hawkins thus comments on the aesthetics of topography, acknowledging the dreariness of the landscape around Goonhilly, for example, while claiming that the ‘traveller, however, if he be a geologist’, will nevertheless feel interested in it. He goes on to observe a part of the cliffs near Landewednack ‘where the serpentine is so beautifully marbled with red veins, and interspersed with crystals of diallage’.55 Like other travel writers, Davy similarly describes the colours and beauty of rocks, while building up another, ‘deeper’ scientific layer of interest. With regard to the serpentine district described by Hawkins for example, Davy explains how the colours of the serpentine district are caused by particular elements,56 and goes on to propose that the ‘Cornish serpentine’ could be mined for architecture or sculpture. While Hawkins had described the beauty of the colourful serpentine landscape, Davy here describes the potential beauty of the mined rocks: ‘I am convinced, that by making proper excavations, many parts of the serpentine district would afford large and beautiful blocks of great fineness and beauty of colour’.57 The economic value of certain rocks, then, is closely tied up with the aesthetic appeal of the landscape – in this case with its beauty rather than its sublimity  – being enhanced by the colours often documented in travel narratives. Finally, in the closing two paragraphs of his article, Hawkins reiterates his point about the local expertise of ‘native observers’, and, echoing the reference in the first volume of Transactions to ‘our local interests’, asserts a sense of ownership, of possession of ‘our Cornish granite, of our slate, or of our serpentine formations’ (my italics): I cannot refrain from the observation, that while travellers glance superficially over every object, and too often from this cause, form

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very incorrect judgements, the indulgence which they are entitled to, cannot well be extended to native observers; from whom we have a right to expect correctness; and above all, an attention to the minutest circumstances of the case before them. It is by this mode of proceeding that the labours of our society may be made most eminently conducive to the progress of geognosy; and the monographies of our Cornish granite, of our slate, or of our serpentine formations, if they were so treated, might constitute a work of such original merit, that its authority would be appealed to, in all controverted points, as decisive.58

Such assertion of ownership could underpin economic claims to the land’s riches in opposition to outside interests. As Denise Crook has observed, many of the members of the Cornish Society had financial interests in the mining industry – as adventurers and landowners (who took a share of the profits of the land they owned), or less directly as bankers, smelters and merchants – and such members could have hoped to benefit from its activities.59 Hawkins’s great family wealth derived largely from Cornish copper, tin and clay mining,60 which was typical of the time when, as Philip Payton observes, Cornish mines were mostly in the hands of ‘indigenous Cornish adventurers’, who were often hostile to outside interests. Boase, similarly, was from a Cornish family and had mining interests: he was a partner in Penzance Union Bank and a tin smelting company.61 From the 1790s until the second half of the nineteenth century, Cornish mining was booming, and Cornish investors often dismissed capitalists from outside the region as ‘foreigners’, according to Payton, although their investment was increasingly needed over the course of the century.62 Rifts between local and ‘foreign’ adventurers seem to run parallel with the conflict between local and national scientific organisations, while the assertion of local expertise could also have been an attempt to counteract growing claims to expert professionalism such as those made by some members of the Geological Society of London and, a little later, the director of the Geological Survey, Henry de La Beche. The Geological Survey was established in 1835 as a government-funded project set up to examine and map Britain in detail, which was in many ways a continuation of Greenough’s earlier project with its aim to produce a geological map of Britain, except that de La Beche wanted paid employees to carry out

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the work in provincial surveys rather than to leave this work in the ‘amateur’ hands of local men.63 In contrast, Davy seems very attuned to the sensitivities and claims of local geologists. Despite his fame, or because of it, he frames his entire article for the first issue of Cornwall’s Transactions as a letter to the local Boase (who was later to produce the Cornish map), downplaying his own expertise in the face of society members who have much more opportunity to study the county: I shall in this letter comply with the request that you did me the honour to make, of offering a few hints regarding the geology of Cornwall. I can hardly venture to hope that they will be worth the attention of the Society: most of the members have had much better opportunities than have occurred to me, of examining our interesting county; and I dare say that many of the observations which I shall make, will have been anticipated by others.64

Davy was born and grew up in Cornwall, in Penzance, a town in Mount’s Bay where the Geological Society of Cornwall was set up, and he retained a long-standing attachment to the county, despite becoming a figure with an international reputation, and being closely involved with national organisations such as the Royal Institution. In his privileging of regional knowledge over national and institutional knowledge, one can see another side to Davy to how he is usually understood, for example by Jan Golinski as an ‘establishment’ figure whose public success depended on turning away from his provincial background and associating himself with the metropolitan centre. Davy seems in this case to have instead allied himself with and used his professional reputation to support the provincial society in its opposition to the far better known London Society.65 Alan Kent goes so far as to claim that Davy’s poetry illustrates a Cornishman’s sense of ‘identity’ with the earth, when in an untitled poem of 1795 he describes his tearful view of his ‘forefather’s graves’: ‘deep in the earth / In darkness and silence the organs of life / To their primitive atoms return’.66 Such a characterisation of Davy is quite typical of Cornish nationalist readings of such material, which associates national identity with ancestry or even race and with the timelessness of the land itself. This reading is favourable to the kind of Cornish nationalism that in the twentieth

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century begins to identify the bones of the land with those of one’s ancestors (as will be seen in Chapter  5), and it is work such as Davy’s – including its personification of rocks – that helps to pave the way. But Kent’s reading may be anachronistic in so far as Davy’s work does not itself directly articulate a sense of Cornwall as a nation or Cornish identity, although it seems to take part in an emerging Cornish proto-nationalism, as this chapter will conclude. In his letter-article for Cornwall’s Transactions, Davy also seems to speak as a now-urban dweller, whose expertise in the locality has in fact diminished, as well as a knowledgeable ‘Cornishman’, whose observations of Mount’s Bay can point the way for further investigation by members of the local Society. Davy seems to occupy a position between the local members and the ‘foreign naturalist’ employed by the London Society, against which the local Society is clearly opposed: The place where the granite joins the schist in St. Michael’s Mount, is remarkable for the number of crystallized substances it contains; oxide of tin, wolfram, phosphate and fluate of lime, quartz, mica, felspar, topaz, are all known to occur in the same veins; and the particular investigation and history of the nature of crystallized bodies occurring in this beautiful and remarkable spot, appears well worthy of the attention of the Geological Society, established so immediately in its neighbourhood. An opinion has been expressed by a foreign naturalist, who was extensively employed in geological researches some time ago by the Geological Society of London, that the granite veins of Cornwall are mere protuberances of primary granite in which mica schist has formed. This opinion does not merit discussion, and could only have been formed in consequence of very superficial examination.67

Like Boase, Hawkins and other contributors to Cornwall’s Transactions, Davy refers to the ‘superficial’ nature of a visitor’s observations. Much as Cornish adventurers referred to outsider capitalists as ‘foreigners’, Davy here refers to this visitor as a ‘foreign naturalist’, setting his London Society against the local Society that is ‘established so immediately in its [the place of a ‘remarkable’ quantity of minerals] neighbourhood’. And here, once again, we find geological observations of minerals mixed with an aesthetic appreciation of the ‘beautiful and remarkable spot’.

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Industrial landscapes Earlier observers had, of course, described the geological distinctiveness and particular qualities of ‘peripheral’ regions such as Cornwall (for example Richard Carew in his Survey of Cornwall first published in 1603, and William Borlase in his Natural History of Cornwall, first published in 1758), but by the middle of the nineteenth century such observers were no longer isolated exceptions. Davy’s writings and the establishment of the Geological Society of Cornwall in 1814 are just examples of a much more general, burgeoning interest in the rocks of such regions. The preoccupation with rocks arose at least in part from growing interests in the aesthetics of rocky landscapes, along with the mining industry. Many geographers and historians and literary critics have observed that from the eighteenth century onwards mountainous landscapes were invested with new value, especially those of the Alps, but also increasingly those of Britain’s mountainous periphery, such as the Peak and Lake Districts, Wales and Scotland.68 Such landscapes were increasingly described in terms of the aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque, becoming the subjects of much travel writing, poetry and painting in the Romantic period, and while many studies have considered how landscape aesthetics tend to exclude concern with material, economic conditions, this opposition can also be challenged. Stephen Copley considers how a new kind of aesthetics of the picturesque emerged in the Romantic period, an aesthetics that tended to exclude signs of economic activity from the landscape but nevertheless accepted limited traces of industry. One of the best-known writers on picturesque travel was, of course, William Gilpin, whose work occasionally accommodates industrial traces such as ‘the black-lead mine’ in the Lake District in contrast to his brief account of the Cornish tin mines on his Western tour which typify ‘the limits of normal Picturesque concern with the conditions of economic production’.69 Gilpin’s visit to Cornwall is cut short because he finds the landscapes ‘coarse’ and ‘uninteresting’, despite the geological qualities of the area. He notes that there is much of interest for the antiquarian and fossilist, including stone monuments, metals, and fossils, and that despite the ‘wildness’ of the ‘dreary landscape’ these lands are ‘the richest in the country’. Few crops are grown but Gilpin goes on to note that ‘it is very

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immaterial what the surface produces: the harvest lies beneath. In this neighbourhood [the moors between Bodmin and Liskeard] some of the richest of the Cornish mines are found.’70 But he soon leaves all this behind: ‘We had not, however, the curiosity to enter any of these mines. Our business was only on the surface.’71 For Gilpin, the local views are not at all picturesque and thus not of interest to the traveller. It is presumably against such a perspective, then, that the local geologist John Hawkins criticises those travellers who ‘glance superficially over every object’ and ‘form very incorrect judgements’. Despite the dreariness and ‘dull uniformity’ of the landscape, Hawkins claims that the traveller can find much of geological interest and goes on to emphasise the striking views and beautiful colours, as have been mentioned earlier. The local geologists we have looked at so far describe the rocks of Cornwall as having functional, economic use as well as aesthetic appeal, while these two aspects of rocks were often separated from one another. Travellers seeking aesthetic qualities of landscape frequently overlooked industrial features such as mineral wealth and mines.Wordsworth’s work, for instance, is far more likely to describe landscapes seemingly untouched by modernity than to acknowledge the presence of industrial activity. ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ famously depicts a picturesque scene in which the ‘wreathes of smoke’ rising up from the charcoal-furnaces on the banks of the River Wye are imagined to derive, instead, from ‘some hermit’s cave, where by his fire / The hermit sits alone’.72 Wordsworth’s ‘An Unpublished Tour’ is one among few exceptions in his work to depict an industrial location,Tiberthwaite slate quarry, but the production of slate is opposed to anything picturesque (slate is also contrasted to the sublime scene of granite rocks at sea, as was discussed earlier): Things are not to be valued merely in reference to picturesque beauty, especially in this mountainous & romantic [? region], else one might be permitted to regret that this delicate art [splitting slate into thin plates] should ever have been invented; for by means of it, trim & [? spruce] roof[? s] upon the surface of which no seed can find a [? rest or haven] will in time be substituted for those moss-grown and fern-clad coverings which, as we have already noticed, harmoniously unite the Cottages & outhouses with the rocks & trees among which they are placed, & represent Nature to

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the fancy as having an interest in adorning the Habitations of her Children.73

Wordsworth went on to collaborate with the geologist, Adam Sedgwick, a member of the Geological Society of London, who contributed a section on geology to his A Complete Guide to the Lakes (1842). Both Wordsworth and Sedgwick here occasionally mention slate quarries, but Wordsworth is far more focused on the aesthetics of the scenery (the ‘grandeur and sublimity’ of mountains, for example),74 while Sedgwick’s contribution concentrates mainly on providing scientific explanations for the formation of such scenery. Sedgwick does defend an interest in mining  – Whitehaven’s coal field is of interest owing to its machinery and related topics, which are ‘of no vulgar interest’ – but, much like Gilpin, he quickly closes: ‘inviting as the subject is, I must here leave it’.75 A little later Sedgwick moves on to an area of slate rocks, briefly describing the ‘fine roofing slates’ and ‘Noble quarries’ of the area, but these quarries cannot compete with the aesthetics of the natural formations of slate rocks, which ‘weather into fine picturesque forms, of which there are many beautiful examples between Broughton and the foot of Coniston water’.76 Critics have demonstrated the significance of friendships and acquaintances between poets and geologists of the period, particularly between Wordsworth and Coleridge, Sedgwick and Greenough, and Davy.77 Even more than Sedgwick, Greenough’s interests in geology were Romantic in so far as they were focused on landscape aesthetics – influenced in part by Gilpin78 – as well as scientific observations. It is only the latter, Davy, who emphasised, at the outset of his contribution to the Cornwall Society’s Transactions, the importance of mineral veins (‘they are equally important to the practical miner, and to the mineralogical philosopher’) in combination with the aesthetic qualities of rocky landscapes. In this respect, Davy seems to side with the priorities of the Cornwall Society. Whereas London Geological Society’s interests in mining were limited – aligning its members more closely with the poets – societies based in Cornwall (and north-east England) tended to have greater interests in mineral resources. Davy’s interest in mining in the context of geology accords with his interest in science more generally for its utility and application, as manifest for example in his well-known invention of the ‘safety lamp’ for

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use in coal mines. Davy refers to his hopes for such an invention – to prevent ‘great loss of life’  – in his letter to Henry Boase, in which he also agrees to contribute to the first issue of Cornwall’s Transactions.79 Cornwall provides a locale for thinking further about the ongoing relations between geological and literary interests in the first half of the nineteenth century, as Davy and other members of its Geological Society used the county’s minerals as well as its landscape aesthetics to contribute to territorial claims concerning its uniqueness and importance. These geological writers, in other words, develop a version of Romantic science in order to make claims about the geological properties of Cornwall, a version that incorporates rocks both in terms of their economic value and their landscape qualities. The Cornish geologists engage with landscape aesthetics but suggest that too much attention to this aspect of the rocks alone is ‘superficial’; they claim a close relationship to and even ownership of ‘our’ rocks through which their true scientific and economic value can be understood and appreciated. The geologists’ interests in both minerals and landscapes arose in part from a wish to contribute to and benefit from the development of Cornwall’s economy:  from its mining industry and also its tourist industry. Cornwall’s mining industry was booming in the Romantic period, and at its height it directly employed around a third of the working population.80 Perceptions of Cornwall’s landscapes in terms of their aesthetic qualities were, at the same time, helping to attract travellers, and their growing numbers over the course of the nineteenth century would swell dramatically in the age of mass tourism in the first half of the twentieth century. The tourist industry made much use of primitive, sublime landscapes to help promote Cornwall as different from England, as Chapter 3 will discuss. At this point, however, mining was the dominant industry in Cornwall, and this helped to create a particular kind of Cornish society. As Bernard Deacon has observed, the ‘growth of the Cornish economy had produced a mature industrial society in which a number of institutions [including the Geological Society] reproduced an assertive Cornish identity’,81 an identity that took pride in its industrial prowess, and which Davy seems to support in his claims for the local geologists’ special knowledge of Cornwall’s exceptional mineral resources. Cornwall could potentially be

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conceived as an economic entity in its own right, that may even become self-sufficient or whose wealth may be unfairly colonised and appropriated by ‘foreign’ (English) visitors and capitalists.82 Further, Davy’s work is published in a journal that participates in the construction of what we might describe, following Benedict Anderson, as an ‘imagined community’:  Cornwall’s Transactions was published alongside an increasing number of newspapers and magazines, which, in taking ‘their sphere of interest to be Cornwall as a whole’, observes Deacon, reinforced ‘local patriotism and encouraged readers to imagine themselves as members of a wider Cornish community’.83 Such literary and economic concerns with Cornwall’s rocks thus began to feed into emerging ideas of nation and natives through the rest of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Davy’s work, however, paves the way for two different images of Cornishness:  for an identity based around industrial prowess, but also based in the ‘primitive’ quality of Cornwall’s rocks. In the poetic and scientific descriptions of the country as ‘primitive’ (and thus especially sublime) as well as being endowed with valuable mineral resources, Cornwall is not only distinguished from the rest of England but can also begin to be imagined as an ancient nation. With its primitivism, its interest in economic resources, and, further, its personification of the land (with its bones and sinews), we can find in Davy’s work a broad basis for beginning to imagine Cornwall as a viable nation, one that is potentially very wealthy and also very old, and with which Cornish natives could come to be identified. The early work of Cornwall’s Geological Society paves the way for that of Robert Hunt, who in the second half of the nineteenth century continued to engage with the aesthetics of Cornwall’s primitive landscapes, while also drawing attention repeatedly to its mineral wealth. Hunt was deeply occupied with the practicalities of mining, but was also enthralled by landscape aesthetics and a certain strand of Celtic Romanticism. The next chapter, then, will first of all map out Hunt’s engagement with the Geological Societies and mining, following some threads from the early to the later nineteenth century, before going on to explore his interests in rocks as a folklorist and to establish the links between these two strikingly different but connected interests. Both interests drew his attention to granite, with its mineral veins and sublime shapes, a rock that

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could be found in abundance in Cornwall and which for Hunt underpinned the distinctiveness not only of the region but also its people: the primitive ‘Celtic race’.

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Notes 1 Transactions of the Geological Society of London, vol. 1 (London, 1811), viii. (Hereafter referred to as TGSL). 2 Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, vol. 1 (London, 1818), viii. (Hereafter referred to as TGSC.) 3 See, for example, Roy S. Porter, The Making of Geology:  Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp.  95–6; Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 144–5. 4 TGSC, v. In contrast, the Preface of TGSL 1 does not include as its purposes the advancement of mining (1811), v–ix. 5 Porter discusses how geology was informed both by economic and landscape interests, in The Making of Geology, pp. 96–103. Historians have also debated the extent to which geology was an economic, industrial enterprise or a gentlemanly leisure activity, while I am interested in the importance of both aspects. Jack Morrell, for example, argues that geological societies engaged with practical mining only to a very limited extent, in ‘Economic and Ornamental Geology: The Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1837–57’, in Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (eds), Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850 (Philadelphia, PA:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 231–56. Paul Weindling focuses more on an economically oriented mineral history as a motivating factor for the London Geological Society, although the hopes of many founding members were not fully realised. He notes that Greenough was opposed to the application of geology to mining, in contrast to another founding member, Davy (whose work will be discussed shortly), and to more provincial societies such as Cornwall’s, in Paul Weindling ‘Geological Controversy and Its Historiography: The Prehistory of the Geological Society of London’, in Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (eds), Images of the Earth:  Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences (Bucks.: British Society for the History of Science, 1979), pp. 248–71. 6 See, for example, Martin Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time:  The Reconstruction of Geology in the Age of Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 93, 97, 108.

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7 See Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 6, for an example of the various studies of Davy as a poet-scientist. 8 David Duff and Catherine Jones (eds), Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (Lewisburg, PA:  Bucknell University Press, 2007); Dafydd Moore, ‘Devolving Romanticism:  Nation, Region and the Case of Devon and Cornwall’, Literature Compass 5 (2008), 949–63. 9 Nicolas Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country (London: Palgrave, 2010), p. 4. 10 Those few chapters which discuss Cornwall at any length do so in the context of Devon and other counties further to the north and east (see especially Parker’s chapter, pp. 15–36). 11 See, for example, Nicolaas A. Rupke, The Great Chain of History:  William Buckland and the English School of Geology (1814– 1849) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 12 Adelene Buckland notes that in current literature ‘geology has tended to be cast as the handmaiden of evolutionary biology’, in ‘Losing the Plot: The Geological Anti-narrative’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008), 10. 13 For a commentary, see, for example, James Secord, ‘King of Siluria:  Roderick Murchison and the Imperial Theme in Nineteenth-Century British Geology’, Victorian Studies 25 (1982), 413–42 (see especially 414–15); Simon Knell, The Culture of English Geology, 1815–1851: A Science Revealed through Its Collecting (Aldershot, Burlington, Singapore and Sydney: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 8–12. For an account of the differences between stratigraphic geology and the use of fossils for zoological purposes, see Sandra Herbert, Charles Darwin, Geologist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 80–91. 14 Knell, The Culture of English Geology, p. 9. 15 For discussion of granite as primary rock see Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, p. 95. 16 For Goethe’s lengthiest and most direct description of sublime granite landscapes, see his ‘On Granite’, in Goethe:  The Collected Works, vol. 12:  Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 131–4. 17 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959). Heringman discusses Davy’s approach to the sublime along with the poets in Romantic Rocks. 18 John Wyatt discusses Wordsworth’s knowledge of contemporary geology, including the theories of Werner, though he is careful to assert that Wordsworth did not strictly belong to a particular faction, in

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Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), see especially pp. 43–4 and 48. 19 William Wordsworth, ‘An Unpublished Tour’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 2, ed. W. J.  B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 287–348 (317). 20 ‘The Prelude’, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). This is from the 1805 edition of ‘The Prelude’. For more on the complexities of the concept of the sublime in Wordsworth’s work, which critics have of course discussed at great length, see Wyatt. Wyatt makes further and more detailed connections between geology and Wordsworth’s sublime, and includes discussion of its element of duration or “eternity”, along with the importance of decay and change. See especially ­chapter 7 (pp. 150–68). 21 Heringman, Romantic Rocks, p. 28. 22 Humphry Davy, On Geology: The 1805 Lectures for the General Audience (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 62. 23 Hindle, Maurice,‘Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth: A Mutual Influence’, Romanticism 18 (2012), 16–29. Critics have discussed the relationship between Davy, Coleridge and Wordsworth at some length: see, for a further example, Wyatt, Wordsworth, pp. 66–8. 24 Hindle, ‘Humphry Davy’, 16–29. 25 See, for example, Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show:  Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2007). 26 Davy, Humphry, ‘Extract from an Unfinished Poem on Mount’s Bay’, Annual Anthology, vol. 1 (Bristol:  Biggs and Cottle, 1799), pp. 281–6 (281). 27 Humphry, ‘Extract’, p. 283. 28 Porter, The Making of Geology, p. 113. 29 Humphry Davy, ‘Hints on the Geology of Cornwall’, in Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall 1 (1818), 38–50 (38–9). 30 See, for example, Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011). 31 Humphry Davy, ‘Sketch of a book to be entitled observations in Cornwall’ [Manuscript], Personal Collections, HD/22/a (London: Royal Institution Archives (n.d.). p. 37. 32 Davy, ‘Sketch’. 33 Humphry Davy, ‘Introduction to the Geology of Cornwall’, in John Davy (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1836), pp. 295–9 (295–6). 34 Davy, ‘Extract’, p. 281. 35 Davy, ‘Extract’, pp. 282, 283.

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36 Davy, ‘Introduction to the Geology of Cornwall’, p. 295. 37 Blake, ‘Jerusalem’ (1804). Christine Berberich’s essay begins with Blake:  ‘This Green and Pleasant Land:  Cultural Constructions of Englishness’, in Landscape and Englishness, ed. Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl (Amsterdam and New  York:  Rodopi, 2006), pp. 207–24. See also, for instance, Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 397. 38 Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks,Aesthetic Geology (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 241. 39 The author is probably Davies Gilbert, the President of the Society at this time, ‘Preface’, TGSC 1 (1818), v–viii (v). 40 For the information about the Cornwall Society, see Philip Payton, Cornwall: A History (Fowey: Cornwall Editions, 2004), pp. 183–6. For the other societies, see Porter, ‘The Making of Geology’, pp. 133–6. 41 Paul Weindling, ‘Geological Controversy and Its Historiography: The Prehistory of the Geological Society of London’, in Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (eds), Images of the Earth:  Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences (Chalfont St Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1979), pp. 248–71 (pp. 259–60). For a discussion of another aspect of conflict between Davy and Greenough, see Martin Rudwick, ‘The Foundation of the Geological Society of London: Its Scheme for Co-operative Research and Its Struggle for Independence’, British Journal for the History of Science 1 (1963), 325–55. 42 Knell, The Culture of English Geology, pp. 225–52. Such conflicts were present from the beginning of the geological mapping enterprises, starting with the provincial mineral surveyor William Smith and the Geological Survey run by the London-based gentlemanly Greenough. Smith’s supporters considered that the Geological Society did not give the provincial effort due credit, as Nicolaas A. Rupke notes in The Great Chain of History:  William Buckland and the English School of Geology (1814–1849) (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1983), 115–17. Simon Winchester gives a full account of Smith’s enterprise, with its attendant difficulties and conflicts with Greenough, in The Map that Changed the World: The Tale of William Smith and the Birth of a Science (London: Penguin, 2001). For discussions of further conflicts in mapping and geology more generally, especially between Roderick Murchison and his colleagues/competitors, see, for example, James Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian-Silurian Dispute (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Martin Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 1985); David Oldroyd, The Highlands Controversy:  Constructing

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Geological Knowledge through Fieldwork in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 1990). Deborah Cadbury considers how opposition developed between provincial geologists, especially Gideon Algernon Mantell, and the Geological Society of London, whose members were at times prejudiced against amateur provincials, especially Richard Owen, in The Dinosaur Hunters (London:  Fourth Estate, 2000). For further discussion of tensions between the metropolitan Society and provincial men in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the specific case of Thomas Hardy and the geologist and collector Gideon Mantell, see Adelene Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology, and the Material Imagination’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008), www.19.bbk.ac.uk (accessed 12 March 2014). 43 Stephen Daniels, ‘Mapping National Identities:  The Culture of Cartography, with Particular Reference to the Ordnance Survey’, in Geoffrey Cubitt (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1998), p.  112–31 (p.  114). Simon Naylor also discusses how geological maps were a way of scientifically claiming territory, looking at the regional case of Cornwall, in Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), pp. 59ff. 44 Naylor, Regionalizing Science, pp. 118–19. For a far more extensive discussion, see Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London:  Granta, 2010). For more on the military uses of maps more generally, see J. B. Harley’s chapter ‘Maps, Knowledge and Power’, in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 51–81. 45 See Knell, The Culture, p.  xiii, and James Secord, ‘King of Siluria:  Roderick Murchison and the Imperial Theme in Nineteenth-Century British Geology’, Victorian Studies 25: 4 (1982), 413–42. 46 John Hawkins, ‘On Some Advantages which Cornwall Possesses for the Study of Geology, and the Use which May Be Made of Them’, TGSC 2 (1822), 3–4. 47 Raymond Williams, Keywords:  A  Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Croom Helm, 1976), pp. 71 and 178. 48 Hawkins, ‘On Some Advantages’, p. 4. 49 Henry Boase, ‘Contributions Towards a Knowledge of the Geology of Cornwall’, Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall 4 (1832), 166–457 (167). 50 Boase, ‘Contributions’, 171, 177. 51 Boase, ‘Contributions’, 167.

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52 John Hawkins, ‘Some General Observations on the Structure and Composition of the Cornish Peninsula’, TGSC 4 (1832), 1–20 (1–5). 53 Porter, The Making of Geology, p. 102. 54 O’Connor makes similar observations to Porter about how travel narratives included geological observations, sprouting ‘geological appendixes’ for example, while geological observers in turn conform to travel narratives. Like Hawkins’s essay, to be discussed further here, the opening of Buckland’s treatise Geology and Mineralogy sounds like a travel guide, as O’Connor notes, The Earth on Show, pp. 228–30. 55 Hawkins, ‘Some General Observations’, 15 (dreary landscape) and 18 (serpentine). 56 Davy, ‘Hints on the Geology of Cornwall’, 43. For more discussion of Davy’s descriptions of the serpentine rocks as beautiful see Shelley Trower, ‘Primitive Rocks: Humphry Davy, Mining and the Sublime Landscapes of Cornwall, Journal of Literature and Science 7 (2014), 20–40 (29), www.literatureandscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ 7.1-Trower-20–40.pdf (accessed 27 July 2014). 57 Trower, ‘Primitive Rocks’, 46. Also see Boase, ‘Contributions’, 209–11. 58 Hawkins, ‘Some General Observations’, 20. 59 Denise Crook, ‘The Early History of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, 1814–1850’ (PhD diss., Open University, 1990), p. 33. 60 ‘The History of Trewithen’, www.trewithengardens.co.uk/ trewithen-house/history-trewithen/ (accessed 12 March 2014). 61 Simon Naylor, Regionalizing Science:  Placing Knowledge in Victorian England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), p. 71 (for Boase’s background). (This is not to say that there were not also internal differences within the Society and the upper and middle class Hawkins and Boase, as Simon Naylor has observed, p. 72ff.) 62 Philip Payton, The Making of Modern Cornwall: Historical Experience and the Persistence of ‘Difference’ (Redruth:  Dyllansow Truran, 1992), p. 80. 63 See James A. Secord, ‘The Geological Survey of Great Britain as a Research School’, in History of Science 26 (1986), 223–75 (especially 238 and 244). 64 Davy, ‘Hints on the Geology of Cornwall’, 38. 65 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 66 Humphry Davy, ‘My Eye Is Wet with Tears’, in Richard Holmes (ed.),The Age of Wonder:  How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New  York:  Random House, 2009), pp. 19–20 (19).

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67 Davy, ‘Hints on the Geology of Cornwall’, p. 41. 68 See, for example, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1959); Wendy Joy Darby, Landscape and Identity:  Geographies of Nation and Class in England (Oxford and New  York:  Berg, 2000); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995). 69 Stephen Copley, ‘William Gilpin and the Black-Lead Mine’, in Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (eds), The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 42–61 (p. 57). 70 William Gilpin, Observations on the Western Parts of England, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London:  T. Cadell Jun. and W.  Davis, 1798), pp. 192–6. 71 Gilpin, Observations, p. 197. 72 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, in Lyrical Ballads, 2nd edn, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 111–17 (lines 18–23). 73 Wordsworth, ‘An Unpublished Tour’, p. 317. 74 William Wordsworth, A Complete Guide to the Lakes (London, 1842), p. 5. 75 Adam Sedgwick, ‘Three Letters on the Geology of the Lake District’, A Complete Guide to the Lakes (London, 1842), p. 22. 76 Sedgwick, ‘Three Letters’, pp. 33–4. 77 See, for example, Tim Fulford, ‘Romancing the Stone: Coleridge and Geology’, The Coleridge Bulletin 37 (2011), 36–47. 78 John Wyatt, ‘George Bellas Greenough:  A  Romantic Geologist’, Archives of Natural History 2 (1995) 61–71. 79 Humphry Davy, Letter to Henry Boase (27 August 1815), www.davy-letters.org.uk (accessed 15 September 2013). 80 John Rowe, Cornwall in the Age of the Industrial Revolution, 2nd edn (St Austell: Cornish Hillside, 2006); Philip Payton, The Making of Modern Cornwall, p. 81. 81 Bernard Deacon, ‘  “The Hollow Jarring of the Distant Steam engines”: Images of Cornwall between West Barbary and Delectable Duchy’, in Ella Westland, (ed.), Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place (Penzance: Patten, 1997), pp. 7–24 (p. 18). 82 Payton has observed how Cornwall’s early industrialisation sharpened the difference between the Cornish and English economies, The Making of Modern Cornwall, p.  73ff. Cornwall may even be considered in Tom Nairn’s terms to have had an ‘over-developed’ economy,

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typically spurred by the ‘exploitation of sub-soil resources’, prompting a range of nationalist movements (most recently Scotland’s), in The Break-Up of Britain (London: Verso, 1981), pp. 126–95 (especially pp. 185–91). 83 Deacon, ‘ “The Hollow Jarring”, p. 18.

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2

Rocks and race: geological folklore and Celtic literature, from Cornwall to Scotland Granite features prominently in all the very different kinds of texts written by Robert Hunt, from his treatises on mining to his folklore. For Hunt, as for Davy and the other geologists discussed in the last chapter, granite was important because it was associated both with rich mineral veins and with spectacular landscapes. By the time Hunt was writing in the 1840s, fossils were becoming far more central to geological enterprises, but these did not entirely replace the interest in primitive rocks. The ‘President’s Address’, introducing Cornwall’s Transactions of 1846, shows that enthusiasm for fossils had reached the south-west, with its explanation that these rock forms were a new addition to the museum. Until recently, it continues, the existence of such fossils was denied or infrequently admitted despite their abundance in Cornwall.1 The rest of the volume contains articles on fossils, but these are accompanied by articles concerning granite, including ‘On Granite Veins’. Hunt himself contributed a similar article published in a later volume of Transactions, ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Mineral Veins’ (1878).2 Hunt was employed by Henry de La Beche as the Keeper of Mining Records at the Museum of Practical Geology in London from 1845 to 1883. Hunt’s role was to gather and to consolidate information such as statistics about mineral production. Although de La Beche’s drive to professionalise geology often involved the repudiation of non-scientific approaches to rocks (as mentioned in Chapter  1), Hunt took a deep interest in the aesthetic value of primitive or granite-based landscapes and the folklore associated with them. To some extent Hunt helped to close the gap

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between the Geological Societies of Cornwall and London, living and working for a time in Cornwall and continuing to be involved in its Society’s activities alongside his later employment in London. His residence in both places, like Davy’s, may help to explain his involvement in both the economic and aesthetic qualities of rocks in his various scientific and literary writings. Hunt was perhaps always a little more distant from Cornwall than Davy and readier to take up the view of the traveller or tourist, as he had grown up in the south-west before first moving away to London around the age of thirteen.3 His work ranges from a locally based, practical involvement with mining operations to a romanticised vision of Cornwall from the perspective of a visitor. Both perspectives contributed to Hunt’s view – a view that was increasingly widespread in and beyond Cornwall – that its rocks underpin its distinctiveness and that of its natives, particularly from the rest of England and ‘the English’. This chapter, then, continues first of all to follow threads from the early nineteenth century. For Hunt, as for the earlier geologists, Cornwall’s minerals helped to distinguish the region, although copper mining declined sharply after 1866 and tin mining was faced with extinction in the 1880s.4 The mining industry remained an important part of the Cornish economy for much of the century, but this chapter also traces an ongoing engagement with primitive landscapes, which were becoming increasingly important to a post-industrial tourist economy. The chapter will demonstrate the significance of Hunt as a geologist-poet, who, like Davy, engaged with mining and landscapes, but has as yet received almost no critical attention. Hunt’s The Poetry of Science is an exception owing mainly to Charles Dickens’s review of it in Household Words – the review normally being quoted rather than Hunt’s work itself.5 The chapter will bring together Hunt’s various forms of narrative  – namely his mining treatises, poetry and folklore collection  – to illustrate how particular rocks serve to distinguish ‘Celtic’ regions and nations from a more ‘sedimentary’ England, and to distinguish the ‘Celtic race’ from the more ‘civilised’ English. As remains of a primordial past, rocks and also fossils were associated with other kinds of survivals in the modern world, including primitive traditions and races. Although fossils often seemed to provide evidence of a linear, progressive history – of the extinction of old species and races, which gave way to new civilisations – ‘primitive’ rocks were a

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kind of anachronism, an eruption from the past, resistant to change or evolution, much like the ‘lower races’. Hunt thus described the Cornish as having a ‘primitive character’, and like the primitive rocks on which they live they appeared to have escaped the process of evolution. So in one sense Hunt helped to designate such an apparently Celtic race as inferior, as incapable of progress, but on the other he contributed to the romanticisation of such races, which seemed to preserve a traditional, and more spiritual way of life than the modern world of urban England. Further, his identification of a primitive Cornish race provided a strikingly different, and potentially conflicting image to his conception of Cornwall as a modern, civilised industrial region at the forefront of British progress. This chapter thereby considers how the geological primitivism discussed in my first chapter develops over the course of the nineteenth century, unearthing a growing association between rocks and race. Davy’s personification of a primitive landscape leads in this chapter to the sense in which an ancient Celtic race is identified with its rocks. The chapter will go on to establish similarities between the work of Hunt, Hugh Miller, Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold and William Bottrell, in particular, each of whom described the primitive ‘Celtic races’ as inhabiting especially primitive terrain, and held ambivalent views about Celtic regions and nations – including Scotland, Wales and Cornwall – being part of England, or at least Britain, but also distinctly separate, independent nations. I thereby explore how competing theories of the nation, including theories based in race, may be understood in relation to ideas about rocks. Race and nation were not always securely mapped onto each other, but the link between rocks and race was much exploited in an age of growing nationalism. These first two chapters, in sum, consider the romanticisation of Celtic Cornwall and the Cornish as primitive but also industrialised. In doing so they link in with ‘archipelagic’ readings that challenge the normative categorisations of English literature. Like Scotland, Cornwall is often defined from outside as a primitive region with its rugged scenery and its mystical associations with folklore. ‘Rather than being a site of Romantic production’, as Ian Duncan, Leith Davis, and Janet Sorensen put it, ‘Scotland’s fate is to have become a Romantic object or commodity: glamorous scenery visited by the Wordsworths’ and other tourists, with its various

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‘invented traditions’, including folktales.6 By looking at literary production by writers who, at least for a time, lived and worked in Cornwall – most especially Davy and Hunt – we can take on board not only the ways in which the region is romanticised as primitive but also how it is simultaneously the site of major industrial activity. Much as Scotland contained the ‘backward’ ‘Celtic fringe’ of the Highlands but also the ‘enlightened’ Lowland boroughs, Cornwall has a long history of being conceived as both archaic and modern, in this case its modernity taking shape through its mining industry. Davy and Hunt provide an alternative insight into an industrial Cornwall that more mainstream English literature, from Matthew Arnold to Conan Doyle and D. H. Lawrence, tends to overlook. These first two chapters, then, illustrate how both an industrialised and romanticised Cornwall is grounded in its rocks, and how these aspects together contribute to growing perceptions of Cornwall as distinct from England, through its great mineral value and its landscapes, its great age and its ancient race. These perceptions feed into a proto-nationalist sense of Cornwall as a potentially wealthy nation, which is grounded in antiquity and inhabited by natives who can be identified with the land itself.

British Mining The specimens displayed at the Museum of Practical Geology were supposed to illustrate sections of the maps of the Geological Survey produced under the directorship of de La Beche. In its discussion of the specimens of granite, for instance, Hunt’s Descriptive Guide to the Museum of Practical Geology (1859) refers to the granite districts of western England, coloured pink on the map suspended on the wall of the museum.7 Granite is the first rock to be discussed in this as in his other monographs such as On Mines and Mining (1878) and British Mining (1884), and its presence in Cornwall is considered at greatest length. The aspirations of the earlier geologists involved in Cornwall’s Geological Society are in a sense realised, then, as Cornwall continues to take primary importance as a place of great mineral wealth and scientific interest. The presence of granite is a key indicator, Hunt observes, of mineral veins, which maps can usefully help people to locate. Hunt also uses the map in British Mining to highlight more general differences between the rocks of eastern

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England and those of more westerly areas, such as Cornwall, which contain the ‘useful metals’: If we examine with attention a geological map, made from a careful survey of the British Isles, we cannot but observe a marked distinction between the rocks which occur in the eastern counties, and those which distinguish the midland and western districts of England and the whole of Wales … Throughout the whole of the eastern region there is almost an entire absence of those metalliferous minerals, other than iron, which are of commercial value … To the south and south-west of these rocks, we reach the Old Red Sandstone, or Devonian series – and in Leicestershire [an anomaly here, as a midland region], Devonshire, and Cornwall, Granitic and Greenstone rocks occur, with Felspathic Traps and Basalt; all these rocks presenting, in the last-named counties, marked systems of lode formations rich in ores of the useful metals.8

Cultural and literary geographers have shown that maps can be used to project an image of a cohesive nation,9 but at the same time we have seen how maps can also make regional differences clearly visible, highlighting a ‘marked distinction’ in this case between the rocks of the eastern and western counties. As Rachel Hewitt puts it, ‘maps assisted the process by which Britain’s component regions were integrated into a unified nation’,10 but the last chapter also identified attempts among local geologists to resist such integration, not least through the production of an independent, separate map of Cornwall. Hunt seems both to consider the nation as a whole and to emphasise, repeatedly, the distinctiveness of regions within it, especially Cornwall. His mining publications operate with the framework of Britain (the title British Mining spells this out from the outset), and refer to the national map, but within this context he tends to begin with Cornwall and to discuss this region in particular depth, drawing attention to its particular minerals and landscapes. Hunt’s focus in his museum guide is on differences in mineral wealth, but for Hunt, as for the geologists mentioned earlier, and in contrast to a traveller like Gilpin, mineral wealth is inseparable from a landscape with particular aesthetic qualities. In describing such qualities in his British Mining he again distinguishes Cornwall from the rest of England, this time in terms of the

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‘beautiful’ and ‘golden’ plants that grow on its granite as well as the shapes of the granite itself, the hills and ‘picturesque’ valleys: In Cornwall, ranges of Granite hills covered with huge masses of ‘moorstone’ (Granite), heaped in fantastic forms, usually mark a mineral boundary. Gently undulating plains spread away from the bases of those hills, barren of vegetation, save the beautiful heath and the golden furze, which, when in full flower, give all the appearance of a garden to an otherwise waste country. These regions are commonly cut through by deep and often picturesque valleys, and within the shelter they afford, numerous plants, and especially shrubs, grow with a luxuriance not to be seen in any other part of England.11

The ‘golden furze’ and uniquely rich ‘luxuriance’ of the plants in the Cornish valleys, then, seem to be a reflection of the wealth of minerals lying underneath the nearby surface, both of which apparently exist in more abundance in Cornwall than anywhere else in England. In a sense Cornwall is to England what England is to the rest of the world, according to the opening sentence of British Mining: ‘The mineral resources of the United Kingdom have been far in advance of those of any country in the world’.12 Hunt seems to express a sense of regional pride in Cornwall that echoes that of the local geologists writing in early issues of the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall. In the second volume, published in 1822, John Hawkins observed that the German state of Saxony took the lead in the science of geology largely because of its mineral resources, and that Cornwall is even better situated to become a ‘country’ of geological importance. As discussed in Chapter 1, Hawkins, like Davy, uses the word ‘country’ with some ambiguity, not only in the sense of a tract of land but also to suggest that Cornwall is a nation among nations. Hunt also adopts the term ‘country’ for the most part in its sense of a tract of land, but occasionally with more ambiguity, as where he refers to ‘that important mining country, Cornwall’.13 Such usage points the way to the increasing use of geology to support the notion of Cornwall  – geologically distinctive as it is, and so well-endowed with valuable minerals  – as a potential nation. The next section will begin to consider another aspect of granite, however, which also plays into a Cornish proto-nationalism but seems almost to

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contradict the idea of Cornwall as a nation based on the modern mining industry, and that is its status as a primitive rock and its associations with the primitive traditions of an ancient Celtic race. The final section of this chapter will discuss how these two aspects of granite – the modern industrial and the primitive – simultaneously feed into conceptions of Cornwall as part of Britain, yet separable from England.

Hunt’s poetry and its primitivism In Hunt’s British Mining, as in articles by members of Cornwall’s geological society, the mineral qualities of Cornwall are of primary importance, but are everywhere accompanied by accounts of its impressive landscapes. The wealth of its minerals seems reflected in the golden luxuriance of its picturesque valleys, surpassing anywhere else in England, as we have seen. In Hunt’s other writings it is the sublimity of landscape that takes priority. An early poem, The Mount’s Bay (1829) – a poem clearly influenced by Davy’s14 – most explicitly refers to the sublimity of Cornwall’s rocks, seen from the perspective of a traveller. Again and again this poem describes the ‘wild and rugged rocks’, designed to gratify ‘the tourist’s mood / To seek for a sublimer food’. For Hunt, the rocks of Cornwall can clearly provide more than mineral value; they can inspire their viewer with the thrill of sublimity. Like Davy, Hunt uses the language of spatial vastness and majesty, and personifies nature, in this case as a female who can clothe ‘Terror’: Or traveller – would you seek to see The beetling rocks immensity; Mount them and cast your eyes below; Thrilling the strong electric blow, Which all must feel, when from such height They gaze on depths majestic might. – On this sublime and favour’d spot Nature has wrought herself a grot; – And as it were in wantonness Robed Terror in Fantastic dress.15

The most ancient rocks tend to be associated with the spatial ‘immensity’ and also the timelessness that feature in Hunt’s poem. Granite, in particular, was still widely thought to be the oldest, the

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most primitive of all rocks, and to be highly resilient – it had survived since ancient times. The Huttonian view, discussed in the last chapter, that granite is an igneous rock and can thus intrude into previously formed sedimentary rocks, won favour in most circles by the mid-nineteenth century, over Werner’s theory that granite was the first of all rocks to form in the primordial sea. Some formations of granite could be therefore be more recent, though Hutton carried on using the term ‘primitive’ and granite continued to be widely considered the oldest of rocks. Thus Hunt speculates in The Poetry of Science (1848) that the globe was once made out of one homogenous rock, which may now exist in ‘our granites’.16 We have seen in Davy’s poem how the granite rocks of Mount’s Bay stood ‘unmoved’ over the ages, and this was just one among a number of poems which testified to the awesome power of the rocky cliffs to withstand the onslaught of the waves, to survive for millennia.17 Hunt’s poem again speaks of the sublime age of granite, and associates it with ancient human traditions. It not only picks up on the associations between nature and woman, as in the previous quotation, but connects a personified landscape with a ‘human race’: ‘Midst pensile rocks, in might sublime, Like some old registers of Time; Whose iron tablets have withstood The Lash of storms, and Ocean Flood, I view Boscawan’s awful throne Sacred to Druid rites alone, Whose granite columns dare the blast, But like Penumbras of the past Tell not the present human race, The secrets of this holy place.18

Having personified nature as female earlier in the poem, Hunt goes on here to suggest that ‘granite columns’ may have communed with the old race in a way that they do not with the present. The Introduction discussed the imagination of nature as a woman, and of the nation as a female body, and although Hunt does not refer directly to Cornwall as a nation he does associate the ancient past of the rocks – those ‘old registers of Time’ – with the history of an ancient race, pointing the way to emerging associations between timeless nature, nations and natives. This ancient past becomes a

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savage history, as he goes on imagine ritual sacrifices of virgins whose blood dyed the granite crags, as though returning living females back to the nature they always already were. Davy’s influence here is not limited to his depictions and personifications of the sublime landscape; he also associated sublime rocks with Druids, as in his poem on Mounts Bay in which ‘On yon rough crag, / Where the wild Tamarisk whistles to the sea blast, / The Druid’s harp was heard’.19 William Borlase was the first to comprehensively survey Cornwall’s ancient stones, linking many of them to the Druids, in his Observations on the Antiquities, Historical and Monumental, of the County of Cornwall (1754). Despite the speculative quality of his enquiry and its errors, Borlase was a respected scholar and his study had great influence over how later generations viewed the county’s prehistoric heritage, not least over Davy, with whom he seems to have been greatly attached in his youth.20 For the traveller, then, Cornwall offers more than wild, frightening and living landscapes; it is also a place of mystery and ancient traditions.The rocks seem to promise to put their beholder – in this case Hunt, and thereby his readers – in touch with the past. Hunt’s poetry operates as a kind of key, unlocking the rocks’ secrets. Musing upon them, he writes that ‘Imagination takes me back / The course of ages, o’er the track’,21 to recall the ‘mystic rites’ through a kind of time travel that, as Ralph O’Connor observes, was a frequent imaginary device throughout the nineteenth century. O’Connor is one of a number of critics who explore the connections between geology and fiction, commenting that geology marketed itself as the key to facts more sensational than fiction, such as facts about prehistoric dinosaurs. Although geologists at times aimed to banish literary narrative from their discipline – especially anything associated with the disreputable genre of romance – narrative was not always a problem; rather, for some geological writers, it presented great possibility in its potential to enable their work to become itself a literary kind of sensation, and thereby to reach wide audiences.22 The Scottish literary geologist Hugh Miller was one of the most popular geological writers who presented his factual, geological work as sensational, claiming in The Old Red Sandstone that ‘no man who enters the geological field in quest of the wonderful, need pass … from the true to the fictitious’.23 Several times in his writings Miller employs a technique of gazing upon rocks  – an exposed piece of cliff, a fossil – which then projects him back to a

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prehistoric world of strange creatures. For Hunt, the rocks unlock a past inhabited by a savage, primitive race. Hunt himself clearly wanted to get beyond the economic applications of geology, and of science in general, promoting the idea that the facts of science are poetic in The Poetry of Science. ‘[S]‌cientific facts’, claimed Hunt, ‘have a value superior to their mere economic applications’. The ‘truths’ generated by ‘the labours of the chemist in his cell’, or by ‘the multitudinous observations of the astronomer on his tower … give to the soul of the poet those realities to which he aspires in his high imaginings’.24 For Hunt, as for Miller, the real world is as strange, if not stranger than an imagined world. ‘Man’, he continues, ‘stands in the midst of a wonderful world, and an infinite variety of phenomena arise around him in strange form and magical disposition, like the phantasma of a restless night … Truth is stranger than fiction’.25

Fossils, evolution and the primitive races Rocks, it seems, could unlock the secrets of an ancient, strange and wonderful past: not only the prehuman past of fish and trilobites but also aspects of human prehistory such as the sacrificial rites of Druids. Many of the earlier geologists in Cornwall’s Geological Society were similarly interested in ancient traditions and folklore: in myths of prehistoric stones, of the lost land of Lyonesse.26 Geology and folklore were considered to be comparable occupations; the search for fossilised animals runs parallel to the quest for ancient human traditions. Historians of science and literature have observed in particular how Miller’s fascination with the deep time of geology blended together with his work as an antiquarian, as he saw geological and human history as existing on a continuum. For Miller, the antiquities and folktales of a ‘Celtic race’ were comparable to fossils, of which he was also a keen collector, and were in danger of suffering the fate of extinction like the now fossilised plant and animal species. He proposed that superstitions, now extinct, only remained as fossils which could not even be fully reconstructed by the anatomist Georges Cuvier, who in the late eighteenth century was the first to establish the fact of extinction using fossils as evidence. The superstitions are ‘so long dead’, wrote Miller, ‘so broken and scattered, that not Cuvier himself could have described their entire appearance from the few mutilated parts of them

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that still survive’.27 As Simon Knell and Michael Taylor put it, ‘Geology merged with local history and folklore – all “libraries” of the past. … Like books and oral traditions, the fossils provided a means to extend the imagined past back through time.’28 By presenting their activities as comparable to those of geologists, both folklorists and anthropologists attempted increasingly to claim for their own disciplines the professional scientific status that geology was managing for the most part to acquire by the mid-nineteenth century.29 In his immensely influential Principles of Geology Charles Lyell also helped to popularise wider comparisons between human and natural history, and between historical and geological researches. The opening chapter of Principles compares the history of nations to that of the natural world, the present condition of both being the result of ‘a long succession of events’. The activities of geologists and historians are similarly comparable: ‘minerals, rocks, or organic remains … afford data to the geologist, as do coins, medals, and inscriptions to the historian’.30 Arguing against Cuvier’s ‘catastrophism’ (the theory that huge natural catastrophes had caused the extinction of numerous species), Lyell’s theory of ‘uniformitarianism’ proposed that geological changes are very gradual, taking place over a vastly longer timescale than the six thousand years derived from the Bible as the age of the earth. This is, of course, a theory that was then extended, using the evidence of fossils, to animal species and eventually to humans, likewise seen as the result of a process of evolution unfolding gradually over millions of years, leaving mass extinctions in its wake. (Lyell resisted evolutionary ideas but Darwin, who also carried out geological work, later developed them extensively.)31 Fossils were enormously important in the development of concepts of human history and evolution, so I  will discuss these a little further here before returning to my focus on ‘primitive’ rocks. Gillian Bennett notes that the evolution of species over a vast period of time in turn provided an analogy for folklorists and anthropologists for the evolution of societies: Contemporary natural science was using fossils embedded in geological strata to reconstruct the history of the earth and its species, demonstrating that both had evolved to their present form by slow degrees … Thinkers interested in the ‘mental history’ of mankind

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used this analogy to propose that human societies had also evolved through several stages, each race passing through identical points on its climb to civilisation.32

Thus geology participates in the development of a whole range of interrelated disciplinary formations  – from anthropology to psychoanalysis – in the second half of the nineteenth century, in which questions of the ‘primitive’, of extinction and survival in the modern world, become the subject of ever-increasing fascination, as well as the basis for social and political theories which look to science to legitimise both nationalist and racist ideologies. Cuvier’s geological theory of catastrophism, for example, underpinned his claims that while natural catastrophes caused numerous species to become extinct, three human races had escaped and developed distinctly:  the ‘savage’ Mongolian, the undeveloped Negro and the ‘superior’ Caucasian, from which apparently sprang the most civilized nations. Cuvier’s hierarchical ordering of human races was extremely influential, and although he rejected evolution himself later versions of race theory assumed that one race could progress or evolve (or degenerate) into another.33 He remained a lifelong hero to his student Robert Knox, an anatomist and zoologist, who in his anthropological study The Races of Men similarly declared one race – the Saxons – as superior to others, including the Celts, whom he considered prone to extinction (especially the Irish).34 Knox was particularly preoccupied with these two apparently distinct races within Britain, whom he believed to occupy distinctive territories: ‘I cannot find any era in history when the Celtic races occupied the lowlands of England and of Scotland.’35 Indeed the geographical difference between the highlands and lowlands seems to take priority over political, national divisions, where he goes on to write: ‘To me the Caledonian Celt of Scotland appears a race as distinct from the Lowland Saxon of the same country, as any two races can possibly be: as negro from American; Hottentot from Caflre; Esquimaux from Saxon.’36 Later anthropologists, often drawing on Knox’s work, continued to distinguish sharply between the Saxons and Celts, generally viewing the latter as an inferior and even ape-like species, but also at times romanticising them.37 In the second half of the nineteenth century, biological understandings of race were becoming the dominant explanation of human difference, and ‘primitive’ races a subject of particular

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interest. As work in the history of anthropology has demonstrated, the growth of interest in ‘primitive’ races was motivated not so much by a ‘humanitarian desire to understand the alterity of other “races” or “cultures” in far-flung corners of the Empire than by a desire to better regulate the savages within England itself ’.38 James Vernon goes on to observe the ambivalence with which the ‘primitive’ was treated: lost worlds and noble savages were on the one hand romanticised and mourned, while on the other their loss  – like that of the animal species whose fossils were uncovered by geologists – was considered necessary for the progress of civilisation.39 ‘Like the colonial “primitive” ’, writes Vernon, ‘ “the savage within” was a prisoner of nature and irrationality, a remnant from an earlier stage of civilisation against which the “civilised” could measure their own modernity.’ Within this framework the Cornish, like the Scottish and Irish, and more ‘far-flung races’ such as the ‘African Negro’, were ‘commonly assumed to occupy a lower point on the evolutionary scale’.40 Folklore was among those disciplinary formations that became a means of tracing the progressive development of civilisation from its ancient origins, emphasising the distance of modern, civilised readers from those other races, and yet it could also document a sense of loss, of regret at the passing of ‘primitive’ cultures and traditions, and a desire to preserve them. Thus Miller writes of his ‘regret’ that the ‘oral knowledge of the past’ is disappearing, that it will ‘perish’ like those fossilised species if he does not record it. Hunt is similarly concerned about the decline and loss of ancient stories and traditions, referring in the opening paragraph of his folklore collection, Popular Romances of the West of England (1865), to how the local people have forgotten many of their old tales and traditions which are, ‘it is to be feared, gone for ever’.41 Thus Hunt, like many other folklorists, ethnologists and anthropologists in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, claims to be saving them from near oblivion – in the face of aspects of modernity including the railway and education – to be preserving them by writing them down.42 Hunt’s emphasis on ‘primitive’ rocks, in this unstable context in which oral traditions can vanish for ever, seems an attempt to establish some firm ground, a solid basis for his retelling of the ‘romances’. Miller focused mostly on fossils, whereas Hunt was most interested in ‘primitive’ rocks, which seem to reflect the ‘primitive

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character’ of inhabitants, who may, like the rocks, have escaped evolutionary progress altogether, remaining uncivilised outcasts in danger of extinction. In this way Hunt suggests that his racial characterisations have a geological basis in scientific reality, supporting the process by which he both romanticises and denigrates the apparently primitive nature of ‘the Celts’. As John Haller observes, scientific theories about race tended to support the idea that evolution does not operate on the ‘lower races’, who are thus unfit for future development. The evolutionary progress of ‘the Caucasian’ is apparently far superior to ‘the lower races’ who ‘broke into the modern world as mere “survivals” from the past’, and would ultimately become extinct.43 As remains of a primordial past, both fossils and primitive rocks provide images for other kinds of survivals in the modern world, including ancient superstitions and races, but while fossils often seem to provide evidence of a linear, progressive history, of old species and races giving way to new civilisations, ‘primitive’ rocks are a kind of anachronism, an eruption from the past, resistant to change or evolution, much like the ‘lower races’. In ‘The Giants’, the opening chapter of his Popular Romances, Hunt locates the tradition of giants – and those who believe in them – in a distinctly primitive environment: Giants, and every form of giant-idea, belong to the wilds of nature. I have never discovered the slightest indication of the existence of a tradition of giants, of the true legendary type, in a fertile valley or in a well-cultivated plain. Wherever there yet linger the faint shadows of the legendary giant, there the country still retains much of its native wildness, and the inhabitants have, to a great extent, preserved their primitive character.44

Hunt is here seeking to understand the Celtic character and its folklore much as he sought information about the primitive rocks underneath. The rocky land and its natives seem closely related, inseparable, even part of each other. Hunt frames the folktales from the outset with the aesthetics of the wild, rocky landscapes of the south-west region. He begins this opening chapter on giants by describing ‘the uncultivated tracts which still maintain their wildness, austerely and sullenly, against the march of cultivation’, where ‘we are certain of finding rude masses of rock which have some relation to the giants’. Seated on ‘the granite masses’ on the hills

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of Cornwall he speculates about the character of those ‘primitive’ inhabitants who believe in giants.45 Giants ‘can exist only in the memories of those races’, Hunt goes on to claim, ‘who are born and live amidst the sublime phenomena of nature’.46 While the inhabitants themselves seem primitive like the rocky landscape, they apparently share the widespread belief that giants have actively shaped such landscapes: Hunt refers to legends such as that giants built St Michael’s Mount, and that their games with quoits and marbles explains the scattered presence of great boulders. ‘There is scarcely a pile of rocks around our western shore upon which the giants have not left their impress’, writes Hunt, and ‘in nearly every part of the country where granite rocks prevail, the monuments of the giants may be found.’47 Miller similarly reports tales of giants moving stones: a giantess is said to have flung the large stone in the parish of Edderton, for instance, while another even larger stone bears the imprint of a gigantic finger and thumb, and ‘almost all the hills of Ross-shire’ were formed by another ‘great woman … from a pannier filled with earth and stones, which she carried on her back’.48 In Greek mythology and in most of the Germanic and other folktales of giants in countries throughout Europe, giants are similarly credited with shaping or constructing rocky landscapes, from single stones to entire islands and mountains.49 For Hunt, the primitive landscape of Cornwall is home to a distinct Celtic race whose origins in tradition can be traced back to the ancient race of giants. His ‘Introduction’ sets out his ideas that the Celtic race has certain characteristics, including ‘minds wildly poetical, and great fertility of imagination, united with a deep feeling for the mysteries by which life is girdled’.50 Like other ‘primitive’ races, then, the Cornish are characterised as irrational, superstitious and passionate, with ‘deep feeling’ rather than capacity to reason. They seem strongly resistant to enlightened progress or evolution. With a language of their own, the people of the south-west, he says a little later, ‘like all the Celts, cling with sincere affection to the memories of the past, and who even now regard with jealousy the introduction of any novelty and accept improvements slowly’.51 The Cornish character is also protected from change, or from evolution, it seems, by its ‘singular isolation’ as a peninsula, surrounded by the sea and almost cut off from (the rest of) England: ‘England, with many persons, appeared to terminate on the shores of the

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river Tamar.’52 Thus the race of Celts seems again a reflection of the wild, uncultivated, primitive landscapes, of the most unchanging of rocks, stuck in the pre-evolutionary past with their ancient stories of giants. Hunt goes on to speculate that ‘the Cornish giant is a true Celt’, or maybe even belongs ‘to an earlier race’, which we then learn in the first chapter may be traced to a ‘mighty race’ of very large, strong men from whom the Celts originated.53 Hunt picks up here on wider ideas circulating about giants.Walter Stephens traces how ancient concepts of giants as a separate race of evil beings distinct from humans were replaced in the early modern period by ideas of the good giant,‘an ideal representation of national identity’.54 The good giant, as a kind of wild man or noble savage, was further popularised by the Romantic interest in oral folklore, with its investment in seeking national origins.55 No longer representations of otherness, the giants in Hunt’s account feature as the somewhat heroic origins of the Celtic race. The giants are a strong, powerful, even god-like ‘Titan race’.56 Hunt’s giants embody a set of Romantic ideals, being wild and free and primitive, even sublime. In particular, Hunt was influenced by Davy, the Romantic scientist who was similarly enthusiastic about primitive nature, about the sublime and the ancient Druids, as we have seen. Davy recited folk tales from the ‘remote district’ of Penzance, Hunt reports in his biographical article in the Dictionary of National Biography.57 Hunt also conveys ambivalence about the primitive, however:  the giants are associated with demons as well as gods. He refers to the work of Miller, who describes the giants in his Scenes and Legends as a distinct race from the modern inhabitants of Scotland, indeed as an extinct race, and one fathered by demons. According to Hunt these giants of Cromarty are ‘intimately related to the giants of Cornwall. Moreover, from him we learn something of the parentage of our giants, for we presume the Scottish myth may be applied with equal truth to the Titans of the south.’58 The myth is that the king of Syria had thirty-three daughters, whom he loaded onto a ship and abandoned to the sea for killing their husbands on their wedding night. The ship drifted about and eventually landed on the British coast, then uninhabited. They lived alone on roots and berries ‘until an order of demons,’ writes Miller (quoted by Hunt),‘becoming enamoured of them, took them for their wives, and a tribe of giants, who must be regarded as the true aborigines of the country, if indeed the demons have not a prior claim, were the fruits of those marriages’.

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The whole tribe, however, was wiped out by Brutus. He ‘overthrew Gog, Magog, and Termagol, and a whole host of others with names equally terrible’.59 The giants, then, are both heroic and demonic. The present race of ‘primitive Celts’ is simultaneously romanticised and denigrated, as is characteristic of the period. The ideals and values of Romanticism seem to be carried forward to some extent throughout the nineteenth century, so that certain qualities of the ‘primitive’ continue to be favoured, while they also come up against new racial characterisations of ‘primitive’ peoples as inferior, lower on the evolutionary scale (if evolved at all), and as dangerous savages who are nevertheless weaker and thus liable to becoming extinct. Thus, on the one hand, Hunt seems to praise such qualities of the Celtic mind as its ‘great fertility of imagination’ (in the ‘Introduction’ quoted above); whereas, on the other hand, he describes such imagination as ‘gloomy’ and delusional, and local traditions as perpetuating ‘errors’. The opening chapter on giants claims that the inhabitants with their rocky, ‘primitive character’, have nurtured a gloomy imagination, and permitted ignorance to continue its melancholy delusions. The untaught mind, in every age, looks upon the grander phenomena of nature with feelings of terror, and endeavours to explain them by the aid of those errors which have been perpetuated from father to son since the days when the priests of superstition sought to rule the minds of men by exciting their fears.60

So although the loss of ‘Celtic’ traditions is considered regrettable, it might also seem that their decline and perhaps even extinction is inevitable in the march towards a more rational, superior civilisation. As we have seen, Miller was similarly keen to collect his fossils of now extinct superstitions, which he presents as interesting and a source of pleasure, but he claims to take greater pleasure in tracing their decline and ‘final extinction’, as he considers ‘the monstrous despotism of Superstition’ a cause of much misery and degradation. Miller with his fossils – those renowned forms of evidence of extinction – seems most confident in progress: ‘I can rejoice that I live in an age when her reign [Superstition] is so well nigh over. I feel how good a thing it is, that instead of being fixed by destiny amid the gloomy and boisterous turmoil of an earlier period, my

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lot has been appointed me on the bright and tranquil verge of a happy future.’61 Such mixed views of ‘Celtic’ traditions as interesting and imaginative, as worthy of preservation, but also as resulting in fear and ignorance, misery and degradation, were not unusual. Many critics have observed how the Irish, Scottish and Welsh were not always simply considered brutal savages destined for extinction but were also at times romanticised in a comparable way to overseas natives or ‘noble savages’.62 Hunt’s views in this respect resemble other depictions of the Celts, including Matthew Arnold’s influential On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), with its claims that Englishness could be enriched by certain Celtic qualities. Arnold builds upon a set of assumptions that were widely shared in Victorian culture, about the Saxons and Celts as distinct races with particular characteristics. His work in some ways closely resembles that by Knox, who, as has been mentioned, drew a sharp distinction between the Celts and the superior Saxons. For Knox, the Celts are addled by certain deficiencies: ‘Furious fanaticism’, for instance, along with ‘a love of war and disorder; a hatred for order and patient industry; no accumulative habits’. Like Knox, Arnold identified the Celts as having distinct characteristics, but although these seem to disqualify them from being able to manage themselves sufficiently for any kind of self-rule or government (Arnold was not, in other words, a Celtic nationalist), neither are they all simply negative characteristics. The Celts are sentimental, spiritual, anarchic and artistic, lacking in patience or self-control, for instance, in contrast to the steadier, more orderly Saxon. But ‘the English spirit’ or ‘genius’ apparently combines the qualities of both races; without the Celtic ‘energy’ the danger for a ‘national spirit’ is through the ‘humdrum, the plain and ugly, the ignoble’, which apparently are the curse of Germany.63 Germany’s ‘national spirit’ does have ‘excellence’, Arnold claims, including in its ‘freedom from whim, flightiness, perverseness; patient fidelity to Nature, – in a word, science’, but it is accompanied by the ‘the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere, pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller’.64 Such shortcomings can be overcome with the incorporation of an element of Celtic energy. As Vincent Pecora comments, Arnold’s interest in Celtic matters was an expression of his Romantic attraction to things ‘that had come

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to seem irrelevant to the utilitarian sensibility, technological progress, and science of the modern world’.65 In The Poetry of Science, Hunt similarly identifies a danger that in the progression from ‘earth’s first poets’ with their ‘beautiful spiritualizations’ to philosophical and scientific understandings, in the progression from ‘fable to fact’, in other words, ‘much of the soul-sentiment which made the romantic holy, and gave a noble tone to every aspiration, is too frequently merged in a cheerless philosophy which clings to the earth, and reduces the mind to a mechanical condition’. Hunt here urges a sustained awareness of the ‘great laws’, of the ‘mysterious workings of the physical sources’, in which we can ‘discover the Sublime’.66 Like Arnold, then, Hunt seems to resist a movement of linear progression in which the past is completely left behind; rather, the past becomes an element of something greater, that is more than the sum of its parts. Critics have discussed the importance of race in Arnold’s work. Lionel Trilling argues that national spirit, for Arnold, is determined by it. The scientific anthropology of Arnold’s day ‘told him that the spirit of a nation – what we might call its national style – is determined by “blood” or “race” and that these are constants, asserting themselves against all other determinants’.67 As Cannon Schmitt points out, however, there is a contradiction in Arnold’s work: ‘At one moment national characteristics are properly racial, inherent in the Celt, Germans, and English because of their blood, their very being … At another moment, however, national characteristics are due to a process of historical development and are, hence, mutable.’68 The concept that national characteristics are racial, on the one hand, is evident in Arnold’s assertion that the Celts are naturally incapable of ruling themselves, which underwrites his confidence that the ‘swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities [into England], is a consummation to which the natural course of things irresistibly tends’.69 As an example of such ‘swallowing up’ Arnold refers to the dying out of the Cornish language, and argues that the other Celtic languages will inevitably follow so that ‘all the inhabitants of these islands’ will speak English, becoming more homogeneous. The Celts, then, seem racially determined and incapable of change; they can only be assimilated. The national characteristics of the English, on the other hand, are mutable, subject to historical development. The English can improve themselves, not least by incorporating the Celtic element. An influential strand of theories of nation, building

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on the work of Ernest Renan, has tended to deny the importance of racial thinking to conceptions of nation, arguing with Benedict Anderson that ‘nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies’,70 whereas Schmitt uses Arnold to reveal that these two conceptions of nation are not exclusive. Arnold employs an ‘immutable nationality to naturalize the continued marginalization of the Celts and to ward off the possibility that, if the English change, the difference between Celt and Englishman may dissolve’.71 The idea that the Celts are somehow fixed in their primitive nature while the English are capable of growth and adaptation seems embodied in their geological territories. The Celts are firmly located in those primitive regions containing rocks like granite, whereas the English ‘lowlands’ more predominantly consist of the fossiliferous, sedimentary rocks that contain the evidence of evolution. The Celts can be identified with the primitiveness of the rocks, while rocks can also apparently determine their racial nature, not least in defending them from outside, ‘civilised’ influences, as will be seen in the next section. Geological and anthropological writers commonly linked rocks and people in part by arguing that different kinds of rocks produce different kinds of races, but also, as Adelene Buckland has put it, ‘by metonymic association’: ‘The features of one could be used to read or interpret the features of the other.’72 The primitive quality of rocks, in the case of Hunt’s folklore, could be used to read the primitiveness of the Celtic race. Hunt, as we have seen, describes the Cornish as fixed and unchanging like the rocks on which they live, which echoes an earlier work, Ernest Renan’s The Poetry of the Celtic Races (1857), a work well-known as one to which Arnold was particularly indebted for his own study of Celtic literature.73

Race, region and nation Renan’s essay opens as a kind of travel narrative, like many of the geological works we’ve looked at so far, although geology here figures as just one element in his introduction to regional and racial differences. A traveller through the Armorican peninsula of France, says Renan, will notice an abrupt change as he enters ‘the true Brittany, that which merits the name by language and race’.74 He first observes the change in the environment:  Brittany is windy,

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bleak and inhospitable, while ‘at every step the granite protrudes from a soil too scanty to cover it’. Like its environment, of course, the Celtic race also seems to differ considerably from its Norman neighbours.The Normans are allegedly self-interested and indulgent while the Bretons are ‘a timid and reserved race living altogether within itself, heavy in appearance but capable of profound feeling, and of an adorable delicacy in its religious instincts’.75 Renan observes that similar differences are said to exist between Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England; between the Celts and the English: A like change is apparent, I am told, in passing from England into Wales, from the Lowlands of Scotland, English by language and manners, into the Gaelic Highlands; and too, though with a perceptible difference, when one buries oneself in the districts of Ireland where the race has remained pure from all admixture of alien blood. It seems like entering on the subterranean strata of another world.76

Again here, there is the idea of a Celtic race as ‘uncontaminated’ by outside influences: the Breton race lives ‘altogether within itself ’, while the Irish in certain districts remain ‘pure’ without ‘alien blood’. In contrast the non-Celtic races of France and England have presumably assimilated other races, have changed or evolved. The ancient, unchanging Celtic races again seem comparable to primitive rocks like granite, which usually forms deep ‘subterranean strata’ but here lies only just underneath the thin soil of the surface.This land and its race are like ‘another world’, without ‘alien blood’, emphasising the divisions between France and Brittany, England and Wales, or the Scottish Lowlands and Highlands. The Celtic lands and their people seem to have absolutely no overlap with their neighbours; they do not even seem to belong to same planet but have an otherworldly quality that is also detected by other commentators of the period, including the geographer Halford Mackinder (noted in the ‘Celtic Britain’ section of the Introduction). Renan goes on to emphasise further the age of the Breton race and its difference from any other: it is ‘an ancient race living, until our days and almost under our eyes, its own life in some obscure islands and peninsulas in the West’. Although this race is now increasingly influenced by ‘external influences’, it apparently continues to contain what we might term ‘primitive’ elements: it

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is ‘still faithful to its own tongue, to its own memories, to its own customs, and to its own genius’.77 Arnold similarly begins his study of Celtic literature with a description of the scenery and its extreme contrasts between ‘eastward’ and ‘westward’, in this case specifically between England and Wales. He looks first of all to the east, from a point on the Welsh coast, the town of Llandudno, towards the English city of Liverpool, and finds that the view ‘a little dissatisfies one after a while’.78 Lacking mystery and beauty, it is too austere and arid. Turning to the west: ‘Everything is changed. Over the mouth of the Conway and its sands is the eternal softness and mild light of the west; the low line of the mystic Anglesey, and the precipitous Penmaenmawr, and the great group of Carnedd Llewelyn and Carnedd David and their brethren fading away, hill behind hill, in an aërial haze, make the horizon.’79 Arnold does not explicitly mention the sight of any primitive rocks  – there was, and still is, a granite quarry at Penmaenmawr, but Arnold’s view seems more exclusively aesthetic and less interested in the land’s economic value than Davy’s or Hunt’s – but this landscape is distinctly rocky and mountainous, with the ‘precipitous’ cliffs rising up behind the town of Penmaenmawr and the mountain massif, where ‘hill behind hill, in an aerial haze, make the horizon’. His progression from the environment to the people is remarkably similar to Renan’s, the ancient past being present in Wales and the Welsh, it seems, as it is in Brittany and the Bretons. The people’s memory seems indistinguishable from place, from the stones with their stories: Wales, where the past still lives, where every place has its tradition, every name its poetry, and where the people, the genuine people, still knows this past, this tradition, this poetry, and lives with it, and clings to it; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon on the other side, the invader from Liverpool and Birkenhead, has long ago forgotten his. And the promontory where Llandudno stands is the very centre of this tradition; it is Creuddyn, the bloody city, where every stone has its story.80

Like the ‘granite columns’ in Hunt’s poem, with their secrets withheld from the ‘present race’, the stones here seem to have a memory and a story to tell. Celtic people and stones again seem alike: the past ‘lives’ in both.

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It is Renan’s concept of an ancient race of Celts that Arnold incorporates into his vision of the English ‘national spirit’. The primitive strata become an element that contributes to that greater national whole, as I  discussed above. In this idea of Englishness it seems he would also have followed Renan’s claims in his best known, later lecture, ‘What Is a Nation?’ (1882), that neither race nor geography themselves make a nation. Geography or ‘natural frontiers’ play an important part in the ‘division of nations’, Renan observes:  ‘Rivers have carried races forward; mountains have checked them.The former have favoured, the latter limited, historic movements.’81 But nations are ultimately historical rather than racial or geographical: ‘it is no more the land than the race that makes a nation … A nation is a spiritual principle, the result of profound historical complications; a spiritual family, not a group determined by the configuration of the soil.’82 In other words, Renan begins to develop a geological conception of race, as has been mentioned, but not of nation. In this he prefigures the work of more recent theorists like Benedict Anderson, who similarly argues against the idea that nations are eternal entities grounded in the unchangeable biology of race or in geographical territory, instead emphasising the historical creation of nations. Arnold, in contrast, develops Renan’s ideas in a different way, using his conception of a primitive rock-like race to form an element of the English nation. As Schmitt has pointed out, there is room for race within Arnold’s understanding of the English nation. For Arnold, as for Renan, the ‘spirit’ of a nation seems to be a historical, changeable entity, rather than being determined entirely by racial divisions or geographical boundaries, but only in part: it is also composed of the ‘primitive’ Celtic element. The ‘natural frontiers’ to which Renan refers could include the mountains that he discusses in his ‘Poetry of the Celtic Races’, which have apparently ‘checked’ races (as he puts it in ‘What Is a Nation?’). The Celts are ‘concentrated on the very confines of the world’, writes Renan, ‘in the midst of rocks and mountains whence its enemies have been powerless to force it’.83 The image of Celts in mountainous peripheries became standard in nineteenth-century literature about these ‘races’, featuring again in the work of Arnold and Hunt, as has been mentioned, and in Miller’s work, particularly his essay ‘The Highlands’ (1851). But where Arnold is keen to include the Celts within his concept of the English national spirit, Miller discusses how the Highlanders were excluded or forced to

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live on the most inhospitable edges of Britain, or even to leave Britain altogether. In contrast to Arnold for whom the Celts are part of a greater England, for Miller the Highlanders contribute to Scotland’s character as a separate nation. Miller mentions the division between the ‘lowland’ and ‘alpine country’ of Scotland in his Scenes and Legends, commenting briefly on the character of the ‘primary’ region before returning to his more usual interest in fossils. He describes a view of a ‘mountainous ridge towards the north’, which ‘forms part of the Highlands’, below and in front of which is the ‘low country’. Observing that ‘the boundaries’ of these districts can be traced not only from their scenery, but also their ‘geological character’, he writes: Wherever the scene presents a bold high outline, we find only primary rock, wherever it sinks below a certain level, and exhibits a softer and less diversified contour we find only secondary. And the two districts belong to very different eras; for when the higher with its granites and its micaceous schists, must have existed as a chain of islands, the widely spread archipelago of some former world, the lower, with all its shales, its clays, and its sandstones, was shrouded in the prolific womb of the sea.84

Geological differences again underpin the division between these two districts then, with their distinct landscapes and ‘eras’  – the Celtic district belonging to a ‘former world’. Elsewhere, in his Popular Geology, Miller says more about the primary rocks and the distinctively sublime scenery of the Highlands,85 but it is in his essay ‘The Highlands’ that he most acutely observes the differences between the Highlanders and the English. Opening with an uncharitable, ‘comfortable-looking Englishman’ travelling ‘among the wilds of the northern Highlands’,86 the essay goes on to explain and to sympathise with the plight of the Highlanders. Miller recalls that there were whole districts in the Highlands that remained untouched early in the century, thus still possessing ‘the aboriginal inhabitants’, who seem to have had a close relationship with the land of ‘primary rocks’. In contrast to the Englishman, ‘the Highlander was never wealthy:  the inhabitants of a wild mountainous district, formed of the primary rocks, never are’.87 The soil is too scanty to yield reliable crops, but the Highlander possessed several cattle and sheep so when the crops failed he could get by

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with the sale of a few animals. He thus retained independence, and never threw himself on the charity of his neighbouring Lowlanders. Further, Miller claims that the mode of life and traditions of the country favoured the ‘development of the military spirit’, making the Highlanders ‘the best soldiers in the service’.88 But with the pressures triggered by the wars of the French Revolution, including increase in taxation and the price of provisions in England and the Lowlands, the Highland proprietor also increased his rent, driving out the original Highlanders. Some emigrated to Canada or the United States, but many thousands more ‘fell down upon the coasts of the country, and, on moss-covered moors or bare exposed promontories, little suited for the labours of the agriculturalist … they became the poorest of men’.89 Miller here occupies an interesting position, neither condemning the Celts for their deficiencies as did many race theorists like Knox (whose description of their lack of ‘patient industriousness’ is contradicted here), nor romanticising them like Renan or Arnold or Hunt. In this essay Miller describes the Highlanders as extremely industrious, attempting to cultivate the scarce soil on the ‘barren primary rocks’, without any mention of superstitions or sentimentality or artistic passion. He seems to be defending the Highlanders against the growing stereotype of ‘the Celts as a race sunk in vice, indolence and savagery’, a stereotype that Colin Kidd observes contrasted against the ‘supposed libertarian and industrious characteristics attributed to the Teutonic stock’ – a construct that identified the Lowlanders with the English race (as part of a wider racial group variously referred to as Germanic, Saxon, or Teutonic).90 The characteristics of the Teutonic race were ‘epitomised by the English nation’, a nation from which the stereotyped Celts were thus excluded. Kidd observes that this conception of Lowland Scotland as part of a greater Britain was commonly held not only by English ethnologists but also in Scottish circles:  by Knox, for ­example – ‘the real founder of British racism’91 – who was based in Edinburgh. Further, according to Kidd, the rise of Teutonic racialism, with its creation of divisions between the two races of Scotland, helped to prevent the full-blown development of a Scottish national movement of the kind typically found in nineteenth-century Europe. ‘The Scottish nation was reinterpreted as an unstable ethnic hybrid’, argues Kidd, ‘whereas Britain  – or at least its heartland of England and the Scottish Lowlands – was

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imagined as a natural community of Saxons’, thus helping to dispel suspicions that the Union between Scotland and England neglected historic national interests.92 For the Teutonic race theorists, then, race is central to the conception of nation. Miller himself was equivocal about Scotland’s relationship with England. As George Rosie puts it, he ‘deeply approved of the Union with England’,93 and yet he also emphasised the differences between the English and Scottish in his First Impressions of England (1847), disapproving of the English government’s treatment of Scotland ‘as if it were not a separate nation, possessed of a distinct and strongly-marked character of its own’.94 In his First Impressions Miller does not acknowledge any inconsistency between the Highland and Lowland Scots. Race is thus perhaps less central to his conception of nation than it is to the Teutonic racialists, but it is still a contributing factor, as he instead opposes a more general Scottishness against a sedimentary Englishness. He talks less of ‘race’ than of ‘character’, presumably because he is formulating his ideas just before racial discourse took off in the second half of the century, but one might see in ‘The Highlands’ and in First Impressions early formulations of the idea of geologically determined racial character. As is typical of other travel narratives, his First Impressions first of all contrasts the landscapes: ‘Not an eruptive rock appears in the entire line on to Walsall. How very different the framework of Scottish landscape.’95 In ‘The Highlands’ the rocks determine the character of the people, whereas Miller here goes on to make metaphorical use of the stratified geology found in England to describe its people. He seems to view the English as both individualist and as divided into classes or strata, in contrast to the ‘clannish’ Scots. The English are ‘like loose grains of sand’, and ‘a middle stratum of English society … like some of the geological formations … has its own peculiar organisms, essentially different, in the group, from those of either the stratum above or the stratum below’.96 This geologically shaped English class structure contributes to Miller’s more extensive discussions of the differences between the characters of the English and Celts, culminating in his comment that Scotland is ‘a separate nation’, not ‘a mere province of England’.97 So in contrast to the view developed by thinkers from Renan to Anderson (nations are neither geographically nor racially determined but conceived of as historical), Miller begins to

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develop the sense that geologically inflected racial character is a contributing factor to nations  – character that can be both determined by and identified with the rocks. The various links between rocks, race and nation are much exploited in this age of rising nationalism, although the relationship between race and nation is of course complex and often tenuous.98 Arnold also considers race to be a contributing factor to nation but far from seeing racial differences (between the English and Celts) as incompatible with national spirit, he argues that a combination of the qualities of the different races would positively improve the English nation, as we have seen. This chapter, then, has so far looked at a variety of ways in which rocks and race have contributed to concepts of nation. In particular, we can see how apparently ancient, natural geological and racial differences could, on the one hand, underpin understandings that a Celtic region or nation like Cornwall or Scotland is clearly separate from England, and, on the other hand, how the ‘primitive’ Celts could contribute to a greater English nation. I would like to return in the next and final section of this chapter to the case of Hunt, whose work takes up both positions in so far as he is interested in Cornwall’s separateness but also in its part of a wider nation. I will first consider his view of how Cornwall’s distinctive industrial character contributes to a greater nation, and will then consider his simultaneous allusions to Cornwall as primitive and separate from England, along with another Cornish folklorist, William Bottrell.

Cornwall as England and not England Hunt shares the understanding that ‘the Celts’ and ‘the English’ are two different races, and like Arnold sees the Celtic as part of a wider nation. He differs, however, in his interest in the mining industry, and in his emphasis on ‘Britain’ rather than ‘England’. For Hunt, the ‘Celtic’ region of Cornwall contributes magnificently to Britain’s mineral wealth, while it also provides Britain with ‘primitive’ landscapes and the imaginative, spiritual Cornish race and its folktales. Hunt’s primary interest in geology as a mineral surveyor helps to highlight an aspect of Cornish identity that is almost always absent from accounts of the Celtic Revival. As Kidd points out, the image of the Celt put forward by Arnold and the Celtic Revivalists is of a

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mystical, emotional character, who is disconnected ‘from the reality of industrialisation and empire’ and protected ‘from the main highways of modernity’.99 In contrast to the aesthetics of certain Romantic poets and travel writers (such as Wordsworth and Gilpin) as well as to Celtic romanticists (Arnold), these first two chapters, threading through the work of Davy and Hunt in particular, have explored the significance of the industrial aspect of ‘Celtic’ Britain.Two contradictory images of the Cornish thus seem to result from their geology: they are on the one hand deemed ‘primitive’, and on the other, as miners, potentially modern and civilised. Hunt’s British Mining describes both how Cornwall contributes great industrial wealth to the nation, and also how the Cornish, far from being isolated and thus stuck with their primitive traditions, are ‘civilised’ and highly skilled. Here and in other writings, he repeats the following quotation from the Greek historian Diodorus: ‘We will now’, says Diodorus, ‘give an account of the tin which is produced in Britain. The inhabitants of that extremity of Britain which is called Bolerian [the Land’s End district], both excel in hospitality, and also, by reason of their intercourse with foreign merchants, are civilised in their mode of life. These prepare the tin, working very skilfully the earth which produces it. The ground is rocky, but it has in it earthy veins, the produce of which is brought down and melted and purified.’100

For Hunt, Cornwall and its inhabitants play an important part in the industrial glory of the nation. The Cornish are not simply cut off from ‘alien’ races or foreigners, in contrast to the Celts as described by Renan and others, but are apparently welcoming and ‘civilised’. Purity here is not racial but metallic: the result of skilful manipulation of the rocky ground and its veins. Hunt seems to focus here on an individual county much as he focuses elsewhere on a few individual figures who have heroically advanced the nation. Ludmilla Jordanova uses Hunt’s introduction to Memoirs of the Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain to lead into her discussion of how scientific and technological achievements are considered a reflection of national prowess, and scientific figures are identified with as a source of national pride. In this introduction Hunt writes: ‘We have advanced to our present position in the

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scale of nations by the efforts of a few chosen minds’,101 going on to allude to the various ‘Discoverers’ included in the collection, not least the two Cornishmen: Humphry Davy and Richard Trevithick. Davy in particular, as I  have already indicated, was clearly among Hunt’s heroes, and not only in his capacity as a scientific discoverer. In his entry for Davy in the Dictionary of National Biography, Hunt notes for example that he ‘delighted in the folklore of this remote district, and became, as he himself tells us, a “tale-teller” ’,102 before moving on from poetry to science. While most of the biographical article discusses Davy’s scientific achievements, here once again Hunt’s parallel interests in the unmodern, in stories and superstition are apparent. Cornwall might contribute not only its minerals and miners and scientists to the nation, but also its folklore. It is curious, however, that Hunt’s account in his British Mining of the Cornish as cosmopolitan and civilised directly contradicts that given in his own folklore collection. In Popular Romances, Cornwall is described as isolated and the miners, along with the wreckers, as uncivilised: ‘It must not be forgotten that Cornwall has, until a recent period, maintained a somewhat singular isolation. England, with many persons, appeared to terminate on the shores of the river Tamar; and the wreckers of the coasts, and the miners of the hills, were equally regarded as indicating the semi-civilisation of this county.’103 Miners, according to this perspective, seem as uncivilised as murderous wreckers. Rather than being a productive, cosmopolitan and civilised part of Britain, the image of Cornwall in Hunt’s folklore collection seems to give way to the darker side of the romanticised perspective of it as an isolated, uncivilized, primitive and dangerous region that might only contribute to the greater nation  – if indeed it does not ‘terminate on the shores of the Tamar’ – in terms of its non-modern qualities such as imagination and spirituality. Hunt may be seen to distance himself here from this perspective, as he refers to how ‘many persons … regarded’ the miners, but a little later he refers more directly to the negative qualities of the Cornish, such as their ‘gloomy imagination’, which has ‘permitted ignorance to continue its melancholy delusions’, as was seen above. Hunt’s work thus seems to resonate with Arnold’s in some respects. This folklore collection shares Arnold’s emphasis on the ‘primitive’ qualities of the Celtic race – imagination, spirituality, passion and

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romance – while Hunt’s British Mining presents Cornwall as contributing to the mineral wealth of the greater nation. Hunt’s differing emphasis not only on the mining industry but on Britain, in contrast to Arnold’s England, may be crucial. It could allow Cornwall to be separate from England, but simultaneously part of a greater nation. The title of Hunt’s collection opens up the ambiguity as to whether Cornwall is part of England. Popular Romances of the West of England, which seems to locate these romances within the English nation, is followed by Or the Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall. This second, alternative title alludes to an ‘Old Cornwall’ that was earlier known as ‘Danmonium’, as Hunt goes on to explain in the introduction (it is now more often referred to as Dunmonia). This greater Cornwall incorporated Devon and part of other nearby counties, and is thought to have formed a separate kingdom from England in the early Middle Ages, until it was overthrown by Saxons. This area is now, however, ‘ordinarily known as the West of England’.104 Alan Kent seizes on Hunt’s reference to Danmonium as evidence that Hunt himself was, at least in part, Cornish proto-nationalist. Kent identifies an impressive range of literature that articulates a sense of Cornwall’s difference from England, to support his claim that there is a tradition of distinctively Cornish literature that develops from the eleventh to the twenty-first centuries. He distinguishes between the folkloric and ethnographic research carried out by Celtic and English scholars. ‘Celtic scholarship’, claims Kent, ‘tended to be guided by emergent nationalist or proto-nationalist objectives of both preservation and revival’.105 In contrast, English scholarship was generally conducted in line with the opinions of Arnold, who was ‘often credited with kickstarting “English” interest in the Celtic renaissance, viewing the Celts as valuable and inspirational assets to Britain, but too passionate and troublesome to conduct their own affairs’.106 Hunt, according to Kent, was unique, as he operated as an ‘English scholar’ but, ‘given his mining background, he had a near-indigenous insight into the place and purpose of the narratives he collected; whilst at the same time defining, at least, in an antiquarian sense, the difference of Cornish narrative’.107 Kent does not explain what it is about Hunt’s work that makes it an English scholar’s, presumably meaning that he was not born in Cornwall. His claim that Hunt nevertheless had a ‘near-indigenous insight’ overlooks the sense in which Hunt also shared an ‘Arnoldian’ view

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of the Cornish as passionate, imaginative, and even ignorant and deluded in his folklore, while his mining publications saw Cornish mining as an asset to Britain. Hunt’s work is more ambiguous than Kent seems to admit. Kent also emphasises the qualities of ‘Celtic scholarship’ in the work of another folklorist, William Bottrell, although, again, his work is in some respects comparable to Arnold’s. The first sentence of Bottrell’s Preface to Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall locates even the far West of Cornwall, and even before the nineteenth century, as part of England, albeit a remote part: ‘Before the commencement of the present century, the district of West Penwith, to which the legends in this volume for the most part belong, was, from its almost insular position, one of the most secluded and unknown parts of England.’108 Further, while Bottrell situates Cornwall as part of England, the Preface to his Stories and Folk-lore of West Cornwall places his collection within a wider tradition of English folklore. It is presented as adding to the collections of the English Folklore Society (formed in 1878), a Society that ‘promises to take an important position among the learned societies of the English nation’. Bottrell’s collection is an especially valuable contribution as ‘it deals not with the traditions of the peasantry of distant and foreign lands, but with the legends and traditions of the country folk of one of the most romantic and interesting counties of “Merrie England” ’.109 Historians have observed that much nationalist interest in folklore blossomed in the nineteenth century. Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich comment that Romantic writers, resisting French domination and the idea of universal progress and rationality, ‘aimed to uncover a national character and even “racial” continuities through which the past, embodied in living memory, could speak to, guide, and nurture the present’. Porter and Teich go on to note that the boundary between ‘discovery’ and ‘invention’ became blurred, but what was crucial was the national distinctions: ‘one common thread to Romanticism across Europe was the forging of historical myths to bolster indigenous national cultures’.110 Such national interest in folklore continued to proliferate over the course of the nineteenth century, of which Bottrell’s preface displays an awareness: ‘The whole subject of folk-lore, however, is at this moment of such general interest, that still it is hoped that this little addition to the stores now being gathered from every nation under heaven,

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may be acceptable to the literary world.’111 Bottrell’s collections seem in this context to contribute to the folklore of the English nation, while there is also the suggestion, as in the work of Hunt, that Cornwall is distinctive, even separable from England, in part because of its mining industry as well as its folklore. Like Kent, Cornish historian Philip Payton considers Hunt to be proto-nationalist. He similarly highlights Hunt’s descriptions of Cornwall as ‘Celtic’ and as different from (the rest of) England. Payton thus argues that Hunt’s ‘treatment of traditional belief anticipated the romantic proto-nationalist tone evident in Courtney [another Cornish folklorist112] later in the century, together with the more overtly nationalist themes elaborated by W.  B. Yeats’.113 For Payton, Hunt also serves to illustrate a major argument within Cornish Studies over the past few decades: that Cornish identity is industrial rather than according simply with the romantic constructions by the Celtic Revivalists of Celts as primitive and mystical. ‘Cornish identity’, writes Payton, in the nineteenth century ‘was essentially industrial – the Cornish were “industrial Celts” – and it was the iconography of industrialization that informed most assertions of Cornishness’.114 The ‘industrial mentality’ of the Cornish to some extent accompanied a decline in ‘folk culture’, not least because the methodism that caught on among many Cornish miners disapproved of superstition and folklore.115 Payton observes, however, that modernity comes together with traditional belief in the folktales that developed around the mining industry, including those of fairy ‘knockers’, for instance, who are supposed to be the spirits of old Jewish miners (so called because they apparently continue with their mining labours, knocking at the rocks with pickaxes), as documented by Hunt and others.116 Davy’s and Hunt’s interests in both mining and folklore also show how these activities together contributed to a sense of Cornish difference. Like Hunt, Bottrell describes Cornwall as geologically distinctive from the rest of England, and as the home of miners and folktales. A proto-nationalist element in their work can be discerned that incorporates both the mineral and the primitive qualities of Cornwall’s rocks, even while acknowledging that they are at times more ambiguous than Kent and Payton might admit. Bottrell gathers his stories almost exclusively from West Cornwall, and he does not simply describe Cornwall as cut off from the rest of England but makes an even more local distinction between West Cornwall

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and the rest, the West with ‘its almost insular position’ being especially ‘secluded and unknown’.117 He describes how a few decades ago there was very little communication between the two areas, and how the people in the West looked on those living further east as ‘foreigners’. Remarkably, Bottrell then traces a further, even more local distinction between two areas within West Cornwall, one of which is inhabited by miners: And even this small district comprises two very dissimilar regions, the inhabitants of which are also distinguished by peculiar traits of character. Bordering on the northern shore, barren moor-lands and rock-strewn hills, topped with granite cairns, mark a tract rich in tin and copper, but, except in some few places, unproductive on the surface, and almost worthless for the purposes of agriculture.118

Once again, geology here seems to form the basis for regional differences in scenery and economic productivity, and also in racial character. Bottrell focuses on the part of Cornwall that most resembles the ‘Celtic Highlands’, being hilly, rocky and barren, while it is also ‘rich’ in metals. The miners inhabiting this area, with their ‘peculiar traits of character’, are described as a kind of race of their own. Despite being uneducated, according to Bottrell, these people are often ‘very intelligent’ and possess ‘a good store of mother-wit, sharpened by their hazardous under-ground occupations, and by a communication and exchange of ideas, facilitated by their working in company’. The mining industry seems entirely compatible with folklore traditions, as this ‘primitive race’ also has the ability to tell good stories: This primitive race of the hills knew next to nothing of any occurrences beyond their immediate neighbourhood, and being, like all the Celtic race, of a loquacious turn and sociable disposition, their chief resource for passing the eventide, and other times of rest, was the relation of traditional stories or, as they say ‘drolling away the time’ in public-house or chimney-corner; many old legends have thus been handed down and kept alive.119

As in Hunt’s collections, Bottrell’s not only frames the folktales by setting them in a primitive landscape; many of the stories themselves are about rocks and the land, beginning with giants’ games

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and also including stories about ancient monuments and stone circles, and knockers in mines. Like Hunt, Bottrell begins with stories about giants, ‘who were anciently the masters of the world and the ancestors of the true Celtic race’, and who actively shaped the rocky landscape, while more recent generations seem to continue to shape this distinctive landscape through the activity of mining. Hunt and Bottrell illustrate the use of geology to underpin a sense of racial and regional, or even national differences.These differences are used to explain the existence and form of the tales in the first place: they are apparently those of a ‘primitive race’, which keeps ‘many old legends … alive’. The stories these folklorists tell about Cornwall’s primitive rocks frame their collections of stories that are themselves about rocks, together helping to position Cornwall as part of England, or at least Britain, and yet clearly distinctive, and to identify a race of Cornish Celts. Hunt and Bottrell illustrate a Cornish proto-nationalism that is grounded in the ‘primitive’ rocks of the land itself – a land that is understood to be rich in mineral value, to be very old, and to be the natural home or even part of its ‘primitive’ inhabitants. Primitive rocks, in other words, help not only to distinguish Cornwall from England through its industry, its landscapes and its people; they make imaginable a wealthy, modern and yet ancient nation, inhabited by a race that is inextricable from its core being. Ideas of rocks as people-like and people as rock-like can be deployed in a range of ways, whether to the advantage or disadvantage of those being compared.To imagine that the Celts are like the primitive land on which they live could on the one hand seem to strip them of any ability to see their native landscape objectively, to have any scientific geological understanding themselves, and even perhaps to make them seem too uncivilised and irrational to be able to manage their own industrial or economic affairs, as Arnold would suggest. We might distinguish here between the territorial claims of Cornwall’s upper and middle class geologists discussed in the previous chapter, and the folklorists’ accounts of the working class ‘peasantry’ as primitive. On the other hand, it is to imagine that the Celts belong uniquely to that land, that they are inseparable from it – and it is such a sense of belonging that Cornish nationalists would take up in the next century in order to stake out territorial claims against tourists and other incomers, as the final two chapters will discuss.

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These first two chapters have considered how an often neglected mining industry has contributed to perceptions of Cornish difference, and also how geological writers engaged with rocky, sublime primitive landscapes, often taking up the perspective of a traveller or tourist. Geology provides a basis for two contrasting kinds of images of Cornwall and the Cornish: as modern and primitive; industrial and traditional; civilised and Celtic. As the mining industry began to decline in the second half of the nineteenth century, tourism became increasingly important to Cornwall’s economy and its romanticised images of a pre-industrial, Celtic region became at least as important as those of the mining industry. In so far as nineteenth-century Cornish identity centred around industrial pride, this was a sense of Cornishness constructed in important ways from inside the region in contrast to the Romantic ideas of the Cornish as a primitive, Celtic race which were more often imposed from outside, from the metropolitan centre, as Bernard Deacon has argued, refining Malcolm Chapman’s claims that Celticity has been historically constructed by the centre and imposed on the periphery.120 It is to travel narratives and the tourist industry that the middle two chapters of this book will now turn, to consider further how ‘outsiders’ perceived Cornwall as a primitive region, or even nation.

Notes 1 Charles Lemon, ‘President’s Address’, Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall 6 (1841), 7–14 (11). 2 Robert Hunt, Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall 9 (1878), 22–5. 3 Much of this information can be found in the obituary for Robert Hunt first published in Western Antiquary 7 (1887) and reprinted in The Geological Curator 4 (1985), www.geocurator.org/arch/Curator/ Vol4No3.pdf (accessed 23 March 2014), 129–30. 4 Sharron Schwartz, Voices of the Cornish Mining Landscape (Truro: Cornwall County Council, 2008), p.  60; Philip Payton, Cornwall:  A  History (Fowey: Cornwall Editions, 2004), pp. 218–20; Hilary Orange,‘Cornish Mining Landscapes:  Public Perceptions of Industrial Archaeology in a Post-Industrial Society’, PhD thesis (London:  University College London, 2012), pp. 53–4.

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5 For example see Daniel Hack, ‘ “Sublimation Strange”:  Allegory and Authority in Bleak House’, in English Literary History 66 (1999), pp. 129–56; Adelene Buckland, ‘ “The Poetry of Science”: Charles Dickens, Geology, and Visual and Material Culture in Victorian London’, Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007), 679–94; BenWinyard and Holly Furneaux,‘Dickens, Science and theVictorian Literary Imagination’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 10 (2010), 19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/ article/view/572/531 (accessed 11 February 2011). Hunt’s folklore is also discussed within Cornish Studies, by Alan Kent, for example, in The Literature of Cornwall: Continuity, Identity, Difference (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2000), which I will discuss further in the last section of this chapter. 6 Ian Duncan, Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen, ‘Introduction’, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–19 (1). 7 Robert Hunt, A Descriptive Guide to the Museum of Practical Geology (London, 1859), p. 18. 8 Robert Hunt, British Mining:  A  Treatise on the History, Discovery, Practical Development and Future Prospects of Metalliferous Mines in the U.K. (London: Crosby Lockwood, 1884), p. 193. In viewing granite as a key indicator of valuable minerals, Hunt echoes the director of the museum and survey, Henry Thomas de la Beche, in his earlier Report on the Geology of Cornwall, Devon, and West Somerset (London:  Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839), pp. 156–92. 9 See Stephen Daniels, ‘Mapping National Identities:  The Culture of Cartography, with particular Reference to the Ordnance Survey’, in Geoffrey Cubitt (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 112–31.Also see ­chapter 1,‘Minerals and maps’. 10 Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation:  A  Biography of the Ordnance Survey (London: Granta, 2010), p. 4. 11 Hunt, British Mining, p. 398. 12 Hunt, British Mining, p. v. 13 Hunt, A Descriptive Guide, p. 91. 14 I discussed Davy’s ‘Extract from an Unfinished Poem on the Mount’s Bay’, with its very similar title and focus on an identical location, early in the first chapter of this book. Hunt’s admiration for Davy’s work is evident in his entry, ‘Humphry Davy’, for the Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen (New York: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 187–93. I will discuss further connections between their work as this chapter progresses. 15 Robert Hunt, The Mount’s Bay (Penzance: J. Downing & T. Matthews, 1829), pp. 18–19. 16 Robert Hunt, The Poetry of Science, or Studies of the Physical Phenomena of Nature, 2nd edn (London: Reeve, Benham and Reeve, 1949), p. 312.

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Hunt later shifted his view, arguing that the formation of ‘primary rocks’ is in some cases ‘much more recent than the secondary rocks’, in On Mines and Mining (London: Longmans, 1878), but granite continued to be associated with great age and sublimity. 17 In Chapter 1 I also discussed Wordsworth’s depiction of granite as a survivor rock. For further examples from Cornwall, see lines from John Harris, ‘The Land’s End’, and Ernest L.  T. Harris-Bickford, ‘Cornwall’s Cliffs’, in Alan Kent (ed.), Voices from West Barbary  – an Anthology of Anglo-Cornish Poetry 1549–1928 (London: Francis Boutle, 2000), pp. 134–7 and 169. 18 Hunt, The Mount’s Bay, p. 63. 19 Davy, Humphry, ‘Extract from an Unfinished Poem on Mount’s Bay’, Annual Anthology, vol. 1 (Bristol: Biggs and Cottle, 1799), pp. 281–6 (p. 282). 20 See Sam Rayne, ‘Henry Jenner and the Celtic Revival in Cornwall’, PhD thesis (University of Exeter, 2011), pp. 126–7; Jane Z. Fullmer, Young Humphry Davy:  The Making of an Experimental Chemist (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000), p. 41. 21 Hunt, The Mount’s Bay, p. 63. 22 Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Buckland observes how ‘narrative was as often a problem as a possibility for nineteenth-century geologists’, in ‘Losing the Plot’, 12. Buckland further discusses the aesthetic value of geology in Victorian fiction, with a focus on Dickens, in her essay ‘The Poetry of Science’. 23 Cited in O’Connor, The Earth on Show, p. 3. 24 Hunt, The Poetry of Science, pp. vii and xvii–xviii. 25 Hunt, The Poetry of Science, p. xx. 26 See, for example, Henry Boase, ‘Observations on the Submersion of Part of Mount’s Bay’, TRGSC 2 (1822), 133; T. F. Barnham, ‘Some Arguments in Support of the Opinion that the Iktis of Diodorus Siculus is St. Michael’s Mount’, in TRGSC 3 (1827), 102. 27 Hugh Miller, Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, or the Traditional History of Cromarty (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1835), p. 13. 28 Simon Knell and Michael Taylor, ‘Hugh Miller:  Fossils, Landscape and Literary Geology’, in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 117 (2006), 85–98 (85 and 94). See also James G. Paradis, ‘The Natural Historian as Antiquary of the World: Hugh Miller and the Rise of Literary Natural History’, in Michael Shortland (ed.), Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 122–49

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29 O’Connor, Earth on Show pp. 438–9; Gillian Bennett, ‘Geologists and Folklorists: Cultural Evolution and “The Science of Folklore” ’, Folklore 105 (1994), 25–37 (25); Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 43–4. 30 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (London:  Penguin, 1997), pp.  5 and 7. Martin J. S. Rudwick discusses how the analogy with human history was already well established in geological rhetoric, being used, for example, by Georges Cuvier, but how Lyell developed it most fully, in ‘Transposed Concepts from the Human Sciences in the Early Work of Lyell’, in L. J. Jordanova and Roy Porter (eds), Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences (Bucks: British Society for the History of Science, 1979), pp. 67–83. For a study of catastrophic/gradualist understandings of geological time (to be discussed next) as a model for historical time, see, for example, John Burrow, ‘Images of Time: From Carlylean Vulcanism to Sedimentary Gradualism’, in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (eds), History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 199–223. 31 Sandra Herbert gives the most comprehensive account of Darwin’s geological work, in Charles Darwin, Geologist (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2005). See also ­chapter 1 of Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings:  Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 17–44. 32 Bennett, ‘Geologists and Folklorists’, pp. 25–37. 33 Numerous historians and literary critics have discussed Cuvier’s influential role in nineteenth-century racial sciences. Here I have drawn particularly on Brantlinger’s useful summary, in Dark Vanishings, pp. 20–1. 34 See Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, which also discusses Knox’s views in a wider context and considers his theories on other races, including Tasmanians and their extinction, pp. 39–44. 35 Robert Knox, The Races of Men (Philadelphia, PA: Lea & Blanchard, 1850), p. 17. 36 Knox, The Races, pp. 17–18. For discussion of Knox’s division between the lowland and highland regions, see Colin Kidd,‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880’, The Scottish Historical Review 74 (1995), 45–68 (see especially 57–59). 37 The classic study of the widespread view of Celts as inferior is L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, CT: Conference on British Studies, 1968).

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38 James Vernon, ‘Border Crossings:  Cornwall and the English Imagi(nation)’, in Cubit (ed.), Imagining Nations, pp. 153–72 (p. 156). See also, for example, Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991). 39 Kuklick, The Savage Within. For discussions of geology in the formation of ideas about race and extinction, see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science (London and Basingstoke:  Macmillan, 1982); Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings. 40 Vernon, ‘Border Crossings’, pp. 156–7. 41 Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England, or the Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall (New  York and London: Benjamin Bloom, 1968), p. 21. 42 For accounts of other folklorists motivated by fear of the loss of traditions, see, for example, Donald Smith, Storytelling Scotland: A Nation in Narrative (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2001), p. 87ff. 43 John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution:  Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. xiii. 44 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 36. 45 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 35. 46 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 37. 47 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 43. 48 Miller, Scenes and Legends, p. 30. 49 See Lotte Motz for further examples, ‘Giants in Folklore and Mythology:  A  New Approach’, Folklore 93 (1982), 70–84. For giants in England more specifically, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants:  Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 5. 50 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 22. 51 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 23. 52 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 25. 53 Hunt, Popular Romances, pp. 29–30 and 39ff. 54 Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days:  Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 5. 55 Stephens, Giants. (See especially ­chapter 1.). See also Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London and New York: Verso, 1998), pp.  15–16; Raphael Samuel, Patriotism:  The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London and New  York:  Routledge, 1989), p. xiii.

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56 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 42. 57 Robert Hunt, ‘Humphry Davy’, in Leslie Stephen (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 187–93 (p. 187). 58 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 42. 59 Hunt, Popular Romances, pp. 42–3. 60 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 36. 61 Miller, Scenes and Legends, p. 14. 62 See Vernon above, and also, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 33–4, 135–9. 63 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London:  Smith, Elder, 1867), pp. 97–8. 64 Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 98. 65 Vincent Pecora, ‘Arnoldian Ethnology’, Victorian Studies 41: 3 (1998), 355–79 (p. 366). 66 Hunt, The Poetry of Science, pp. 21–2. 67 Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Harcourt, 1977), pp. 232–3. See also Pecora, ‘Arnoldian Ethnology’, for an excellent discussion of Trilling’s work within the context of the various arguments put forward by critics about race in Arnold’s work. Much like Schmitt’s argument, which I go on to discuss next in this chapter, Pecora notes that ‘Arnold was never much bothered by inconsistency’ and that Celtic Literature is ‘riddled with contradictions’, especially when we compare it with his best known Culture and Anarchy, 361 and 362. For Pecora, Arnold’s concept of culture is ‘fluid and dynamic’ though ultimately anchored in a theory of racial inheritance, 364 and 377–8. 68 Schmitt, Alien Nation:  Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 121. 69 Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 12. 70 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. edn (London and New York: Verso, 1983), p. 149. 71 Schmit, Alien Nation, p. 123. 72 Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of NineteenthCentury Geology (Chicago, IL and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 135. 73 See, for example, Flavia Alaya, ‘Arnold and Renan on the Popular Uses of History’, Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967), 551–74; Pecora, ‘Arnoldian Ethnology’, 363. 74 Ernest Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Studies, trans. William Hutchison (London: Walter Scott, 1896), p. 1.

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75 Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races. 76 Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, pp. 1–2. 77 Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, p. 2. 78 Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 1. 79 Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 2. 80 Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature. 81 Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, p. 79. 82 Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, p. 80. 83 Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, p. 2. 84 Miller, Scenes and Legends, p. 49. 85 Hugh Miller, Popular Geology (Boston, MA: Gould and Lincoln, 1860), pp. 277–86. 86 Hugh Miller,‘The Highlands’, in Essays (4th edn), Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1870), pp. 207–17 (p. 208). 87 Miller, ‘The Highlands’, p. 209. 88 Miller, ‘The Highlands’, p. 211. 89 Miller, ‘The Highlands’, p. 212. 90 Colin Kidd,‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880’, The Scottish Historical Review 74 (1995), 45–68 (48). 91 P. D. Curtin, The Image of Africa, British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison, WI:  The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 377; cited in Kidd ‘Teutonist Ethnology’, 49 (Kidd goes on to discuss Knox further, 58–9). 92 Curtin, The Image of Africa, 61. See also Colin Kidd, ‘Race, Empire, and the Limits of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Nationhood’, The Historical Journal 46 (2003), 873–92. 93 George Rosie, Hugh Miller: Outrage and Order (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1981), p. 1. 94 Miller, First Impressions, p. 405. 95 Miller, First Impressions, p. 368. 96 Miller, First Impressions, pp. 395 (‘loose grains’) and 384 (‘a middle stratum’). 97 Miller, First Impressions, p. 405. 98 For an essay which focuses on the relationship between racial and national origins, for example, see Inga Bryden,‘Reinventing Origins: TheVictorian Arthur and Racial Myth’, in Shearer West (ed.), The Victorians and Race (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 142–53. For discussions that acknowledge the complex and various connections (and non-connections) between race and nation, see Peter Mandler, ‘ “Race” and “Nation” in Mid-Victorian Thought’ in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.  224–42; Kidd, ‘Race, Empire, and the Limits of Nineteenth-Century Scottish

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Nationhood’; Laura Doyle, ‘The Racial Sublime’, in Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (eds), Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780– 1834 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN:  Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 15–36. 99 Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology’, p. 66. 100 Hunt, British Mining, p.  4. See also Robert Hunt, A Treatise on the Progressive Improvement and Present State of the Manufactures in Metal, vol. 3 (London: Longman Brown Green, 1853), p. 5. 101 Robert Hunt, Memoirs (London: W. Walker & Son, 1862), p. viii. 102 Robert Hunt, ‘Humphry Davy’, Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen (New York: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 187–93 (p. 187). 103 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 25. 104 Hunt, Popular Romances, p. 28. 105 Alan Kent, The Literature of Cornwall:  Continuity, Identity, Difference 1000–2000 (Bristol: Redcliffe, 2000), p. 127. 106 Kent, The Literature of Cornwall. 107 Kent, The Literature of Cornwall, p. 128. 108 William Bottrell, Traditions (Penzance, 1870), p. iii. 109 William Bottrell, Stories and Folk-lore of West Cornwall (Penzance, 1880), p. iii. (This Preface has no named author so one might assume this is also by Bottrell, but it explains that he had by this time suffered a stroke which paralysed his hand, and it is also written in the third person. He could have dictated it, and third-person Prefaces are not uncommon, but one can at least assume that Bottrell was satisfied with it as he allowed the book as a whole to go to publication before his death.) 110 Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 5. 111 Bottrell, Stories and Folk-lore, p. iii. 112 Margaret Ann Courtney is best known for Cornish Feasts and Folklore (1890). 113 Philip Payton, ‘Bridget Cleary and Cornish Studies:  Folklore, Story-Telling and Modernity’, Cornish Studies 13 (2005), 194–215 (203). 114 Payton, ‘Bridget Cleary and Cornish Studies’, 199. See also Philip Payton, ‘Industrial Celts? Cornish Identity in the Age of Technological Prowess’, Cornish Studies 10 (2002), 116–35. 115 See Orange, Cornish Mining Landscapes, pp. 52–3. 116 Hunt, Popular Romances, pp. 90–1 and 341–55. See also, for example, M. A. Courtney, Folklore & Legends of Cornwall (Exeter:  Cornwall Books, 1989), pp.  8, 61, 120, 128 (first published 1890 as Cornish Feasts and Folklore); A. K.  Hamilton Jenkin, Cornwall and the Cornish: The Story, Religion, and Folk-lore of ‘The Western Land’ (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1933), pp. 221–9. 117 Bottrell, Traditions, p. iii. 118 Bottrell, Traditions, p. iii.

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119 Bottrell, Traditions, p. iv. 120 Bernard Deacon, ‘  “The Hollow Jarring of the Distant Steam Engines”: Images of Cornwall between West Barbary and Delectable Duchy’, in Ella Westland, Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place (Penzance: Patten Press, 1997), pp. 7–24.

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3

On the cliff edge of England: trembling rocks in sensation fiction and empire Gothic This chapter considers how cliffs function as a space that is almost but not quite detached from the nation, as part of the mainland of England but also semi-foreign. It observes that in travel narratives and tourist literature, cliffs are of interest in part because of their geological importance (they expose strata formations, for example), and also because they seem to take the traveller as far from home, as far from normality and the known as it is possible to go before leaving the nation altogether. Cliffs provide an exemplary embodiment of a more general perception of Cornwall, in particular, as being both part of, yet different and separable from, England. The first part of the chapter looks most closely at a mid-Victorian travel narrative by Wilkie Collins, Rambles Beyond Railways (1851), and at one of his early novels, Basil (1852). Like the folklore collections by Robert Hunt and William Bottrell, discussed in the ­previous chapter, these texts illustrate Collins’s interest in Cornwall as both part of England but also a remote and distinctive, even somewhat foreign region, with its ‘primitive’ people and sublime rock formations, along with its mines and other geological points of interest. Collins’s texts thus help to illustrate further my argument in previous chapters that geology contributes to perceptions of regional and racial distinctiveness. This chapter then focuses specifically in this context on Collins’s descriptions of cliffs: in his Rambles and Basil they provide a sublime and hazardous location for especially strange or excitingly ‘non-English’ activities and dramatic scenarios. Cliffs provide a space for the traveller to experience a certain sense of difference, a foreignness within England. Since the eighteenth-century ‘Grand Tour’, British travellers had

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increasingly turned towards regions and nations closer to home, to the rocky landscapes of the Lake District and Wales, for example, as discussed in Chapter 1. In the nineteenth century, travel writers and novelists, including Wilkie Collins, continued to engage with such sublime landscapes, while the growing tourist industry developed the romance of a Celtic nation, being keen to promote Cornwall as a separate, distinctive holiday destination. Cliffs are thus seen in operation again as a foreign part of England in later tourist literature, such as the Great Western Railway’s The Cornish Riviera (1904). Rocks provide a material basis for Cornwall’s economic conditions, for its tourist industry as well as its mining industry, both of which can be traced back to the early days of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall. Chapter 1 has discussed how a primary purpose of the Society was to make the mining industry more lucrative, but it also had additional potential for profit-making in Cornwall, by enhancing Cornwall’s attractiveness to visitors. In contrast to many of the Society’s members whose financial interests were primarily in mining, a founder and the first secretary of the Society, John Ayrton Paris, had interests in promoting Cornwall as a visitor destination. He was Penzance’s resident physician and instigated the building of hot and cold seawater baths for visiting invalids.1 His involvement in the Geological Society provided welcome publicity, as did his publication of a guide to Penzance in 1814, dedicated to the Society. The dedication claims that the Society has rendered Cornwall’s ‘native riches increasing sources of prosperity’, and while this seems most obviously to refer to its potential influence on the mining industry, it could also refer to how it publicised Cornwall’s interesting geology and landscapes.2 Indeed, in his second edition of A Guide to the Mount’s Bay (1826), the opening address ‘To the reader’ presents the Society itself, along with the sea baths and a mild climate, as an attraction for visitors: Since the publication of the first Edition, Penzance, and the District of the Mount’s Bay, have become objects of greatly increased interest; the successful establishment of the Geological Society,  – the erection of commodious Sea Baths, – the growing confidence of the Public, and of the medical profession, in the superior mildness of the climate, – and the general amelioration of every thing connected with the wants and comforts of a winter residence, have powerfully

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operated in augmenting the influx of strangers and invalids, into this formerly obscure, and comparatively neglected district.3

Paris thus appeals in his Guide to the extremely popular science of geology to help promote Penzance not simply as a health resort but as a region that contains much of geological interest for the visitor. The introduction begins by describing Cornwall’s exceptional coastline as a further attraction, including its sublime cliff scenery, and how it displays ‘the exact structure and relations of the rocks of which the country is composed’ – much as Davy described the exposure of Cornwall’s naked ‘bones’ and ‘sinews’ in the Society’s Transactions.4 Paris builds here on a growing awareness of Cornwall’s mild climate. In 1797 another physician, Paris’s patron William George Maton, referred to the ‘mildness of the air’ of Penzance, helping to render it fit for invalids for whom ‘it may justly be considered as the Montpelier of England’; this climate, he claims, is ‘as beneficial to invalids as that which they are generally sent across the Channel to enjoy’.5 Such perceptions of Penzance as foreign or even exotic would be maintained through the next two centuries, both by geological writers and the tourist industry. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Great Western Railway, in particular, would capitalise on the idea of Cornwall as equivalent to nations overseas, as will be seen. Mineral veins were still important to the Cornish economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but cliffs among other aspects of Cornwall’s geology became increasingly valuable to its growing tourist industry. Cornish copper and tin mining declined rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century, which by the 1890s had resulted in huge waves of migration out from Cornwall to mining regions in South Africa, Australia, Mexico and America, as well as to other parts of Britain, amounting to over a fifth of Cornwall’s population moving away.6 Mines in this context could begin to take on a secondary profit-making purpose, as a curiosity to attract tourists: in Paris’s Guide, for an early example, Botallack mine – a mine on the very edge of the cliffs, with its tunnels going under the sea – is among those that render the ‘country’ interesting to the traveller.7 Tourism would partially fill the gap in the post-industrial economy  – at least providing seasonal employment  – and it invested

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in perceptions of Cornwall as foreign in order to help attract visitors. The shift towards a tourist economy also coincided with perceptions of British imperial decline. In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, in the context of concerns about the British Empire and fears of ‘reverse colonization’,8 the rocky clifftops  – subject to the constant onslaught of the elements, erosion and collapse – figure as vulnerable spaces that become physically dislocated from the English nation, being invaded and even replaced by foreign territories such as Egypt and West Africa. The Cornish race in turn apparently resembles primitive African races. Another kind of foreignness was thus felt in a new way to invade the cliff edge of England, as depicted in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’ (1910). No longer a sunny tourist destination like the Mediterranean, as promoted by the tourist industry, the Cornish coastline becomes an exemplary manifestation of insecure national borders and the dangers of empire, posing a threat to the English visitor.

Walking on cliffs Wilkie Collins travelled through Cornwall on foot in 1850, before the opening of the railway in 1859 (from Plymouth, just outside the border, to the Cornish city of Truro). He described his travels through the county in Rambles beyond Railways, or Notes in Cornwall Taken A-Foot (1851). The ‘Letter of Introduction’, addressed to the reader, is written by Collins in the third person about himself, as though a friend on his travels through this distinct part of England: ‘He will speak to you of one of the remotest and most interesting corners of our old English soil. He will tell you of the grand and varied scenery; the mighty Druid relics; the quaint legends; the deep, dark mines; the venerable remains of early Christianity; and the pleasant primitive population of the county of Cornwall.’9 Rambles introduces Cornwall as part of the ‘English soil’ but with its various distinct qualities that circulate through a range of texts through the nineteenth century: its ‘grand’ landscapes and standing stones, its folklore and mines, its religion and its ‘primitive population’. The inclusion of the ‘deep, dark mines’ here indicates how the mining industry is amenable to a secondary purpose or even profit as a visitor attraction, contributing to

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Cornwall’s interesting distinctiveness along with its more primitive or pre-industrial aspects. As the narrative progresses more detail is given about the scenery, when on the Cornish moor the reader is introduced to the ‘primitive’, sublime granite landscapes that geologists and folklorists take to characterise ‘Celtic’ regions and nations including Cornwall, Brittany, Wales and Scotland, as has been mentioned in previous chapters. The reader hears of ‘granite-built cottages’, and then of masses of granite rocks heaped irregularly, and of ancient granite monuments. Collins then describes the scene from a higher point: ‘All the granite we had seen before was as nothing compared with the granite we now looked on. The masses were at one place heaped up in great irregular cairns  – at another, scattered confusedly over the ground; poured all along in close, craggy lumps; flung about hither and thither, as if in reckless sport, by the hands of giants.’10 Travel narratives and geological treatises and folklore often seem blended together, as in Paris’s Guide and here in Rambles, which mixes descriptions of Collins’s journey through various landscapes with observations of granite and with folktales  – which commonly included stories about giants, as we have seen in Hunt’s and Bottrell’s collections in which the giants were the original race of Celts. The granite landscape here is imagined as one that has been shaped by long-ago natives, conjuring strange semi-human beings while alluding to fantastic folklore that may itself be imagined to derive from a semi-civilised Cornish race. Another travel writer of the time, J.  T. Blight, in his guide to Cornwall entitled A Week at the Land’s End (1861), similarly observes the preponderance of granite in this ‘fabled land of giants’.11 Like Collins’s Rambles Beyond Railways, Blight’s tour is a walking one beyond the reach of the railway, which by now extended into Cornwall but only as far as Truro. Both writers promote the benefits of walking, including how it enables the traveller to make certain geological observations. Collins proposes that if you are a geologist you may ‘chip rocks wherever you please, the live-long day’, and Blight that you can turn aside ‘to observe some peculiar geological formation’.12 Both writers make numerous geological observations, while Blight in particular – echoing many geological and other writers13 – notes that the coast is of special geological interest: ‘The character of the coast is particularly favourable for the study of the geologist,

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presenting, as it does, in the natural section of cliffs, the exact structure and relations of the rocks of which the country is composed.’14 A little later he suggests that Cornwall’s granite cliffs contribute to this county’s uniqueness: ‘The Land’s End district presents the finest, we might say the only, granite cliffs in England’15 Collins similarly makes close observations along with aesthetic judgements of types of rock, which appear to create unique landscapes, to add to the sense of Cornwall as a distinctive place. At Kynance Cove in the Lizard district, for instance, ‘such gigantic specimens are to be seen of the most beautiful of all varieties of rock – the “serpentine” – as are unrivalled in Cornwall; perhaps, unrivalled anywhere’.16 Much as travel writing becomes geology, geology merges into travel writing. As has already been seen in Chapter 1, the science of geology from the beginning was bound up with travel and the accompanying interest in landscape aesthetics, and many of the geological texts that have been discussed thus appeared as a form of travel narrative. Among their observations of landscape aesthetics, Davy and John Hawkins also pointed out the ‘beautiful’ qualities of serpentine, just as Collins does here. Geologists also refer at times to folktales, while folklore collections by Hunt and others similarly set out the geological scenery in which giants throw stones, and so on. Chapter  2 has discussed how the ‘primitive race’ with its folktales are imagined to resemble the ‘primitive rocks’ on which they live, while the folktales themselves are often about rocks. Such tales include those in which giants throw rocks (as above), and Cornish men and women are turned into rocks. In both the folktale collections and in Collins’s Rambles we hear of the ‘Hurlers’, for example, a stone circle in which the stones are said to have been ‘Cornish men, who profanely went out … to enjoy the national sport of hurling the ball on one fine “Sabbath morning,” and were suddenly turned into pillars of stone’.17 The Cornish here seem related to the giants, both being sportsmen: the giants shape the landscape by throwing rocks; the hurlers by turning into them. This reference in Collins’s Rambles to the ‘national sport’ is his first explicit suggestion that Cornwall may itself have characteristics of a nation that is separate from England, hurling being a distinctly Cornish sport.18 Tales and traditions like these are understood to contribute to the primitive culture of the Cornish population, a people that seem to be part of the land that they so closely resemble and even turn into.

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Just as the primitive landscapes seem strikingly different from elsewhere in England, the Cornish race with its ancient traditions seems distinct from the English. Following Collins’s chapter set on the moors is one entitled ‘Cornish People’, in which he describes the various occupations of what he comes to call the Cornish ‘race’,19 namely mining, farming and fishing. He claims to find the miners well-educated in contrast to the fishermen, among whom ‘the strong superstitious feelings of the ancient days of Cornwall still survive, and promise long to remain, handed down from father to son as heirlooms of tradition, gathered together in a remote period, and venerable in virtue of their antiquity’.20 But it is not just that the Cornish have a character of their own that is observable by the English traveller; they have a sense of their own Cornishness that verges on a national identity: ‘Cornwall – a county where, it must be remembered, a stranger is doubly a stranger, in relation to provincial sympathies; where the national feeling is almost entirely merged in the local feeling; where a man speaks of himself as Cornish in much the same spirit as a Welshman speaks of himself as Welsh.’21 Rambles Beyond Railways begins to establish a sense of foreignness within England which Collins builds on in his sensation novel Basil, where it takes on a threatening form. As numerous critics of Victorian and especially Gothic fiction have observed, the threatening ‘other’ is frequently depicted xenophobically as a non-British foreign race: as Romanian or Jewish in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, as African in H. Rider Haggard’s She. But as Cannon Schmitt points out, the sensation novel turned inward, depicting the threats to national identity as coming from within England.22 Schmitt argues that Collins’s writing is comparable to Matthew Arnold’s, in so far as both subvert Englishness, or depict its threatened destruction, in order to reconstruct it with a difference. Thus Arnold challenges any sense of a pure Englishness, as has already been seen (Chapter  2) in order to reconstitute it as hybrid: as incorporating a Celtic element. In the case of Collins, Schmitt examines The Woman in White to argue that while a secure sense of Englishness is disrupted (in part from within, by the evil Sir Percival, for instance, as well as by the foreignness of Italians), the effeminate protagonist Walter Hartright, in the process of developing suitably heroic masculine characteristics, reconstitutes a new kind of national identity, a blended aristocratic middle class.23 This kind of internal challenge to a secure sense of nationhood can be traced back to Collins’s earlier work.

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Rambles begins to depict a remote corner of ‘our old English soil’ first as containing certain differences within England  – including geological and racial differences, as in Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature – but increasingly exploiting its potential as an ambiguous, semi-foreign space. The Cornish people, the ‘pleasant primitive population’, are similarly presented as increasingly different, to the extent that they are said to have their own ‘national sport’ and a feeling of being ‘Cornish’ that almost entirely overrides any feeling of Englishness. In Collins’s next novel, Basil, the superstitious fishermen reappear in more sinister form, becoming the foreign kind of Gothic threat from within.

The threat of the primitive in Basil Basil’s first-person narrative, his ‘Journal’ written in a fishing hamlet on the shore of Cornwall, tells us that his curiosity and imagination about this county were first excited by his nurse in childhood, by her ‘Cornish stories, by the descriptions of the scenery, the customs, and the people of her native land, with which she was ever ready to amuse me’.24 As Eve M. Lynch observes, domestic servants were often ‘conduits from the regions beyond the home, bringing in with them the alien culture, ancient rural beliefs, folklore, superstitions and oral traditions that underpin ghost stories’.25 As an adult, once he has been disinherited and is pursued by the evil character, Mannion, Basil thus flees to ‘the rocky boundaries of the Cornish shore’.26 It is of course not long before his earlier ‘fancies’ are faced with a harsher reality, before the ‘rocky boundaries’ become hostile and dangerous, along with the natives. Basil takes up residence in a village on the cliffs, where the local fishermen with their folktales are suspicious and superstitious: My arrival produced, at first, both astonishment and suspicion. The fishermen of Cornwall still preserve almost all the superstitions, even to the grossest, which were held dear by their humble ancestors, centuries back. My simple neighbours could not understand why I had no business to occupy me … They began to recall to memory old Cornish legends of solitary, secret people who had lived, years and years ago, in certain parts of the county – coming, none knew whence; existing, none knew by what means; dying and disappearing, none knew when. They felt half inclined to identify me with these mysterious visitors – to consider me as some being, a stranger to the whole human family.27

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In contrast to the romanticised ‘quaint legends’ of the ‘pleasant primitive populations’ as depicted in Rambles, the ‘old Cornish legends’ here are more sinister. The Cornish here seem to match Hunt’s claims that they suffer a ‘gloomy imagination’, that they are ignorant with ‘melancholy delusions’ (Chapter 2). For a time Basil develops friendships with his neighbours, but as the story goes on he again, and increasingly, experiences the natives as judgemental, hostile and threatening, along with the natural environment. Granite, as we have seen, is the type of rock taken to characterise Cornwall as a primitive land, the home of such a primitive people. Here, the cottage that Basil inhabits is ‘built of rough granite’, like the other cottages in the village, and the surrounding cliffs: ‘Mighty piles of granite soar above the fishermen’s cottages on each side.’28 Basil’s location reflects a stage of Collins’s journey as documented in Rambles, when he has travelled from the Lizard to Land’s End, observing the change in the type of rock from serpentine rock to granite, a change that is accompanied by increasing danger. When he progresses towards Land’s End, the hazardous conditions of walking on cliffs, which earlier in his travels Collins had already experienced as dangerous, seem to become even more intense, the stormy waves and mists to become more furious and ‘fiercer’, a change that is accompanied by a change ‘in the forms of the cliffs’: You no longer look on variously shaped and variously coloured ‘serpentine’ rocks; it is granite, and granite alone, that appears everywhere – granite, less lofty and less eccentric in form than the ‘serpentine’ cliffs and crags; but presenting an appearance of adamantine solidity and strength, a mighty breadth of outline and an unbroken vastness of extent, nobly adapted to the purpose of protecting the shores of Cornwall, where they are most exposed to the fury of the Atlantic waves. In these wild districts, the sea rolls and roars in fiercer agitation, and the mists fall thicker, and at the same time fade and change faster, than elsewhere.29

In Rambles Collins emphasises the dangers of cliff walking in his role as explorer to unknown regions beyond the reach of railways, to the very edge of the nation. In Basil, our hero similarly perceives the environment – mist, sea, wind – as increasingly dangerous, as well as the natives (and his enemy, Mannion). While the furious sea in Rambles ‘roars’ like a beast in its ‘fiercer agitation’ in its wilderness, in Basil it ‘howls’. The cliff edge of Cornwall is described as if

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alive, the moving shapes of sea mist, of the howling, growling sea and wind produce a terror beyond the edge of the nation: It is when the rain falls, and wind and sea arise together – when, sheltered among the caverns in the side of the precipice, I  look out upon the dreary waves and the leaping spray – that I feel the unknown dangers which hang over my head in all the horror of their uncertainty. Then, the threats of my deadly enemy strengthen their hold fearfully on all my senses. I see the dim and ghastly personification of a fatality that is lying in wait for me, in the strange shapes of the mist which shrouds the sky, and moves, and whirls, and brightens, and darkens in a weird glory of its own over the heaving waters. Then, the crash of the breakers on the reef howls upon me with a sound of judgement; and the voice of the wind, growling and battling behind me in the hollows of the cave, is, ever and ever, the same thunder-voice of doom and warning in my ear.30

Basil, then, feels threatened not only by the locals but by the land and the environment, which seem to become a prominent character in their own right. Again, the natives and their landscape seem to resemble each other, here in their hostility and their judgemental voices:  the Cornish with their suspicious folktales and the landscape with its ‘sound of judgement’ and ‘thunder-voice’. As the story goes on Basil increasingly experiences the natives and the natural environment as hostile and violent, and is eventually forced to leave. He quits his cottage during stormy weather, when the huge waves ‘hurled themselves, foaming and furious, against the massive granite of the Cornish cliffs’. Pursued by Mannion, and unable to see in the thick mist, Basil is guided, precariously, by sound, ‘keeping from the edge of the precipices only by keeping the sound of the sea always at the same distance from my ear’.31 In Rambles, similarly, having been warned by his landlady that he and his companion would lose their way in the mist or would ‘fall over fog-veiled precipices among the rocks, if we ventured to approach the coast’, Collins later writes: ‘You go on, guided … by the sound of the sea, when you stray instinctively from the edge of the cliff, as mist and darkness gather once more densely and solemnly all around you.’32 But the dangers in the novel are realised: the cliffs are fatal. Basil finds himself in increasing danger, far ‘out on one of the great granite promontories which project into the sea’, surrounded by a vast chasm. The very ground, the land of England

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shakes, as the ‘wild waves … seemed to convulse the cliffs about them, like an earthquake’. In this extremely unstable and treacherous place, Mannion of course catches up with him, and after a struggle eventually falls to his death, from a ‘slippery plane of granite’, into the abyss.33

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Great Western Railway and the edge of England Like many characters in Victorian fiction, Basil has travelled from the relative safety of civilized London to an outer, rocky wilderness that is part of Britain and yet different and dangerous. In later fiction, such as Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, and Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle, the journeys continue in the same direction out from the city, as we will see, though they are taken by train. One of the main reasons for the popularised perception of Cornwall as different from England was its promotion by the tourist industry, especially through posters and publications produced by the Great Western Railway (which formed an advertising department in the 1880s), as an exotic, sunny and warm part of England, which resembles the Mediterranean while being located conveniently close to home.34 As James Vernon notes, the proliferation of guidebooks after the arrival of the railway – which typically offered ‘detailed “scientific” introductions’ to the geology and climate of Cornwall, as well as to Cornish history and people – contributed to the perception of Cornwall as ‘a county of England and a foreign country … [and] of the Cornish as English, but not English’.35 He goes on to observe that many travellers were drawn to ‘the most distant and “exotic” parts of the Empire’, but that ‘others were no less struck by the difference of places closer to home’.36 Over the course of the nineteenth century the competition grew increasingly exotic and exciting. The Middle East, and especially Egypt, for instance, became a favourite tourist destination, continuing through the age of imperialism.37 The Great Western Railway’s promotional publication The Cornish Riviera thus makes the comparison with the sunny and warm climates of the Mediterranean, Monte Carlo, and, further afield, the islands of Madeira and the Azores, while it also describes Cornwall as a place of adventure, with its primitive traditions and folklore, its superstitious natives and dramatic landscapes, building on earlier perceptions of Cornwall as distinctively Celtic. Early editions

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of The Cornish Riviera refer to Cornwall as an ‘old-world region of romance and folk-lore’,38 while later editions by S. P. B. Mais expand on the difference between a ‘normal English holiday’ and a trip to Cornwall in terms of the climate and landscape and also its supernatural elements and superstitious Celtic natives, who he compares, like Collins, to the Welsh: You may go there with the idea that you are in for a normal English holiday, and find yourself in the atmosphere of warlocks and pixies, miracle-working saints and woe-working witches … Your Cornishman thinks little of Devon, and less of the rest of England. He is sufficient unto himself, affable and hospitable, like the Welsh extremely devout, and like all Celts extremely superstitious.39

Along with the witches and the independent character of the superstitious Celt, Mais adds a touch of adventure to the sunny Cornish holiday, a touch of the terror, even, of the sublime, with his descriptions of the power of the sea and the dangerous cliffs, which echo Collins’s descriptions of dramatic cliff scenery, such as a giant chasm named ‘Lion’s Den’40 – again emphasising the foreignness of Cornwall: the home of savage creatures. That it is the coastline, including the beaches and the more ‘romantic scenery’ of the cliffs, which attracts visitors to Cornwall was earlier alluded to by geological writers, including William Jory Henwood in Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall in 1843. Along with even earlier writers such as John Ayrton Paris, as this chapter’s opening section observed, Henwood’s article demonstrates that even before the Great Western Railway tourists were beginning to journey to Cornwall as an alternative, ‘healthful’ destination to those overseas. Henwood describes much of Cornwall as ‘most wild and desolate’, but continues by observing that the coast attracts tourists, not least with its ‘endless variety of tints’, echoing Collins and Davy among other earlier geological observers of colourful rocks: the sea coast, with its pleasant coves and level sandy beaches, is much resorted to by those to whom it would be inconvenient to take a distant journey to more fashionable, though not more healthful, watering places; whilst its lofty and caverned cliffs, whose decomposing rocks assume an endless variety of tints, attract many summer pleasure parties and lovers of romantic scenery.41

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Henwood alludes here not only to the ‘pleasant’ and healthy, colourful attractions but also to the wilder, ‘romantic scenery’ of the cliffs. Mais’s Cornish Riviera makes more of such threatening, or thrilling, aspects of Cornwall’s coastline, and describes how the sea and rocky landscape, like the Cornish people who think less than little of ‘the rest of England’, contributes to the uniqueness of Cornwall: On no other coast do the waves dash up in long rollers for the surf-board riders to crest, on no other coast are there so many natural diving boards of rock overlooking secluded pools of infinite depth. Nowhere else does the sea make its terrific power felt so strongly. It may be friendly and full of colour to us in the summer, but the churchyards are full of bodies of shipwrecked sailors.42

The Cornish Riviera is structured like the earlier Rambles Beyond Railways, in that each chapter takes as its title and topic a part of Cornwall. Thus, like Rambles, with its chapters on ‘The Lizard’ and ‘The Land’s End’, The Cornish Riviera contains chapters entitled ‘The Lizard’, ‘From Helston to Land’s End’, and ‘From Land’s End to St. Ives’. These chapters similarly contain, along with stories of wreckers, numerous descriptions of the spectacular and frightening grandeur of different types and formations of rocks along the cliffs, such as ‘a terrifying chasm’ named the ‘Holed Headland’, an ‘awe-inspiring granite cliff … more frightening than the Giant’s Causeway’, and ‘that most terrifying pile of rocks known as the Brisons, dreaded of all sailors’.43 Thus Cornwall figures both as part of England and as exotic or even otherworldly, serving as a place for English exploration. It is as though this place located conveniently just down the line can provide the safe holiday sunniness of the Mediterranean and at the same time can offer adventure and excitement and even the thrill of danger. It offers the opportunity for a relatively manageable, semi-domestic version of the imperial activities described in the numerous and popular explorers’ journals and adventure novels set in the more distant reaches of the empire such as India and Africa.44 This sense of a Cornish mission was promoted further by the boy’s adventure novel, which formed an important strand of the region’s storytelling, as Ella Westland points out:  ‘In the later nineteenth century, the period of Ballantyne and Stevenson, “West Barbary” offered itself as an ideal land for exciting tales of wrecking, smuggling

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and danger at sea. It was also mysterious and spooky.’45 Cornwall’s reputation as an exciting land of wild smugglers and pirates was further promoted through popular dramatic productions, such as William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, or Love and Duty (1879), the opening scene of which is ‘A rocky seashore on the coast of Cornwall’ where pirates are mingling and drinking.46 The coastal town of Penzance was associated with such unlawful activity partly due to a history of fearful reports and rumours of pirate ships out at sea, and a particular incident in 1760 when a Turkish corsair ship ran aground.47 Its geographically vulnerable and isolated position, and a series of historical attacks and potential invasions meant that Penzance was also a place where fears of invasion were concentrated. It was the place where the Spanish Armada was first spotted in 1588, for example, and it was attacked along with the neighbouring villages of Paul, Mousehole and Newlyn, in 1595.48 Incidents such as these contributed to the image of Cornwall as wild and lawless, combined with perceptions of the Cornish themselves as ‘foreign’ and as involved in smuggling and wrecking. The enormous popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera in Britain and the United States thus further branded the Cornish coastline as a place of invasion, danger and adventure (while also critiquing people’s fears, as the pirates are shown to be kind-hearted and noble). The Cornish Riviera, then, like Collins’s Rambles and Basil and other guides and novels and dramatic productions, accordingly depicts experiences of travelling to the ‘mysterious’ edge of England, to the very boundaries of the nation, to its unstable, stormy borders, where anything might happen. A similar journey can be seen in Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, when the narrator travels by train from London to Cornwall, although here it is not only that Cornwall is itself perceived as foreign, as being like the Mediterranean, but that it overlaps with, or is invaded by an exotic, dangerous place from the overseas empire: Egypt. Cliffs are frightening, not only because of their physical dangers – as a cause of shipwrecks, or as precarious edges from which one can fall off, or in other words as lethal points of entry and exit – but in their embodiment of insecure national borders, as unstable, shaky boundaries that undergo the continuous onslaught of the elements. Cornwall operates as a complex space the foreignness of which can be redoubled, both as a foreign region itself and as one that is invaded from further reaches of the empire.

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The mummy’s hand Two directions of imperialist movement are well-established within Victorian and Gothic studies:  the movement of the explorer or imperialist adventurer outwards to regions perceived as exotic, and the return movement, of foreign bodies and objects, often experienced as an invasion, described by Stephen Arata as ‘reverse colonization’.49 Arata, like many critics and historians, observes that the late-Victorian period was a time of imperial crisis, pointing to the decline in global markets for British goods, for example, the increasing instability of British colonies and possessions, and growing uneasiness about the morality of imperialism.50 Hence the emphasis on fictions depicting imperialist adventures that have gone wrong:  explorers ‘go native’ instead of civilising the natives, and England is invaded instead of continuing to expand its empire.51 Critics have tended to focus on how these movements outwards and inwards begin and end in London, as in the classic case of Dracula in which Jonathan carries out his research into Transylvania in the British Museum before ‘leaving the West and entering the East’,52 a movement reversed by the vampire’s invasion of the urban heart of civilisation. The cliffs of Cornwall, however, are also particularly subject to both kinds of movement: they are a place to which explorers travel  – like Collins or Basil  – being perceived as an exotic location (which the tourist industry increasingly claimed resembles foreign regions overseas), and a place that is invaded, as it is also (despite its exoticisation) part of England. In Dracula the vampire makes his entrance on the cliffs of Whitby, in Yorkshire, while those of Cornwall provide the location for the invasion of Egypt in The Jewel of Seven Stars, and of West Africa in Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’. Whether the movement is outwards towards the exotic or in the reverse direction, usually England and its ‘Other’ are, at least initially, sharply opposed. The English explorer may undergo the process of ‘going native’,53 but the very possibility depends at the outset on the perception of an essential difference that is then subject to challenge or collapse. Cornwall, however, complicates this relation between England and those regions perceived as foreign, as this county is of course part of the English nation at the same time as it is often perceived as being distinctively ‘Celtic’. Critics have previously focused on ‘Celtic’ places that are more clearly differentiated

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from England, considering Stoker’s and Conan Doyle’s relations to Ireland and Scotland.54 While Ireland and Scotland became part of the United Kingdom with the Acts of Union in 1800 and 1707 respectively, they have never been part of England. There are many similarities, however, in the way these authors depict Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall: the ‘geographical doubling’, which David Glover identifies in Stoker’s depictions of Ireland and Transylvania, for example, can again be found in his depictions of Cornwall and Egypt, all of which are perceived at times as foreign from the perspective of the English traveller.55 R.  L. Stevenson similarly developed comparisons between Scotland and the Pacific islands, especially between the fate of their natives, as Robert Peckham observes,56 while on his travels through America he perceives the Cornish emigrants as entirely different from their English neighbours at home. For Stevenson, though, the Cornish seem incomparable to anyone:  ‘Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel – that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.’57 Stevenson here highlights the paradox that Cornwall is part of England and yet its natives seem more foreign than those overseas. Cornwall, then, with its potential to figure as foreign while it is also an English county, serves both as the outlying destination for the English explorer, or tourist, who typically heads out from the urban centre that is London, and as a space where England might be especially susceptible to invasion from elsewhere. The Cornish cliffs operate as an ambiguous space, a permeable border at the edge of England that serves as both a point of destination and infiltration. In The Jewel of Seven Stars the journeys outwards are to Egypt and to Cornwall, while Cornwall is in turn invaded by Egypt. The journey to Egypt is taken in the narrative’s past, the leading explorer being Mr Trelawny who brought back various objects including an Egyptian mummy, that of Queen Tera. Mr Trelawny and his circle, including his daughter, Margaret, and Margaret’s devoted admirer, our narrator Malcolm Ross, later make the journey from London to Cornwall as this is a relatively isolated place where the ‘Great Experiment’, the resurrection of the mummy, can be carried out. Ross briefly describes the overnight train journey, which departs from London, to the south-west peninsula. During this journey a minor incident occurs on the coast where a small landslip causes a delay, while Margaret begins

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to behave strangely (later we learn that she is being possessed by the Egyptian queen), occasionally recovering herself ‘when there occurred some marked episode in the journey, such as stopping at a station, or when the thunderous rumble of crossing a viaduct woke the echoes of the hills or cliffs around us’.58 In this way the reader is given the sense of a distance being crossed, and of the progress through new places – through the echoing sounds of their geology – towards an adventure far from the city. Although this journey is shorter and involves less excitement than the earlier explorations in Egypt, the resemblance between the two outlying locations, where the key supernatural scenes take place, soon becomes clear. The Egyptian and the Cornish locations are both isolated and rocky, situated on a steep cliff, in a secret, ancient cave. Having travelled to the far edge of England, Malcolm describes his first sight of the ‘great grey stone’ Cornish mansion, on the ‘very verge of a high cliff ’, and a little later the position of the dining room, its walls hanging right over the sea: We were all impressed by the house as it appeared in the bright moonlight. A  great grey stone mansion of the Jacobean period; vast and spacious, standing high over the sea on the very verge of a high cliff. When we had swept round the curve of the avenue cut through the rock, and come out on the high plateau on which the house stood, the crash and murmur of waves breaking against rock far below us came with an invigorating breath of moist sea air. […] We had supper in the great dining-room on the south side, the walls of which actually hung over the sea. The murmur came up muffled, but it never ceased. As the little promontory stood well out into the sea, the northern side of the house was open; and the due north was in no way shut out by the great mass of rock, which, reared high above us, shut out the rest of the world. Far off across the bay we could see the trembling lights of the castle, and here and there along the shore the faint light of a fisher’s window. For the rest the sea was a dark blue plain with here and there a flicker of light as the gleam of starlight fell on the slope of a swelling wave.59

In this liminal place, the borders around the nation, between land and sea, seem blurred. The sea not only crosses the boundary into

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land (the sound of its ‘murmur’ and its moistness in the air) but seems itself to become land (a ‘dark blue plain’). The actual land is, in contrast, invisible from the house, being shut out by the mass of rock that rears high above. From the far distant shore, on the other side of the bay, the lights vibrate across both land and sea, further collapsing the sense of a distinction between them: from the ‘trembling lights’ of the castle to the intermittent ‘flicker of light’ on the waves. Teetering on, or just beyond, the very edge of England, such locations offer a space that is felt to be almost detached from the nation, to overlap with distant places overseas. Much as the explorers in Egypt had to climb up a cliff and find the entrance to the cave, a tomb into which they descended to find the treasures and mummy, in Cornwall the hidden house on the cliff contains a secret cave, previously used for smuggling, into which the explorers descend. Mr Trelawny explains that he has chosen this spot for the resurrection of Queen Tera’s mummy, at least partly because of its similarity to the Egyptian location: ‘In a hundred different ways it fulfils the conditions which I am led to believe are primary with regard to success. Here, we are, and shall be, as isolated as Queen Tera herself would have been in her rocky tomb in the Valley of the Sorcerer, and still in a rocky cavern’.60 The special properties of granite provide another similarity between the two locations in Egypt and Cornwall. Mr Trelawny speculates that radium  – a radioactive element, which early twentieth-century physicists were beginning to understand, most commonly found in granite61 – may make the resurrection possible, as it is a kind of energy that is ‘heat-giving, light-giving – perhaps life-giving’.62 He claims that it is very likely that radium exists in Egypt, because of its large quantities of granite, and that it may have been known to the ancient Egyptians. Granite and its ‘decomposed’ form as clay or kaolin has been quarried in Cornwall (as Chapter 6 will discuss), but in Egypt granite apparently exists in even greater proportions: ‘That country has perhaps the greatest masses of granite to be found in the world; and pitchblende [a uranium ore that is mingled with other radioactive metals such as radium] is found as a vein in granitic rocks. In no place, at no time, has granite ever been quarried in such proportions as in Egypt during the earlier dynasties.’63

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Thus Cornwall with its granite on a lesser scale serves as a sort of small-scale, conveniently located Egypt. Further, the ‘life-giving’ properties of granite may begin to enhance the possibilities of human identification with rocks, or its own ghostly potential: not only are these rocks extremely ancient but they also contain a kind of life of their own, or at least the ability to give life to the dead. The movement of the explorers outwards, then, are to two locations perceived as exotic – Egypt and Cornwall – and this movement is paralleled by the invasive movement often described as ‘reverse colonisation’. Cornwall functions as an exotic location but also as part of England, with the potential to be invaded or otherwise disturbed by an alien culture. Mr Trelawny’s large collection of Egyptian artefacts, like other collections in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, clearly helps to contribute to his image as a triumphant imperial explorer, but as Erika Rappaport has recently observed, in the context of the instability and dangers associated with imperialism in late-century gothic, objects like the mummy ‘occasionally come to life and grab back’.64 Thus while Mr Trelawny has taken possession of the Egyptian goods, he begins to lose a degree of control as the Egyptian Queen seems in turn to take possession of his daughter, who becomes increasingly strange to our narrator. Egypt begins to enter Cornwall in an increasingly overpowering, supernatural and disturbing way. Malcolm goes out for a stroll on the cliffs to think over Margaret’s strangeness, and concludes that ‘in some occult way the Sorceress [the mummified Queen Tera] had power to change places with the other’.65 The collapse of space brought about by the Queen’s ‘astral body’ becomes increasingly prominent as Margaret loses possession of herself, and the Cornish cave in the closing chapter is finally, it seems, lost to the dangerous presence of the foreign land. Though there are two different endings (Stoker revised the original for republication in 1912), in both, crucially, a mysterious Egyptian miasma  – a ‘faint greenish vapour’ or ‘smoke’, with a ‘strange, pungent odour’66 – fills the Cornish cave, becoming so dense as to obliterate vision and to overpower the witnesses. In the 1903 edition the filling of the room with smoke corresponds climactically with the shaking of the cliff below the house as though the land of Cornwall is in danger of falling apart, of becoming altogether detached from the nation of England, of collapsing into the sea: ‘The storm still thundered round the house, and I could feel the

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rock on which it was built tremble under the furious onslaught of the waves.’67 Similarly in Basil, we have seen how the shaking of the rocks is accompanied by a loss of vision, in that case due to the thick mist, contributing to the victim’s sense of passive powerlessness as he can feel the ground fall apart under his feet while he lacks the ability to control his situation. At this point in The Jewel – the narrator can just about see in a now blinding light – the mummy’s hand appears to rise in a white mist. But the stormy wind then breaks through the window causing the vapour to drift from its course. Smoke fills the room so that the narrator can no longer see at all, and when he eventually finds his companions they are all dead. In the later version the smoke again becomes denser and denser, obliterating the light and producing a darkness which the narrator here interestingly calls ‘the Egyptian darkness’.68 Again the presence of Egypt in these climactic scenes seems dangerously to overwhelm the space of the cave, a space that already seemed far removed from England. In this revised ending the results of the experiment are left uncertain, but Margaret survives and there is the hint that the Queen was resurrected and might continue to live on as part of her. In Dracula the initial invasion of the alien similarly takes place as close to the cliff edge as possible, in a graveyard that ‘descends so steeply over the harbour that part of the bank has fallen away, and some of the graves have been destroyed’.69 This is Mina’s favourite spot, where she sits as the storm approaches, bringing with it the foreign ship. As she watches, the line between land and sea, and sky, is blurred even further, becoming lost in an equalising greyness that colours everything from rock to clouds to sea to sand: ‘Everything is grey – except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock; grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers.’ And with the stormy greyness a mist begins to enter England, further blurring and then erasing the difference between sea and the wet sky that becomes so dense it resembles solid land: ‘The horizon is lost in a grey mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks.’70 The masses of fog then drift inland, obliterating vision like in the Cornish cave, leaving ‘only the organ of hearing’ to sense the violence of the storm. Out of this darkness springs the alien creature – the wolf – much as the mummy’s hand rises out of the mist, and heads straight towards the point on the projecting cliff:

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[T]‌he very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow onto the sand. Making straight for the steep cliff, where the churchyard hangs over the laneway to the East Pier so steeply that some of the flat tombstones – ‘thruff-steans’ or ‘through-stones’, as they call them in the Whitby vernacular  – actually project over where the sustaining cliff has fallen away, it disappeared in the darkness.71

Stoker builds on these scenes at Whitby for The Jewel, relocating the point of foreign invasion in Cornwall where he further develops the sense of difference from (the rest of) England.With the ‘Whitby vernacular’ here, which the locals speak in at some length,72 we get some sense of Whitby’s distinctiveness.Yorkshire’s regionalism is comparable to some extent to that of Cornwall: it is similarly distant from the urban centre, with its own landscapes and legends and dialects, and it provides an escape for tourists.73 But Mina’s journey hardly constitutes the mini-imperial adventure that is seen in The Jewel – we hear nothing more of it than ‘Lucy met me at the station’74 – while there are hints in her following account of the local scenery, history and folklore about the regional difference that is exploited more fully in Stoker’s later novel. As Nancy Armstrong points out, focusing on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights  – also set in Yorkshire (further to the west)  – nineteenth-century fiction and folklore took part in a regional mapping of Britain that divided it into a literate urban centre and a ‘Celtic or ethnic periphery’.75 Novelists and folklorists described the English countryside as marginal in ways that resembled foreign nations, which the tourist industry selectively incorporated into its own narratives. Armstrong points to some of the similarities between British colonial attitudes towards Africa and Asia and the voyeuristic gaze of a narrator-tourist such as Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, who documents and classifies the natives as primitive, while also romanticising them. Similar characteristics of the travel narrative in Dracula are apparent with Mina’s detailed accounts of her new surroundings and the dialect-speaking ‘natives’ (echoing Jonathan’s earlier accounts of Romania), while The Jewel provides us with a more developed sense of an imperial adventure into regional difference with its more eventful train journey to Cornwall, followed by the narrator’s detailed description of

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the scenery, the house on the cliffs with its Egyptian cave, and his Cornish lover/Egyptian Queen. In The Jewel the peripheral region is described, as I have said, not just as different from England but as closely resembling Egypt, before being invaded by its atmosphere to the extent that it becomes indistinguishable. It is as if the mini-imperial journeys are finally magnified into the real thing: our narrators become immersed absolutely in the alien atmospheres.

The Devil’s foot Cornwall’s clifftops are similarly invaded in Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’. As in The Jewel of Seven Stars, this story first involves the movement outwards from London to Cornwall, where an exhausted Sherlock Holmes is advised by his doctor to take a holiday. Holmes and Watson take up residence in a cottage located ‘at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula’,76 much as the protagonists of The Jewel inhabit the house on the edge of the cliff with its spectacular view of the sea. That this is the very edge of the land of England is similarly emphasised in ‘The Adventure’ by the view from their cottage:  ‘From the windows of our little whitewashed house, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon the whole sinister semi-circle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge-swept reefs on which innumerable seamen have met their end.’77 For Conan Doyle, the distinctiveness of Cornwall and the Cornish was a result of its position as a peninsula stuck out in the sea. In his autobiographical Through the Magic Door he writes: ‘That long peninsula extending out into the ocean has caught all sorts of strange floating things’, which have ‘woven themselves into the texture of the Cornish race’ – a race which occasionally throws up great men with ‘un-English ways and features’.78 Cornwall’s position as a peninsula is also prominent in ‘The Adventure’. Following his account of the sea view from the headland – with the dangerous, shipwrecking rocks that feature also in the tourist literature of the period – Watson goes on to describe Cornwall as though it is not quite part of the modern nation. Again, as in Stoker’s novels the boundary between land and sea is blurred where he describes how their surroundings on the land side were as ‘sombre’ and ‘lonely’ as the sea, with no sign of human life except the prehistoric ‘traces of

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some vanished race … of forgotten nations’.79 Holmes becomes interested in the prehistoric remains and in the ancient ‘Cornish branch of the great Celtic speech’,80 the study of which is interrupted and only resumed once the mysterious case, which suddenly intrudes on their holiday  – or, rather, transforms it into a more exotic imperialist adventure – is solved. Once again, then, Cornwall is being portrayed as un-English or foreign, which paves the way for the further leap into Africa. Holmes eventually discovers that the fumes from an African poison, imported by the explorer Dr Leon Sterndale, were used to murder two victims. Having taken some of the powder he found at one of the crime scenes, Holmes then sets about burning it in an experiment on himself and Watson in order to ascertain its effects.Watson reports that he very quickly began to feel mentally affected: A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul.81

As is the case in the final scenes of The Jewel of Seven Stars, the existence of the room on the cliffs of Cornwall is lost to the narrator’s senses. In Dracula the thick mist on the Yorkshire cliffs similarly seems itself to become as substantial as the ‘giant rocks’, while in Collins’s Basil the mist also takes on threatening shapes of its own, where Basil sees ‘the dim and ghastly personification of a fatality that is lying in wait for me, in the strange shapes of the mist’. (See sections earlier in this chapter.) The visibility of the room in this case is similarly obscured not just by the ‘dark cloud-bank’ but by hallucinated shapes of horror and evil, in wait on the threshold.The nation’s borders are once again unstable, lacking definition, so that unsubstantial ‘things’ of the air – mist and clouds and smoke – can become as solid as rocks. Watson’s mind and body are possessed by the presence of this strange cloud from somewhere as yet unknown, which he only just manages to escape through a desperate force of will after seeing Holmes’s face looking exactly like the two dead victims. He then

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lurches with Holmes out of the door and onto the grass outside. Gradually, the cloud begins to clear, and they become conscious of their location, of the grass beneath them: ‘Slowly it rose from our souls like the mists from a landscape until peace and reason had returned, and we were sitting upon the grass.’82 In this story, like Stoker’s novels, the mist or cloud similarly transcends national borders, invades and overpowers the domestic space, and threatens the lives of several people including the English hero Holmes himself. The major difference between the two narratives is that in Conan Doyle’s the Londoners provide an entirely rational explanation for the mysterious, seemingly supernatural occurrences, while in Stoker’s the possible resurrection of an ancient Egyptian Queen remains somewhat mysterious. Holmes discovers that the deaths were caused by the poison used by West African medicine-men, and named ‘Devil’s-foot root’ by a botanical missionary because the root is shaped like a foot, half-human and half-goatlike. A parallel between the missionary in Africa and the Cornish natives is suggested, as the latter are prone to be superstitious and to believe the Devil is involved in the deaths, thus requiring the intervention of modern, civilized city dwellers to solve their mystery. ‘We are devil-ridden, Mr Holmes!’ reports the vicar when he goes to the detective with the news of Mr Tregennis’s death: ‘Satan himself is loose in it! We are given over into his hands!’ The vicar is described as a ‘ludicrous object’, dancing about in agitation, ‘if it were not for his ashy face and startled eyes’.83 On hearing his news about the murder, Holmes immediately jumps up and goes to the house with the horrible atmosphere, and begins to unravel the entirely unsupernatural plot. Unlike Holmes, missionaries and explorers are often depicted in fiction as ‘going native’, as many critics have observed.84 The African explorer and lion-hunter, Dr Leon Sterndale, says as much of himself when interrogated by Holmes: ‘ “I have lived so long among savages and beyond the law,” said he,“that I have got into the way of being a law to myself ”.’85 His very name, ‘Leon’, of course immediately indicates that he was always already foreign, already animal (like the rocks of ‘Lion’s Den’, mentioned earlier by Collins). In contrast to Holmes’s composed, rational behaviour, he seems when provoked to behave like a passionate, dangerous beast: ‘Sterndale’s fierce face turned to a dusky red, his eyes glared, and the knotted, passionate veins started out in his forehead, while he sprang

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forward with clenched hands towards my companion.’86 He is also Cornish, like the other murderer, Mr Tregennis, who stole his poison, and like the explorer from The Jewel of Seven Stars, Mr Trelawny (the prefix Tre- is very common in Cornish surnames and place names87). Both of the stories emphasise the explorers’ Cornishness through their families. Sterndale is a cousin of the Tregennis family on his ‘Cornish mother’s side’, while Trelawny has inherited the hidden house on the cliff from ‘an ancestor’, who built it ‘in the days when a great house far away from a centre had to be prepared to defend itself ’.88 Both stories thus suggest that the explorers were already not quite English even before their travels abroad, according with established perceptions of the Cornish, like other ‘Celts’, and races in the more far-flung regions of empire, as being more primitive, savage, and dangerous, prisoners of nature and irrationality.89 While the Cornish explorers are at the same time romanticised and admirable as masculine heroic characters (Mr Trelawny’s daughter is similarly exoticised and desirable) in a comparable way to overseas natives or ‘noble savages’,90 they are clearly depicted as sources of potential danger. Sterndale’s lion-like fierceness is as threatening as his native landscape, ‘the sinister semi-circle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap … [where] innumerable seamen have met their end’.91 Trelawny’s passionate interest in the Egyptian mummy endangers the lives of others as well as his own. These characters are both depicted as somewhat formidable and exotic Celts, in contrast to the more reserved, self-possessed narrators, Dr Watson and Malcolm Ross, both of whom originate in London, from where they narrate their more domestic journeys to the south-westerly clifftops. The narrators of The Jewel and ‘The Adventure’ embark on what at first seems to resemble the adventure holidays promised by the travel industry, with the scenic views of dramatic cliff scenery and the beginnings of a series of mysterious events, but these adventures become increasingly hazardous and disturbing. On the one hand the narrators’ journeys are a kind of echo of the earlier African explorations, so that they might identify with the heroics of imperialist explorers, yet on the other there is a distinction between these upright English gentlemen and the rather more reckless, rather more fanatical and dangerous Cornish importers of alien substances. This dual possibility of identifying both with and against the Cornish in these stories reflects how Cornwall was perceived as foreign while at the same time being part of England. While the obvious threat in these stories seems to originate from colonies overseas, there

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is also a sense of fragmentation of a coherent national identity or territory, a fragmentation that is materialised in the shaking, crumbling cliffs in Basil, Dracula and The Jewel. As Vernon puts it, ‘it may be more productive to examine the internal relationships of the inherently unstable ‘British Self ’, than to assume that ‘the Other’ is always overseas, somewhere else’.92 As the British empire was contracting overseas, losing control of African colonies, the fear seems to have developed that the mainland of England itself was subject to erosion, its outlying regions slipping from its grasp.

Extinction, erosion, time travel Like the white cliffs of Dover, which function as a prominent national image, as mentioned in the Introduction, the Cornish cliff edge is a space where foreignness is located within England. The threat is not simply invasion, but also the fragmentation of the home nation. The preoccupation with cliffs derives in part from concerns around the end of the nineteenth century about the disintegration of imperial Britain, but also of course with the widespread interest in geology. Cliffs could reveal fossils, as in Alfred Tennyson’s well-known lines:  ‘From scarped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, “A thousand types are gone”.’93 Cliffs speak of huge, terrible extinctions. In Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, Knight hangs precariously off the edge of north Cornwall in a literal cliff-hanger, on the cusp of his own extinction, just before sighting the ancient fossil, the trilobite.94 Less commented on than the fossils is how cliffs revealed strata and other geological formations, for example (as for Paris and Blight above), and also how the coastline was understood to be a site of erosion, as observed in issues of Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall and in Charles Lyell’s widely circulated Principles of Geology. T.  F. Barham, for example, in the third issue of Transactions (1827), refers to the changing landscape of Cornwall as the sea makes its ‘considerable encroachments’: ‘Those banks of granitic sand extending on either hand from the town of Penzance … are known to have been much diminished in breadth by the action of the waves, even within the memory of all middle-aged persons now residing in the neighbourhood.’95 Barham also refers to the various folktales of the sea breaking over ‘its accustomed boundaries’, such as the legend of Lyonesse, a drowned land between southern Cornwall and the Scilly Isles.96 Geology thus seems to confirm the sense that the

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coastline is unstable, and that it is a changeable rather than a fixed boundary between nations. Cliffs seem to take the traveller to the edge of the nation and also beyond it, to Egypt or West Africa in the fictions by Stoker and Doyle. For Collins, too, to travel to the edge of the nation is simultaneously to travel back in time, to the primitive past. In Hardy’s novel, Henry Knight is a ‘fair geologist’ who begins to imagine ‘the varied scenes that had had their day between this creature’s [the trilobite’s] epoch and his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these’.97 Much like Robert Hunt, Hugh Miller and other geologists, Knight seems to experience a kind of time travel that was a frequent imaginary device in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 2): Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts – perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus … Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles:  still underneath were fish beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.98

Knight here seems to lose any sense of the civilised nation to which he belongs, having travelled from London to the far edge of the land, much as Basil, Malcolm and Watson did before him, and other narrators will do after: the stories by L. T. C. Rolt and D. H. Lawrence discussed in the next chapter are also set on cliffs, where the past returns, in ghostly form, in the present. Rather than being evidence of humankind’s evolutionary progress, fossils here drag Knight far, far back into prehistory.The native ‘Fierce men’ are again associated with beastly animals, being clothed in their ‘hides’, and equipped with clubs and spears for savagery. Again this sense of a strange or otherworldly primitive past is not simply a result of invasion: it seems to lurk within the civilised nation. It is as though the rock itself contains the past, as the phantoms rise from it.

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As Adelene Buckland has observed, the plot of Hardy’s novel is generated by the opposition between London and the provinces, and a ‘sensitivity to the politics of knowledge embedded in attitudes towards those places’.99 Knight is the elite, urbane visitor from London who typically takes ‘antiquarian and geological excursions’ in Cornwall – much as numerous tourists took part in the popular activity of seashore collecting 100  – and whose expert knowledge of fossils allows him to travel in time through the ages. The landscape, for Knight, becomes a kind of ‘metropolitan playground’, writes Buckland, ‘which, in fact, makes that landscape “provincial” in the sense that it registers it as something other, something outside, the cultural centre of London’.101 Knight views the provincial people as part of that landscape, in his contemplation of the locals as ‘weather-beaten West-country folk’, subjected to the same processes as the ‘weather-worn series of jagged edges’ of the cliffs.102 As Buckland puts it, ‘these people are imagined as subjected to, indeed part of, the natural world and unable, therefore, to objectify it with the detached gaze of the scientist’.103 As part of the landscape, the provincial Cornish people seem related to those ‘Fierce men’ who ‘rose from the rocks’ in Knight’s imagination. Comparisons between rocks and natives can on the one hand help to romanticise the Cornish (and other ‘Celts’), as discussed above (Chapter 2), but on the other to perceive them as ignorant and deluded, and to disqualify them from being able to objectively observe their own landscape. Ideas of people as rock-like and rocks as people-like, and of people and rocks as part of each other, can be deployed both by English visitors and ‘Celtic’ inhabitants themselves in a range of ways, whether to the advantage or disadvantage of those being compared, as later chapters will consider further. One might imagine Knight’s perspective as being shared by such London-based geologists as those discussed in Chapter  1, which focused in contrast on the views of local, Cornish geologists – and Humphry Davy’s support of their ‘cause’ – in their efforts to resist metropolitan claims to expert professionalism. This chapter has focused on a series of English visitors to Cornwall, from Rambles’s narrator to Knight, who view the region  – and most especially its cliffs  – as a distant, primitive province that is alien to London, and who again associate the primitive landscapes with the natives who live on them. Connections between the Cornish rocks and race are made in

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a variety of ways:  the natives not only shape rocky landscapes (including giants who throw rocks, miners who mine them) but resemble and turn into rocks (such as ‘The Hurlers’); rocky landscapes are turned into natives through their personification; granite is imagined to contain a life force; and cliffs contain the ghostly lives of long dead ‘Fierce men’. All these conceptions of rock-like humans and human-like rocks support the idea of Cornish natives as primitive and for the most part hostile and dangerous. Following the decline of the mining industry, the potential to view Cornwall as a modern and civilised part of Britain was diminishing as tourists were increasingly encouraged to view it as a primitive Celtic place. The next chapter will continue to explore depictions of Cornwall’s ghostly geology as perceived by visitors to Cornwall. A  growing tourist industry, along with fears of imperial decline, contributed to perceptions of Cornwall’s difference to an England from which it threatened to become detached.The tourist industry could exploit widespread perceptions of Cornwall as Celtic and primitive, which the Cornish ‘Celtic Revival’ – a movement that developed in the early decades of the twentieth century to revive or create traditions in support of local self-assertion, helping to fuel Cornish nationalism – has also been keen to utilise. There is a synergy, then, between Cornwall’s tourist industry and its nationalist movement, as Philip Payton among others has observed, both of which invested in the sense of Cornish difference and primitivism.104 The touristic views depicted in this and the next chapter – through which Cornwall continues to be perceived as a strange, rocky place, inhabited by ghosts – will thus feed into the understanding of Cornish nationalist literature in Chapter 5.

Notes 1 See Denise Crook, ‘The Early History of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall: 1814–1850’ (PhD thesis: The Open University, 1990), p. 17. 2 John Ayrton Paris, A Guide to the Mount’s Bay and the Land’s End; Comprehending the Topography, Botany, Agriculture, Fisheries, Antiquities, Mining, Mineralogy and Geology of Western Cornwall, 2nd edn (London, 1824), p. iv. 3 Paris, A Guide, pp. v–vi.

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4 Paris, A Guide, p. 2. For Davy see ­chapter 1. 5 William G. Maton, Observations Relative Chiefly to the Natural History, Picturesque Scenery and Antiquities of the Western Counties of England, vol. 1 (2 vols) (Salisbury, 1797), pp. 211 and 194. 6 Philip Payton, The Making of Modern Cornwall: Historical Experience and the Persistence of ‘Difference’ (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1992), p. 107. 7 Paris, A Guide, pp. 127–8. 8 Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist:  Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies 33: 4 (1990), 621–45. This concept will be discussed further later in this chapter. 9 Wilkie Collins, Rambles Beyond Railways (London: Westaway, 1948), p. 2. 10 Collins, Rambles, p. 28. 11 J. T. Blight, A Week at the Land’s End (Penzance:  Alison Hodge, 1989), p. 6. 12 Collins, Rambles, p. 5; Blight, A Week, p. 33. 13 Including, for example, Hugh Miller, who, on the ‘outer edge of one of those iron-bound shores of the Western Highlands’, discusses how they reveal the vegetation of the Silurian period, in Testimony of the Rocks, ed.William P. Nimmo (1869), p. 18. Philip Henry Gosse’s AYear at the Shore was another popular book, in this case observing the natural history of the coastline (first published in 1865), and contributing to the popularization of seashore natural history. 14 Blight, A Week, p. 3. 15 Blight, A Week, p. 4. 16 Collins, Rambles, p. 73. 17 Collins, Rambles, p. 27. 18 There is also an Irish and Scottish sport called hurling but this differs from the Cornish version. For an account of this see Tony Collins, John Martin and Wray Vamplew, The Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), pp. 166–70. 19 Collins, Rambles, p. 40. 20 Collins, Rambles, p. 41. 21 Collins, Rambles, p. 47. 22 Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 110. 23 There is a whole chapter in Schmitt that discusses Arnold and Collins, pp. 107–34. 24 Wilkie Collins, Basil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 243. 25 Eve M. Lynch, ‘Spectral Politics: The Victorian Ghost Story and the Domestic Servant’, in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela

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Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 67–85 (p. 70). 26 Collins, Basil, p. 243. 27 Collins, Basil, p. 248. 28 Collins, Basil, pp. 247, 249. 29 Collins, Rambles, p. 100. 30 Collins, Basil, p. 249. 31 Collins, Basil, pp. 253, 254. 32 Collins, Rambles, p. 100. 33 Collins, Basil, p. 254, 255. 34 The Great Western Railway had set up an advertising department in 1886, as documented by Roger Burdett Wilson, Go Great Western:  A  History of GWR Publicity (Newton Abbot:  David and Charles, 1970), p. 21. For a discussion of the railway and tourism in Cornwall along with other factors in the exoticisation of Cornwall, see Philip Payton, Cornwall:  A  History (Fowey:  Cornwall Editions, 2004), pp. 256–8, and for a wider context beyond the railways of how the tourist industry promoted Cornwall as different from the rest of England see Ronald Perry, Cornish Studies 7 (1999), 94–106. For a more focused account of the railway and the ‘domestic exotic’, see Charles Thomas, ‘See Your Own Country First:  The Geography of a Railway Landscape’, in Ella Westland (ed.), Cornwall:  The Cultural Construction of Place (Penzance: Patten P, 1997), pp. 107–28. 35 Charles Vernon, ‘Border Crossings:  Cornwall and the English (Imagi)nation’, in Geoffrey Cubit (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 153–72 (pp. 153 and 163). 36 Vernon, ‘Border Crossings’, p. 162. 37 See, for example, Brian Fagan, The Rape of the Nile:  Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt (London:  Macdonald and Jane’s, 1977); pp.  251, 305–29; Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 74; Derek Gregory, ‘Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel’, Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 114–50. 38 The Cornish Riviera:  Our National Winter Health and Pleasure Resort, 2nd edn (London:  Great Western Railway Company, 1905; repr. by Kessinger: Montana, 2009), p. 26. 39 S. P.  B. Mais, The Cornish Riviera (London:  Great Western Railway Company, 1934), p. 3. 40 Collins, Rambles, p. 70.

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41 William Jory Henwood, ‘On the Metalliferous Deposits of Cornwall and Devon’, Transactions 5 (1843), p. 113. 42 Mais, Cornish Riviera, p. 5. 43 Mais, Cornish Riviera, pp. 84, 94, 96. 44 See, for example, Brantlinger,Victorian Literature, pp. 30–5, 134–47. 45 Ella Westland, ‘The Passionate Periphery:  Cornwall and Romantic Fiction’, in Ian A. Bell (ed.), Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), pp. 153–72. 46 Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance, ed. Carl Simpson and Ephraim Hammett Jones (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), p. 13. For more on the context of melodrama and other dramatic productions in Cornwall in this period, including those inspired in the 1880s by the huge success of The Pirates of Penzance, see Alan Kent, The Literature of Cornwall (Bristol:  Redcliff, 2000), pp. 123–4. 47 Once fears of a raid from these Turks had subsided, they seem to have become an object of curiosity to local visitors with their ‘Asiatic dress, long beards and mustachios, with turbans … the dark complexion and harsh features of a piratical band’, all of which ‘made them objects of terror and surprise’ (D. Gilbert, Parochial History of Cornwall III (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1838), p. 97). I am very grateful to Jo Esra for pointing these incidents and this report out to me and for explaining the context of constructions of piracy in Cornwall in general, drawing on her study ‘The Shaping of “West Barbary”: The Re/ construction of Identity and West Country Barbary Activity’ (PhD thesis: University of Exeter, 2013). 48 As reported, for example, by Payton, Cornwall, pp. 129–30. 49 Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies 33: 4 (1990), 621–45. 50 Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist’, 622. 51 In his discussion of ‘imperial Gothic’, Patrick Brantlinger similarly discusses ‘invasion-scare stories’ around the turn of the century, ‘in which the outward movement of imperialist adventure is reversed’. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY and London:  Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 233. Victor Sage discusses further instances of what he calls ‘Empire Gothic’, in which exploration outwards results in ‘encroachment’ and ‘invasion’, as ‘The Empire will strike back’, in ‘Empire Gothic:  Explanation and Epiphany in Conan Doyle, Kipling and Chesterton’, in Clive Bloom (ed.), Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy

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in the Twentieth Century (London and Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, 1993), pp. 3–23 (pp. 7 and 11). 52 Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 1. 53 As described by Brantlinger for example, p. 230. 54 See, for example, David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1996) and Catherine Wynne, The Colonial Conan Doyle:  British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism and the Gothic (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002). 55 See Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals, pp. 32–5. 56 Robert Shannan Peckham,‘The uncertain state of the islands: national identity and the discourse of islands in nineteenth-century Britain and Greece’, Journal of Historical Geography 29:  4 (2003), 499–515 (505–6). 57 R. L. Stevenson, Across the Plains (New York: Cosimo, 2005), p. 39. 58 Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (London: Arrow Books, 1962), p. 195. (First published in 1903 and with a deleted chapter and revised ending in 1912.) 59 Stoker, The Jewel, p. 202. 60 Stoker, The Jewel, p. 206. 61 R. J. Strutt, ‘On the Distribution of Radium in the Earth’s Crust, and on the Earth’s Internal Heat’, Proceedings of the Royal Society (1906), 472–85 (pp. 478, 485). 62 Stoker, The Jewel, p. 189. 63 Stoker, The Jewel, p. 188. 64 Erika Rappaport, ‘Imperial Possessions, Cultural Histories, and the Material Turn’, Victorian Studies 50:  2 (2008), 289–96 (p.  294). This article discusses four articles around this topic of imperial possessions, making a connection here between the two which are of particular interest to my discussion of Stoker’s novel: Claire Wintle’s article considers the collector Sir Richard Carnac Temple as a ‘triumphant colonial chief, a “shining light” in the emerging discipline of anthropology, and a wealthy, upper-class lord of the manor’, in ‘Career Development:  Domestic Display as Imperial, Anthropological, and Social Trophy’, 279–88; Aviva Briefel discusses how objects like the mummy’s hand can pose a threat to the collector, in ‘Hands of Beauty, Hands of Horror: Fear and Egyptian Art at the Fin de Siecle’, 263–71. For further discussion of the mummy as an imperial possession and commodity see Nicholas Daly, ‘The Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy’, Novel 28: 1 (1994), 25–51.

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65 Stoker, The Jewel, p. 214. 66 In the 1903 version (the two versions will be discussed shortly), it is described as a ‘faint greenish vapour’, Stoker, The Jewel (London: Penguin, 2008), 241; in the 1912 version it becomes a ‘faint greenish smoke’, The Jewel (London: Arrow, 1962), p. 250. On the same pages both versions refer to its ‘strange, pungent odour’. 67 Stoker, The Jewel (2008), p. 241. 68 Stoker, The Jewel (1962), p. 251. 69 Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 62. 70 Stoker, Dracula, p. 73. 71 Stoker, Dracula, p. 79. 72 Stoker, Dracula, pp. 63–7, 74. 73 The influx of tourists is mentioned in Dracula at the start of the newspaper report of the storm, the ship, and the wolf: “the great body of holiday-makers set out yesterday for visits to Mulgrave Woods, Robin Hood’s Bay, Rig Mill, Runswick, Staithes, and the various trips in the neighbourhood of Whitby. The steamers Emma and Scarborough made excursions along the coast, and there was an unusual amount of ‘tripping’ both to and from Whitby’ (p. 75). 74 Stoker, Dracula, p. 62. 75 Nancy Armstrong, ‘Emily’s Ghost: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Fiction, Folklore, and Photography’, Novel 25:  3 (1992), 245–67 (p. 245). 76 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’, Sherlock Holmes and the Devil’s Foot:  Further Cases of the World’s Most Famous Detective (London:  Severn House, 1986), pp.  50–77 (p.  51). Other Sherlock Holmes stories similarly involve the movement out from the city by train, including Hound of the Baskervilles (set on Dartmoor). 77 Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure’, p. 51. 78 Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, n.d.), p. 87. 79 Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure’, pp. 51–2. 80 Conan Doyle, p. 77. 81 Conan Doyle, p. 68. 82 Conan Doyle, p. 69. 83 Conan Doyle, p. 64. 84 Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is of course a classic example of such “regression”. Also see the reference to Brantlinger’s Victorian Literature above. 85 Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure’, p. 71. 86 Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure’.

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87 ‘Tre’ is Cornish for homestead. 88 Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure’, p. 62; Stoker, Dracula, p. 191. 89 See Vernon, ‘Border Crossings’, pp. 156–9. 90 See, for example, Brantlinger, Victorian Literature, pp. 33–4 and 135–9. 91 Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure’, p. 51. 92 Vernon, ‘Border Crossings’, p. 169. 93 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, ed. Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 79 (verse 56). 94 Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (London and New York: Penguin, 1986), pp.269–71. (The cliff-hanger is between ­chapters 21 and 22.) 95 T. F. Barnham, ‘Some Arguments in Support of the Opinion that the Iktis of Diodorus Siculus Is St. Michael’s Mount’, Transactions 3 (1827), 96. 96 Barnham, ‘Some Arguments’, 102. See also Henry Boase for discussion of Lyonesse, ‘Contributions Towards a Knowledge of the Geology of Cornwall’, Transactions 4 (1832), 166–457 (365) 97 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, pp. 271–2. 98 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes. p. 272. 99 Adelene Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology, and the Material Imagination’, 19:  Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008), www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/viewFile/469/329 (accessed 1 April 2014), 11. 100 Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy’, 12 (for the excursions), and Buckland also discusses the popular activity of collecting geological specimens on the coast. A popular book was Philip Gosse, A Year at the Shore (first published in 1865). 101 Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy’, p. 13. 102 Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes p.  272 (‘weather-beaten’ folk) and 268 (‘weather-worn’ edges). 103 Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy’, p.  17. Critics have frequently observed how Hardy’s works depict characters as closely connected to, even ‘at one’ with nature, including Andrew Enstice, Thomas Hardy:  Landscapes of the Mind (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979). 104 Philip Payton, ‘Paralysis and Revival:  the reconstruction of Celtic-Catholic Cornwall 1890–1945’, in Ella Westland, Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place (Penzance: Patten Press, 1997), pp. 25–39. (To be discussed further in the introductory section of Chapter 5.)

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4

Haunted houses and prehistoric stones: savage vibrations in ghost stories and D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo Ghosts begin to take on a prominent role in this chapter, forming another kind of threat to the English visitor to the rocks with which they are at times closely associated. A connection between rocks and ghosts emerges in this chapter, in part because ghosts, like rocks, are perceived as survivals from an earlier time, when Cornwall was most distinct or even separate from (the rest of) England, and as such they are used to assert its difference as a primitive place. Rocks and ghosts are perceived as survivals in their very different forms:  rocks because of their hard durable materiality, and ghosts because they are perceived as transcending the material world, as spiritual returns from the dead. Like other ‘Celtic’ regions and nations, Cornwall is perceived as being especially haunted, as well as having its own distinctive rocks; it is perceived as a place that is steeped in the past. The flourishing of folklore in the nineteenth century helped to popularise ghost story traditions that were then further publicised by the tourist industry, adding to the sense of Cornwall (along with other ‘Celtic’ regions) as different from England, even otherworldly.1 This chapter builds on earlier observations that ‘primitive races’ are seen to live on primitive rocks, to be shaped by them, to be like them, to belong to and even be part of them, by considering how rocks are in turn shaped by their past inhabitants, taking on their ghostly energies or even life. The emphasis here is on rocks – or more precisely on the walls of old haunted houses and prehistoric stones – that have survived the centuries, rather than on more unstable structures, such as the cliffs discussed in the last chapter. Like the ghosts that seem to inhabit them, such geological materials

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outlive mortal generations. The chapter focuses on fictions from the 1920s to the mid-twentieth century, which depict rocks as containing a ghostly kind of life. Such ghostliness seems to pose a threat especially to visitors or incomers who attempt to possess property that turns out to be haunted by previous, often ‘primitive’ or savage inhabitants, as in gothic fiction by L. T. C. Rolt and E. F. Benson. The hauntings take place in the ongoing context of Cornwall as a distinctive tourist destination, or, especially in the work of D. H. Lawrence, as a place that in the first decades of the twentieth century seemed to provide an escape from the modern world and its war. Ghosts contributed to the sense of Cornwall as a different, more mystical place than England – and the tourist industry helped to promote such haunted locations – but ghosts can do more than simply contribute to the thrill of the touristic adventure into the unknown. Cornwall’s difference from England at the same time as providing an escape, produces a problematic sense of insecurity about belonging and property ownership in a count(r)y perceived as your own and yet different. In many stories of the supernatural set in Cornwall there is a strong sense of the uncanny: familiar, domestic spaces take on an unsettling, ghostly strangeness or become actively hostile. A post-colonial strand of ghost studies has engaged with the sense of ghosts as the product of repressed national pasts which then return to haunt the present, such as Renée Bergland’s study of Indian ghosts in American culture, and Warren Cariou’s study of Aboriginal ghosts on the West Canadian prairies, which similarly employs the idea of the uncanny.2 Cariou claims that ghosts reflect anxiety suffered by settlers regarding the legitimacy of their claims to belong, which he describes as ‘a lurking sense that the places settlers call home are not really theirs’.3 In so far as the Cornish are perceived as a kind of native people, who belong to or are even part of their homeland, while English visitors cannot legitimately belong to or claim spiritual possession of the land, such studies can provide some context for understanding the ghosts examined in the second half of this book. Although the Cornish have by no means been as violently or thoroughly driven from the land as Aboriginal people from prairies, and indeed the whole idea of a Celtic people, whether defined by race or ethnicity, is highly contentious,4 the last chapter considered the imagination of Cornwall as exchangeable with European colonies in Africa, rather than simply an English

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county, and of the Cornish Celts as primitive like African races in opposition to the English visitors.The identification of the Cornish with the primitive land on which they live helps to establish a sense that although Cornwall is part of England, it is perceived as a distant, foreign region inhabited by another race. Michael Hechter has argued in Internal Colonialism that England has colonised and taken resources from British ‘Celtic’ regions with the result that these regions have become poor and rebellious, asserting their own identities against such domination, and work in Cornish studies has developed similar arguments in application to Cornwall.5 At the same time as condemning the alleged English colonisers, however, the work in Cornish studies has celebrated the Cornish diaspora, which, from another perspective, contributed to the displacement of populations through its participation in the mass emigrations to South Africa, Australia and other parts of the British Empire, following the decline of Cornwall’s mining industry,6 so comparisons between Cornwall and overseas colonies need to be made cautiously. Cornwall is not simply a victim of colonisation; its own problematic, post-industrial economy meant that its population contributed to the colonisation of other parts of the world, while Cornwall itself was ‘colonised’ by tourists and settlers attracted to a romanticised Cornwall. Cornwall, like Scotland, played an active part in British imperialism even though it also appeared to have some characteristics of a colony.7 This chapter therefore considers a sense of the uncanny that is to some extent particular to how visitors have perceived Cornwall as part of England but also as foreign; as home but also as belonging to strangers. Victorian imperial stereotypes of the Cornish as Celtic and primitive – and, as such, threatening to English incomers – continued to be reproduced in twentieth-century English literature. This chapter explores the ongoing perception of Cornwall’s ghostly inhabitants as foreign and savage. The next chapter will make the shift from the viewpoint of visitors back to a Cornish perspective, looking at Cornish nationalist writers who use ghosts, along with rocks, to stake out claims of original, timeless belonging. In these texts, the blame for any dangerous encounters suffered by the English visitors is ultimately placed with the English colonial powers themselves, however savage the natives appear to be. Rocks and ghosts are both used to convey the idea of the native race of Celts

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as belonging timelessly to their land, while both seem to react violently against visitors or ‘incomers’.

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Trevarthen House L. T.  C. Rolt’s short story ‘Music Hath Charms’ (1948) typically begins with the railway journey from London, like the journeys out from the city in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars and Dracula, as discussed in the previous chapter. James Heneage has inherited a property, Trevarthen, situated on the Cornish cliffs, and being engaged in a study of the early Celtic civilization of Cornwall (much like Holmes) he enthusiastically goes to check it out with his friend, Thornton. They arrange to meet at Paddington station the next day, and in the meantime Thornton looks up Trevarthen in his Guide to Cornwall, where he finds this entry: ‘TREVARTHEN HOUSE AND COVE (Map 2, Sq. 6c). Small but picturesque private fishing cove in Mounts Bay. Penzance 10 m.; Helton 6 m.  Traditionally associated with activities of Count Hennezè, notorious eighteenth-century smuggler and wrecker. Rugged cliff scenery.’8 Cornwall is by now a well-established tourist destination, and Thornton’s guide is typical; we have seen how geologists and travel guides engaged with Cornwall’s ‘cliff scenery’ since the early nineteenth century. This story, in which Heneage’s wicked ancestor continues to haunt the house, also picks up on Cornwall’s reputation as the home of smuggling and wrecking. That it is just one among countless other comparable stories set in Cornwall is indicated by the narrator as he goes on to comment that the tourist guidebook is not really informative:  ‘it would be difficult to find a Cornish cove which did not boast “rugged cliff scenery”, and which was not popularly associated with smuggling in fact or fiction’.9 Like the Great Western Railway guide and other texts discussed in the previous chapter, this guidebook provides the sense of Cornwall as not only a distant place of adventure and dramatic scenery but also as containing an element of the foreign, with the mention of ‘Count Hennezè’ (a slightly more French version of James’s surname, Heneage). During the journey towards Cornwall on ‘the Cornish Riviera Express’, James imparts further information about the house and his ancestor. For many generations it was

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apparently owned by minor Cornish gentry but after the line died out it was acquired by the Count (we are now provided with his full French title:  Count Pierre Hennezè du Hou), in 1750, who moved in with his mistress, La Pucelle, and began to carry out his criminal activities. While James presents this as just a ‘colourful story’, ‘Good enough for a schoolboy thriller’,10 after only one day’s stay it begins to seem that this foreign couple continue to haunt the house, that they somehow reside within its walls. Rolt’s story further sets the scene for the haunted house, by describing the surrounding rocky landscape as threatening, as a dangerous animal, where the narrator refers to ‘those pitiless shark’s teeth of rock’ out at sea, which cause shipwrecks.11 This metaphorical body part is one way in which rocks are described as at least potentially animate, as a living threat to English visitors or tourists, while the ghostly inhabitants of the Cornish house seem to take part in the primitive, animal savagery of such rocks. Such savage inhabitants are in most cases the ‘primitive’ Celts of Cornwall, although in Rolt’s story they are the previous French owners. It may be that Rolt is debunking the notion of the indigenous Cornish as uniquely primitive, ancestrally Celtic savages (a notion that features in the shape of Leon Sterndale, in Conan Doyle’s story, for example, and in stories discussed later in this chapter), instead mythologizing invasion as a historic norm in Cornwall. From the perspective of the haunted visitor, however, to some extent it does not matter; whether French or Cornish the ghostly inhabitants figure as foreign to the English tourist, contributing to the sense of Cornwall as different from the England of which it is at the same time a part. The difference between the Cornish and the foreign seems collapsible, as in the case of Leon’s African savagery, or Trelawney’s daughter’s exchangeability with the Egyptian mummy. In many stories of the supernatural set in Cornwall there is a strong sense of the uncanny:  of familiar, domestic spaces which begin to take on an unsettling strangeness or to become actively hostile.This juxtaposition of the familiar and strange can be understood, as I have mentioned, in terms of how Cornwall is perceived as being both part of England and as different or foreign. The usual pattern in most of these stories is for the visitor to enter Cornwall which at first seems relatively safe, to be part of one’s own country while being a retreat from the city, located conveniently just down the line. Cornwall at this stage might even be considered

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more English than England, as a place where rural traditions survive against the onslaught of modernity. As Mais put it in The Cornish Riviera, ‘Old England is everywhere crumbling about our ears, and it is a sorry business trying to find any traces of her nowadays in the Home Counties, but in the Duchy medievalism still exists … and our remote ancestors still haunt the ancient places.’12 But Mais, of course, is promising the best of both worlds: an Old England that is, nevertheless, exotic. In stories like ‘Music Hath Charms’, reflecting the context of Cornwall as both a long-lost homeland and as foreign, once the visitor is settled into a homely environment, things begin to change. Following their journey to the cliffs, the two men in Rolt’s story first settle down comfortably into their new home, being served by a good old matriarchal woman who prepares their beds, serves pasties and orders her husband to relieve them of suitcases. But the next day Thornton detects a slight irregularity in a wall, which grows rapidly into a realisation that Cornwall is infested with a foreign evil: he notices under the layers of wallpaper that the wall is not entirely smooth, and uncovers a secret cupboard with a music box inside it.13 Similarly in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, following the overnight journey, Margaret and Malcolm settle down in their new home, where the housekeeper and her staff ‘had worked well, and all was bright and fresh and clean’, and they eat supper, before discovering the house’s ‘secret’: the cave underneath the house.14 Again, the house is not what it appeared to be at first; a secret is embedded in its stones. Anthony Vidler observes in The Architectural Uncanny that the haunted house was by far the most popular manifestation of the uncanny in the nineteenth century in fairy tales, horror stories and Gothic novels: ‘The house provided an especially favored site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits.’15 Rolt’s story follows this tradition closely, the homely slowly unfolding into the unhomely, through the realisation that the foreign or ‘alien spirits’ inhabit the very walls, much like stories by Edgar Allan Poe,Victor Hugo and E. T. A. Hoffman in the previous century. Vidler argues that this sense of the uncanny initially arose from the insecurity of a newly established class, that it was a bourgeois anxiety about material security and property ownership, an anxiety that intensified and became widespread during the two

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world wars of the twentieth century. This insecurity about home ownership could be extended to the bourgeois activity of tourism, of taking temporary possession of houses by visiting or renting them out, especially in a county within one’s home nation that at times seems a nation of its own. There are hints of the bourgeois insecurity in Rolt’s story, through which is seen the end of the old class, of the family line of Cornish inheritance and the purchase of the house by a foreign stranger, before it is then inherited by his descendant. The ‘alien spirits’ haunting the house are those of the foreign couple rather than the previously established gentry, however, so the dominant form of anxiety in this story could derive from the bourgeois occupation of being a tourist, as the descendent and his friend visit a distant region they know only through their guidebook. In E. F. Benson’s ghost stories, as I will shortly discuss, it is the Cornish themselves who are described as foreign, or at least non-English, and who seem to retain possession – in the form of ghostly presences recorded in stone – in opposition to the bourgeois visitors. In The Jewel, as we have seen, the dead, mummified object almost returns to life, fuelled by the life-giving energy of radium found within granite. In Rolt’s story again the dead return to life, although it is sound in this case that seems to become a kind of energy, awakening the house itself. On the lid is depicted the hideous scene of a shipwreck, the vessel ‘breaking up on the rocks beneath towering cliffs’,16 while the wreckers dance by a fire, but its sound is even more disturbing. After producing the sound of a lively jig, it then begins to have a physical impact on the human ear and then on the house itself, which seems to awaken, with the inanimate again coming to life: It reached a top note that, like the squeak of a bat, was almost beyond the range of audibility and whose piercing quality positively hurt the ear-drum.The tune rose to this thin yet deafening climax, or fell away again in a series of exuberant capriccios quite horrible to hear because the dissonance of their diminished intervals never seemed to find resolution. Again, despite the comparatively small volume of sound it produced, the instrument seemed to possess the power to awake sympathetic resonance, not only in the table upon which it stood, but in surrounding objects, until the whole room seemed to be whistling in unison … It was as though they had somehow

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awakened Trevarthen House from sleep, and that this wakefulness was hostile.17

As in many other fictions the visitor is driven away, in this case by the house and its sounds. Thornton suffers one more, very noisy, night in the house, and then rushes back to London in terror. The evil ancestor returns from the past, to take possession of James. Ships are wrecked, once again, on the cliffs. Like the rocky land itself, then, which kills strangers at sea, it seems houses can hold a kind of life of their own, and can pose a threat to visitors. Sound tends to play a prominent role in these stories of haunted houses, as it does in the earlier fictions such as those by Collins and Stoker, partly owing to the collapse of the distance maintained by ‘the tourist gaze’, John Urry has pointed out that guidebooks from the Romantic era onwards promoted new ways of seeing, or ‘scenic tourism’, taking in landscapes that are sublime (like those rocky landscapes discussed in Chapter 1) or in some other way extraordinary, and reproducing them in various ways.18 In the early stages the visiting characters tend accordingly to look at the scenery, as where Watson describes his view of the ship-wrecking rocks from the ‘windows of our little whitewashed house’ in Conan Doyle’s story, or Malcolm describes his first sight of the house on the cliff ‘as it appeared in the bright moonlight’ in Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars.19 The panoramic views from train windows also provided a new way of seeing stretches of landscape at a distance. Although the railway made Cornwall more accessible to visitors, as James Vernon observes, ‘it also became more distant and remote … it engendered a totalising panoramic vision of the Cornish landscape – absorbed effortlessly from the safety and distance of carriage windows as the train climbed moors and crossed valleys and viaducts’.20 In Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles Watson thus describes his first sight of Dartmoor through the window of his railway carriage (though this moor is in the county of Devon, it shares geological features with the nearby Bodmin Moor in Cornwall):  ‘Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream.’21 In Rolt’s story, the travellers first see Cornwall’s rocky landscape from the safe distance of the train: ‘the train slid down the long incline from St Erth and they saw the majestic shape of St Michael’s Mount framed in the carriage window’.22 (St Michael’s Mount is a

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castle on a rock that can only be walked to at low tide.) This is to describe the Mount as a kind of picture, as a view that is ‘framed’ much as the view of the Mount reproduced in the Great Western Railway’s promotional posters. In all these stories, however, the characters gradually lose the sense of distance and safety, becoming immersed in the dangers of the remote semi-English environment. The sound of the sea tends to become especially prominent in stories set on cliffs, as we have already seen in Collins’s novel where Basil gauges his way through the mist, walking on by using the ‘sound of the sea’ as a guide. This sound is also a constant background noise in The Jewel. Soon after his first sight of the house, the narrator describes ‘the crash and murmur of the waves’, a murmur which from inside of the dining room ‘never ceased’. The sense of the sea builds up towards the climax, when the waves finally become palpable, vibrating the rock under his feet in the thundering storm: ‘I could feel the rock on which it was built tremble under the furious onslaught of the waves.’23 Similarly in Rolt’s story, vibration seems to operate as a force that cannot be safely contained but transmits itself through buildings and bodies, when the sounds of the music box physically impact on the eardrum and awake sympathetic resonance in the house. After seeing the picture-like view from the railway carriage, the two travellers arrive at the station and make their way by road to the house, where sound begins to take on its important role, as they hear ‘the eternal voice of the Cornish coast; the endlessly recurring thud and surge of the waves against the cliffs of Trevarthen’.24 At night the sound of the sea lulls the travellers to sleep, its influence helping to prepare the way for the full realisation of the power of sound with the discovery the next day of the music box. During Thornton’s last night in Trevarthen House, no longer able to preserve the distance of the view from a window, typically it is a storm that generates much of the noise that keeps him awake: ‘he could hear, above the tumult of the wind, the thunder of heavy seas breaking upon the rocks … the house seemed full of sound’.25 Sound is similarly of key importance in many of Benson’s stories, to which I will now turn.

Ghost sounds and the ‘stone of sacrifice’ Predictably, many of the ghost stories by Benson begin with the central character setting out for a rural, isolated destination on the coast, such as a village in Sutherland or Norfolk or Cornwall,26

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where he rents property, which soon loses its homeliness. By now, the journey is usually by car; we have seen the shift from the mid-nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century from walking (Collins’s Rambles) to the railway (Stoker’s The Jewel, Rolt’s ‘Music Hath Charms’) and to the motor car. Benson’s stories work with the idea that just off the beaten track, beyond the end of the line, the familiar tourist trail, lie places with a difference, retaining a separateness from England. ‘Negotium Perambulans’ for instance, begins by introducing a place, named Polearn, only briefly mentioned by the tourist guide, much like the brief entry for Trevarthen in Rolt’s story.27 Little visited, the isolated community at Polearn retains an ‘independence of character’, and furthermore seems mysteriously linked together as if ‘inspired and framed by forces visible and invisible’.28 In other stories too, the local people are perceived as having a different character from the English, often being suspicious and superstitious, unfriendly and in touch with supernatural forces. In another story, ‘Expiation’, in which the narrator and his friend leave London to rent a house near another isolated village on the coast, the Cornish housekeeper is ‘slightly aloof, as is the habit of her race, from strangers and foreigners, for so the Cornish account the English’. But ‘the English’ of course view the Cornish no less as strangers. The narrator’s friend expresses his sense of feeling unwelcome, and that the housekeeper is ‘aware of something which we knew nothing of; of being on a plane which we couldn’t imagine’.29 A little later they meet the vicar: while displaying characteristic pride in his native home, ‘Something between reserve and suspicion came into Mr. Stephens’ face.’30 The house is haunted by its previous, Cornish owners, and the homeliness of ‘this perfect little domain’ soon begins to turn into an unhomely strangeness.The housekeeper is ‘capable-looking’ as well as ‘aloof ’, which contributes to the uncanny sense of a contented household with its dinners and clean sheets that is, nevertheless, not quite familiar. It is the sound of a telephone during the first evening that first gives an indication that there is another presence in the house, a telephone which the narrator’s companion does not hear, and which it is later revealed was cut off a year ago. About a week later, he sees a man in the garden, hanging by a rope, strangled. It is of course a stormy, noisy night: ‘All night the storm raged and bellowed, making sleep impossible, and for an hour at least, between the peals of thunder, I heard the ringing of the telephone bell.’31

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It turns out that the previous owner, George Hearne, was evil but loved his wife, from whom the two guests have now rented the house. When she learned of his bad character she left him, but on the night of his suicide she tried to telephone – repeatedly – after the vicar told her she was George’s only hope for salvation. The Hearne family had lived here for more than two centuries, being ‘an old family … and large landowners’,32 and seem very much to continue to possess the house in the form of a kind of sound recording.The vicar explains, when asked about the repeated sound of the telephone during the recent stormy night: ‘ “Don’t you think that great emotion like that of Mrs. Hearne’s may make some sort of record,” he said, “so that if the needle of a sensitive temperament comes in contact with it a reproduction takes place?” ’33 As in Rolt’s story, then, it seems the sound of the past is stored in the house, ready to be replayed in the present. Previous owners continue to haunt properties, making their possession by living English people insecure. Ghostly presences are frequently described and understood in terms of musical instruments and auditory technologies like the telephone and phonograph, technologies that enable sound to be transmitted across distances and years, and the voice to transcend the mortal body. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Society for Psychical Research, for instance, with which Benson later became acquainted,34 used telephony as a model for understanding the transmission of thought waves from one living person telepathically to another, or from the spirits of the dead to the living.35 The invention of the phonograph soon led to interest in recording the voices of the dead, and to the various claims in the twentieth century, by psychical researchers including Attila von Szalay, Friedrich Jürgenson and Konstantin Raudive, to have successfully captured spirit voices on tape recorders. Benson’s story combines different mediums, with its disembodied emotions transmitted telephonically and recorded phonographically in the house. The idea that something as solid and enduring as a house can store or record such vibrations or energies seems to give to the past an added resilience. Later, Nigel Kneale directed the BBC TV production The Stone Tape (1972), which in a similar way to Benson depicts a house that records the sounds of the past. Science fiction critics have identified the archaeologist T. H. Lethbridge, with his theories about environments acting as recording media,

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as a potential source for Kneale’s influential work,36 while one might also look to the earlier work of Benson. Like Lethbridge, and numerous later spiritualists and storytellers, Benson conceived of prehistoric stones, as well as houses, as being able to store or record the past, while a receiving person with a ‘sensitive temperament’ or ‘on the right wave-length’ could receive the impressions.37 In another of Benson’s stories, ‘The Temple’ (1925), the “recording equipment” is of this even older order:  an ancient stone that was once a sacrificial altar forms the central part of the kitchen floor of another house rented by visitors from London. Similarly in The Stone Tape, a part of the house is much older than the rest: a pre-medieval room, where the recordings reside, of suicidal screams. Like Holmes, and Heneage in Rolt’s tale, Frank Ingleton in Benson’s ‘The Temple’ is studying the ‘remains of prehistoric civilization which are found in such mysterious abundance in the ancient county’. The narrator accompanies him to Cornwall, to yet another tranquil village, ‘remote from any of the more celebrated holiday centres’.38 In this place where superstitions linger and witchcraft trials continue, they find a ‘most enchanting little house’ hidden deep in some dense woods, an apparently unoccupied house with a notice proclaiming it is available for rent.39 The fantasy of taking possession of this house seems realised the very next day, when they pick up the keys from the agent who also provides staff: ‘a rotund and capable Cornishwoman’ and her daughter, who are clean and thoroughly competent but refuse to sleep in the house.40 The usual scene of pleasurable comfort and a good dinner is set out, before the sense of the uncanny begins to intrude. The next day Frank’s companion discovers ‘a tall, black granite stone’ peeking out of the undergrowth. After a brief search they begin to discover further stones, which together form the remains of an ancient temple, fragments of which have also been used to build the house in which they now live, a conjecture that is ‘confirmed by the discovery of pieces of granite built into the walls of the house we occupied’.The house is situated in the centre of the ancient temple, and in the middle of the homely kitchen floor lies, of course, ‘The stone of sacrifice’.41 In Frank’s mind this realisation is accompanied by visions of the sacrificial blood of young boys and maidens, and the sounds of the ancient past seem for a moment to become audible: ‘the stone seemed wet and darkly glistening, and was that

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noise only the rain volleying on the roof, or the beating of drums to drown the cries of the victim?’42 Here it is not the previous owner who continues to haunt the house; the threat is much older. Frank discovers that the body of the previous owner had been found on the sacrificial stone with the throat cut by a flint knife. The strange ‘presences’ that drove him to suicide seem still to linger, until finally a full replay of the ancient rites seems to take place. His friend finds the flint knife, and says he is unable to leave the house: ‘They’ve surrounded the place, and there’s no way out. Listen! Can’t you hear the drums and the squeal of their pipes?’ Frank just about manages to drag him away from the house, saving him from ‘the evil and the unseen’.43

Lawrence’s ‘savage vibrations’ Since the eighteenth century, archaeologists, antiquarians and folklorists have speculated that Cornwall’s ancient stones were often sites of pagan rites of sacrifice. William Borlase published his Antiquities, Historical and Monumental, of the County of Cornwall in 1754, claiming that stone circles were the temples of the Druids, where they conducted ‘their nefarious Rites of Witchcraft, and Necromancy’, for example.44 As the first comprehensive survey of Cornwall’s many ancient sites, this study helped to construct the image of Cornwall as a mystical land apart, its influence spanning from Humphry Davy’s and Robert Hunt’s images of Druidry (as was seen in Chapter 2) to tourist guidebooks.45 Benson clearly drew on such studies and folkloric myths for his stories about ancient stones, while more generally such work feeds into a wider myth of Cornwall as a place where especially primitive, superstitious beliefs and evil deeds take place, from ancient sacrifices to smuggling and wrecking. In many of these stories, from Collins’s Basil to Benson’s ‘The Temple’, the visitors from London flee back to the city, away from the Cornish or Celtic natives, who, whether alive or long dead, seem to be hostile and dangerous. Some of the stories are also semi-autobiographical. For his novel Collins drew on his journey to Cornwall, earlier documented in his Rambles Beyond Railways, as we have seen, while Benson spent much of his childhood in Cornwall, as do some of his narrators, who also return in later life (for example in ‘Negotium Perambulans’ and ‘Pirates’).46 Although

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these authors to some extent depict Cornwall as a place of danger and hostile natives, it is probably D. H. Lawrence for his thinly disguised memoir, Kangaroo (1923), who drew most heavily on his personal experiences of feeling unwelcome, involving his perception of stones of sacrifice. Kangaroo is set in wartime, but it is the conflicts between the central character, Somers, and his neighbours and national authorities, and his anger at the ruin of ‘old England’, that feature far more prominently than any conflict between nations. Most of the novel takes place in Australia  – a major destination for Cornish emigrants – and there are hints even here that Cornwall is a dark, violent place. Somers lived in Cornwall for a while (Lawrence hired a cottage there for a year or two47), and now, in Australia, meets a Cornishman, William James, who left at the age of fifteen:  ‘And they talked for a while of the bleak, lonely northern coast of Cornwall, the black huge cliffs, with the gulls flying away below, and the sea boiling, and the wind blowing in huge volleys: and the black Cornish nights, with nothing but the violent weather outside.’48 William James seems no more welcoming than his native land. He looks at Somers with ‘suspicion’, while ‘his nature was secretive, maybe treacherous’.49 Lawrence was attracted to Cornwall at least partly because of its distance from London, its perceived difference from the wartime England he so resented, and its ongoing romanticisation in the Edwardian era as a mystical place. Cornwall was marketed, as has been mentioned, as a place where ‘Old England … still exists’.50 He had wanted to leave England for Florida, but failed to obtain a certificate confirming his exemption from military service. John Doheny writes that Lawrence was drawn specifically to Zennor, in Penwith, on the north coast of Cornwall’s southernmost tip, because it ‘was as close to the edge of England as he could get’, considering that he could not leave England.51 So it seems that the Cornish cliffs could have served for Lawrence (as for characters in so many of the fictions discussed in this and my last chapter) as another country as much as anywhere in England could, a perception reflected by Somers’s sense of the Cornish as distinct from the English, as suspicious and treacherous, and his ‘great fascination’ with Cornwall’s ‘magic – a magic in the atmosphere’.52 Later, Somers’s recollections of living on the coast involve various encounters with Cornish suspicion and with Cornwall’s

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magical atmosphere. Living with his wife, Harriet, in a rented ‘cottage by the savage Atlantic’, Somers apparently talked freely to those ‘few Cornish people around’ about his hatred for the war, and was seen as a spy. The policeman visited and ‘the two began to be hated, hated far more than they knew’. He is treated as a ‘foreigner’.53 This unwelcoming social environment is paralleled by the hostility and dangerousness of the geographical environment of the cliffs, with their sacrificial stones: ‘Nowhere can it be so black as on the edge of a Cornish moor, above the western sea, near the rocks where the ancient worshippers used to sacrifice.’54 Immediately following this reflection, again a policeman knocks at the door to interrogate their American guest, and Somers decides to go to America himself. The following snowy morning he experiences the stones, the earth, or the land as ‘strange’, almost another world, in which time is frozen. The previous blackness of the environment is transformed into a ghostly whiteness, in which he feels himself ghostly: A white, static arrested morning, away there in the west of Cornwall, with the moors looking primeval, and the huge granite boulders bulging out of the earth like presences. So easy to realize men worshipping stones. It is not the stone. It is the mystery of the powerful, pre-human earth, showing its might. And all, this morning, static, arrested in a cold, milky whiteness, like death, the west lost in the sea … It was like walking in death: a strange, arrested land of death. Never had he known that feeling before: as if he were a ghost in the after-death, walking a strange, pale, static, cold world.55

As for many nineteenth-century geologists and folklorists, Somers’s contemplation of stones seems to put him in touch with the past, to allow him to enter another, timeless world.56 At times, Somers experiences the land of the stones as strange, or even otherworldly, as a world to which he does not belong, and yet despite the attempts to drive him away he increasingly identifies with it, making a kind of claim to belong. He communes with the stones in a way that he sees even the Cornish – like James, who dismisses the idea of its magical atmosphere as ‘fairy tales’ – as unable to do. Somers’s sense of becoming ghostly signals that he is not only able to apprehend but has slipped into the past himself, to become one among the ‘men worshipping stones’.

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His application to go to America is ignored, so, for the time being, Somers stays in Cornwall. Deeply disheartened with England  – ‘England will never be England any more’  – Somers begins to commune with the spiritual presence on the moors of Cornwall, now explicitly described as a separate ‘country’ and identified with Ireland with its Celtic spirits: Cornwall is a country that makes a man psychic. The longer he stayed, the more intensely it had that effect on Somers. It was as if he were developing second sight, and second hearing. He would go out into the blackness of night and listen to the blackness, and call, call softly, for the spirits, the presences he felt coming downhill from the moors in the night. ‘Tuatha De Danaan!’ [Irish spirits] he would call softly. ‘Tuatha De Danaan! Be with me. Be with me.’ And it was as if he felt them come.57

Somers loves Cornwall, and yet he also hates it because of the hatred that he feels the Cornish have for him. Somers also feels ambivalence about Cornwall being both part of England as well as a ‘country’. In his call to the Irish spirits in this scene Somers suggests that Cornwall retains an element of Celtic difference, but at the same time he believes that it has finally been submerged by the English, specifically by the ‘war spirit’. Tales are told against him and his wife. ‘They were watched and listened to, spied on, by men lying behind the low stone fences. It is a job the Cornish loved.’58 But among all this he finds a kind of home in a particular Cornish family, working on their farm, and begins not only to commune with the ‘spirit’ of the Celtic past, but to be invaded by it, to become part of the very land – a land that is beastly, savage, and alive: And then the Cornish night would gradually come down upon the dark, shaggy moors, that were like the fur of some beast, and upon the pale-grey granite masses, so ancient and Druidical, suggesting blood-sacrifice. And as Somers sat there on the sheaves in the underdark, seeing the light swim above the sea, he felt he was over the border, in another world. Over the border, in that twilight, awesome world of the previous Celts. The spirit of the ancient, pre-Christian world, which lingers still in the truly Celtic places, he could feel it invade him in the savage dusk, making him savage too and, at the same time, strangely sensitive and subtle, understanding the mystery

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of blood-sacrifice: to sacrifice one’s victim, and let the blood run to the fire, there beyond the gorse upon the old grey granite.59

Somers’s sense of the ‘savage’ invading him, of becoming ‘savage too’, contrasts strikingly with the other narratives that have been examined in this and the previous chapter, when the opposition between savagery and the visitors is maintained. The previous narrators – Basil, Malcolm, Watson – all describe the dangers and violence of Cornwall’s cliffs while finally managing to extricate themselves from the terror, to preserve the narrative distance. Similarly, in the third-person narratives the leading protagonists with whom the reader is encouraged to identify  – including Thornton and Ingleton – finally escape from the terrifying dangers, materialised for Ingleton in the ‘stone of sacrifice’. Somers, in contrast, actively seeks the supernatural – he listens – wishing to commune with the spirits of the past. For Somers, the savage past, the rites of sacrifice, do not hold the same terrors, but rather, a certain attraction: ‘He preferred to drift into a sort of blood-darkness, to take up in his veins again the savage vibrations that still lingered round the secret rocks, the place of the pre-Christian human sacrifice. Human sacrifice! He could feel his dark, blood-consciousness tingle to it again, the desire of it, the mystery of it.’60 In contrast, then, to the painful sensation experienced by Thornton in response to the ‘piercing’,‘horrible’ vibrations of the music box, or the revulsion felt by Ingleton at the sounds of the rites of sacrifice, Somers feels himself ‘tingle’ with a sense of excited attraction to and connection with the mystical landscape. Many critics have noted how Somers’s experiences closely reflect Lawrence’s own, and here we can see how his earlier impressions of strangeness are replaced by a closeness, much as Lawrence’s ‘imagined Cornwall’ was replaced by an alternative kind of engagement, or ‘dwelling’, as Ella Westland observes.61 The desire ‘to take up in his veins the savage vibrations’, to feel his ‘blood consciousness tingle’ to the human sacrifice, might be considered a Romantic kind of modernism in its turn, or return to the primitive in opposition to modern culture:  the city, war, a failed England. As geographer David Matless has observed, attempts to define and to claim ‘magical, sacred geographies’ in inter-war Britain were not uncommon, while ‘spectrally attuned’ modernist writers could claim a certain ‘cultural authority’.62 Like Mary Butts, the subject of

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Matless’s study, and other visitors at this time, Lawrence uses ghosts, or spiritual vibrations, to help demarcate a particular locale – west Penwith, closely associated with Celtic mysticism – ‘as something to be cherished, defended, retreated to’.63 Butts, like all the writers I  have considered in this chapter, sees ‘the Cornish as exotic and mystical, within but not of England’.64 Like Butts, Lawrence can also be identified with a high literary modernism, or an elite that defined itself against modernity and the masses. Even more selectively than Butts, though, who marked out a select group of ‘special people in special places’,65 Lawrence seems to deem only himself, in the form of Somers, and one ‘Cornishman’ – one of the last of the ‘true Celts’, presumably – capable of connecting to and comprehending the primitive reality. Somers despises the Cornish in general but would talk with his friend, the farmer John Thomas, of the ‘half-mystical things with which they both were filled … And the farmer, in a non-mental way, understood, understood even more than Somers’.66 So here, it seems, we have a true Cornishman, linked deeply with his homeland, the place he will never leave, and Lawrence, who, like Butts, makes a claim to belong, to be able to commune with the native, and to participate in, to take deep into his own body the spirit of the land itself. Such claims of belonging tend to entail exclusion: in this case the exclusion of most of the Cornish.Westland notes that the locals were not easily assimilated into the scenario of Celtic mysticism associated with Penwith’s landscape and monuments.The mystically inclined, former Etonian musician Philip Heseltine, who stayed with the Lawrences and returned briefly to Cornwall in 1917, offered the solution of mass clearance in 1917:  ‘We ought to repeople this wonderful neighbourhood, for the indigenous man is vile. It is all very well to wax romantic about the Celt in the abstract … but your average Cornishman is a veritable savage – ignorant, suspicious and quite hysterically ill-tempered.’67 Somers also notes the apparently ‘suspicious’ nature of the Cornish, repeatedly noting that he is being watched and treated with suspicion, like a foreigner, much as Butts noted in her diary that the locals are ‘watchful and hate foreigners’.68 Celts, as we have seen, were on the one hand idealised as spiritual and creative in contrast to the dull, unimaginative English, but on the other deplored as an inferior, even subhuman race. Lawrence is thus attracted to the ideal, in the shape of John Thomas (though even he loses favour in the end), but he also, as

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Westland and Philip Payton note, wrote in his letters of the Cornish as selfish and insect-like: The Cornish people still attract me. They have become detestable, I  think, and yet they aren’t detestable. They are, of course, strictly anti-social and un-Christian. But then, the aristocratic principle and the principle of magic, to which they belonged, these two have collapsed, and left only the most ugly, scaly, insect-like, unclean selfishness, so that each one of them is like an insect isolated within its own scaly, glassy envelope, and running seeking its own small end. And how foul that is! How they stink in their repulsiveness … They ought all to die. (Letter to Beresford, 1 February 1916)69

Again, here, the Cornish are described as animals: though not now as primitive beasts but as insect-like. For Lawrence, the beastliness of the land was powerful and appealing, whereas the Cornish insects seem insignificant and easy to obliterate. It seems indeed to be because the Cornish are not in tune with their savage history, with the inheritable ‘magic’ of their sacrificial stones, that Lawrence seems to find them so despicable. The Cornish, then, can have no right to their land:  only Lawrence is able to spiritually connect with the territory. On 12 October 1917 Lawrence received an expulsion order to leave Cornwall within three days. In response to this scene, described in Kangaroo, Somers goes on to imagine mass extermination, though by now he is living in Oxfordshire, and it is not just the Cornish but all the watchers (he still feels ‘watched all the time’) and the authorities whom he has come to despise: ‘They are canaille, carrion-eating, filthy-mouthed canaille, like dead-man-devouring jackals. I wish to God I could kill them off, the masses of canaille.’70 Somers’s hatred for the masses intensifies  – it is no longer just directed to the Cornish – and he thereby continues to single himself out in a way that is characteristic of ‘paranoid modernism’. As David Trotter comments, ‘Through this insurgence of megalomania, paranoid symmetry adjusts the degree of fantasized grandeur to the degree of fantasized persecution’, enabling Somers to preserve himself from mass culture.71 Somers, then, like Lawrence, returns to London, like so many of the characters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. But rather than fleeing from a violent, irrational, and foreign land, a

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land possessed by the past – with its houses haunted by previous owners and rocks by the spirits of ancient savages – it seems Somers is forced away from it, torn from the rocks with which he came to identify, from his own ‘true’ self. Instead of the familiar or homely unfolding into the strange, foreign dangers from which one must flee, as in the narratives by Stoker, Conan Doyle, Rolt and Benson, here we have a reverse sense of the uncanny: the strange world has become so familiar that it is part of one’s deepest, unconscious being. Lawrence’s (and Butt’s) sense of the uncanny belongs to ‘that class of the frightening’, identified by Sigmund Freud, ‘which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.72 This is also a distinctly modernist move into the subjective mind: strangeness is not actually strange, existing out there in the world, but is only perceived as such; one must seek within oneself for the primitive elements lurking in the unconscious. In communion with the ‘savage vibrations’ of the ‘secret stones’, Somers’s ‘soul’ moves away from ‘intensive mental consciousness’, ‘back into the semi-dark, the half-conscious, the clair-obscur, where consciousness pulsed as a passional vibration, not as mind-knowledge’.73 In London and in Oxfordshire he continues to feel an anguished nostalgia for Cornwall, as though he has lost a part of himself, until his unconscious memory erupts into his conscious mind, itself like an igneous, granite black rock. It is only in Australia, where this whole episode is recalled, that the memories finally rise to the surface: Till now, he had always kept the memory at bay, afraid of it. Now it all came back, in a rush. It was like a volcanic eruption in his consciousness … deep in his unconsciousness had lain this accumulation of black fury and fear, like frenzied lava quiescent in his soul … Why should it suddenly erupt like white-hot lava, to set in hot black rock round the wound of his soul?74

The sedimentary rocks of England, the rocks that underlie the Downs and the cliffs of Dover, seem to contrast dramatically to the vibrating, erupting granite landscape of the Cornish moors situated on ‘the black huge cliffs’ of its north coast. Somers leaves south-east England, from Folkestone, by boat, and looks back at the cliffs: ‘England looked like a grey, dreary-grey coffin sinking in the sea behind, with her dead grey cliffs and the white, worn-out cloth of snow above.’75 England, Lawrence suggests, is repressed. Its layers upon layers of sedimentary

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rocks have formed an interminable process of burial, creating a grave under which all the fossilised primitive animals are forever frozen, while the supposedly civilized, evolved English masses above remain repressed. Cornwall’s igneous, erupted granite landscapes, in contrast, seem an embodiment of the primitive unconscious. Through the eruption of his unconscious, then, becoming rock-like himself, Somers can identify with the Cornish landscape. Across a range of Gothic and detective fiction and ghost stories, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, we have seen how the Cornish are depicted as primitive savages. Victorian imperialist stereotypes seem to survive well into the next century, and Cornwall continues to seem comparable with colonies overseas – or to hoard a foreign race within England – rather than to be simply an English county. In much of this fiction, English visitors feel unwelcome, and tend to flee Cornwall in terror, whereas Lawrence’s claims to the land involve the fantasy of excluding the Cornish themselves – to the extent that he wishes to empty Cornwall of the ‘foul’ Cornish. If Lawrence puts forward a form of raving English colonialism, in some respects he also mirrors the claims made by Cornish nationalists, as the next chapter will observe: in his identification with its stones and its spirits, and his desire to exclude others. Despite their differences, almost all the narratives we have looked at so far, from the work of local geologists and folklorists to English travel writers and novelists, have something in common, along with the nationalist writings discussed in my next chapter: they depict Cornwall and its rocks as different from England, as a distinct, haunted nation even, while it is at the same time part of the larger nation. We have seen how the tourist industry has invested in the idea of Cornwall as exotic, feeding into such depictions, but it did not of course pull this idea out of thin air. The industry could exploit the much older idea that Cornwall is Celtic and primitive, which goes back at least to the eighteenth century, and which the ‘Celtic Revival’ has also been keen to utilise. Stoker, Conan Doyle, Benson, Rolt and Lawrence, were all aware of tourist depictions of Cornwall, and possibly also of the Cornish Revival movement  – a movement that was gaining momentum in the period, reviving or creating traditions in support of local self-assertion – including the work of one of the foremost revivalists: the linguistic and historical scholar Henry Jenner.76

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Interest in Cornwall’s difference from England intensified after about 1900, as the texts spanning from Stoker’s novel of 1903 to Rolt’s story of 1948 indicate, with the development of the Cornish Revival along with the increase in tourism. As Philip Payton observes, there was an ‘alliance of sorts between the enthusiasts of the Cornish Celtic Revival and the purveyors of the rapidly developing Cornish tourist industry, each feeding off the other’s desire to create a highly differentiated post-industrial Cornwall’ – a post-industrial Cornwall in which the tourist industry and Revivalists paradoxically turned to the pre-industrial.77 The Cornish Revival movement – part of the wider ‘Celtic Revival’ in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany and Wales – emerged out of eighteenthand nineteenth-century antiquarianism and was developed by folklorists (such as Robert Hunt) and, later, by nationalist writers. In the early twentieth century Jenner played a key role in forming the first Cornish Revivalist organisation, Cowethas Kelto-Kernuak (the Cornish Celtic Society), and his studies of the Cornish language would later form the basis for nationalist attempts to revive it. A further wave of Revivalist activity began with the formation of the first ‘Old Cornwall Society’ at St Ives; by 1924 enough Societies had sprung up for a Federation to be formed, and its journal Old Cornwall was launched in 1925. My next chapter will continue to explore the ongoing construction of an old and mystical Cornwall in the second half of the twentieth century, moving on from the perspective of English visitors to focus on that of Celtic and New Age nationalists, who also conceive of rocks, even the land itself as alive, but who constructed a much more favourable, desirable image of the Cornish race.

Notes 1 The Great Western Railway’s publicity picked up on Cornwall’s folklore, for example, as the previous chapter noted; see The Cornish Riviera:  Our National Winter Health and Pleasure Resort, 2nd edn (London:  Great Western Railway Company, 1905; repr. by Kessinger Publishing, Montana, 2009), p. 26; and S. P. B. Mais, The Cornish Riviera (London: Great Western Railway Company, 1934), p. 3. Such publicity seems to continue as the magazine published by what is now called First Great Western refers to the ‘West Country’ as one of the most haunted areas of Europe; ‘the region is a hotbed of all things supernatural’. See

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Tristan Nicholls, ‘Ghost Stories’, Go to… Things To Do, Places to Go 7 (2008), 30–2. For the use of ghosts in Scottish tourism, see David Inglis and Mary Holmes, ‘Highland and other Haunts:  Ghosts in Scottish Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 30 (2003), 50–63. 2 Renée Bergland, The National Uncanny:  Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 2000); Warren Cariou, ‘Haunted Prairie: Aboriginal “Ghosts” and the Spectres of Settlement’, University of Toronto Quarterly 75:  2 (Spring 2006), 727–34. 3 Cariou, ‘Haunted Prairie’, pp. 727–8. 4 Influential critics of the idea of ‘Celtic’ peoples include Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992); Simon James, The Atlantic Celts:  Ancient People or Modern Invention? (British Museum Press, London, and University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1999). 5 See Bernard Deacon, ‘Is Cornwall an Internal Colony?’, in Cathal O’Luain (ed.), For a Celtic Future (Dublin:  Celtic League, 1983), pp.  259–60; Philip Payton, The Making of Modern Cornwall:  Historical Experience and the Persistence of ‘Difference’ (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1992), pp. 30–2. 6 For example see Bernard Deacon, who refers to how ‘The enthusiastic and dramatic, even heroic, participation of thousands of Cornish people in the movement to the frontiers of the “British world” in North America, Austalasia and South Africa, and elsewhere to South America, has caught the imagination of late twentieth-century Cornish historians’, in ‘ “We don’t travel much, only to South Africa’: Reconstructing Nineteenth-Century Cornish Migration Patterns’, Cornish Studies 15 (2007), 90–116 (91). For more about Cornish migration, in the same issue of Cornish Studies, see Charles Fahey, ‘From St Just to St Just Point:  Cornish Migration to Nineteenth-century Victoria’, 117–40; and Ronald M. James, ‘Home Away From Home: Cornish Immigrants in Ninteenth-century Nevada’, 141–63. 7 Chapman points out that the Scots also ‘had a deep and fruitful involvement in British imperialism’, The Celts, pp. 255–6. 8 L. T. C. Rolt, ‘Music Hath Charms’, in Sleep No More: Railway, Canal and Other Stories of the Supernatural (Glos:  Sutton, 1994), pp.  101–13 (p. 101). 9 Rolt, ‘Music Hath Charms’. Other examples of stories involving smuggling and wrecking include those collected in folklore, such as Robert Hunt, ‘The Pirate-Wrecker and the Death Ship’ and ‘The Smuggler’s Token’, in Popular Romances of the West of England (New  York and

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London:  Benjamin Bloom, 1968), pp.  359–62 and 367. The best-known story, published just over ten years before Rolt’s story, is probably Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn (first published in 1836). (Smuggling certainly has a long history in Cornwall, but there is no evidence that wrecking – the luring of ships onto rocks using lights supposed to resemble those of a lighthouse – ever took place.) 10 Rolt, ‘Music Hath Charms’, pp. 102 (‘Cornish Riviera Express’) and 103 (‘schoolboy thriller’). 11 Rolt, ‘Music Hath Charms’, p. 103. 12 Mais, Cornish Riviera, p. 7. 13 Rolt, ‘Music Hath Charms’, pp. 104–5. 14 Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (London:  Penguin, 2008), pp. 196, 199. 15 AnthonyVidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992), p. 17. For further discussions of the uncanny, the ghost story and property ownership, see Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp.  89–94 (Smith later also discusses Benson’s stories, pp.  127–132), and Geoffrey Gilbert, ‘The Origins of Modernism in the Haunted Properties of Literature’, in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 239–57. 16 Rolt, ‘Music Hath Charms’, p. 106. 17 Rolt, ‘Music Hath Charms’, p. 107. 18 John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London:  Sage, 2011), pp. 4–6. 19 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’, Sherlock Holmes and the Devil’s Foot:  Further Cases of the World’s Most Famous Detective (London:  Severn House, 1986), pp.  50–77 (p.  51); Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (London: Arrow Books, 1962), p. 202. 20 James Vernon, ‘Border Crossings:  Cornwall and the English (Imagi)nation’, in Geoffrey Cubit (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 153–72 (p. 163). 21 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1999), p. 55. 22 Rolt, ‘Music Hath Charms’, p. 103. 23 Wilkie Collins, Rambles Beyond Railways (London:  Westaway, 1948), p. 100; Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (London: Arrow Books, 1962), p.  202 (‘murmur … never ceased’); The Jewel of Seven Stars (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 241 (trembling rocks). 24 Collins, Rambles, p. 104. 25 Collins, Rambles, p. 108.

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26 Stories set in Sutherland, for example, include E.  F. Benson’s ‘Gavon’s Eve’, ‘The Shootings of Achnaleish’, and ‘Between the Lights’, in Richard Dalby (ed.), The Collected Stories of E.  F. Benson (London: Robinson, 1992), pp. 23–31, 55–67, 123–32. 27 E. F.  Benson, ‘Negotium Perambulans’, in Dalby (ed.), The Collected Stories of E. F. Benson, pp. 227–39 (p. 227). 28 Benson, ‘Negotium Perambulans’, p. 228. 29 Benson, ‘Expiation’, in Dalby (ed.), The Collected Stories of E. F. Benson, pp. 394–408 (pp. 395–6). 30 Benson, ‘Expiation’, p. 398. 31 Benson, ‘Expiation’, p. 405. 32 Benson, ‘Expiation’, p. 398. 33 Benson, ‘Expiation’, p. 407. 34 One of Benson’s cousins, Henry Sidgwick, was a founding member of the Society, and Benson shared an interest in the supernatural with his father, according to Brian Masters, The Life of E. F. Benson (London:  Chatto & Windus), pp.  16 and 84–5. Andrew Smith in Gothic Literature also notes that Benson, like Conan Doyle and other writers of the time, referred in some of his stories explicitly to spiritualism, though he is often satirical in his earlier work, such as ‘Mr. Tilly’s Seance’ (1922), (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 127–8. 35 See, for example, Shelley Trower, ‘Wires, Rays and Radio Waves’ (­chapter 3), in Senses of Vibration (New York and London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 73–93. 36 Paul A. Green, ‘The Stone Tape’, Culture Court (2001), www. culturecourt.com/Br.Paul/media/StoneTape.htm (accessed 22 December 2013); Dave Rolinson and Karen Devlin, ‘  “A New Wilderness”:  Memory and Language in the Television Science Fiction of Nigel Kneale’, Science Fiction Film and Television 1 (2008), 45–65 (57). 37 The ‘sensitive temperament’ is referred to in the story discussed above; for the ‘right wave-length’ see T. C. Lethbridge, Ghost and Ghoul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 3. Lethbridge frequently uses technological metaphors, another being ‘television pictures’ for ghosts, transmitted between the ‘projecting machine in one mind’ and the ‘receiving machine in another’, p.  10. He also had archaeological interests which are frequently evident in his work, as in his reported experiences of the Shiant Islands, on which geological phenomena of the cliffs look ‘like ruins of ancient temples’, pp. 12–13. Colin Wilson’s biographical ‘Foreward’ to The Essential T. C. Lethbridge notes Lethbridge’s interests in archaeology, and his fascination with

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our ability to play back ‘tape recordings’ in nature (London: Granada, 1982), p. 14. For a discussion of how prehistoric stones (including the Merry Maidens in Cornwall) can store past energies, see Lethbridge, The Essential T. C. Lethbridge, pp. 226–7. 38 Benson,‘The Temple’, in The Collected Stories of E. F. Benson, pp. 451–64 (p. 451). 39 Benson, ‘The Temple’, pp. 454–5. 40 Benson, ‘The Temple’, p. 455. 41 Benson, ‘The Temple’, p. 457. 42 Benson, ‘The Temple’, p. 458. 43 Benson, ‘The Temple’, p. 463. 44 Borlase, Observations on the Antiquities Historical and Monumental of the County of Cornwall (Oxford, 1754), p. 185. 45 Samantha Rayne notes that John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Devon and Cornwall refers to Borlase for example, describing ‘Druidic Circles’, in ‘Henry Jenner and the Celtic Revival in Cornwall’, PhD thesis (University of Exeter, 2011), pp. 137–8. 46 See Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, E. F.  Benson as He Was (Hastings: Lennard, 1988), pp. 18–20, 25–6, 38. 47 See Melissa Hardie, A Mere Interlude: Some Literary Visitors in Lyonesse (Penzance: Patten, 1992), pp. 63–6. 48 D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 68. 49 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 70. 50 Mais, Cornish Riviera, p. 7. 51 Doheny, ‘Seeking the Living Body of Reality: Women in Love and the social fabric’, in Melissa Hardie (ed.), A Mere Interlude, pp. 75–86 (p. 76). See also Philip Payton, D. H. Lawrence and Cornwall (Cornwall: Truran, 2009), pp. 5–13; Ella Westland,‘D. H. Lawrence in Cornwall: Dwelling in a Precarious Age’, Cultural Geographies 9 (2002), 266–85 (273). 52 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 69. 53 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 247. 54 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 248. 55 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 250. 56 See my discussion in Chapter 2 (the section entitled ‘Hunt’s poetry and its primitivism’). 57 Lawrence, Kangaroo, pp. 250–1. The ‘Tuatha De Danaan’ are the Irish spirits. 58 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 251. 59 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 263. 60 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 264. 61 Ella Westland examines the context for Lawrence’s ‘Edwardian romance’, involving its construction as Celtic and its promotion by tourist literature

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during a wartime when Englishness was once again being reinvented, in ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Cornwall: Dwelling in a Precarious Age’, Cultural Geographies 9 (2002), 266–85. 62 David Matless, ‘A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts’, Cultural Geographies 15 (2008), 335–57 (p. 335). 63 Matless, ‘A Geography of Ghosts’, 339. See also Westland, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Cornwall’, 271–2. 64 Matless, ‘A Geography of Ghosts’, 346. Matless also refers here to Ella Westland, Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place’ (Penzance: The Patten Press, 1997) and A. Hale, ‘Whose Celtic Cornwall? The Ethnic Cornish Meet Celtic Spirituality’, in David C. Harvey et al. (eds), Celtic Geographies, pp. 157–70; Westland, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Cornwall’. 65 Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country:  The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), p. 104. 66 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 264. 67 Quoted in Cecil Gray, Peter Warlock:  A  Memoir of Philips Heseltine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), p. 153. 68 Nathalie Blondel, The Journals of Mary Butts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 379 (diary entry for 29 January 1932). 69 Letter quoted in Payton, D. H. Lawrence, pp. 24–5; Letters… Quoted in Westland, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Cornwall’, p. 273. 70 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 277. 71 David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism:  Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 331. 72 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 17, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 219–52 (p. 220). For Matless’s reference to Freud’s uncanny in relation to Butts, see ‘A Geography of Ghosts’, p. 339. 73 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 264. 74 Lawrence, Kangaroo, pp. 286–8. 75 Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 286. 76 Conan Doyle corresponded with Jenner: see Rayne, ‘Henry Jenner’, pp.  38–9. Ella Westland also notes that the Cornish ‘colluded with outsider images to exploit tourism and appropriated Celticity for their own cultural and political ends’, especially ‘activists like Henry Jenner, L. C. Duncombe-Jewell and Robert Morton Nance’, in ‘D.H. Lawrence’s Cornwall’, 270. While Westland notes that the question as to whether Lawrence knew of such work remains a matter of speculation (270 and n. 283), Philip Payton has more recently claimed that

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Lawrence did at least come into contact with the work of ‘Mrs Henry Jenner’ and ‘was almost certainly aware of the activities’ of her husband, in D. H. Lawrence and Cornwall (Cornwall: Truran, 2009), p. 16. See also pp.  16–21. The lack of references, however, limits Payton’s evidence. 77 Philip Payton, ‘John Betjeman and the Holy Grail: One Man’s Celtic Quest’, Cornish Studies 15 (2007), 185–208 (p. 190).

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Living stones and the earth: dreams of belonging in Cornish nationalist and New Age environmental writing This chapter looks at tales of living, or at least moving stones  – especially those known as prehistoric monuments – and how these support regional or national identity, focusing on the period from the 1960s to the present. Prehistoric monuments are often not clearly separable from the land on which they are situated, partly because their construction is usually determined by its geology, as in Cornwall where they are almost invariably built out of granite, but also because it is not always easy or possible to distinguish what has been constructed by humans from natural formations.1 Because prehistoric monuments are, of course, widely understood to be very old, even as old as ground on which they stand, identification with them can underpin a sense of timeless, exclusive belonging. That concepts of nationhood are closely connected with the preservation of ancient monuments, along with changes in their interpretation, description, and imagination since the seventeenth century, has become increasingly clear in the work of critics, geographers and archaeologists such as Sam Smiles, Nuala Johnson and Yannis Hamilakis.2 Much of this work is concerned with how prehistoric stones have been used in attempts to root nations in antiquity, rather than to acknowledge their more recent construction. Hamilakis points out that the discipline of archaeology itself developed in Europe at a time ‘when the emerging nation-states were in need of proving their perceived antiquity with physical proofs’.3 Or, as Johnson puts it in her article about a National Heritage Park in Ireland, which displays recreated field monuments from the Mesolithic to the Norman period, ‘the park’s displays suggest that nationhood can be situated in the early antiquities of the island’; whereas historians generally locate the emergence of

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nationhood in recent centuries.4 By showing how Cornish nationalist writers deploy stones – and also ghosts – to assert a sense of timeless identity with the land, this chapter will contribute to the understanding of how monuments are used to root nations in an apparently immemorial past. The aliveness of stones, especially relatively indestructible stones like granite, seems to enable some people to feel they belong to the land and will continue to do so indefinitely, often through their ancestry.5 Stones are also described as coming alive in order to attack or expel others who are seen not to belong or to be enemies. In some stories, as will be seen, the ground itself is described as coming alive, and as teaming up with other supernatural forces and entities such as ghosts, in order to drive out visitors and ‘newcomers’ and to protect those who belong as natives. Rocks and race continue to be closely aligned, in other words, for which we can find historical background in the nineteenth-century association between the ‘primitive’ land and its people. Previous chapters have explored how the ‘primitive’ was often perceived as threatening, although it also continued to be romanticised, as a kind of authentic, creative unconscious force by D.  H. Lawrence, for example. While the previous two chapters have explored the perspective of visitors and their view of the Celts as primitive, like the savage rocks, this chapter will look at how some Cornish writers romanticise themselves as a primitive race, and as such as having special claims of belonging to and ownership of the land. Such claims to belong naturally to the land have increasingly taken on the stance of respecting, protecting and preserving the environment, and as such, in the face of growing ecological concerns, to have a certain moral authority, which this chapter will eventually question. David Matless has explored ‘forms of cultural authority claimed by the spectrally attuned’ in his study of the writings of Mary Butts, who in contrast to the writers considered here rejected Celticity and Cornishness, but who, like Lawrence as discussed in the previous chapter, similarly engaged with an apparently spiritual realm in order to authorise her claims to belong.6 Ghosts are located at specific places and landscapes (such as a room in a haunted house, a granite hilltop), and contact with them can thus affirm a sense of attachment or belonging to a place, while through their repeated return they also resist changes in time. Butts in high modernist style

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used classical anthropology to call up an ‘authentic’ natural world in opposition to an ‘artificial modern culture’,7 and while the writers to be considered in this chapter employ less elite, local folklore traditions, they similarly attempt to use selective cultural knowledge to uphold an opposition between supposedly primitive nature and modern culture and to violently exclude the seemingly ignorant foreigners or ‘aliens’. For Butts, much as for Lawrence, the Cornish are suspicious and ‘hate foreigners’ and are unable to engage meaningfully with the spirits of the place; for the Cornish writers to be considered here, an English person like Butts or Lawrence can never belong. But in seeking to exclude each other, both English and Cornish writers employ similar methodologies. The use of Cornwall’s ghosts takes place in the context of specific economic conditions. Following the decline of the mining industry, the tourist industry increasingly promoted Cornwall as a romantic and mystical place, as we have seen, while Cornish Revivalists similarly looked back to a pre-industrial Celtic Cornwall. Philip Payton has observed how some Revivalists aimed to facilitate a post-industrial economy based around tourism in the early twentieth century. He argues that while the success of the Revival within Cornwall was to begin with very limited, Revivalists did have some influence over tourist images  – not least because the author of The Cornish Riviera, S. P. B. Mais, sought their advice as part of the Great Western Railway’s marketing campaign.8 Since Malcolm Chapman’s argument that images of Celtic ‘Otherness’ have been externally constructed and imposed on the ‘Celtic’ periphery, much debate has centred on whether ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ views have predominated.9 Whether or not the tourist industry or the Cornish Revivalists came first, there is concordance in their twentieth-century images of Cornwall as a land of legend, and the Cornish as primitive and spiritual, rather than, as previously, modern and industrial.The Royal Geological Society among other Cornish institutions were ‘products of the scientific and literary flowering of Cornwall’s industrial era’, as Payton puts it, ‘powerful expressions of that Cornish identity that the Revivalists now proposed to supplant’.10 It is not just visitors who describe Cornish people as Celtic, then; this chapter will provide examples of Cornish writers who have come to perceive themselves as primitive, spiritual Celts – albeit far more favourably than how ‘outsiders’ have tended to portray them. No longer primitive savages, the Cornish are once

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again romanticised: they are in tune with the environment, superior in their spiritual sensitivities, at one with the Celtic land. Owing in part to the problems of a post-industrial, tourist-based economy, many Cornish people are at a material disadvantage in owning land and property, and this chapter examines attempts to instead claim a kind of spiritual possession.11 While the Cornish Revival helped to fuel this sense that the Cornish are especially spiritual, many of its protagonists became increasingly disillusioned with tourism as a way to help counter the problems of industrial decline, as tourism began to severely affect the ability of the Cornish to afford houses in Cornwall. Seasonal part-time employment in the service industry is often inadequate to allow Cornish people to buy property in a housing market that has become increasingly competitive owing to the numbers of tourists, second homeowners and other incomers attracted by a romanticised Cornwall, who make demands on the limited housing stock.12 In this economic context a politicised Cornish nationalist movement emerged out of the Revival, along with a sharpening of Cornish identity, often characterised by resentment at the advantages apparently possessed by the English over the suffering Cornish. An upsurge in Celtic nationalism in Scotland and Wales also gave impetus to the emergence of the Cornish nationalist movement. In the 1960s the Welsh political party Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalist Party won their first parliamentary seats, marking a period of growth in the strength of the nationalist parties which continued through to the next decade. In this context the Cornish pressure group Mebyon Kernow attempted to transform itself into a political party, gaining increased membership and seeking electoral impact in both local elections and general elections. Several candidates won seats in the local elections, and although the new party did not succeed in the general election (no candidates were voted into parliament), this move encouraged some interest within Cornwall in its potential as a Celtic nation.13 One further factor contributed to the growing understanding of Cornwall’s prehistoric stones as Celtic and spiritual in the 1960s and 1970s: the emergence of the ‘New Age’ movement. While the ‘nationalists’ and ‘mysticists’ are often distinct groups with very different aims, both the Cornish nationalist and New Age movements have fed into the conception of places like Cornwall as special, mystical, and separate from the apparently more mundane, rational

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England.The ‘Sixties’ had seen the flowering of new kinds of ‘alternative’ lifestyles and forms of spirituality, and the ‘Celtic nations’ were considered in this context as an alternative space from the conventionalities of England, where artistic freedom and spirituality could flourish.14 By the 1970s, participants in various forms of spiritual – often ‘Celtic’ – practices, were becoming aware of themselves, according to Wouter Hanegraff, as belonging to a New Age movement.15 Although some nationalists have tried to distinguish themselves from such mystical movements, both of these trends – a rising interest in Celtic spiritualities and an upsurge in Celtic nationalism – have tended to work together in the form of what could be described as a form of mystical ‘Celtic nationalism’.

‘A hill that lurked and loomed’ ‘Celtic’ writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often attempt to revive certain features of nineteenth-century folktales, such as their focus on tors and stone circles, on giants and ghosts, and also formal aspects such as shortness and straightforward plot structures. Stories from folklore collections like Robert Hunt’s are also sometimes reprinted in later publications. The earlier folktale collections are themselves seen as written echoes of even older oral traditions, so this practice of reprinting or of writing new stories with old ingredients is part of the attempt to promote the idea that Celtic traditions are essentially ancient, originating in the ancient lands of the Celts.The Cornish nationalist writer Donald R. Rawe has typically published many short stories in this vein, often involving Cornishness and the supernatural, included in collections including Denys Val Baker’s Haunted Cornwall (1973) and Rawe’s own Haunted Landscapes (1994).16 A story published in both of these collections, entitled ‘Night on Roughtor’, provides an interesting instance of the blurring of any distinction between various kinds of geological formations and monuments – all of which come to life, or at least appear to move. The inside cover of Haunted Landscapes presents Rawe as Cornish:  ‘DONALD R.  RAWE was born in 1930 in Padstow, of a very old Cornish family (the surname is the Cornish form of Ralph or Radulphus, and has not been Anglicised to Rowe)’.17 That Rawe’s ethnic or even racial (rather than civic) identity qualifies him as Cornish is a commonly held assumption, and we will see

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further instances of racial identification as Celtic later in this chapter. His antagonism towards ‘newcomers’ is also set out here, while Cornwall’s ancientness is emphasised, as Rawe goes on to explain that he hopes to continue to write his stories, to the annoyance and hindrance of bureaucrats, developers, big business … and city-oriented newcomers who do not understand life in Cornwall and the Westcountry. He is a firm believer in the Celtic and pre-Celtic traditions of South-West Britain (the ancient Kingdom of Dumnonia), which, if maintained and nurtured, will counterbalance the evils of greed and materialism now threatening us all.18

Rawe pits the very old and Cornish – including his ancestry and ‘Celtic and pre-Celtic traditions’  – against the new, the English and the urban. Like other Celtic Revivalists throughout the twentieth century, Rawe seeks to preserve and nurture the Celtic heart of Cornwall against the corrosive influence of England’s ‘cheap materialism’.19 This idea of using the ancient to counteract modern ‘evils … now threatening us all’ is an ongoing theme, which takes on an increasingly ecological dimension in the twenty-first century, as we will see. As Malcolm Chapman has put it, ‘the Celtic/ Anglo-Saxon opposition’ is one between ‘pure rural magic’ and ‘polluted urban industry’.20 It could of course be argued that Rawe’s opposition between the old and new, the ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, is a contradiction, as Celtic traditions have been invented relatively recently from outside those regions defined as Celtic, according to critics like Chapman.21 But this chapter is less concerned with attempting to establish exactly how fiction deviates from fact than in exploring how a selection of nationalist writers use living stones to elaborate fantasies of belonging and exclusion. In Rawe’s collection of stories, the opposition between the ancient and new, the Cornish and non-Cornish, provides the background to how some of the stories are about ‘newcomers’ to Cornwall, who are sceptical with regard to traditional tales of the supernatural, and who are finally driven away. ‘Night on Roughtor’ is about three young men who have been at university, who are visiting Cornwall and want to go on a camping trip on Bodmin Moor. They first stay at the house owned – but not usually lived in  – by the father of one of the

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men, McMahon (they refer to each other by their surnames). This group of men are thus immediately presented as privileged and wealthy, and they are staying in a second home; they are the kind of incomers often perceived as contributing to housing shortages in Cornwall. The ‘villa’ is looked after by Mrs Tregellas (a Cornish surname, like Rawe’s), who makes pasties, has a strong Cornish accent, is superstitious, and advises them not to go on the moors. They tell her that she is just being irrational with her primitive ‘animal instincts’22  – as is typical of the visitors’ perceptions of the Cornish that have been mentioned in previous ­chapters – but she continues to warn them against it: ‘all I can say is you’m all three of you furriners when it come to the point, and where none of our crowd ud set foot there after sundown you certainly never ought to’.23 In contrast to Rawe’s own identification as a Cornish author, McMahon’s ancestry is only partly Cornish, so he is classed as one among the group of ‘furriners’. His ancestral or racial identity is presented as the reason why he is not superstitious and will get into trouble with supernatural entities including Tregeagle, a ‘giant ghost’.24 McMahon responds to Mrs Tregellas by mocking the superstitious Cornish, and by referring to his own ancestry:  ‘ “Anyway you needn’t worry, Mrs Tregellas: my grandmother was Cornish, so I’m entitled to play the host and entertain friends, even on the holy of holies.” ’ But the narrator’s sinister comment suggests that this ancestry is not Cornish enough to protect him:  ‘McMahon’s father was half-Cornish, half-Irish. His mother was French. He called himself an Englishman.’25 So he ignores Mrs Tregellas’s advice and drives with his friends to the moor. A sense of the landscape as not simply inanimate matter but potentially living, and as very old or ancient, is presented when the three men first park the car. The narrator compares the landscape to a rather threatening, primitive creature (like the shark in Rolt’s story, or the ‘beast’ in Kangaroo, for example): ‘On the other side of the shallow valley was Roughtor, with its crest broken, jagged like the backbone of a skeleton saurian.’26 The Cornish housekeeper with her primitive ‘animal instincts’ thereby seems to be associated with the rocky landscape, and the connection between the Cornish race and its rocks is soon further developed. Shortly after they find a spot to camp, the nearby standing stones appear to have

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the potential to move. This disturbs McMahon, who is left alone while the others fetch the rest of their things from the car: Standing on the brow overlooking the precipitous west end, he could see vague stone pillars set in a circle immediately beneath. In daylight no doubt they would look mundane enough, but here in twilight their very vagueness seemed to promise life:  at any moment they might begin to shuffle and dance. A half-forgotten tale about maidens changed into stones for dancing on the Sabbath came back to him.27

West Country folklore in the sixteenth century enlisted stone circles in the new cause of sabbatarianism. Stone circles were described as revellers or sportspeople, who were petrified for enjoying these activities on a Sunday.28 This tale was attached to several monuments by the early eighteenth century, and folklorists including Robert Hunt, William Bottrell and M. A. Courtney continued to collect such tales in the late nineteenth century, which in turn continue to be reproduced and retold  – as in Collins’s Rambles (see Chapter 3) – to explain the origin of stones such as those named the ‘Merry Maidens’,29 to which Rawe is presumably referring in this story. The housekeeper’s warning that the men should not go on the moor after sundown seems to take in the moral of such tales, that visitors will encounter dangers at certain times, in this case from the Cornish stone maidens; the suggestion in Rawe’s tale is, of course, that the revellers might return to life, and the stones ‘might begin to shuffle and dance’. Further, it is not only the circle of stones that appear to McMahon to ‘promise life’, but, in the following paragraph, an entire hill: Westwards there was a white hill, a china claytip which by its incongruity attracted his attention. Perhaps it was a mile off, but he could not say because at every second it seemed to be at a different distance away. It was a hill without roots or foundations; a hill that lurked and loomed, having no fixed place for its being. He found it disturbingly easy to imagine it approaching, stealing nearer and nearer and then slipping away among the other tors, all fast losing their identities in the gloom.30

The distinction between the ancient stones and the much more recent pile of industrial waste (most of the clay tips were generated

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in the twentieth century when the industry thrived) appears literally here to blur. The crucial point is that it is not only stone circles that ‘promise life’ – the very land itself is described as though reacting against the ‘newcomer’ McMahon and his friends. Its movement refuses to allow them to settle for the night, and eventually drives them away altogether. Another moving stone that appears repeatedly in folktale collections is the Logan Stone, which, in the short story ‘Night on Roughtor’, after goblin-like ‘spriggans’ have chased the three friends back to their increasingly precarious tent, rocks frantically in the stormy wind:  ‘The Logan Stone oscillated yet more wildly, a gauge of the wind’s violence; clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk, like a mad thing’.31 Another Cornish legend is then wheeled out – the giant ghost, Tregeagle, cursed to empty a bottomless pool with a leaky shell forever, among other things, as punishment for depriving the rightful owner of his Cornish land  – terrifying the men further, before the movement of stones through the air, ‘flung by the gale’, causes the tent to collapse.32 The land itself thus seems to take on a life of its own, deploying goblins and a giant ghost against the non-Cornish visitors to enact a Cornish nationalist fantasy of destroying their property. (A more recent expression of such a fantasy could be the ‘Burn second homes’ slogan sprayed onto road signs, attributed to the Cornish nationalist group An Gof, which admires second-home burning in Wales.33) As an evil, unscrupulous landlord who corrupted the rightful ownership of land, it seems apt that it is the cursed Tregeagle who helps terrify the trespassing men into fleeing the moor. Not only does their temporary accommodation on the moors collapse; it is finally revealed that McMahon later inherited the property left to him by his father, but hardly ever visits Cornwall. He lives in London and travels abroad. The ‘Englishman’, as he was earlier described, has been driven out.

Storytelling stones, bones and energies Rawe’s fictional characters are clearly meant to be more than simply imaginative constructions; the author has created a kind of enemy against whom he can express his own violent fantasies, while asserting his sense of authentic belonging. In contrast to McMahon is of course the author himself, with his ‘very old Cornish family’ and his knowledge of old traditional tales. The

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nineteenth-century folklorist William Bottrell similarly described himself as ‘an Old Celt’, as do other contemporary collectors and storytellers. A repeated claim, often made in introductions to collections of short stories like this one, is that both the land and the stories, the stones and the storyteller’s ancestry, are very old or even ancient, and, essentially, Celtic. Denys Val Baker, for instance, in whose Haunted Cornwall Rawe’s ‘Night on Roughtor’ was first published, presents himself as a ‘Welshman and a fellow Celt’.34 As such he presents himself as especially ‘sensitised’ to the ‘subterranean link between Cornwall and its creativity’, this creativity somehow deriving from the ‘strange and compelling powers embedded in Cornwall’s granite body’.35 This is, of course, ‘a timeless land’, but any logical explanation is, Val Baker claims, impossible:  It is, apparently, a land beyond language as well as linear time.Val Baker often repeats himself both within single texts and between them, frequently asserting that Cornwall is different from England both geologically (as granite) and geographically (a peninsula), that he and the Cornish are Celtic, and that this endows him and his fellow Celts with a special kind of sensitivity and creativity.36 Further, he develops the parallels between the land and its people, both being ‘old’ and ‘withdrawn’, as in The Timeless Land (1973), for example: Granite forms the spine of Cornwall – granite is Cornwall, in so many ways. And this, too, is part of the strangeness of the county – part of the difference … Small wonder then, that against such background the Cornish people themselves should develop essentially as an isolated race, the past at their elbow continuously … The Cornish people themselves are like their land, an old and knowing race, withdrawn to strangers, living as much in the past as the present.37

Val Baker makes explicit here the identification between the Cornish rocks and race, an identification that we have traced back to nineteenth-century geology and folklore. He picks up on the tradition of describing the Cornish as a primitive or an ‘old’ race, developing the romanticised view of them rather than denigrating them as savages: they seem to have special sensitivities or understanding, they are ‘an old and knowing race’. Cornwall’s geology (its granite) is the foundation of it all (it ‘is Cornwall’), while the Cornish race belongs to the land to which it is likened. That

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Cornwall has a granite ‘spine’, recalling the granite ‘backbone’ of Roughtor in Rawe’s story, helps to make this a two-way identification: the land can be read as bodily or human-like, while the ‘people themselves are like their land’. It is not just that the granite land and the Celts are imagined to have some kind of close, special relationship, but that they are like each other and could even be part of each other. Accounts such as Val Baker’s regarding the essential sameness of the land and the Celts are a way of claiming that these people belong, that the land is inherently theirs, inseparable from their very selves. Humans are described as having the qualities of granite, and granite is characterised as bodily and human, or as having the capacity to speak or tell tales, much like the author himself, in Val Baker’s Haunted Cornwall: ‘I defy anyone to stand on some lonely hilltop, such as Trencrom or Brown Willy – especially on a moonlit night! – without a sense of awesome contact with the past. If those granite boulders could only speak – what strange tales would they tell? There is in fact an answer to that question. Granite boulders do speak, if you will only listen.’38 The capacity of the Celts to tell good tales, noted by folklorists like Bottrell as well as more recent storytellers, is here seen as a quality shared, or inspired by the stones. As a teller of ‘strange tales’ himself, the implication here is, of course, that Val Baker is a kind of spokesperson for Cornwall, the granite land itself. Collections of short stories like this one edited by Val Baker can be seen as a continuation in some respects of earlier, traditional folktales, which are, in turn, presented as a form of preservation of yet earlier, oral folktales. Both the earlier folktales and the more recent collections are attempts to defy forgetting or erosion, a defiance which granite seems to embody in its survival from the ancient past. They are attempts to revive and preserve an ancient historical period, when regions like Cornwall were independent nations with languages of their own, and when Celts told stories passed down from ancient ancestors, stories as old as the land itself.The survival of granite against the erosion of millions of years seems almost to defeat linear time, contributing to a sense of the collapse of the distinction between past and present. This sets the scene for other kinds of temporal transcendence, above all in the form of the ghosts which feature prominently in many of the stories here and in similar collections, like Donald Rawe’s Haunted Landscapes (featuring, for example, the giant ghost Tregeagle). It is

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not just the content of the stories that are ghostly; the storytellers and the stories themselves are presented as Celtic survivals from the ancient past, which continue to haunt the present. Like Rawe and Val Baker, Michael Williams, a Cornish folktale collector in the late-twentieth century, similarly presents himself as Celtic, and describes the land as bodily, stones as bones: ‘I am a Cornishman and proud of my nationality. There is a Celtic something in the bones of this land, in some of its people, too.’39 The implication again here is that through his ancient ancestry, a Cornishman like Williams is part of the very land. Like Val Baker, he gives authority to his work by suggesting that stones, or bones, might have their own tales to tell, even that he is a receptive kind of mediator for them. Writing about Avebury, he speculates: ‘Maybe the bones of this ancient landscape are not speechless – that is provided we are humble and receptive’.40 This landscape is a ghostly one, consisting of ancestral bones that seem to speak from the grave. The image of land as bones is again used to describe Cornwall in Daphne du Maurier’s reference for example to ‘Cornwall’s backbone, that high hinterland running from north to south, comprising Bodmin moor, the uplands of St. Breock, and the startling perimeter of the china-clay district’.41 Later, in Vanishing Cornwall, she describes Cornwall’s peninsulas as parts of a dangerous creature – as though going back even beyond human ancestors to the primitive animals from which the Cornish have semi-evolved  – with pinching, stabbing ‘claws’ and the ‘jaw’ of Mount’s Bay (the location similarly depicted as a dangerous creature in Conan Doyle’s and Rolt’s stories), a creature that protects itself against foreign invaders: Kirrier, ‘the high coast,’ forms the southern grip of Cornwall’s claw, its pincher probing the Channel at Lizard Point, while across the bay, in West Penwith, Gwennap Head stabs the Atlantic … In old days a ship under sail, caught in a sudden gale some miles offshore, could scarcely hope to avoid one or other of the pinching claws; and if the rocks at Lizard or Land’s End did not break her back, then she would be driven into the open jaw of Mount’s Bay.42

For du Maurier, who also supported Cornish nationalist principles, repeatedly emphasising the independence and uniqueness of Cornwall, its geological structure was crucial. Opposing herself,

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perhaps, to the foreign sailors, in Vanishing Cornwall she identified herself, with her ‘Breton forebears’, as sharing ‘a common ancestry’ with the Cornish and Irish, before moving on to the stones: Superstition flows in the blood of all three peoples. Rocks and stones, hills and valleys, bear the imprint of men who long ago buried their dead beneath great chambered tombs and worshipped the earth goddess. Nowhere else in England do these symbols of eastern ritual stand, but here in Cornwall the tombs are with us still. Great slabs of granite, weather-pitted, worn, with another mighty slab, tip-tilted, to form a roof; these were the burial places of priests, perhaps of queens … they stand as memorials to a forgotten way of life and a once-living cult.43

She goes on to suggest that these ‘memorials to a forgotten way of life’ enable her to remember, to transcend time, to connect with her ancestry: ‘The stones, like the natural granite cast up from the earth by nature, defy the centuries. To stand beside them … is to become, as it were, an astronaut in time. The present vanishes, centuries dissolve, the mocking course of history with all its triumphs and defeats is blotted out.’44 Such time travel, through the contemplation of rocks and stones, is an imaginary device often used by nineteenth-century geologists, as Ralph O’Connor has observed (discussed in Chapter 2). For the geologists, however, as for the fictional Knight in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (Chapter 3), it was their scientific expertise that enabled them to access the past, and for Robert Hunt it was his imaginative capacities as a poet-folklorist, whereas for du Maurier it is her racial qualification as Celtic, with her superstitious ‘blood’, that allows her to become ‘an astronaut in time’. Lawrence’s Kangaroo depicts Somers as similarly accessing the past, transcending time to become ghostly himself (Chapter  4), but his special relationship with the stones develops despite being un-Cornish and treated as a foreigner. By using his spiritual contact with the stones to stake out his claims to belong to the timeless land, Somers seems to compete against and to exclude the Cornish, while Cornish writers such as Rawe, Williams and du Maurier rule out the possibility that those who are not ancestrally or racially Celtic can make equal or greater claims to belong, to be as creative, or as spiritual – to be able connect with the ancient spirit of the land.

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Again in Williams’s writing ancient stones are seen as a spiritual link to one’s ancestors, even to a past life. In one of his accounts of his encounters with mystical and spiritual phenomena and people, called ‘Meeting a “Wise Woman” ’, he travels to Bodmin Moor to meet Joan Bettison, known as ‘a charmer’. They soon discover their shared Cornish–Breton ancestry, which is identified immediately with a prehistoric monument:  ‘Within minutes of meeting we were on the same wavelength:  not surprising really because we discovered we’re as Cornish as Lanyon Quoit [a burial chamber located near Penzance] or Dozmary Pool, though there’s some Breton blood in both our family trees.’45 To be as Cornish as the quoit or the pool is to have originated in prehistory, in the geological formation of Cornwall’s monuments and landscapes. As for du Maurier, the ancestry shared by Williams and Bettison, also described as ‘Celtic’, seems to provide them with special access to the long-distant past, to which ‘ancient stones’ provide the key. Like Lawrence, they perceive these stones as having a kind of energy which radiates outwards, and enters the body of the living person, but in contrast to Lawrence they believe that person should be Cornish or at least Celtic. Joan is reported as saying that ‘I believe too we Cornish can pick up the power from ancient stones’, and that when she touches a stone Celtic cross ‘I feel a link with the past go up my arm’.46 The author then goes on to relate a similar feeling of connection with the past earlier that day, and his language of ‘tingling’ recalls Lawrence’s sensations: I had visited the Hurlers [earlier mentioned by Collins:  like the ‘Merry Maidens’ these are named after those who enjoyed their Sunday activities, in this case the Cornish ‘national sport’47], and even though much of the landscape was cloaked in a grey mist I still felt their magic. Contact with these aged, mysterious stones, for me, is not only a communion with the old people, but I feel a sense of peace and power seeping through … Some people have suffered a tingling sensation, rather like a mild electric shock, when touching segments of a stone circle. I cannot make such a claim, but I have felt physically, mentally and spiritually better for a visit to the Hurlers.48

In contrast to how the ‘Merry Maidens’ ominously promise life in Rawe’s story, then, signalling the violent rising up of the living stones against the incomers, the ‘Celtic’ Williams feels a sense

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of communion with ‘the old people’. Instead of being physically injured and permanently scarred like the ‘Englishman’ McMahon, Williams feels energised by the stones; he claims to feel ‘physically, mentally and spiritually better for a visit to the Hurlers’. There is, in other words, a striking contrast between how the ‘English’ and ‘Celts’ are described in relation to the land: the former are rejected by it while the latter are likened to it, are part of and welcomed by it – apparently receiving its life giving energies.

A ‘bloody foreigner’/‘primeval woman’ Many other short stories similarly describe characters who are visitors or invaders, and who are driven out of the region, in contrast to characters who are presented as Celtic and thus as belonging. Five of the sixteen short stories collected in Val Baker’s Haunted Cornwall, for example, directly concern property, and its inheritance by ‘natives’ or loss to ‘outsiders’, who are caught up in supernatural mysteries, driven away or killed.49 ‘The Castle’, by M. E. Simpson, is one such story, narrated in first person by someone from Essex whose firm is looking to relocate in the West Country, and who therefore looks for a suitable property. This is difficult, not least because of resistance by the locals, whom he hears describing him as a ‘bloody foreigner’.50 The opposition is thereby set up between an outsider with his financial interests in Cornwall and the locals who attempt to prevent him from buying up property. After three weeks, his driver, a local, becomes friendlier and tells the narrator about the ruins of a castle, which he then visits, and buys at a very low price. The resistance from most of the locals, however, seems to be matched by that of Cornwall’s essential geological core. Granite is a central ingredient in the building, and its immobility and permanence over centuries begin to suggest its resistance to the changes that would be necessary to develop into the new base for the firm:  ‘each stair was of the natural granite shaped and placed into the walls of the tower and the bricks all seemed keyed into each other. There was no movement anywhere that had shaken them out of alignment in three hundred years’.51 The firm is anyway unimpressed with the building, so he remains the owner, and begins to have nightmares. His brain becomes a computer churning out profit calculations in the form of ‘masses

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of ticker tape’, in which he seems to become entangled, as does the friend he tells about it (one of the odder moments).The ticker tape seems to drag his friend into a cave in Cornwall where his head is severed and placed with many others on spikes. It turns out that the castle is haunted. In contrast to the materialistic outsider who is apparently obsessed with money, with his endless churning out of ‘profit calculations’, the superstitious locals, like the housekeeper in ‘Night on Roughtor’, turn out to be right: His driver ‘had heard tell that way back there were some pretty funny old stories about that old ruin I’d bought’, about smugglers who were eventually caught and killed, and their heads, we might assume, severed. The narrator asks: ‘Had the castle a spirit that rejected all I had been going to do?’52 He sells the castle. Again, then, the ‘foreigner’ is unable to retain ownership of the property, and supernatural forces from the past resist what Rawe has described as ‘bureaucrats, developers, big business’, punishing his friend like the criminal smugglers before him. Cornwall is typically depicted as a primitive, savage place, where the heads of foreigners are severed and placed on spikes, but in the Cornish stories the blame for such dangerous encounters is with the English visitors themselves, with their own materialistic greed and their propensity to wrongfully attempt to possess Cornish land and property. ‘The Castle’ contrasts sharply with another short story in the collection, ‘Inheritance’, by David Eames, in which the property owner, Elly, is presented as belonging rather than as an outsider owing to her ancestral or racial origins as Cornish. Although Elly lives in London at the opening of the story, she inherits a house from her Cornish grandmother, and thereby becomes its ‘rightful owner’. Like the castle depicted in Simpson’s story, this house is made out of granite – it is a ‘big, bleak granite house on Bodmin Moor’53– but granite plays a more prominent and active role in this story. The sense of closeness between the building and the Cornish character in this story is soon sexualised. Elly experiences a sense of belonging in the first days of dwelling in the house: ‘It was almost as if the house had been waiting for her to come, now enfolded her in its bleak embrace, like a lover.’54 She in turn loves the house, and increasingly confines herself within it. The house is described in some detail, as she walks through it and touches it, and when she later undresses, her naked body is described in what becomes an increasingly voyeuristic, rather odd and sadistic

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fantasy of female masochism. The closeness she feels with the granite seems to be a sexualised variation of the closeness felt by Celtic visitors to stone circles (as described above by Williams, for example), as the granite again has a kind of ‘power’ or ‘electric’ vibratory energy which connects or communicates with the spiritually attuned Celt: Yes, even the very granite, its presence everywhere, rock-like and impregnable, surrounding her – even that had a way of communication. Sometimes she delighted in walking slowly around the outside of the house, pressing her fingers along the gnarled, curling shape of the granite blocks … and through their stone shape she could feel mysterious vibrations, as of echoes, of past ages.This was particularly so of the huge granite lintel which stretched across the open fireplace in the big sitting room.55

Once again there is the idea that certain kinds of rocks and stones, especially those made of granite – with its resilience against erosion – can store or record past events, giving to the past a power to endure indefinitely. As the story progresses, Elly is presented as being increasingly able to connect with or ‘tune into’ this past, to transcend time. Like Williams and other Cornish writers it seems she does not even need to seek this connection, this sense of belonging; the stones actively seek to possess her. Those who ‘truly’ belong, these stories suggest, will have a mutual relationship with and will be inevitably accepted by the land and the monuments and buildings built out of it. It is not simply that Elly has inherited and now owns the house; the house also owns her. One night when the moon is full, Elly dances, strips naked, and seems to become possessed by ‘ageless, primeval woman’. The moon is apparently watching, waiting, and getting closer, and she ends up at the fireplace, by the granite lintel, dancing or moving in a rhythmical manner, which is presumably supposed to represent sexual orgasm. Even more bizarrely, while the moon is her lover, the granite is somehow involved: Above her head stretched the great wall of granite, impregnated with a thousand memories of moments such as this:  she could feel the weight suddenly pressing, bearing down, down … At last, uttering a wild savage scream, as an animal might have done centuries before, she turned, opening her dilated eyes, parting her red lips, baring her

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white teeth, offering herself up, her whole primitive being, to the weird, unearthly embrace of the devouring moonlight, to that final elemental consummation.56

In this story, Elly’s essential femaleness and nativeness is supposedly revealed. Her primitive, animal sexuality is apparently awakened by the Cornish granite to which she belongs. Following the moonlit night, a week later the police find ‘the woman dead with every sign of a sexual assault’, with a ‘strange look’ on her face that is ‘more like pleasure’ than pain – ‘why, you might almost say a kind of ecstasy’.57 Many feminists have critiqued the ways in which constructions of femininity are made to seem natural and irrefutable. Here, geology is used to make both female sexuality and Cornishness seem as naturally fixed and unchangeable as the ground on which we stand; in her relationship with granite, with the essence of Cornwall, she is timeless woman ‘uttering a wild savage scream, as an animal might have done centuries before’. Elly, as a Cornishwoman, is killed by granite, but she is imagined to belong to the house, to perhaps become part of its energies and to echo on through the ages, in contrast to McMahon and other successfully rejected incomers. Unlike the incomers’ terrifying and painful experiences, the violence inflicted upon Elly  – the penetration of her body by Cornwall’s granite being – is imagined to make her feel ultimate pleasure, as if she has found the very core of her Cornish womanhood. All these fantasies are clearly violent fantasies.The racial attitudes put forward by Rawe, du Maurier and others, are of Celtic superiority as especially creative and spiritual in contrast to the allegedly materialistic English, who deserve violent expulsion. Eames’s story extends such attitudes into the idea that a Cornish woman is not only especially spiritual but also especially sexual. In doing so his fantasy of female sexual pleasure involves a grotesque kind of rape scene in which passive woman enjoys being penetrated to death. While the racial idea of the English encourages fantasies of violent exclusion, the racial–sexual idea of the Cornish woman involves a violent kind of inclusion.

New Age eco-nationalism Du Maurier’s idea of ‘the earth goddess’, Williams’s feeling of connection with the healing energies of stones, and the various description of granite vibrations are, despite their differences, recognisable

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as characteristic of the kinds of spirituality grouped together as part of the ‘New Age’ movement. Participants in various forms of ‘alternative’ spiritual practices (including goddess worship, crystal healing, astrology, geomancy, dowsing) became aware of themselves in the 1970s as belonging to this unified though highly disparate movement. By the 1990s the most significant thing about New Age thinking was its correlations with popular science, as Steven Connor has observed,58 while the twenty-first century has seen it tighten its association with nature and environmental concerns. For Marion Bowman, while there is a widespread sense of damage to society and the environment, ‘there are those who feel sure that in the past our ancestors understood the symbiotic relationship of people and planet, were in tune with nature and each other, cherished the earth’.59 A trajectory could be traced from the Romantic understanding that megalithic stones were left behind by nature-worshipping Druids, which, as Ronald Hutton points out, played into a nationalist celebration of ‘wise and noble ancestors’,60 to more recent associations between stones, nature and nation. Contemporary eco-nationalism, as I will call it, presents a mixture of romanticised ancient religions, folklore and semi-scientific, New Age theories of phenomena such as earth energies,61 and tends to favour those aspects that conceive of earthly matter as animate. Cheryl Straffon, for example, another Cornish writer with nationalist views, reflects such a mixture of interests in her work, having edited and published a tri-annual magazine, Meyn Mamvro: Ancient Stones and Sacred Sites in Cornwall, since 1986, which includes articles about the earth goddess, earth energies and ley lines, along with folktales about petrified dancers and such like. (‘Meyn Mamvro’ is Cornish for ‘Stones of our Motherland’.) The first issue sets the scene by referring to the high concentration of ancient sites in Cornwall, and to the importance of respecting and protecting the environment, which is increasingly under threat from nuclear waste, and from landowners and speculators ‘who would turn our country into just another part of England’.62 A key point here is of course that Cornwall is not part of England, and its difference from England is rooted in the ancient sites, which thus need protecting. Further, like the authors discussed above, Straffon refers to her origins in Cornwall,63 and this helps to enable her spiritual connection with the stones.

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The concern with distinguishing Cornwall from England remains prominent in more recent editions of Meyn Mamvro. In particular, a piece entitled ‘How Celtic Is Cornwall?’ (2007) refers to the controversy over whether Cornwall can be viewed as a Celtic land that is separate from England, and claims that DNA research has now shown that ‘Cornwall is indeed a Celtic place’. People who could trace their Cornish lineage back several generations apparently tend to have a distinctive gene and features, which leads illogically to the racist suggestion that they are somehow more ‘special’ or native than other people: the Cornish after all are descended from the original inhabitants of Britain, those that built the megalithic sites, and first settled and farmed this land. The Cornish who come from Cornwall are the great-great grand-children of the earliest hunter-gatherers who first arrived here 10,000 years ago, and eventually settled down to become our Neolithic and Bronze Age ancestors.64

Straffon’s claim here that the Cornish are ‘our’ ancestors seems to assume that her readers see themselves as racially British, identifying nation with a kind of extended family lineage. If the Cornish ‘are the great-great grand-children of the earliest hunter-gatherers’, then Cornwall itself – the ‘motherland’ – is the original ancestor from whom these natives derived. All these ideas of a Cornish identity with its special connection to the granite land are based on ancestry, from Rawe’s ‘very old Cornish family’ to the fictional Elly’s Cornish grandmother and to Straffon’s ‘motherland’. Marion Bowman has pointed out that many people engaging with Celtic spirituality in recent decades ‘elect’ to be Celtic, rather than having the right kind of ancestry65 (as though having such ancestry means you cannot elect or choose to be but must be Celtic), but the various instances of ancestral and racial identification as Celtic indicate that there has been some ongoing expectation that Cornishness is derived from genealogical descent. We have already seen how nineteenth-century race theory defined the Cornish, and Celts more generally, as an ‘aboriginal’ British group. This idea of the Cornish as a primitive or pure race has circulated from influential nineteenth-century texts such as Ernest Renan’s The Poetry of the Celtic Races (1857) and John Beddoes’s The Races of Britain (1885) to Halford Mackinder’s Britain and the

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British Seas (1902) and also more recent work from the Cornish Celtic Revival to eco-nationalism. Genealogical descent from the ancient Britons was crucial to Henry Jenner’s claims, for example, for the Celtic nationality of the Cornish, and a recent survey by Joanie Willett found that people in Cornwall continue to link contemporary Cornishness ‘primarily to genealogy and perceptions of Cornish descent’.66 As Samantha Rayne has observed, ‘That such feelings of nationalism today are based on descent and not language, religion, class or any other indicators that Jenner himself found to be secondary is a testimony to the strength and resilience of his vision’,67 although it also seems characteristic of much more widespread forms of racial nationalism. Rayne also observes how Jenner turned derogatory perceptions of the Cornish race as primitive savages around so that a Cornish identity became more desirable: ‘in a reversal of nineteenth-century stereotypes, to be Celtic was to be superior to being Anglo-Saxon’.68 The notion that the Cornish, among other Celts, are most native to Britain  – defining Britishness in terms of racial purity  – also finds its way into Cornish studies. Charles Thomas, an archaeologist, Cornish nationalist and the first professor of Cornish studies, in his Celtic Britain (1986) describes immigration – from Roman times to much more recent history – as a threat to English identity, defining identity in racial terms. The Cornish, in contrast, are unproblematically British. Protesting against how the word ‘English’ is often used to convey the meaning ‘British’, while people in Wales, Scotland, Cornwall and the Isle of Man ‘would not dream’ of calling themselves English but identify themselves as Welsh, Scottish, Cornish and Manx, he writes: The English, heaven knows, should find enough problems in defining their own identity without seeking to extend it to other peoples’. They were early enriched by Scandinavian immigrants, then by Normans and other varieties of Frenchmen, and more recently by significant Flemish, Jewish, Italian, Polish and Chinese infusions. Even the English language proves to be dualistic and inconsistent.69

Thomas goes on to discuss how, in contrast to the English language, the survival of Celtic languages against Roman invasions makes the Welsh and other Celts the most British, claiming that ‘all those in Britain are British, but some are more British than

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others’.70 Thomas is careful not to claim directly that the Cornish are a purely native, isolated race, but he implies as much in his emphasis on the opposition between the English and Cornish (among other ‘Celts’), and in his move from immigration and its ‘infusions’ into the English people and their language, to Cornish as a ‘pure’ language. In his inaugural lecture as professor of Cornish studies, ‘The Importance of Being Cornish in Cornwall’ (1973), Thomas also, like Straffon, defends Cornwall’s environment. Thomas sets up the opposition between the Cornish, who should protect the environment, and tourists among other incomers who pose the main threat to it. In this lecture Thomas acknowledges that the Cornish people do not constitute ‘some isolated racial stock’, having long been ‘open to settlement’, but he defines ‘Cornishness’ as dependent on both parents being born in Cornwall along with oneself. ‘By even such minimal standards’, he continues, ‘the true Cornish in Cornwall are now slightly in the minority’.71 He also explains his view that being born in Cornwall cannot be enough to make anyone Cornish, as this criteria ‘would cover a Congo pygmy or a Chinaman who happened to be born here; if a cat has kittens in the oven this doesn’t make them into pasties’.72 Thomas’s is clearly not a civic nationalism but an ethnic nationalism, which in its emphasis on family history shares a concern with ancestry that is common to racial thinking.73 It is the tourist industry – which has reached ‘nightmare proportions’ – along with the retired people who move into Cornwall, and the ‘overspill populations’ from the Midlands, that Thomas considers the most destructive to Cornwall, causing damage to its environment, as well as the inflated house prices that are driving the Cornish out of their own homes.74 The economic context of low wages and high unemployment along with house prices is set out here, and it is precisely this context that continues to be of great concern within Cornish studies.75 The worst problem, though, for Thomas, is the environment:  ‘The basic problem of the tourist trade  – which, let us face it, the vast majority of the people of Cornwall dislike intensely, and regard as a very poor substitute for a permanent industrial provision – is that it poses such a terrifying threat to the physical environment.’76 This sentence points to a contradiction, highlighting the incoherence of such an environmentalist–nationalist position in its opposition to tourism: the alternative of ‘industrial provision’ has caused far greater

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destruction to the environment.77 (It is also hard to see how the threat to the environment is ‘such a terrifying’ one, now that people are accustomed to the understanding of a global environmental crisis, while Thomas is talking about the building of roads and such like in terms of their impact on the local landscape.) His lecture is given in the context of what he describes as a ‘strong environmental movement’  – a movement that has taken on a variety of manifestations since the 1950s, from conservationist attempts to preserve ancient monuments and landscapes to spiritualist preoccupations with ley lines and earth goddesses.78 Thomas’s orientation in this lecture is conservationist, while Straffon’s spans across this range from monument preservation to Celtic mysticism. Although Thomas argues that the Cornish should protect his nation’s environment from the non-Cornish incomers, it is Straffon whose Cornishness gives her an apparently spiritual connection with that environment. For Straffon, along with the allegedly ancient Celtic DNA of the Cornish people, the Celtic earth goddess has survived in Cornwall – contributing to its special distinctiveness – and it is the Goddess that has become an increasing focus in her work since the 1990s. As well as the occasional item in Meyn Mamvro from 1991 onwards she has written and published booklets entitled Pagan Cornwall:  Land of the Goddess (1993; second edition 2012), The Earth Goddess: Celtic and Pagan Legacy of the Landscape (1997) and Daughters of the Earth: Goddess Wisdom for a Modern Age (2007), and in 2001 began and has since continued to maintain the online annual magazine Goddess Alive.79 The view of Cornwall as separate from England, and the land as ‘alive’, frequently features in these publications, as in the first paragraph of the preface of Pagan Cornwall: Land of the Goddess, for example: From one end of Cornwall to another I  have journeyed, always aware of the special separate quality of the land. For each individual person there will be different reasons why Cornwall is so special and different, but for me it is because I can feel the ancient ways and the sacred land still alive in a way I  feel nowhere else. Those ancient ways and that sacred land take me to the heart of the mystery known as The Goddess, a spiritual essence who was once revered, loved and acknowledged in this land, and whose ways lingered on here perhaps later than many other places.80

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Much like Williams and others discussed in the previous section, Straffon claims here to have a special sensitivity to and connection with her land: she is ‘always aware’ of its special, spiritual quality that separates it from England; she can ‘feel the ancient ways and the sacred land still alive’ as she feels nowhere else. As a living land, it is one with which she can identify. Straffon goes on in the following paragraph to claim that Cornwall is the land of the Goddess, and that the land and its people are her children.The Goddess is the ‘life-giving and sustaining force of the universe’. In other words, it seems, Cornwall – ‘my country’, not county – is the centre of just about everything: Many books have been written on ancient Cornwall, but for me they have generally lacked the insight that the land and its peoples was [or were], and in many ways still is [are], the children of the life-giving and sustaining force of the universe, known to our Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Celtic ancestors as The Goddess. This book then is my small attempt to reclaim her again, to find her rightful place in the land that is hers … always it was the awareness of her presence in my country and in my heart that led me on, and will, I hope, lead you on to find her again in the pages of this book and in Cornwall herself – land of the Goddess.81

Straffon is not, of course, the only New Age spiritualist whose interest in ‘the Goddess’ has grown since the 1970s, and Cornwall is not the only place to be especially associated with ‘Her’.82 Straffon herself notes in the introduction to her most recent Goddess book that the last two decades have seen a revival in Goddess spirituality, indicated by an increase in the number of books and magazines about it and ‘the Goddess Conferences, Festivals and Events’.83 While Straffon has focused largely on Cornwall, the environmentalist James Lovelock has developed the idea of the earth goddess in its most global form, both in terms of readership and application. Widely reviewed and debated, Lovelock’s use of the earth goddess Gaia to describe his theory of the earth as a living organism was accepted first of all only within the New Age movement, but has become increasingly acceptable to ‘sensible scientists’, according to the foreword to The Revenge of Gaia.84 This chapter will say more about Lovelock’s work shortly, as the potential of the Goddess for global environmental thinking is, despite the local focus of Straffon’s

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Pagan Cornwall, indicated in its introduction, written by Monica Sjöö, who, like many of the other writers discussed so far, seems to identify with the living land, or ‘Earth’ – experiencing ‘her great pain and grief ’: I knew that Earth is our living and creating Mother and I experienced vividly her great pain and grief and the danger all biological life now faces at this time. Patriarchal genetic engineers and nuclear physicists, and the Western-led ‘New World Order’ they work for, could annihilate all life as we know it. We must now dream alive the past and future and we must return to the Mother if we want to live.85

The connection between ecology and feminism is strong, partly because both can be seen to have developed in the 1970s and to have promoted critiques of science and technology. Further, habitual associations between Nature and Woman have at times led to the view of both as dominated and otherwise damaged by patriarchal and imperialist forms of oppression. For Carolyn Merchant it is a specifically female and living earth that has given way to the scientific view of nature:  ‘the image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth at its center gave way to a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstituted as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans’.86 Some ‘radical ecofeminists’ maintain oppositions between nature and science, spirituality and reason, and women and men, which have been criticised for appearing, as Greg Garrard puts it, ‘to present us with a mirror-image of patriarchal constructions of femininity that is just as limited and limiting’.87 Such a critique may be applied to the story about Elly, ‘Inheritance’, which by associating woman with nature and spirituality, presents her as a creature whose ultimate fulfilment is in the orgasmic pleasure of being penetrated to death by a lump of granite. Kate Soper connects the imagination of nature as woman with nationalism and the family. She observes that women have been devalued through their naturalisation, and nature through its representation as female, and goes on to consider the nation-state as sexualised. ‘The idea of the motherland’, Soper argues, ‘invokes nationality in its supposedly eternal territorial fixity as land or earth, as ‘natural’ precondition and spatial background to its historical and

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cultural existence’ (as was seen in the Introduction).88 This serves to disguise how the nation has actually been constructed relatively recently, and also to present the oppression of women and the gender division of labour as ‘natural’.89 Cornwall, to return to the imagination of this particular ‘nation’, in Straffon’s publications is clearly sexualised in this way as eternal woman, or mother.The role of woman here seems to be naturally divided from the ‘Patriarchal genetic engineers and nuclear physicists’, who are in opposition to both the motherland and mother earth. Straffon’s most recent work, Daughters of the Earth:  Goddess Wisdom for a Modern Age, appears to take a leap out of the prehistoric nation of Cornwall to engage with contemporary and global environmental issues, referring explicitly to Lovelock’s work: ‘This complex dynamic of life of [or on] earth has been maintained by Mother Earth Herself, what James Lovelock has called ‘the Gaia principle’.This principle maintains that the Earth’s biosphere works as a single living organism, able to respond to changes in the climate and eco-systems and makes adjustments accordingly.’90 Despite the focus on the global, Lovelock, like Straffon, also seems to associate the goddess with south-west Britain, where he lives. He explains that he moved to Devon (the neighbouring county to Cornwall) because it was one of the few places with ‘good countryside’ left, and that ‘in my mind these last remaining areas of countryside were the face of Gaia’ (about to be ‘sacrificed’ to wind turbines).91 An emphasis on locality is compatible with the understanding of an interconnected global ecosystem, as individual action can have global effects – a concept that has caught on with the slogan ‘think global, act local’.92 That nationalist groups, including the political parties Mebyon Kernow and Plaid Cymru, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have tended to support the principles of the Green Party also makes manifest a sense of connection between local (or national) and global environmental issues.93 Thomas’s involvement with Mebyon Kernow, as one of its instigators and first members, along with his interest in the local environment indicates how the broader environmental concerns could have grown out of an earlier, more confined focus. As Jane I. Dawson observes, in her study of anti-nuclear and nationalist activism in the former Soviet Union, ‘Because environmental movements stress the protection of land, territory, or a group

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of people, there is a natural affinity between environmental and national goals.’94 In Dawson’s study, poorly constructed and operated nuclear power stations across the former USSR are ‘portrayed as powerful threats to the survival of a people or nation’, so that the mobilization of national identity has in some cases benefited anti-nuclear activism.95 Although the case of Cornwall is, of course, very different, not least in the severity of the environmental threats, Thomas attempts to mobilise the Cornish to protect their environment from the ‘terrifying threat’ posed to the land and its people by tourists. Straffon’s publications refer to wider threats to mother earth as a whole, including from nuclear power, but she also, like Thomas, imagines a natural, ancestral connection between the land and its people, between the motherland and its children, and her own sense of spiritual connection with her nation is opposed to the patriarchal threats to the environment. According to Graham Harvey, Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis is ‘considered a justification of far more than Lovelock intended’ among Goddess-feminists and other pagans (who, as he observes, typically engage with animist and pantheist beliefs, both of which see nature as in some way conscious), being used not only to describe the self-regulation of living processes, but the earth’s consciousness as a living planet.96 The introduction to Straffon’s Pagan Cornwall alludes to such consciousness in describing ‘her great pain and grief ’ (see above). Lovelock himself seems to acknowledge and to appreciate the relation between the New Age and ‘Gaia’, however, saying that although when he first began to use the word he did not expect the New Age to take the goddess myth up again, and although this contributed to the resistance of scientists, ‘the New Agers were more prescient than the scientists. We now see that the great Earth system, Gaia, behaves like the other mythic goddesses … she acts as a mother who is nurturing but ruthlessly cruel towards transgressors, even when they are her progeny’.97 Straffon conceives in this way of Gaia as a nurturing mother, but in her emphasis on claiming her own identity as the goddess’s child, along with the land of Cornwall, she does not seem to make imaginable that such a mother could be as cruel to her children as to anyone else. There is a contradiction within some New Age, apparently global environmental thinking about the future. It is not simply that environmental causes may be used unjustifiably within eco-nationalism

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to support claims that nations are natural; that natives, through their ancestors or race, belong to the ancient motherland (or fatherland) – mystifying nature and retarding practical action in the process98  – but that nationalist ideology and current perceptions of environmental crisis are opposed. Whereas eco-nationalism uses ‘nature’ to promote, borrowing Soper’s words, ‘fictitious conceptions of national and tribal identity that have been all too destructive in their actual effect’,99 Lovelock uses Gaia as a metaphor for an earth that has absolutely no regard for nations, and that will expel humans – however native – if, or when, necessary for its survival. Part of the problem, according to Lovelock, is that ‘we care more about our national tribe than anything else … We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth’.100 Lovelock’s non-nationalist and non-human-centred view of the world might even encompass the notion that prehistoric monuments or rocks are living. But they would be living because they are part of the earth, not Cornwall. The vision of the whole earth as living could be seen alternatively as a kind of super-nationalism, an extension of the sense of national belonging to encompass the entirety of our planet.Timothy Morton sees the Romantic idea of holism, developed by Lovelock and others, as ‘a major ecological ideology’, which also ‘constitutes the “feel” of nationalism  – “we” are interconnected in a whole greater than the sum of its parts’.101 Such a feeling of interconnectedness is described in the many accounts provided by Straffon of contact with the earth goddess, in womb-like caves and other stony surroundings. A member of a group of women provides an account in Daughters of the Earth of a goddess ritual by the sea in Cornwall, for instance: ‘I stand before time in a place which is not a place, in time out of time, on a day not a day. Sacred space, feet firmly rooted in wet earth or firm cold granite, soft sparkly water, elemental place, timeless, wild and beautiful as the Goddess herself. She comes to me, this ancient deity, called, summoned. She is within me, I am Her, She is me.’102 The fantasy is of feeling part of something timeless and global if not universal, of identifying with, or even becoming, a powerful entity that extends back into the distant past and forwards into the future, that extends beyond the limits of any one nation, and that determines the fate of all. Lovelock’s work emphasises, however,

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that the greater whole that is the earth will not hesitate to expel humans. Lovelock has become progressively more critical of many Green ideas of sustainability, and seems now to view the idea of living in harmony with nature as a regressive and dangerous fantasy – we need to get out of nature, to find technical and not spiritual solutions.103 Previous chapters have observed the identification between ‘primitive’ rocks and race that emerged in the nineteenth century, and traced its development through ghostly properties and landscapes in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter has looked at how the relationship between a land and its natives developed further in the Cornish nationalist imagination in the second half of the twentieth century, moving on from visitors’ fears and fantasies of exclusion and belonging to examine how some self-identified Celts have formulated their own claims to belong in opposition to outsiders. For writers like Rawe, du Maurier, Williams and Straffon, Cornwall is a nation apart from England, and a race of natives most especially belong to it. These Cornish nationalist writers identify and connect spiritually with the land as a moving, or living being – from its dancing stone circles and its energies to Cornwall as part of the life of the earth mother goddess – while tourists and other incomers tend to be excluded. No longer primitive savages, the Cornish Revival helped to revive a romantic sense of the Cornish as spiritually attuned Celts, sensitive to nature and their land in a way that others apparently cannot be. The growing environmental movement is used to endow the special abilities of the Cornish to connect with the land with a certain moral superiority over the English incomers and ‘patriarchal’ violators, although Lovelock’s understanding of the living earth is opposed to nationalism. The next chapter explores a form of resistance to nationalist fantasies of belonging to or identification with the land, and another type of rock, which is related to granite but is much softer, and whiter:  clay. In contrast to the writers considered in previous chapters who describe the land as ‘primitive’ or even timeless, Jack Clemo describes it as constantly changing and rejects certain notions of Celticity. As even such a hard substance as granitic feldspar is subject to chemical alteration, transforming it into a very different kind of material  – one that is mined in vast quantities and shipped away to other countries, transforming the landscape

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in the process – the ground on which nationalist fantasies rest is inherently unstable. In contrast to the writers considered in this chapter who describe the land as having human characteristics, as living, as female, and as welcoming and nurturing those races who belong, Clemo describes the land as unnatural, alien and extremely unstable.

Notes 1 Many commentators have observed this difficulty, as, for example, where Neal Ascherson describes how ‘the difference between natural stone formations – “living rock” – and old masonry had not been at all obvious to me’, in Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland (London: Granta, 2002), p. 1. 2 Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity:  Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, CT and London:  Yale University Press, 1994); Nuala Johnson, ‘Framing the Past: Time, Space and the Politics of Heritage Tourism in Ireland’, Political Geography 18 (1999), 187–207; Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins:  Antiquity, Archaeology, and the National Imagination in Greece (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007). See also, for broader discussions of ruins, poetry and “Britishness”, Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins:  Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 3 Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins, p. 14. 4 Johnson, ‘Framing the Past’, 190. 5 For further observations of how identities are bound up with ancient stones within Cornish archaeological writing see Nicholas Johnson, ‘Introduction’ to Robin Payne, The Romance of the Stones (Fowey:  Alexander Associates, 1999), p.  vi; Caradoc Peters, The Archaeology of Cornwall: The Foundations of our Society (Fowey: Cornwall Editions, 2005). 6 David Matless, ‘A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts’, Cultural Geographies 15 (2008), 335–57 (335). 7 Matless, ‘A Geography of Ghosts’, 340. 8 Philip Payton, ‘Paralysis and Revival:  The Reconstruction of Celtic-Catholic Cornwall 1890–1945’, in Ella Westland, Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place (Penzance: Patten Press, 1997), pp. 25–39. 9 Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1992). 10 Payton, ‘Paralysis and Revival’, p. 32. 11 Along with Matless’s essay, an essay by Michael Mayerfeld Bell is very pertinent to my study in its discussion of how ghosts help constitute

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our feelings of belonging and not belonging in specific places, ‘The Ghosts of Place’, Theory and Society 26 (1997), 813–36. 12 Cornish studies, which originated in the Revival movement, have been concerned with this economic situation from the beginning: for example see the inaugural lecture by Charles Thomas, first Professor of Cornish Studies, ‘The Importance of Being Cornish in Cornwall’ (Institute of Cornish Studies, 1973), and a more recent publication by the most recent Professor of Cornish Studies, Philip Payton (ed.), Introduction and Chapter 1, ‘Post-War Cornwall: A Suitable Case for Treatment?’, in Cornwall Since the War:  The Contemporary History of a European Region (Redruth: Institute of Cornish Studies, 1993), pp. 1–21. 13 For a discussion of the context of Mebyon Kernow and its development, see Bernard Deacon, Dick Cole and Garry Tregidga, Mebyon Kernow and Cornish Nationalism (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2003). 14 For a commentary see Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: Construction of a Myth (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 219ff. 15 Wouter Hanegraff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 17. 16 Denys Val Baker, Haunted Cornwall (Devon: Heritage, 1973), pp. 73–88; Donald Rawe, Haunted Landscapes (Truro: Lodenek, 1994), pp. 72–89. 17 Rawe, Haunted Landscapes, inside cover. 18 Rawe, Haunted Landscapes. 19 See James Vernon, ‘Border Crossings:  Cornwall and the English [Imagi]nation’, in Geoffrey Cubit (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 166. 20 Chapman, The Celts, p. 252. 21 Chapman, The Celts; John Collis, The Celts:  Origins, Myths and Inventions (Stroud:  Tempus, 2003); Leslie Jones, ‘Stone Circles and Tables Round: Representing the Early Celts in Film and Television’, in Amy Hale and Philip Payton (eds), New Directions in Celtic Studies (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000), pp. 30–51. 22 Donald Rawe, ‘Night on Roughtor’, in Val Baker, Haunted Cornwall, pp. 72–89 (p. 74). 23 Rawe, ‘Night on Roughtor’, p. 75. 24 Rawe, ‘Night on Roughtor’, p. 85. The tale of Tregeagle is retold in many folklore collections, and will be discussed further below. See, for example, Robert Hunt, ‘Romances of Tregeagle’, in Popular Romances of the West of England (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1916), pp. 132–45. 25 Hunt, ‘Romances of Tregeagle’, p.75. 26 Hunt, ‘Romances of Tregeagle’, p. 77.

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27 Hunt, ‘Romances of Tregeagle’, p. 78. 28 Ronald Hutton, ‘Megaliths and Memory’, in Joanne Parker (ed.), Written on Stone:  The cultural reception of British prehistoric monuments (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 10–22. 29 See, for example, M. A. Courtney, Cornish Feasts and Folklore (1890); repr. as Folklore & Legends of Cornwall (Exeter:  Cornwall Books, 1989), p.  77; J. A. Brooks (ed.), Cornish Ghosts and Legends compiled from William Bottrell’s Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (Norwick:  Jarrold Colour Publications, 1981), pp. 131–2; Jennifer Westwood, Gothic Cornwall (Princes Risborough, Bucks:  Shire Publications, 1992), p.  39; Cheryl Straffon, Pagan Cornwall:  Land of the Goddess (Penzance: Meyn Mamvro, 1993), pp. 27–8; John Michell, Prehistoric Sites in Cornwall (Salisbury: Wessex Books, 2003), pp. 24–5; Paul Newman, Haunted Cornwall (Stroud:  Tempus, 2005), p.  27. Richard Hayman explains that this set of stones was actually erected to commemorate the victory of the Saxon King Athelstan against the Cornish King Hywel in about AD 930, Riddles in Stone: Myths, Archaeology and the Ancient Britons (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 12. 30 Rawe, ‘Night on Roughtor’, p. 78. 31 Rawe, ‘Night on Roughtor’, p. 84. For the Logan Stone in folklore see, for example, Courtney, Folklore & Legends, p. 68; and for more on spriggans see Courtney, p. 126; Hayman, Riddles in Stone, p. 14. 32 Rawe, ‘Night on Roughtor’, p. 86. 33 As discussed, with some economic context, by Michael White, ‘Cornish nasties’, Guardian (14 June 2007)  www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2007/jun/14/cornishnasties (accessed 7 April 2014). 34 Denys Val Baker does this in many of his books, including The Spirit of Cornwall (London: W. H., 1980), p. vii. 35 Val Baker, The Spirit of Cornwall, pp. vii–viii. 36 Along with The Spirit of Cornwall, examples include Haunted Cornwall and The Timeless Land, which will be discussed further shortly. He also edited ten issues of the Cornish Review (1949 to 1952 and relaunched in the late 1960s) which further articulated such claims. 37 Denys Val Baker, The Timeless Land:  The Creative Spirit in Cornwall (Bath: Adams & Dart, 1973), pp. 6, 7. 38 Denys Val Baker, ‘Introduction’, Haunted Cornwall (Devon: Heritage, 1973), pp. 8 and 9. 39 Michael Williams, Supernatural in Cornwall (Bodmin:  Bossiney, 1974), p. 2. 40 Michael Williams, Supernatural in the West (Bodmin:  Bossiney, 1996), p. 75.

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41 Du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall (Harmonsdworth:  Penguin, 1972), p. 9. 42 Du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall, p. 70. 43 Du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall, pp. 12–13. 44 Du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall, p. 13. 45 Michael Williams, Superstition and Folklore (Bodmin: Bossiney Books, 1982), p. 80. 46 Williams, Superstition, pp. 81–2. 47 For example Courtney, Folklore & Legends, p. 21; Westwood, Gothick Cornwall, p. 30. 48 Williams, Superstition, p. 83. 49 Further examples include A. L. Rowse’s ‘The Stone that Liked Company’, in West Country Stories (London:  Macmillan, 1945), pp.  11–17, in which a Scottish-looking young lad in Cornwall encounters a stone which haunts him, and discovers that a couple from London built his house and that the stone killed their little girl. See also Rawe’s Haunted Landscapes. 50 M. E. Simpson, ‘The Castle’, in Val Baker, Haunted Cornwall, pp. 89–96 (p. 90). 51 Simpson, ‘The Castle’, p. 91. 52 Simpson, ‘The Castle’, p. 95. 53 Eames, ‘Inheritance’, in Val Baker, Haunted Cornwall, pp. 40–9 (p. 40). 54 Eames, ‘Inheritance’, p. 42. 55 Eames, ‘Inheritance’, p. 45. 56 Eames, ‘Inheritance’, p. 49. 57 Eames, ‘Inheritance’. 58 Steven Connor, ‘Weird Science’ (2000) www.stevenconnor.com/ weirdscience/ (accessed 27 March 2008). 59 Marion Bowman,‘Contemporary Celtic Spirituality’, in Amy Hale and Philip Payton (eds), New Directions in Celtic Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), pp.  69–91 (p.  71). Hanegraff considers how ecological concerns are particularly prominent in ‘neopaganism’, viewed as part of the New Age movement, New Age Religion and Western Culture, p. 76. 60 Hutton, ‘Megaliths and Memory’, p. 15; also see Smiles, The Image of Antiquity. 61 For other examples of eco-nationalism, in addition to those that follow, and which specifically incorporate pagan religions, folklore, earth energies and attention to global environmental crisis, see work by Paul Devereux, including Earth Memory:  The Holistic Earth Mysteries Approach to Decoding Ancient Sacred Sites (London, New York, Toronto

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and Sydney: Quantum, 1991). Though it takes on distinct characteristics in the 1970s, as mentioned in the opening section of this chapter, the New Age movement can be traced back further through to nineteenth-century spiritualism and earlier. For consideration of ‘energies’ in the nineteenth century, see, for example, Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002); Anthony Enns, ‘Psychic Radio: Sound Technologies, Ether Bodies and Spiritual Vibrations’, in Shelley Trower (ed.), special issue ‘Vibratory Movements’, The Senses and Society 3 (2008), 137–152; Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York: Continuum, 2012), especially ­chapter 3. 62 Cheryl Straffon, Meyn Mamvro (Penzance: Meyn Mamvro, 1986), p. 1. 63 Straffon, Meyn Mamvro, p. 18. 64 Straffon, Meyn Mamvro, p. 23. 65 Bowman, ‘Contemporary Celtic Spirituality’, p. 70; Marion Bowman, ‘Cardiac Celts:  Images of the Celts in Contemporary British Paganism’, in Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman (eds), Paganism Today (London: Thorsons, 1996), pp. 242–51. 66 Joanie Willett, ‘Cornish Identity:  Vague Notion of Social Fact?’, in Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies 16 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), 183–205 (183). Willett’s work and the question of Cornish identity and genealogy is discussed further in the Conclusion. 67 Samantha Rayne, ‘Henry Jenner and the Celtic Revival in Cornwall’ (PhD thesis: University of Exeter, 2011), p. 205. 68 Rayne, ‘Henry Jenner’, p. 53. 69 Charles Thomas, Celtic Britain (London:  Thames & Hudson, 1997), p. 13. 70 Thomas, Celtic Britain, p. 14. 71 Thomas, ‘The Importance’, pp. 11–12. 72 Thomas, ‘The Importance’, p. 12. 73 For a discussion of how the boundaries tend to be blurred between ethnicity and race in so far as ethnicity stresses descent, see Thomas Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism:  Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto, 2010), pp. 7 and 88. Ethnic and civic nationalism, and race, will be discussed further in the Conclusion. 74 Thomas, ‘The Importance’, p.  15 (‘nightmare proportions’); p.  11 (retired people); p. 18 (‘overspill populations’). 75 See, for example, Payton, The Making of Modern Cornwall. 76 Thomas, ‘The Importance’, p. 16. 77 See, for example, Shelley Trower, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Regional Writing and Oral History, from China Clay to Eden’, in Place,Writing, and Voice

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in Oral History (New  York:  Palgrave, 2011), pp.  1–19, 87–105. The next, final chapter of this book also discusses the impact of the mining industry on the environment. 78 Trower,‘Introduction’, p. 17. David Matless’s Landscapes and Englishness observes the evolution of environmentalism from preservationist and organicist activities into ley lines and earth energy in the final chapter (London: Reaktion, 1998), p. 281. 79 Cheryl Straffon, Pagan Cornwall: Land of the Goddess (Penzance: Meyn Mamvro, 1993); The Earth Goddess:  Celtic and Pagan Legacy of the Landscape (Blandford, 1997); Daughters of the Earth: Goddess wisdom for a modern age (Hants: O Books, 2007); Goddess Alive www.goddessalive. co.uk/index.php/contents-listings (accessed 9 December 2013). 80 Straffon, Land of the Goddess, p. 4. 81 Straffon, Land of the Goddess. 82 Glastonbury is another obvious location, and its association with the Goddess is observed by Marion Bowman, ‘More of the Same? Christianity, Vernacular Religion and Alternative Spirituality in Glastonbury’, in Steven Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman (eds), Beyond New Age:  Exploring Alternative Spirituality (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 83–104. For more on the feminist goddess movement further afield see Wouter Hanegraff, New Age Religion, p. 88; Lawrence E. Joseph, Gaia: The Growth of An Idea (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 236ff. 83 Straffon, Daughters of the Earth, p. 1. 84 James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Penguin, 2007), p. xiv. 85 Straffon, Land of the Goddess, p. 7. 86 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, 1990), p. xvi. 87 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (Oxon and New  York:  Routledge, 2005), p. 24. 88 Kate Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human (Oxford UK & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 106. 89 Soper, What Is Nature?, pp. 110–11. 90 Straffon, Daughters of the Earth, p. 209. 91 Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, p. 193. 92 Lovelock refers to the relationship between local action in The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 235–6. For the coinage and use of the motto ‘think globally, act locally’ by Friends of the Earth see the press release, ‘FOE mourns death of founder’ (2000) www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_ releases/1107obit (accessed 10 April 2014).

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93 For coverage of an election deal between the Green Party and Mebyon Kernow see ‘Historic election deal between Cornish party and Greens’ (2004) www.greenparty.org.uk/news/1301 (accessed 31 March 2008). For the more general environmental aims of Mebyon Kernow and Plaid Cymru see ‘Mebyon Kernow  – Environment’ (2007) www. mebyonkernow.org/?q=policies_environment and ‘A Sustainable Wales’ www.plaidcymru.org/content.php?nID=164;lID=1 (consulted 31 March 2008). 94 Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism:  Anti-nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 24. 95 Dawson, Eco-Nationalism. 96 Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (London: Hurst & Co., 2005), p. 87. 97 Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, p.  188. For an account of how Lovelock’s first book on Gaia, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), helped to generate an ‘industry’ of New Age books, and even a new ‘religion’, see Lawrence E. Joseph, Gaia: The Growth of An Idea, pp.  63–73. For further reflection of Lovelock’s work in relation to the New Age movement see Hanegraff, New Age Religion, pp. 155–8. 98 Soper’s views on the limits of religious and spiritual approaches to ecology can be applied to the cases of Cornish nationalism, in What Is Nature?, pp. 274–8. 99 Soper, What Is Nature?, p. 250. 100 Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, p. 5. 101 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature:  Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA and London:  Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 101. 102 Straffon, Daughters of the Earth, p. 191. 103 James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia and The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (London: Penguin, 2009).

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6

Clayscapes: decomposed granite in Jack Clemo’s anti-nationalist writing Clayscapes Granite is known to be an especially durable rock. Because it is felt to be such a ‘primitive’, even immortal rock, it is used to support ideas of Celtic regions and nations as ancient and different from England, as part of an underlying shared geology, which contrasts with the softer rocks of south-east Britain. It is associated with the oldest traditions, with the most ‘primitive’ races, as we have seen. Like all rocks, however, granite is subject to weathering. Granite can be sculpted by wind and rain into boulders and plains. Fractures and veins can be deepened. Surface roughness usually increases over time, as some of its elements – quartz crystals and large potassium feldspars  – are more resistant to erosion by the action of air and water, and hence stand out. Granite breaks down into individual grains of gravel and sand. Its chemical composition can be altered. It is mined. Chapter 3 considered how cliffs, as part of the changing, eroding, and at times even quaking coastline, were a locus of national instability.The borders of the nation figure as vulnerable spaces that become physically dislocated, invaded and even replaced by foreign territories. The qualities of granite that are so revered in the work of geologists and folklorists, nationalists and New Age spiritualists – its resilience and ability to resist outsiders and so on – may also be undermined by its transformation into such forms as clay. Clay is usually formed from the chemical weathering of granite, a group of processes that includes hydrolysis. This is probably the most widespread and important process, which involves the reaction of a mineral with water, resulting in changed compounds. One

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of the main clay minerals resulting from this process is kaolinite. The alteration of granite into clay minerals can also be caused by interaction between rock and hot fluids in the early stages of the formation of granite intrusions, but while there has been much debate as to whether the kaolin deposits in south-west England have their origin in the early formation of granite or in its weathering, it now seems certain that the much longer process of weathering at least plays a role in the decomposition of granite into clay (a process termed ‘kaolinisation’).1 Beyond the work of geologists, literary accounts of the formation of clay in Cornwall describe it as a product of the long process of decomposition. In Vanishing Cornwall, Daphne du Maurier quotes from a nineteenth-century guide, emphasising the contrast between hard granite and soft clay, to explain that ‘China clay is a species of moist granite – that is, the rock once so firm and tenacious has been reduced by decomposition into a soft adhesive substance, not unlike mortar’.2 That clay is a transformed form of granite is more recently described by Tim Smit in Eden: ‘There is a granite backbone that runs from Dartmoor in the east to Land’s End in the far west. Granite decomposes into very fine particles of china clay alongside hard gritty sands called mica and quartz.’3 Smit goes on to describe the clay industry as extremely destructive of the environment, which could be taken to further undermine any sense of this ‘Celtic’, granite region as stable or secure. It is not just that the granite itself is transformed and weakened over time, but that the activity of mining further transforms the landscape. It is seen to damage or even destroy the natural environment to the extent that it becomes unrecognisable. The mid-Cornwall area dominated by the clay industry is often overlooked or criticised, while Cornwall’s granite landscapes are widely romanticised, which may in part be owing to the desire for the ‘timeless’, for a stability that the clay area is felt to threaten. The clay landscape does not readily fit into ideas of Cornwall as a spiritually Celtic, harmoniously natural and ancient place. It also differs from other mining landscapes, which have characterised Cornwall as distinctive from England since at least the late eighteenth century (as discussed in Chapter 1), and which have become part of Cornwall’s heritage, of triumphant narratives of historical success and wealth and industrial prowess. Since the decline of the copper and tin mining industries in the second half of the nineteenth

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century, and the shift in Cornwall’s economic base towards tourism and other service industries, mining heritage has itself become increasingly important as a tourist attraction and also to Cornish identity. As Hilary Orange has observed, since the 1970s Cornwall began to take part in the industrial heritage business, and ‘industrial sites now matter to the ongoing Cornish Revival movement’, to help shape contemporary perceptions of Cornishness as, once again, ‘industrial Celts’.The silhouette of the Cornish engine house is now ‘adopted within the canon of nationalist Cornish symbols’.4 Like prehistoric monuments, used in attempts to root the nation in the ancient past, industrial ruins can become part of national history, as well as lucrative tourist attractions, but the remains of the clay industry do not figure so prominently, if at all in this way.5 As clay mining in Cornwall only began to decline seriously in the 1990s, its industrial remains still dominate the landscape only partially covered by foliage, unlike most of the tin and copper mining areas over which plants have since grown. Unlike tin and copper mining, which takes place at least partly underground, the extraction of clay takes place on the surface and leaves huge exposed pits and tips – often strikingly white. Certain elements of kaolinised granite, including the quartz crystals, do not decompose and so have to be separated out from the clay and deposited as waste, forming tips sometimes almost as big as the pits from which it is taken, some spanning two kilometres across.6 Thus much of mid-Cornwall is seen as a damaged, ‘scarred’ environment, unsuitable for those harmonious relations between the Celts and the land discussed in the previous chapter. This unsuitability may also be owing to the fact that clay mining seems to involve breaking up and sending the granite land itself away to other parts of the world. Tin and copper mining also result in the break-up of land, but here it is not the granite itself that is sent elsewhere but the metals (formed when granite intruded those millions of years ago, but crucially not part of the granite itself). Clay mining seems to emphasise the unsustainability of the mining industry more generally; an industrial Celtic identity that revels in its success can be maintained at its best only at the expense of selling the very foundation of Cornwall itself. Like most of the visitor guidebooks, the New Age books that focus on Cornwall do not usually feature the industrial clay area, and where they do they tend to describe it as unnatural and less

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spiritual than other areas of Cornwall.7 In The Sun and the Serpent, the dowsers and ley line followers Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst refer briefly to the clay area, first describing the ‘unnatural lunar landscape’ as ‘raped unceremoniously of its mineral content’, in stark contrast to surrounding countryside and the ‘sacred site’ of Resugga Castle.8 Once they have entered the clay area, they write that ‘everything seemed bleached a ghostly pallor by the fine white dust that covered the landscape’.9 Here, ghostliness is of course not meant to allude to a spiritual condition of afterlife, but to the sickly, deathly unhealthiness of the environment that is ‘bleached’ by clay. They go on to say that followers of the St. Michael Line found that it ‘meandered through a shattered land, ripped apart with its unprofitable residues dumped in great pyramids as memorials to a ruthless god’.10 The ley line has apparently survived the onslaught, but clearly the clay region is not seen as spiritual or magical in the same way as the rest of Cornwall. Where it is described as magical, and even as beautiful, the clay region is at the same time described as otherworldly or foreign, as though not part of Cornwall. In Vanishing Cornwall, du Maurier pays exceptional attention to the clayscape, considering the perspective of the visitor, the ‘layman’ or ‘casual wanderer’, who is witness to ‘the strange, almost fantastic beauty of the landscape, where spoil-heaps of waste matter shaped like pyramids point to the sky, great quarries formed about their base descending into pits filled with water, icy green like arctic pools’.11 So although du Maurier spent most of her life in Cornwall, she represents this particular locality as unfamiliar, as ‘fantastic’ and foreign, describing the shape of the tips as ‘like pyramids’ and the water in the pits as ‘like arctic pools’. This locality it seems is not quite part of Cornwall, but distinct, separate, a world of its own: a kind of polar Egypt of the mind. Du Maurier is unusual in seeing the clay tips as a kind of monument to be admired, but the paradox remains that they are formed out of the very land of Cornwall, ‘the rocky soil itself ’, yet are foreign or alien: These clay-heaps, with their attendant lakes and disused quarries, have the same grandeur as tin mines in decay but in a wilder and more magical sense, for they are not sentinels of stone or brick constructed to house engines but mountains formed out of the rocky

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soil itself, and the pools, man-made, are augmented by water seeping from underground sources and by the winter rains.12

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A couple of paragraphs later du Maurier describes the landscape as ‘lunar’, and finally otherworldly: A stranger set down upon this spot today, or closer still amongst the slag and shale, white hills on either side of him, would think himself a thousand miles from Cornwall, in the canyons of Colorado, perhaps, or the volcanic craters on the moon. Sense of orientation goes awry … and there seems no way out, no means of escape from this fantastic world … [T]‌he clay-worker will continue to blast and excavate, the wanderer to stare in fascination upon this strange white world of pyramid and pool.13

Du Maurier recognises a crucial difference here between the perspective of the clay-worker and the visitor. As I have argued elsewhere, while clay-workers earn a living from the land, visitors and writers and film-makers tend to dwell on the landscape as evidence of the destructive impact of the clay industry on the environment, or to present it as strangely beautiful and otherworldly (further examples include the Doctor Who episode ‘Colony in Space’ (1971) in which the clayscape features as the planet Uxarieus).14 This chapter engages most closely with the novels and poetry of Jack Clemo, whose contrasting view of the landscape is partly due to his own family’s involvement in the clay industry and the fact that he lived most of his life in the area.15 Clemo held ambivalent views of the landscape as strange but also familiar, as extremely unstable and damaged but also spiritual and beautiful. He saw the clay industry as destructive of the environment, but unlike eco-nationalists was opposed to certain notions of Celticity and Cornishness. He considered himself to be a Calvinist mystic, and developed a set of religious views which contributed to his individual sense of the landscape as a moving, ghostly, even living, rather than inanimate thing. Clemo’s descriptions of the landscape differ from but also in some ways resemble those of writers considered in earlier chapters. Like many of the mysticists discussed above (from Lawrence onwards), Clemo claims a special kind of relationship and right to a spiritualised landscape  – which his heroic characters, crucially,

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both resemble and haunt  – and which poses a threat to English strangers. Clemo was writing from the 1930s to the 1980s, when the clay industry was still active and the local environment in flux, however, so this is a constantly changing rather than a fixed, timeless landscape. It is with their focus on the ever-changing and unnatural clayscape, then, that Clemo’s novels provide an alternative to nationalist ideals of belonging, possession and inheritance. These ideals also tend to dominate the numerous romance novels set in ‘Celtic’ regions, typically in non-industrial locations such as moors, or in the post-industrial, ‘heritagised’ landscapes of tin and copper mines  – all featuring granite. In the romance novels, the male heroes are usually wealthy property owners, whose land has belonged to the family for countless generations, whereas Clemo’s working-class heroes have a sense of belonging to the land that is neither permanent nor economic.

Clemo Unlike timeless granite, the land is constantly shifting; it seems extremely unstable in Clemo’s world. Clay pits and tips seem endlessly to expand, swallowing up and burying footpaths, buildings and fields. His autobiography explains that the house of his paternal grandparents was buried under a clay-tip, while his mother’s premarital home has since disappeared into a pit, along with more fields, trees, and moorland.16 The view is described as ‘uniformly harsh’, making you feel ‘stranded and menaced by the curving wall of white precipices’, and nature’s hold is ‘precarious’, yet the landscape has a kind of beauty: All round the ripening crops of summer and the ploughed fields of the darker months, was a hostile world of grey beauty, majestic as the land in its contours and more profound in its significance to the sensitive mind. It was a landscape of purgation in which the soil was thrown into tanks and kilns, and it brought to the human spirit more poignantly than anything in the peaceful countryside the sense of insecurity, the sudden pounce of the destroyer. There were no rhythms about it, no recurrences; only a pitiless finality in every change. Buildings were frequently altered or removed, familiar nooks and hollows overrun by the sprawling refuse; paths that had been used for years by lovers as well as workmen were obliterated

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by dynamite in a moment. Nature might promise further instalments of the glory of Spring, but the clayworks told a different tale that was truer to human life.17

What is so striking is that Clemo describes the landscape as hostile, menacing and damaged, and at the same time as having a certain ‘beauty’ and majesty, with ‘profound … significance’ and poignancy. The ‘ripening crops of summer and the ploughed fields’ do not interest him; the industrial landscape tells a different tale from that told by ‘Nature’, a tale that is ‘truer to human life’. In contrast to the long tradition spanning from Romantic poets to writers informed by the environmental movement today, Clemo does not value ‘Nature’. Clemo saw Nature, like such elaborate places and performances of worship as ‘ornate cathedrals’ and ‘oratorios’, as an illusory form of interference between himself and God.18 As a reflection of humankind’s fallen condition, Nature can, however, be purged by the mechanical ravages of the clay industry. In the early stages of his rejection of organized religion, when he first refused to attend chapel (aged twenty-three), Clemo developed a more conventional, pantheist view of a divine power diffused through the universe, but claims that even this sense of God differed from Romantic pantheism, which located such divinity in Nature: ‘It was not that I felt any Shelleyan or Wordsworthian rapture in Nature – that was still beyond my temperamental range; but I could not recognize the chapel God in the Power that had restored my sight’ (Clemo had lost his sight, and was to do so again, but for a time seemed to recover). He spent Sundays walking through the industrial landscape, in which he sensed the presence of a God who, in contrast to the chapel God, ‘had become to me more cloudy, diffused, a vague Spirit of the universe’.19 Instead of finding God in picturesque natural scenes, or in cathedrals or churches, Clemo describes Christ’s footsteps in mud, his blood as rust. His sense of divinity in the industrial landscape is expressed in his poem ‘Christ in the Clay-Pit’: Why should I find Him here And not in a church, nor yet Where Nature heaves a breast like Olivet Against the stars? I peer Upon His footsteps in this quarried mud;

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I see His Blood In rusty stains on pit-props, waggon-frames Bristling with nails, not leaves. There were no leaves Upon His chosen Tree, No parasitic flowering over shames Of Eden’s primal infidelity.20

Critics have focused on Clemo’s poetry, and see this poem as one of his most successful pieces of writing. His renunciation of Nature and his vision of Christ in a clay-pit are seen as a strikingly original reaction against Romantic ideals and religious conventions.21 The title of his autobiography, Confession of a Rebel, provides a further indication of the multiple layers of his apparent ‘rebellion’ against religious, regional, literary and scholarly conventions.22 Clemo can also be seen to react against Celtic nationalism. His autobiography sets out his rejection of the ‘Cornish Celtic Movement’, largely as a result of its focus on the past, on ancestry and ancient legends and customs. In contrast to the sense of granite as having a supernatural timelessness, Clemo senses the moving, ever-changing, fragile landscape as spiritual. Christ’s footsteps are found in the formlessness of ‘quarried mud’ and his blood in the decay that is rust. It is not just picturesque nature, cathedrals and churches that Clemo rejects, but the museum-like institutions attempting to secure Celticity as timeless. Following his account of the Cornish language as foreign to himself and to ‘all modern Cornish people’, he goes so far as to resort briefly to his previously rejected pantheist sense of Nature in preference to such an antiquated Celticity: The entire absence in me of a pure historical sense also hastened the collapse of my Celtic sympathies. My mysticism, veering between Christianity and pantheism, could find no stimulation in a museum atmosphere. It demanded warmth, light, passion, a stream of living consciousness pouring newly through the flowers of a present season, breaking in from the universe but not from the past. When my true faith was freed it made short work of any lingering antiquarian kinks.23

Clemo’s sense of God is more spatial than temporal. He looks outwards at the present, ever-changing (usually industrial) landscape for inspiration, rather than back in time for some sense of continuity or immortality.

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The antithesis between Clemo’s clayscapes and the Celtic movement seems to work both ways. The Celtic revivalist group the Cornish Gorseth has not held any of its annual ceremonies, which commenced in 1928, in the clay district, with the exception of two which were held on its outskirts at Roche Rock24  – an unusual geological feature which bears no resemblance to the nearby clayscapes. Like clay, Roche Rock is formed out of an altered form of granite, but in this case it is granite that has undergone the process of ‘tourmalisation’ (whereby original elements of granite are replaced by tourmaline, a process thought to have been effected by boron-rich gases).25 Roche Rock originated as an offshoot (or ‘apophysis’) from a larger intrusion of granite, and continues to stand out prominently because tourmaline and quartz are both tough minerals, resistant to erosion. So in contrast to the surrounding clay landscape, which has undergone huge changes, Roche Rock appears to be relatively stable  – even primitive. It thus fits into the more conservative and romanticised idea of Cornwall as one among the Celtic granite nations. Roche Rock, like the other locations where Gorseth ceremonies are held (which include prehistoric monuments), is strongly associated with myths and the supernatural.26 In an article for the Fortean Times, local writer Loic Rich describes some of the ‘myths and spooky stories’ surrounding the rock, going so far as to refer to it as a kind of ‘geological ghost’. It may be frightening, or even sinister, Rich proposes, because of the ‘timelessness of geology and legend’.27 Again and again Clemo’s poetry describes his preference for the industrial landscape over picturesque or timeless nature, but my next section will turn to his novels, which have received even less attention by critics, and which also describe the industrial landscape as a special, spiritual location. In his novels, the narrative shifts from the first-person to the third; instead of the authorial narrator it is the singular male heroic characters who have the special, spiritual relation to the shifting landscape. His autobiography makes clear that in many respects the lives and views of these characters closely resemble his own. One of the things both his autobiography and novels highlight is his self-perception as unique, as different from, and often in conflict with the other, less central characters (absent in most of his poetry) in his special relation to the clay world. Clemo formulates claims of belonging and ownership, like many ‘Celts’, but, like Lawrence (as observed in Chapter 4), does

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not locate these claims in a shared Cornishness. His novel The Clay Kiln specifically mentions one of the Gorseth ceremonies held at Roche Rock, from which the central character Joel Kruse separates himself. Marvran, for whom Joel has feelings but who sees herself as superior, describes the ceremony as ‘boring, just jabber in Cornish, a foreign language to us moderns’.28 She goes on to describe Joel’s isolation and apparent sense of belonging, as he was sitting, she says disparagingly, ‘ “All by himself glowering at the crowd as if he was the spirit of the place – a very insulted spirit, by the look of him.” ’29

Heroes The Shadowed Bed opens with a collapsed clay dump. Even the old dumps, left to settle, are shifting and unstable: The dump was an old one, abandoned years ago and now deeply fissured, but yesterday’s rainstorm had broken its peak, two hundred feet up; several tons of sand had been swept down through the gullies and poured over the low hedge into the village lane. Some of it had fanned out into the gutter farthest from the dump, but coneshaped mounds still remained on the nearer side awaiting the arrival of lorries to remove them.30

Shortly afterwards, the hero Joe Gool is introduced as someone who is not merely influenced by or even part of the landscape, but is imaginable as clay himself. His ‘pale’, ‘warped’ face reflects its whiteness and the distorted features of the mined landscape: ‘His pale face had something of the wrenched, warped perversity of the landscape; he seemed to commune with the coldly volcanic clay-world, knowing its vagaries and loving them.’31 ‘Natives’ are often imagined to resemble the primitive rocks of their homeland or ‘motherland’, as we have seen in earlier chapters, but here neither the landscape nor the ‘native’ are understood to be natural or timeless. Nature in this scene seems covered, worn and blocked, with its ‘whitened gorse twigs and frayed clotted hazel boughs’.32 Joe Gool’s whiteness is not a racial characterisation, or at least not in the sense that was discussed earlier (in the Introduction and Chapter 2), but an attempt to identify him with the very unnaturalness of the land, purged of its nature, purified by the clay industry.

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Like the heroes in Clemo’s other novels, Joe’s sanctified sexuality is eventually rewarded when he is united with his lover. In Clemo’s novels the heroes are often influenced deeply by the landscape and also resemble it themselves, if not physically then psychologically. Joe Gool is described as Celtic, as Clemo saw himself, but this is not to be endowed with the creative, imaginative, idealised and clichéd qualities, but to be a dreamer with dreams as ‘grey’ as the ‘sand-dunes’ and with a limited ‘mental world’: ‘He belonged to the class loosely described as dreamers, but there was seldom anything romantic or poetic about his dreams; they were as harsh and grey as the sand-dunes, so that his mental world was limited, bounded by jagged horizons and smoky haze, through which a sudden white glare of illumination might pierce to glint on stagnant water.’33 Clemo’s heroes are not simply idealised, but are often damaged or limited in some way. Joe, again like Clemo himself, suffers ill-health which together with his limited ‘mentality’ makes him ‘unemployable’.34 Such difficulties are presented as part of the trial that Joe has to go through before being spiritually and sexually rewarded. Like Thomas Hardy, whose novels influenced Clemo’s own, Clemo uses the landscape (though often with less subtlety) as a way of materialising the psychology of his characters and the direction of his dramatic action.35 But in contrast to Hardy, who uses such ‘natural’ landscapes as Egdon heath to which the native returns in Return of the Native, Clemo, of course, uses the industrial landscape. In Wilding Graft, the central character Garth Joslin’s declining hope in finding his long lost lover Irma is reflected in the colours of clouds – as they lose the pure whiteness of the clay tips below – and of the sky: Change there too, exhaustion, decay. When he left home an hour ago all the clouds up there had been white, crisp as snowballs, but sunset had now stained them, adding a touch of the symbolism to their appearance. Those in the west were red and shiny as tomatoes, those overhead were purple, with here and there a brassy tinge on the underside, while those riding eastward were of a dull grey deepening to black. The clear spaces between them, that had been blue, were turning steely, and the distinct ridges of the clay range beyond Kernick and Trethosa already dwelt in a sombre shade which was not that of cloud. Garth brooded upon that advancing wave of twilight, and upon the tinted cloud-groups, as

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if he saw the successive phases of his own life mirrored therein. Flamboyant hope passing to purple shame and grey misery.36

Clemo’s use of the landscape is also a way of categorising certain characters as ‘natives’ in distinction to their opponents. Both Joe Gool in The Shadowed Bed and Garth Joslin in Wilding Graft are ‘natives’ set against certain ‘enemy’ characters: the vicar Mr Reed, and the atheist socialist Mr Griffiths respectively. The vicar has spent ten years in Essex before moving to the clay country, and in contrast to Joe’s love for the landscape, he loathes its unnaturalness: He had loathed the clay landscape from the first moment he glimpsed it, and his deepening knowledge of it was forcing him into an acute spiritual disharmony. He was beginning to perceive the clay land as a sort of evil parody of the mental climate and texture which he found most odious – the climate and texture of orthodoxy. He disliked the industrial scene for the same reason that he disliked orthodox dogma – because it was a barbarous, arbitrary interference with the natural order of things.37

Whereas Joe seemed to revel in the instability of the landscape, the vicar sees it as a corruption of nature. He is horrified by the ‘continuous state of unrest’, the ‘vicious assaults and transformations’ inflicted on the soil, ‘blasted by dynamite, bitten into by excavators, washed under hose-jets and finally shaped by sheer mechanical force into hard white cubes … Beliefs that came soothingly to the mind amid the unstained fields and woods were incongruous and unreal here.’38 Mr Reed also blames the clayscape for destroying natural sexual relations with his wife, while for Mr Griffiths, the ‘enemy’ in Wilding Graft, it becomes even more destructive: it threatens his life. Like Mr Reed, Griffith’s search for sexual fulfilment fails. He heads off to the clay area to find a landscape that corresponds with his bleak mood and mental conflicts, but as he clambers down into a pit, attempting to find some shade from the heatwave, he finds himself increasingly debilitated. As he descends, the landscape becomes entirely industrial, and seems to take on an ominous kind of life of its own: ‘All natural landscape had disappeared: nothing was visible above him but the sky, the rim of the pit notched with stacks of

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drying-kilns, and the huge towering bulk of Kernick dump sprawling from north-west to south-west, dazzlingly white, glittering with a sort of fervid menace’.39 Griffiths has a heart attack. He survives, but is seriously weakened and plans to soon leave Cornwall. In many ways this resembles a story such as Donald Rawe’s, discussed in the previous chapter, in which the non-Celtic visitors are violently driven away, while ‘natives’, like himself, belong. But here it is not the apparently natural granite backbone or ancient Celtic monuments that rise up against the incomers; the ground is stripped of all nature and is constantly changing. In The Clay Kiln the industrial landscape seems to actively repel visitors, as though the rocks are bones but bones with some kind of malevolent power: ‘The pit was full of that harsh melancholy which makes this area of Cornwall so repellent to the casual tourist. A  latent ferocity breathed forth from the mouldering hollows of rocks, as from a skeleton.’40 In contrast to the visitor, once again in this novel the hero is said to resemble the rocks himself: ‘You’re as grey and heavy as the clay of your kiln’, Marvran critically observes.41 Nature’s assumed goodness is of course inverted in Clemo’s work, while prehistoric monuments, as we will see, neither reject ‘foreigners’ nor play their traditional roles in the lives of ‘natives’. While Mr Reed blames the unnatural landscape for destroying sexual relations with his wife, for Joe Gool and other local characters it performs a key role in the coming together of lovers. The clayscape has been purged of nature; it is spiritually pure. While love scenes in hedgerows are presented as immoral, those on the clay tips prepare characters for virtuous marriage.42 Better still, in place of the romanticisation of prehistoric granite monuments as traditionally endowed with some kind of pagan Celtic power or sexual energy, Clemo gives key prominence to the ‘Rock’. Crucially, it is made out of clay. Rosa, whose corrupt sexual nature has been purified by ‘the spell of the Rock’, explains to Maggie, in her attempt to ‘convert’ her: ‘ “It’s white – clay rock, like you see blasted in the pits,” she said as the wind lulled. “But the feel of it … I can’t tell you how different ’tis.You feel as if it’s alive.” ’43 The ever-changing, moving landscape in general in Clemo’s novels rarely seems inanimate, and has a great deal of influence over individual characters – for good or for ill – but it is the Rock that has a supreme kind of power over the local community. The vicar struggles to understand this power, considering that it is

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neither ancient nor Celtic. In a conversation with Beale, another corrupt character, in this case in his role as a ruthless clayworks owner, the vicar tries to learn more about the rock but continues to find it incomprehensible:  ‘ “If  – if this Rock you mentioned yesterday were an ancient Druidical stone I could understand such primitive folk reverting at times to the tribal rites of their ancestors. But it is clear from the general talk that there is nothing in the least Celtic or even pagan about the stone.” ’44 Beale confirms this understanding and that its history is recent, by going on to explain that Potter, his enemy, a mysterious figure who seems to have some kind of special spiritual knowledge and influence for the good of select locals, brought the Rock to its present position ‘in fairly recent times: I’m sure it wasn’t in his lane when I began living at the manor’.45 Like most romance novels, Clemo’s end with the central characters coming together as lovers. The Shadowed Bed ends with Joe and Bronwen coming together in a romantic scene by the Rock. In Wilding Graft, Garth and Irma meet again after several years and move in together. In striking contrast to the vicar and the socialist Griffiths, these characters are presented as belonging to the landscape, and further, in the case of Garth and Irma especially, as having rightful claims of ownership. Far from being driven away, from the beginning of Wilding Graft it seems Garth is here to stay, in the form of a ghost, if not of a living human. In the opening pages of this novel he is confronted by an old girlfriend, Edith, who now wishes to move into Garth’s property with her husband. Garth retorts that he will stay for at least another year until he is called up for war:  ‘ “You may have a chance then, though if I’m bumped off ” – he smiled grimly – “I shouldn’t be surprised if you found the place haunted.” ’46 The theme of the ghost recurs near the end of the novel, when Irma returns to the area after several years, having met up again with Garth and made their plans to settle into his house together. When neighbours see her they are startled, one of them saying ‘If I’d seed a ghost I couldn’t ha’ felt more like a dish-cloth.’47 These references to ghosts are brief and perhaps meant to be humorous rather than taken seriously as the beliefs of the characters, but they seem to allude – along with the mocking reference to Joel in The Clay Kiln as ‘the spirit of the place’ (see previous section above) – to a certain kind of haunting that, as we have seen, is

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frequently used in a range of fictions to assert continuity in property ownership.

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Industrial romance This depiction, taken from a romance novel, of an ancient standing stone with ‘magic powers’ is far more conventional than Clemo’s industrial clay rock: ‘Do ’ee dare to go to the Larnie Stone at midnight? If you go there and drink the potion I give ’ee, then walk slowly round the stone twelve times before ’ee look through the hole towards the sea, you might see the face of a certain man –’ … She shivered, unsure whether she would want to visit the Larnie Stone at midnight. It was a great granite mass of stone, halfway down the moor between the clay works and St Austell. Its middle was a great gaping hole, through which the sea could be seen. It was reputed to have mystical powers … They were here, beneath a great yellow moon, beside a standing stone with magic powers. A trysting-place … and this was Cornwall, where anything was possible. And ancient ways were stronger than the laws of etiquette at that moment.48

The ‘Larnie Stone’ performs a central role in Killigrew Clay, the first of a series of nine romance novels by Rowena Summers (pseudonym for Jean Saunders), set in the clay area. This novel also follows the conventional plot of romance novels: a young woman (or man) meets a wealthy man (or beautiful woman), falls in love, overcomes various obstacles, and they marry. In this novel, the wealthy man is a capitalist owner who makes his money from the clay industry. In order to provide a suitable setting, the clay tips are not seen as an unsightly environmental problem, but are rated aesthetically as ‘beautiful’: ‘Beyond and around the clayworker’s cottages, rose the pale mounds of the spoil heaps, made eerily beautiful by moonlight, and as much a landmark for a returning clayworker in his cups as any standing stone on the moor.’49 But it is the ‘great granite’ standing stone on the moor, and not the clay tips, which has ‘magic powers’. Among the many romances set in romanticised ‘Celtic’ locations, few are located in areas dominated by modern industries such as

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clay. Countless romances are set in rural locations, on clifftops or moors, and locations dominated by older industries such as tin and copper mining, but the clay industry rarely supplies the scenery and background for action. Summers’s novels, then, are unusual in this respect, though as the industrial remains begin to age since its decline over the last few decades there may be others to follow in future, playing a role in the romantic heritagisation of the past. The tourist industry is already beginning to replace the older clay industry, with the opening of ‘Eden’ in an old clay pit and the creation of the ‘Clay Trails’.50 Clemo’s novels, set mostly in the interwar years of the twentieth century, describe how tourists either overlook or are repelled by the clay area, whereas the heroine of Summers’s final novel, A Brighter Tomorrow (2000), embraces the tourist industry, investing in a museum for visitors.51 Those romances which do unfold in the clay landscapes – with the exception of Clemo’s – are quite typical in their depiction of respectable family histories and the rightful ownership of land and property, passed down through generations. Critics have argued that the novel was tied up with the value of property ownership from its beginnings in the eighteenth century, or even earlier. The eighteenth-century novel in particular tends to arbitrate between competing claims to legitimacy made by the aristocracy and the new capitalist classes, but there are many variations in the basic plot structure of rightful inheritance as it evolves over the centuries.52 What romance novels tend to have in common is their focus on marriage and the wealthy middle- or upper-classes, whether these are aristocratic and/or capitalist, and the continuation of rightful inheritance through the family line. Thus in the first of the series of Summers’s clay novels the hero Ben Killigrew is the son of the ‘self-made man’ Charles Killigrew, set to inherit his property and clay works, and to marry the beautiful woman who will bear his children, while his masculine capitalist capabilities are tested along the way. Such continuation through the generations depicts a kind of racial inheritance on a microcosmic scale, the nation being modelled on the family since the eighteenth-century writings of Edmund Burke.53 E. V.  Thompson, another novelist who has written a series of nine romances centred in Cornwall (1980–2006), very similarly presents his leading male characters – the fathers and sons of the Retallick family – as heroically capable, mine-owning businessmen.

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Following the decline of metal mining the later generations of the family shift their capital to the more recent clay industry, so the last three of these novels are set in the clay area where the Retallicks continue to survive various adventures in the competitive business world. Probably the best-known novelist to base his romances in Cornwall is Winston Graham, who wrote his series of twelve novels based around the Poldark family (1945–2002), the first seven of which were serialised in the popular TV series, broadcast in twenty-two countries, Poldark (1975–77). Again, the leading character, Ross Poldark, is a mine owner, but here his capitalist qualities of enterprise are combined with his aristocratic ancestry to make him a business-like but paternalistic, fair-minded employer and hero, in conflict with his ruthless enemies, the self-made capitalist Warleggan family. It is presumably because Graham’s historical romances are set earlier than Thompson’s and Summers’s, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that he depicts the successful transition of an aristocratic hero into the increasingly competitive industrial world. Certainly the earlier time period means that the Poldarks do not have to negotiate the further transition to the clay industry (the tin and copper mining industries in Cornwall survived into the twentieth century, and clay mining peaked in the second half of that century). But the crucial point here is that all these novels – and the numerous other novels by Mary Williams and others encouraged by the success of the Poldark series54 – are centred around wealthy families (both aristocratic and capitalist) in contrast to Clemo’s romances. As well as rejecting Celtic nationalism and traditional folktales, Clemo develops an alternative to the upper class industrial romance. The conventional romances present the heroic lovers as having a very different kind of relationship with and claim to the land from the lovers in Clemo’s novels. Like Ben Killigrew and Morwen in Summers’s first novel Killigrew Clay, various sets of lovers in Thompson’s and other romance novels share their romantic encounters at old granite stones and ancient ruins and tors on the moor, rather than the industrial landscape.55 The Killigrews, Retallicks and Poldarks all make money from the land – from tin, copper and clay – and are seen to rightfully own it for generations past and into an indefinite future, but they do not engage spiritually with that land in the same way as Clemo’s lovers, whose parents are usually absent or inadequate (dead, cruel, mad). The

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extended generations of families, with their recognisably Cornish surnames,56 are depicted as natives whose continuity of ownership extends into a fantasy of near-timelessness for the select wealthy, while Clemo’s are working-class heroes who do not have access to such forms of ownership. As Raymond Williams observes, working-class writers faced certain difficulties in translating their experiences into the form of the novel: ‘The received conventional plots – the propertied marriage and settlement; the intricacies of inheritance; the exotic adventure; the abstracted romance – are all, for obvious reasons, at a distance from working-class life.’57 This can help to explain the delay in the production of industrial novels from a working-class perspective, but Clemo’s novels also differ from the working-class Welsh novels discussed by Williams, in which industrial work and social relations are central. The industrial work undertaken by Clemo’s heroes is not as important in these novels as the central role of the industrial landscape itself. They do not engage significantly with the land as paid workers, or take economic possession of the land like the upper-classes – rather, they appear to have a spiritual kind of relation to it. The landscape has a certain power over their lives which eventually results in romantic fulfilment, while outsiders seem ruined by it. In Wilding Graft, as I have mentioned, this corresponds with Garth and Irma – both depicted as potential ghosts – finally moving into the cottage together, while Griffiths is driven out of Cornwall. Ghosts sometimes play a role in romance novels, figuring as previous owners – whether aristocratic or the more modern capitalists – who haunt those who inherit. In the series by Summers, the ghosts of the past appear in the later novels, especially the last, A Brighter Tomorrow, in which the young woman from the first novel, Morwen, becomes a haunting presence to her granddaughter Skye. In Trenhawk, by Mary Williams, the heroine is comforted by her dead husband’s presence in the house that he rightfully fought to possess. In another novel by Williams, The Granite King, prehistoric stone monuments themselves have a ghostly presence, while the Cornish heroine feels a ‘deep, strange kinship with the rocky territory’, as though part of the family.58 The Granite King himself – a monument that resembles a stately human head – reigns over the landscape, ‘Supreme and invincible as it had been for countless centuries’, and seems to come to life at the end to bless the lovers’ rightful inheritance of property.59 Rocks and ghosts together play

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into the fantasy of timeless ownership. Even physical removal, or death, will not stop certain families from retaining possession of their land. Cornish nationalist writers have similarly deployed ghostly, prehistoric landscapes in their attempts to claim ancestral territorial ownership and to exclude others, as we have seen. Although these nationalist claims are made in a different economic context, in which Cornish people feel themselves unable to possess property owing largely to tourists and other incomers, in contrast to the wealthy landowning families usually featured in romance novels, the desire for ancestral or even racial ownership is comparable. But while Clemo seems to allude to this convention of ghostly, timeless inheritance, both Garth and Irma are alive and there is no mention of previous or future generations (beyond Garth’s mad mother and Irma’s unfaithful one). In Clemo’s novels, fathers are usually either absent or violent, while mothers are presented as unwell or corrupt or dead. Far from the fantasy of continuous property ownership through infinite generations, unlike both Celtic nationalists and romance novelists Clemo seems finally to relinquish, or to reject possession of the land.

Escape Joel Kruse, the hero of The Clay Kiln, feels entrapped by the landscape. His claustrophobic sense of the clay world is evident in his account to his newly-wedded wife of his past as being lived out within the confines of a kiln: ‘It’s like being in a kiln, the way I’ve growed up and got where I  am. Penned in behind the walls and shutters, almost in the dark not even a window to look out of. Nothing to be seen but the hot clay: the air like an oven, getting thick wi’ dust till you’re half choked.’60 His wife, Lorraine, replies by observing that he was ‘fighting to get out – where you could see the pattern of things’.61 The perspectives of the characters in Clemo’s novels are intensely local. Rarely does the narrative follow the experience of a character beyond the clay world, with the occasional exception, such as the trip to Truro taken by Garth in Wilding Graft. A few key figures leave and return, such as Irma, initially a refugee from London, but we are told nothing from her point of view in the city. The clay world is confined, stifling, closed in on itself. Characters gossip

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about each other and fight between themselves; they rarely seem to notice events of national or international importance and urgency, such as the onset of war. Among those few, isolated trips beyond the clay world, is a visit to the Isles of Scilly in the closing scenes of The Clay Kiln, on Joel and Lorraine’s honeymoon. As Gemma Goodman observes, this contrasts most significantly with the clayscape in ‘the sense of freedom’, as the views are long range and panoramic – ‘a perspective that is never afforded the reader or the characters when within the clayscape’. From the top of the clay tips, Goodman observes, it would be possible to provide a vista of equal scale and distance: ‘Instead these tips emphasise the claustrophobia of existing in this microcosm … Joel is often depicted within clay pits, therefore below surface level, with the clay tip towering above him from the edge of the pit.’62 In contrast, the closing scenes on the cliff top describe their view of the clay tips lit by the sun in the far distance, from the island of St. Mary’s. Joel’s fulfilment at the end of the novel, then, is not just achieved through his marriage to Lorraine but also through his escape from the stifling world, as he is at last given the opportunity to see it from afar. The ever-shifting, all-consuming clay tips dominate the landscapes and lives of characters throughout much of Clemo’s work. They provide more than scenic background, playing a dominant, inhuman but active role in the plot.This is perhaps most apparent in Clemo’s short horror story ‘The Clay-Dump’, in which the central character, Lucy Gribble, feels herself buried under the clay.Typically, in the early stages the clay tips are described as looming over the villages, in preparation for their later role. This clay dump dominated the village and was a landmark for miles around: ‘By day it dwarfed to insignificance the cluster of dour houses and their little defiant puffs of chimney smoke, while in the darker evenings the homely glow from the cottage windows looked pale and timid compared with the cold, baleful glare of the floodlight on the tip.’63 The clay tip seems to threaten both Lucy Gribble’s home, so close to the dump that ‘the white pyramid loomed up from the garden hedge’, and also herself: ‘’Tis like sand poured out over everything in my life.’64 As the story goes on, the clay dump edges closer and closer, becoming more and more imposing. It takes on a sinister force for Lucy, who feels that it impels her to commit a crime: she steals coal from the school at which she works. She is caught by the

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headmaster, who threatens to report her unless she returns sexual favours, and who similarly blames the clay dump for his sins: his sexual obsession with ‘girl children’.65 As Lucy and the headmaster talk, feeling trapped by guilt and lust, they hear the refuse slither down the clay dump towards them. As they make their way to a classroom where he intends to make her ‘pay’ for her crime, Lucy again has the sense of sand being tipped over her. Unlike the heroic characters of conventional romances, then, Clemo’s characters are not rewarded for their trials with economic possession of the land. Rather, the land takes possession of them. Happy endings do not necessarily involve couples living together harmoniously in cottages; they can involve escape from the clutches of clay.This mode of plot development again echoes Hardy’s novels, the closing scenes of The Clay Kiln resembling the later stages of Jude the Obscure, in which Jude and Sue become less confined to the provincial life of Wessex, gaining increasing mobility.The hero’s ambitions are focused on the city of London.66 The desire to reach beyond the confined space and the happy ending of escape is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Clemo’s own life, as reported in his autobiography and poetry. Confession of a Rebel was followed up with The Marriage of a Rebel (1980), in which Clemo describes his attempts to find a woman to marry, and eventually his married life outside Cornwall, in Dorset – where several of his later poems are based. In The Marriage Clemo explains that during one of his first correspondences with an adult woman (aged sixteen) called Eileen, they began to think that they might marry, and agreed that if they did they would live outside of Cornwall. Clemo reports that they went so far as to concern themselves with practicalities about how to live together, resulting in a poem entitled ‘Priest Out of Bondage’.67 In this he describes himself slipping off the fetters of the land, uprooting himself from the Celtic race, recovering from his self-identification with granite and clay – the materials of ‘this dead land’ which he had previously imagined himself to be part of, to belong with as one: Dark, mutinous land: I shared Its moods through my dead youth, but I am spared To wake and live and know it a husk and tetter Which faith and sunrise peel from my soul. I slip with every other fetter

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The Cornish bond, for I must be whole Within the eternal Moment, and have no root In soil or race, in the annals Of the Celt, or in the dubious channels Whence idiosyncrasies and tensions shoot. I rise, no longer dark, No longer mutinous, and embark On the journey outward, the escape To air that is rid of superstition, to a pulse That draws no heavy blood from the obscure Cycles of savagery, the historic shape Of atavism. I shed the lure Of a dim mother-breast I have outgrown, And while the Moment’s hot fierce joys convulse My heart I take the irrevocable step beyond Loyalty to this dead land: no longer bone Of my bone is its granite, nor flesh Of my flesh its clay.68

In this poem, Clemo’s sense of himself as part of the geology of the land – his bones as granite, his flesh as clay – rearticulates a prominent theme in this book:  the identification of the Cornish with Cornwall, or more broadly of race with rocks, natives with region or nation. We have seen not only how some Cornish people themselves have identified with the land but also how ‘outsiders’ have contributed to such associations between this ‘primitive’ race and its rocks. Clemo describes the ‘motherland’ as bodily rather than a metaphorical ancestor, as a ‘mother-breast’ but one he has ‘outgrown’. This chapter has moved away from nationalist perspectives to explore a more ambivalent view of Cornwall and Celticity, and finally Clemo’s outright rejection of it, and his desire for escape and freedom. Clemo, turning away from Celtic history and from the land itself, rejects any ‘root / In soil or race’, to make himself anew.

Notes 1 See E. B. Selwood, E. M. Durrance and C. M. Bristow (eds), The Geology of Cornwall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), pp. 168–75; Piotr Migon, Granite Landscapes of the World (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 65–7.

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2 Daphne du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall (Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1972), p. 150. 3 Tim Smit, Eden (London: Corgi, 2001), p. 42. 4 Hilary Orange, ‘Cornish Mining Landscapes: Public Perceptions of Industrial Archaeology in a Post-Industrial Society’ (PhD thesis: University College London, Institute of Archaeology, 2012), p. 65. See also Philip Payton, The Making of Modern Cornwall (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1992), pp. 192–3. 5 See Gemma Goodman, ‘Seeing the Clay Country: The Novels of Jack Clemo’, in Philip Payton and Shelley Trower (eds), Cornish Studies 17 (2009), 34–50. 6 Migon, Granite Landscapes, p. 340. 7 For a tourist guide that does refer to the clay area, see, for example, S. P.  B. Mais’s classic guidebook The Cornish Rivera (London:  Great Western Railway Company, 1928), p. 3. As Gemma Goodman points out, the language used here, describing the ‘white pyramids of china clay refuse that litter the hill-sides’, suggests that it is a wasteland, in contrast to such natural scenes as the ‘wooded loveliness of the Fowey valley’, in ‘Seeing the Clay Country’, p. 3. 8 Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst, The Sun and the Serpent (Cornwall: Pendragon Press, 1989), p. 46. See also Amy Hale for discussion of this work in relation to how ‘Cornish’ people have increasingly come to see the industrial landscape as ‘Celtic’: ‘Whose Celtic Cornwall? The Ethnic Cornish Meet Celtic Spirituality’, in David C. Harvey, Rhys Jones, Neil McInroy and Christine Milligan (eds), Celtic Geographies: Old Culture, New Times (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 157–70. 9 Miller and Broadhurst, The Sun and the Serpent, p. 135. 10 Miller and Broadhurst, The Sun and the Serpent. 11 Daphne du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall (Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1972), p. 152. 12 Du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall. 13 Du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall, pp. 153 and 155. 14 Shelley Trower, ‘Regional Writing and Oral History, from China Clay to Eden’, in Shelley Trower (ed.), Place,Writing, and Voice in Oral History (New York: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 87–105. 15 Trower, ‘Regional Writing’, pp. 90–3. 16 Jack Clemo, Confession of a Rebel (London:  Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), p. 5 17 Clemo, Confession, pp. 5–6. 18 Clemo, Confession, p. 35. 19 Clemo, Confession, p. 65.

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20 Jack Clemo, ‘Christ in the Clay-Pit’, Selected Poems (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1988), p. 21. 21 John Press, Rule and Energy:  Trends in British Poetry Since the Second World War (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 128–32. 22 As Simon Featherstone and Rick Rylance put it, Clemo ‘offers himself as outside the conventional forms of his faith and community; outside the conventions of discourse of the period; and outside the materialism of the age and the culture of complacent affluence.’ Further, he is ‘hostile to scholarly learning, formal education, and the conventions of rationality, preferring instead to work by instinct and conviction.’ In ‘The Poetry of Jack Clemo and the Way We Read Today’, in Ideas and Production 9 and 10 (1989), 105–4 (108). 23 Clemo, Confession of a Rebel, p. 90. 24 See Rodney Lyon, Gorseth Kernow: The Cornish Gorsedd – What It Is and What It Does (Cornwall: Gorseth Kernow, 2008), pp. 51–3. 25 See R. M. Barton, An Introduction to the Geology of Cornwall (Truro: D. Bradford Barton, 1964), pp. 113–14. 26 There are numerous local folklore books and tourist guides which discuss Roche Rock. For example see Sheila Bird, Haunted Places of Cornwall:  On the Trail of the Paranormal (Berks:  Countryside Books, 2006), pp.  84–5; Paul Newman, Haunted Cornwall (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), pp.  31–2; B. Trevail, Curious Cornwall, which notes that the spirit of Tregeagle howled at Roche Rock (Truro: Tor Mark, n.d.), pp. 11–13. 27 Loic Rich, ‘Roche Rock, Cornwall, UK’, in Fortean Times (August 2006)  www.forteantimes.com/features/fortean_traveller/89/roche_ rock_cornwall_uk.html (accessed 22 June 2009). 28 Jack Clemo, The Clay Kiln (St Austell: Cornish Hillside, 2000), p. 66. 29 Clemo, The Clay Kiln, p. 66. 30 Jack Clemo, The Shadowed Bed (Herts: Lion, 1986), p. 11. 31 Clemo, The Shadowed Bed, p. 11. 32 Clemo, The Shadowed Bed, p. 11. 33 Clemo, The Shadowed Bed, p. 22. 34 Clemo, The Shadowed Bed, p. 22. 35 For Hardy’s influence on Clemo, see Clemo, Confession of a Rebel, p.  199. For a discussion of the various ways in which Hardy uses landscape in relation to character, see Andrew Enstice, Thomas Hardy:  Landscapes of the Mind (London and Basingstoke:  Macmillan, 1979), and Michael Irwin, Reading Hardy’s Landscapes (Hampshire and London:  Macmillan, 2000). For a specific discussion of how Hardy uses physical landscape to exteriorise mood, see, for example, Irwin, Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, pp. 17–18.

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36 Jack Clemo, Wilding Graft (London: Anthony Mott, 1983), pp. 189–90. 37 Clemo, The Shadowed Bed, pp. 52–3. 38 Clemo, The Shadowed Bed, p. 53. 39 Clemo, Wilding Graft, p. 289. 40 Clemo, The Clay Kiln, p. 13. 41 Clemo, The Clay Kiln, p. 94. 42 See, for example, Clemo, The Shadowed Bed, p. 74. 43 Clemo, The Clay Kiln, p. 126. 44 Clemo, The Clay Kiln, p. 187. 45 Clemo, The Clay Kiln, p. 188. 46 Clemo, Wilding Graft, p. 12. 47 Clemo, Wilding Graft, p. 259. 48 Rowena Summers, Killigrew Clay (London: Sphere, 1987), pp. 40–1 and 81. 49 Summers, Killigrew Clay, p. 6. 50 For comments on heritagisation and tourism in the region see Trower, ‘Clayscapes: Views of a working landscape, from poetry to oral history’ and Gemma Goodman, ‘Seeing the Clay Country’, in Cornish Studies 17 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2009), 17–50. 51 Rowena Summers, A BrighterTomorrow (London: Pan Macmillan, 2000). 52 For a review of much of the critical literature on property ownership and inheritance in relation to the novel, see the introduction to Allan Hepburn (ed.), Troubled Legacies:  Narrative and Inheritance (Toronto, Buffalo, NY and London: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 3–21. 53 See Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel:  The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 20, 31–2. This book will return to the theme of the family and its connection to ideas of nation in the Conclusion. 54 Mary Williams, author of over twenty romance novels and almost twenty collections of ghost stories set in Cornwall, was encouraged by her publisher to produce work in the ‘genre of Cornish romantic historical fiction in the Winston Graham tradition’, according to her obituary by Richard Dalby, Independent (24 January 2001) www. independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/mary-williams-728775.html (accessed 24 June 2009). Some of the other more prolific authors of Cornish romances, whose novels often contain references to the Poldark series on their front covers, and which are all concerned with estates, inheritance, and marriage, include Gloria Cook (who since 1995 has written three series and several single novels set in Cornwall, totalling over twenty novels altogether), Kate Tremayne (who since 1999 has written ten novels of a series), and Anita Burgh (author of a trilogy, ‘Daughters of a Granite Land’, 1989–91).

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55 For example see E.V. Thompson, Chase the Wind (London: Pan, 1979), p. 212; Mary Williams, Trenhawk (London: Sphere, 1982), pp. 101–2, 232–6; Mary Williams, The Granite King (London:  Sphere, 1985), pp. 62–3, 81, 105–6. 56 Killigrew and Retallick are Cornish surnames, as documented by Richard Stephen Charnock, Patronymica Cornu-Britannica; or, the Etymology of Cornish Surnames (London:  Longmans, Green, 1870), pp. 57 & 100. Pol- is a common prefix for both surnames and place names (pp. 92–5). 57 Mary Williams, ‘The Welsh Industrial Novel’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), p. 219. 58 Williams, The Granite King, p. 16. 59 Williams, The Granite King, pp. 232–3. 60 Clemo, The Clay Kiln, p. 246. 61 Clemo, The Clay Kiln, p. 246. 62 Goodman, ‘Seeing the Clay Country’, 42. 63 Jack Clemo, ‘The Clay Dump’, in Denys Val Baker (ed.), Cornish Short Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 11–18 (pp. 11–12). 64 Clemo, ‘The Clay Dump’, p. 12. 65 Clemo, ‘The Clay Dump’, p. 17. 66 For a discussion of this see Parrinder, Nation and Novel, pp.  284–5. Clemo was also influenced by D. H. Lawrence, who also depicted his hero (Paul Morel) in his novel Sons and Lovers as reaching beyond the English provinces, as Parrinder notes (p. 290); also see p. 341ff.). 67 Jack Clemo, The Marriage of a Rebel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980), p. 45. 68 Jack Clemo, Selected Poems (Newcastle upon Tyne:  Bloodaxe, 1988), p. 35.

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Conclusion

This book has traced a historical journey through two centuries, from around 1800 to 2000, during which geologists, poets, folklorists, travel writers, novelists, nationalists and mysticists have made varying claims about the land and its people. It has spanned from Cornwall’s industrial heyday, when Cornish geologists made claims of expert scientific knowledge and ownership of their rocks and minerals, to the twentieth-century claims of Cornish mysticists that their Celtic ancestry gives them special, spiritual connection with the motherland, a connection that Jack Clemo finally rejects. With the gap of over 150 years between them, and the shift from an industrial economy to the Revivalist interest in the pre-industrial, the geologists’ claims are in many ways very different from those of a ‘New Age’ mysticist, such as Cheryl Straffon, who reproduces long-standing associations between women, nature and spirituality in opposition to masculine, scientific enterprises.The geologists stake out their material, territorial claims of ownership over Cornwall’s exceptional landscapes and valuable minerals, while the New Age eco-nationalists are concerned with claiming a spiritual sensitivity to the ancient land of which they feel themselves to be part. In different ways, however, both the geological and mystical claims are rooted in economic conditions. Tom Nairn has argued that conditions of under- and overdevelopment, caused by the uneven spread of capitalist ‘progress’, trigger sub-nationalist movements, and while the geologists are not nationalists this book has unearthed a proto-nationalist element in their work. As a region of ‘relative over-development’ in the first half of the nineteenth century, Cornwall seems to share the typical characteristics outlined by Nairn of a region where nationalist movements are likely to

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develop – his primary example being Scotland.Their shared neighbour is a larger, politically dominant power; their ‘peoples and territories … are small’ (although Cornwall’s territory is considerably smaller than Scotland’s, Belgium’s and the other nations and regions discussed by Nairn); and their rapid development was a result of ‘the discovery and exploitation of sub-soil resources’1 (minerals in nineteenth-century Cornwall and petroleum in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Scotland). It is in this climate of overdevelopment that we have begun to detect, in the geological journal dedicated in large part to promoting the interests of Cornish mining, ‘an assertive Cornish identity’, as Bernard Deacon has put it,2 and clear opposition to ‘foreign’ observers and capitalists, an opposition that resembles a micro-scale version of Scottish nationalist resistance to England’s exploitation of its oil. Philip Payton has discussed how over-specialisation in mining created specific economic conditions that served to differentiate Cornwall from its neighbour, contributing to its boom but also to the catastrophic effects of its collapse.3 The inequality experienced in such a region that was, by about 1900, therefore undergoing economic ‘under-development’, can also provoke nationalist movements, ethnic differences being deployed in separatist campaigns to achieve better economic conditions for such regions. Since the decline of the mining industry, and the development of its post-industrial tourist and service economy, Cornwall has undergone sustained periods of depopulation, high unemployment, low wages and unaffordable housing, as we have seen, which has helped motivate nationalist claims of exclusive, ancestral belonging. Claims such as Straffon’s are made in the context of growing nationalist interest in Cornwall’s pre-industrial Celtic past and how this differentiates it from an exploitative modern England, and in the related antagonism to the mostly English tourists, developers and other incomers who are perceived as contributing to economic problems – especially housing shortages – as well as being a threat to the environment. Nairn points out that Wales does not quite belong to either of the categories he outlines, having undergone periods of both underand overdevelopment. He notes that Wales shares many features with underdeveloped regions, including depopulation, but that ‘in another key respect Wales is more akin to the relatively overdeveloped group: like them, it is a great secondary centre of the European

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industrial revolution’.4 Like Cornwall, Wales became a centre of industrial enterprise, although in this case it specialised in the iron and steel industry. Like Cornwall, ‘Wales led the world’.5 The industrial revolution did not enable the already near-dead Cornish language to survive, however, in contrast to how Welsh became the language of the industrial valleys and was thereby given a new lease of life. If industrialisation gave to Welsh culture new impetus, supporting a movement that was already more than ‘simple poetic protest or the dreams of small intellectual coteries’,6 it is perhaps harder to discern continuity in Cornish culture from the industrial period to the post-industrial.The Cornish language had almost completely died out by the time Cornwall’s industrial economy was peaking,7 and interest in its revival did not emerge until after steep industrial decline. Industrial Cornishness gave way to romantic images of the Cornish as a primitive race, with its pre-industrial Celtic ancestry, language, traditions and beliefs. The utilisation of Celtic ancestry as part of the response to underdevelopment is clearly distinct, in other words, from the earlier sense of industrial pride in the period of overdevelopment, although in more recent decades industrial heritage has come together with Celtic prehistory in articulations of Cornwall’s difference from England.8 Rocks provided a material basis for Cornwall’s overdeveloped industrial economy, and to some extent for the landscapes utilised by the tourist industry, as we have seen, but they were also taken up in the nationalist imagination as being the heart of the nation with which natives could identify. In short, rocks were a basis for economic conditions that encouraged natives to identify with rocks. The geologists attempted to protect their valuable rock formations against English visitors, but we have also seen, with Davy, how rocks could be personified, paving the way for identification with them, which in another way could play into hostility towards the English. The growing identification of the primitive rocks with the primitive Celtic race of Cornwall, depicted in folklore, travel literature and fiction, could be taken up by nationalists in the later economic conditions of underdevelopment:  it became a way of claiming a territorial connection with the land from which others are excluded. Donald Rawe, Denys Val Baker, Daphne du Maurier, Michael Williams, Straffon and others all identify their Cornishness in their Celtic ancestry, and in doing so describe themselves as having an affinity with the rocky landscape. Nationalist fiction at the

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same time depicts English characters who are violently driven out by that landscape. This book has traced a genealogy of modern nationalism through the diverse ways in which rocks are used to construct a past that is experienced as distinctly Cornish. The primitive qualities of Cornwall’s rocky ‘backbone’ underpin its specific economic history, and also scientific and folkloric perceptions of the primitive Cornish race. Present day nationalism has complex antecedents, including the intersection of poetry and geology in the nineteenth century, when rocks started to take on new meaning as an index of a modern idea of what the ‘past’ is. Davy’s personification of rocks as bones reflects how the ground began to be experienced as our human-animal past, rather than the inanimate matter on which we happen to live. The past became much, much longer, as rocks and fossils were increasingly interpreted as the remains of humankind’s evolutionary ancestors. Whereas the White Cliffs of Dover contain the remains of billions of billions of dead animals, and so could symbolise the evolutionary progress of the English people whose land is their history, the primitive, fossil-less rocks of the western and northern regions and nations seemed increasingly to embody the unevolved primitiveness of the Celtic race. Through its focus on rocks, then, this book has uncovered a history of racial nationalism in Cornwall, or at least of an exclusive ethnicity that is articulated within Cornish nationalist literature. It has traced the emerging perception of a primitive Cornish race in the nineteenth century, a period when scientific understandings of race became dominant explanations of human difference, and its survival in twentieth-century nationalist writing. Tourists and others from outside Cornwall created and consumed derogatory descriptions of ‘primitive’ Cornish savages, and the Revivalists then began to re-romanticise the Cornish. The primitive becomes a valued alternative to modern ‘evils’. For Val Baker and others, their Celtic ancestry qualifies them as members or at least relatives (Welsh, Breton) of what they continue to describe as the Cornish race, which is by now a magical, desirable race to belong to. Even Jack Clemo describes the ‘Cornish bond’ as rooted in ‘soil or race’, but he chooses to uproot himself. Such membership is exclusive in so far as others who do not share Celtic ancestry cannot elect to identify in this way with the Cornish race and its territory (while its inclusiveness may even be experienced as entrapping, as in the

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case of Clemo). Further, we have traced a corresponding hostility to the English tourists and incomers, represented in fiction from Rawe’s short stories to Clemo’s novels, from the privileged university students who are too terrified ever to return, to the socialist Griffiths who has a heart attack in a clay pit. Such fictional depictions seem representative of Cornish hostility to and resentment of outsiders far more generally, from ‘emmets’ (an offensive Cornish dialect word for tourists9) and second-home owners (‘Burn Second Homes’10) to people who move into the region more permanently (often retired, and able to afford houses that the Cornish-born cannot11). It is possible to contrast such an ethnic form of national, territorial identity – often understood by theorists of nationalism as exclusive – against civic forms of identity, which are often judged more favourably as inclusive.12 There may be some economic and cultural justification for Cornish nationalism, however, even in its desires to exclude non-Cornish people, who may be no less hostile to the Cornish, contributing to an antipathy that cuts both ways.13 Resistance to second-home ownership, for example, which has caused entire towns and villages to become almost unaffordable, depopulated ‘ghost towns’ – a term which echoes this book’s earlier discussions of how Cornish ghosts are imagined to retain ownership of property inhabited by outsiders – seems understandable. Cornish separatist politics in some respects form an effective response to problematic economic conditions, as when the appeal for Objective 1 funding (a European Union programme that operates for its poorest regions) was only successful once it had deployed Cornish ethnicity in its argument that Cornwall should be judged separately from the neighbouring, and wealthier Devon.14 Cornish ethnic identity may be used to help alleviate the worst excesses of uneven development, and to replace offensive perceptions of the Cornish as backwards working-class yokels with more favourable images, while it is also not necessarily exclusive. Joanie Willett has argued that contemporary ethnic nationalism in Cornwall is in fact less exclusive than civic forms of identity in the region, which introduce economic exclusions  – a ‘lifestyle’ that many Cornish people cannot access.15 As Willett discusses, ethnicity need not draw on race and bloodlines but can be defined in terms of a more inclusive shared culture. In her interviews with Cornish nationalist activists, ethnicity is described as ‘fluid’, adaptive and open, as

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something people can pick up or self-identify with, rather than as fixed in stone or timeless like the rocks. But if incomers, in contrast, present ‘the Cornish’ as an ‘other’, and can be disparaging about what they see as a ‘regressive’ Cornish ethnic nationalism, as Willett observes, there are multiple forms and articulations of such nationalism – not all of which are as inclusive as Willett’s essay suggests. As she shows elsewhere, along with more inclusive ‘civic’ forms of identity, ‘Individuals with family connections to Cornwall were more likely to have exclusive definitions of Cornishness, while there was less tolerance of suggestions that individuals might ‘learn’ or acquire an identity’.16 Kerryn Husk and Malcolm Williams similarly note that ancestry need not become the focus for ethnic identification, but that what counts as Cornish can differ widely. For some ‘it was being able to trace a Cornish ancestry’, while for others identifying as Cornish without this precondition was sufficient.17 More generally, nationalism is also exclusive in so far as it is restricted to certain nations and regions, such as Wales and Cornwall, which can mobilise ethnicity to address their problems of underdevelopment. As Eric Hobsbawm and Raymond Williams have observed, Cornwall and Wales can utilise their histories of Celtic and other forms of difference in ways that other struggling regions cannot.18 As Hywel Dix puts it, ‘The emotional pull of nationhood can be a barrier to the deeper issues of social class, and an unequal social order’, issues that are shared far more widely beyond any single nation or region.19 This book has traced the historical development of racial and ancestral definitions of Cornishness, although there are, of course, other ways of identifying as Cornish. That Cornish identity continues to be focused on ancestry and race, as well as other aspects of ethnicity, and that the ongoing racialisation of national identity is not restricted to Cornwall, as this book’s introduction indicated, is further demonstrated by the TV series Face of Britain (2006), which incorporated research into individuals’ genetic variants to determine whether they were Celts,Vikings or Anglo-Saxons.20 Most of the respondents wanted to be Celtic. Celts, according to the author of the Face of Britain’s accompanying book, Robin McKie, have ‘the oldest bloodline in the country’, and it is that which ‘makes them a little bit separate and a little bit special’.21 One Cornish respondent, Ken Sweet, also felt that it is his Celtic ancestry that enables his family to feel a special ‘bond’ with his homeland, once again

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implying that others cannot experience such a sense of belonging: ‘I think that makes us very special people and shows why my family feels such a bond with Cornwall.’22 It may be possible to find economic justification for Cornish nationalism, but in so far as it deploys an exclusive ethnicity it is nevertheless problematic, as are the disparaging views of the Cornish.As Nairn admits, all forms of nationalism are stained: ‘Forms of “irrationality” (prejudice, sentimentality, collective egotism, aggression, etc.) stain the lot of them … In short, the substance of nationalism as such is always morally, politically, humanly ambiguous.’ To focus only on the problematic or on the beneficial aspects of any nationalism, to be for or against, is to seize only on ‘one face or another of the creature’, according to Nairn.23 The ‘irrational’ or emotional quality of nationalism is also observed by Walker Connor, who, perhaps seizing on the regressive ‘face’ of nationalism, argues that it is a feeling of being ‘ancestrally related’, or of ‘shared blood’, that is at the core of national mobilisation. The nation is experienced as a kind of extended family, although of course such descent does not accord with factual history. He observes that familial metaphors are extended to the land itself, a land that is thereby transformed into an ‘emotion-laden phantasma’: The core of the nation has been reached and triggered through the use of familial metaphors which can magically transform the mundanely tangible into emotion-laden phantasma: which can, for example, mystically convert what the outsider sees as merely the territory populated by a nation into a motherland or fatherland, the ancestral land … A  spiritual bond between nation and territory is thus touched. As concisely stated in the nineteenth-century German couplet, ‘Blut und Boden’, (‘Blood and Soil’) become mixed in national perceptions.24

In so far as Cornish identity is grounded in ancestry, and ancestry is what Cornish people feel enables them to identify with their territory, we can see how ‘blood and soil’ become mixed in the case study examined in this book. As Connor puts it, although relations among nations are not equally ‘hate-filled’, ‘the national bond, because it is based upon belief in common descent, ultimately bifurcates humanity into “us” and “them” ’25 – but this book has also argued that soil, or the rocky land itself, in its material forms as well as in its potential for metaphorical identification, has

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contributed to the economic conditions that can exacerbate such divisions.

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Notes 1 Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: Verso, 1981), p. 185. 2 As discussed above in Chapter 1: Bernard Deacon, ‘ “The hollow jarring of the distant steam engines”: Images of Cornwall between West Barbary and Delectable Duchy’, in Ella Westland, (ed.), Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place (Penzance: Patten, 1997), pp. 7–24 (p. 18). 3 See Part Three of Philip Payton, The Making of Modern Cornwall (Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1992). 4 Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, p. 209. 5 Nairn here quotes from Plaid Cymru’s Economic Plan (Cardiff, 1969). 6 Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, p. 210. 7 Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1778 and was something of a local celebrity, is usually presented as the last monoglot Cornish speaker. 8 See Hilary Orange, ‘Cornish Mining Landscapes: Public Perceptions of Industrial Archaeology in a Post-Industrial Society’ (PhD thesis, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2012). 9 See, for example, Tim Heald, ‘A Plague on You Ghastly Emmets’, Telegraph (1 September 2002)  www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/ personal-view/3581111/A-plague-on-you-ghastly-Emmets.html (accessed 13 April 2014); or definitions two and four (and others) from Urban Dictionary, ‘Emmet’, www.urbandictionary.com/define. php?term=emmet (accessed 13 April 2014). 10 This slogan has been sprayed on road signs in Cornwall, as reported by Michael White, ‘Cornish nasties’, Guardian (14 June 2007) www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/14/cornishnasties (accessed 13 April 2014). See also the claims by Jack Bolitho, a member of the ‘Cornish National Liberation Army’, that Cornish nationalism is changing and ‘a lot of second homes’ will ‘go up in smoke’, reported by Daniel Foggo, ‘Revealed: The Cornish Militant, 18’, The Sunday Times (1 June 2007), www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/ article2010217.ece?print=yes (accessed 7 February 2007. 11 See, for example, Charles Thomas, ‘The Importance of Being Cornish In Cornwall’ (Institute of Cornish Studies, 1973). 12 See, for an early and influential example, Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1946). For discussion and critique of such judgements of ethnic and civic nationalism see Joanie Willett, ‘Liberal Ethnic Nationalism, Universality, and Cornish Identity’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 13: 2 (2013), pp. 201–17.

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13 For an example of how senior regional development personnel describe ‘the Cornish’, see Willett, ‘Liberal Ethnic Nationalism’, 211. Derogatory perceptions of Cornish people also continue to circulate more widely, for example in the Doc Marten comedy series on ITV1 (six series aired between 2006 and 2013) in which Cornish locals are at times portrayed as a bit stupid, gossipy, ridiculous and even nasty, as where the boyfriend of the woman who wants to go to university tries to stop her for example, and the locals throw pasties at the Doc. 14 See Joanie Willett, ‘National identity and regional development: Cornwall and the campaign for Objective 1 funding’, National Identities (2013) http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2013.806890 (accessed 23 July 2013). 15 Willett, ‘Liberal Ethnic Nationalism’, pp. 201–17. 16 Joanie Willett, ‘Cornish Identity:  Vague Notion or Social Fact?’, in Cornish Studies 16 (Exeter:  University of Exeter Press, 2008), pp. 183–205 (p. 196). 17 Kerryn Husk and Malcolm Williams, ‘The Legitimation of Ethnicity: The Case of the Cornish’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 12: 2 (2012), 249–67 (260). 18 Eric Hobsbawm briefly refers to Cornwall in this context in Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 178; Raymond Williams discusses Wales in ‘Are We Becoming More Divided’ in Daniel Williams (ed.), Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 186–90 (p. 189). 19 Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams:  Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), p. 134. 20 See Samantha Rayne’s discussion of this programme in the Cornish context, ‘Henry Jenner and the Celtic Revival in Cornwall’ (PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2011), p. 70. 21 Robin McKie, Face of Britain:  How Our Genes Reveal the History of Britain (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 55. 22 McKie, Face of Britain, pp. 123–4. I am indebted to Samantha Rayne’s thesis for insight into the Face of Britain. 23 Nairn, The Break-Up, p. 348. 24 Walker Connor, ‘Beyond Reason: The Nature of the Ethnonational Bond’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 16: 3 (1993), 373–89 (385). 25 Connor, ‘Beyond Reason’, 386.

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Index I J Acts of Union 7, 81–2, 115 Ahmed, Sara 2 ancestry 42–3, 167, 174–5, 176, 181–4, 186, 214, 230–1 see also family; race Anderson, Benedict 14–15, 48, 76–7, 79 animals (non-human) 111, 123–4, 126, 139, 150, 153, 169, 174, 180–1 see also fossils; personification anthropology 67–9 antiquarianism 65–7, 156 see also prehistoric stones Arata, Stephen 114 ‘archipelagic’ studies 9, 27–8, 59–60 Armstrong, Nancy 120 Arnold, Matthew 74–6, 78–9, 83–4, 86, 106 Ascherson, Neal 192n.1 autobiographical writing 147–8, 151–3, 207–8, 219

Bennett, Gillian 67–8 Benson, E. F. 143–7 Billig, Michael 3–4, 14–15 Blight, J. T. 104 Boase, Henry 39, 41 bones 34–5, 172–3, 174, 211, 220, 228 borders 13, 15 see also cliffs Borlase, William 32, 44, 65, 147 Bottrell, William 87–90, 172 Bowman, Marion 181–2 Breton 175–6 see also Brittany British National Party (BNP) 2–3, 5 see also UK Independence Party; Scottish National Party Brittany 77–9 Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights 120 Buckland, Adelene 9–10, 50n.12, 53n.42, 76, 127 Butts, Mary 151–2, 164–5

Beche, Henry de La 41–2, 57, 60, 92n.8 Beddoes, John 12, 182 belonging 136, 152, 171–91 passim, 203–4, 207–13, 216–17, 219–20, 230–1 see also national identity

caves 109, 116–17, 178, 190 Celtic revival 83–4, 88, 128, 155–6, 165–6, 191, 206–8 chalk see cliffs: white cliffs of Dover Chapman, Malcolm 23n.27, 91, 165, 168

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class 82, 90, 140–1, 204, 213–17, 229–30 clay 16, 170, 191, 199–206, 208–13, 217–20 Clemo, Jack 191–2, 203–4, 207–8, 215–16, 217 ‘Christ in the Clay-Pit’ 205–6 ‘The Clay Dump’ 218–19 The Clay Kiln 208, 211, 217–19 Confession of a Rebel 204–5, 206 The Marriage of a Rebel 219 ‘Priest Out of Bondage’ 219–20 The Shadowed Bed 208–9, 210–11 Wilding Graft 209–11, 212, 217 cliffs 16, 30–2, 34, 39–40, 100–5, 107–27, 138–9, 141, 143, 148, 199 Whitby 114, 119–20 white cliffs of Dover 1–6, 11–12, 15–16, 35, 154 climate 101–2, 110–11 Collins, Wilkie 100–1 Basil 107–10 Rambles Beyond Railways 103–7, 108–9 The Woman in White 106 Conan Doyle, Arthur 114–15, 161–2n.76 ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’ 103, 121–5 Hound of the Baskervilles 142 Through the Magic Door 121 Connor, Walker 21n.17, 231 Cornish nationalism 42–3, 90, 128, 155–6, 164, 166–8, 174–5, 181–5, 188–9, 201, 225–31 Mebyon Kernow 166, 198n.93 Cornish revival see Celtic revival Cornish studies 9, 183 see also Payton, Philip; Thomas, Charles Courtney, M. A. 170

Cubitt, Geoffrey 15 Cuvier, George 66–8 Daniels, Stephen 19, 37 Davy, Humphry 27, 37, 42–3, 46–8, 58, 72, 84–5 ‘Extract from an Unfinished Poem’ 31–2, 34, 63, 65 ‘Hints on the Geology of Cornwall’ 33, 38, 40, 42–3 ‘Introduction to the Geology of Cornwall’ 34–5 On Geology 30–1 ‘Sketch of a book’ 33–4 Dawson, Jane I. 188–9 Deacon, Bernard 47, 91, 226 Dickens, Charles 58 dinosaurs 65–6, 126 Druids 64–5, 103, 147, 150, 181 du Maurier Vanishing Cornwall 174–5, 200, 202–3 Dunmonia 86, 168 earth goddess 175, 181, 185–91 eco-nationalism 181, 184–5, 188–91 economic conditions 225–7, 229 see also materiality; mining; tourism ‘Eden’ project 214 see also Smit, Tim Edensor, Tim 3 Egypt 110, 115–17 emigration 81, 102, 115, 137, 148, 157n.6 empire see imperialism energy 117, 176–7, 181 see also ley lines; radium; vibration English nationalism 8 see also British National Party; UK Independence Party

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environmental concerns 164, 181, 186–7, 188, 200–3 see also eco-nationalism erosion 2, 15–16, 125, 173, 199 escape 217–20 exclusion 152, 164–5, 168–71, 177–8, 180, 210–12, 226–30 family 79, 106, 124, 138–9, 145, 178, 214–17, 231 see also ancestry fishing 106–7 folklore 57–60, 66–7, 69–75, 85–90, 103–6, 107–8, 111, 125, 135, 165, 167, 170–1, 181 see also oral traditions fossils 28, 44, 57–8, 66–70, 73, 76, 125–7, 155–6n.1, 228 Gellner, Ernest 14–15 gender 187–8 see also earth goddess; motherland; sexual violation genetics 182, 230 see also race Geological Societies 26–7, 32, 36–43, 58–9, 66, 101, 125, 165 Germany 11, 38, 74 ghosts 5, 8, 17–18, 35, 118, 126, 135–52 passim, 164–78 passim, 202, 207–17  passim giants 70–3, 89–90, 104–5, 169, 171 Gilbert and Sullivan 113 Gilpin, William 44–5, 46 Gilroy, Paul 3 Glover, David 115 goddess see earth goddess Goodman, Gemma 218 Gothic studies 106–7, 114, 118

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Graham, Winston 215 granite 29–31, 48–9, 57, 60–4, 104–5, 108–10, 117, 163, 172–80, 191, 199–201, 207 Greenough, George Bellas 26–7, 37, 46 Haller, John 70 Hamilakis,Yannis 163 Hanegraff, Wouter 167 Hardy, Thomas 209, 219 A Pair of Blue Eyes 125–7 Haunting see ghosts Hawkins, John 38–40, 45, 62 Hechter, Michael 137 Henwood, William Jory 111–12 Heringman, Noah 30, 36–7 Hewitt, Rachel 61 Hobsbawm, Eric 24n.33, 230 Hunt, Robert 48–9, 57–60, 83–4, 86–7, 88, 90 British Mining 60–3, 84–5 Descriptive Guide 60 ‘Humphry Davy’ 72, 85 Memoirs 84–5 On Mines and Mining 60 The Mount’s Bay 63–5 The Poetry of Science 58, 64, 66, 75 Popular Romances 69–73, 85–6, 167 Hutton, Ronald 29, 64, 181 immigration 2–5, 183 see also British National Party; incomers; UK Independence Party imperialism 102–3, 110, 112–18, 120–1, 123–5, 137, 155 incomers 19, 166, 168–71, 177–8, 184, 210–11, 226, 228–9 see also tourists

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inheritance 171, 178–9, 214–16 see also family; property ownership Ireland 115, 163 Irish 74, 77, 175

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Jenner, Henry 155–6, 183 Kent, Alan 42–3, 86–7 Kidd, Colin 81–2, 83–4 Knell, Simon 28–9, 37, 50n.13, 67 Knox, Robert 68, 74, 81 Labour party 3 Lake District 28–9, 36, 44 language 71, 76, 76–8, 120, 122, 156, 183–4, 206, 208, 227 Lawrence, D. H. 153, 164–5 Kangaroo 147–53 Lethbridge, T. H. 145–6, 159–60n.37 ley lines 202 London 58, 110, 114, 126–7 see also Geological Societies Lovelock, James 186, 188–9 Lyell, Charles 67 MacDiarmid, Hugh 8, 25n.46 Mackinder, Halford 10–12 maps 15, 26–7, 37–8, 39, 41–2, 60–1 materiality 9–10, 14, 17–18, 135 Matless, David 20, 151–2, 164–5 Maton, William George 102 memory 154, 173, 175 Merchant, Carolyn 187 Miller, Hugh 65–7, 69–70, 83–4 First Impressions of England 82 ‘The Highlands’ 79–81 The Old Red Sandstone 65 Popular Geology 80 Scenes and Legends 66–7, 71–4, 80

mining 14, 18–19, 26–49 passim, 60–3, 83–6, 88–91, 101–2, 184–5, 200–1, 225–7 clay mining 200–6, 208, 210–11, 213–15 mist 108–9, 116–17, 118–9, 122–3, 176 Morton, Timothy 190 motherland 2, 20n.3, 181–2, 187–8, 220, 231 mummy 114–15, 117–18 Murchison, Roderick 37–8 museums 33, 57 Nairn, Tom 24n.46, 56–7n.82, 225–7, 231 national identity 3, 5, 12–15, 17–18, 35, 42–3, 59, 105–6, 125, 155, 164, 181–5, 227–32 see also belonging Naylor, Simon 53n.43 New Age movement 166–7, 180–2, 185–6, 189–90, 201–2 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope 29 O’Connor, Ralph 51n.25, 54n.54, 65, 175 oral traditions 69, 78, 167, 173–4 see also folklore Orange, Hilary 201 otherworldly 77, 149–50, 202–3 Oyeyemi, Helen 4 Özkirimli, Umut 17 pantheism 205–6 Paris, John Ayrton 101–2 pasties 140, 169, 184 Payton, Philip 23n.30, 41, 88, 128, 156, 165, 226 personification 34–5, 59, 63–4, 108–9, 173 see also animals

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I  Index  J picturesque 44–6, 62 pirates 113 Plaid Cymru 166, 188 poison 122–3 Poldark 215, 223n.54 political parties see British National Party; Cornish nationalism (Mebyon Kernow); Labour party; Plaid Cymru; Scottish National Party; UK Independence Party Porter, Roy 32, 40, 49n.5, 87 prehistoric stones 78, 90, 103–5, 121–2, 146–7, 149–51, 163–85 passim, 211–13, 215–16 property ownership 19, 40–1, 140–1, 171, 177–9, 184, 204, 212–13, 214–17, 229 see also second homes race 3–5, 11–13, 15, 58–9, 68–87, 106–7, 124, 136–7, 164–84 passim, 220, 228–32 see also ancestry radium 117 railway 69, 103, 115–16, 130n.34, 138, 142 Great Western Railway 101–2, 110–13, 140, 156–7n.1, 165 Rawe, Donald R. 167–71, 178 Rayne, Samantha 183 Renan, Ernest 15, 75–9 Roe, Nicholas 28 Rolt, L. T. C. 138–43 romance novels 204, 212–17 Rudwick, Martin 50n.15, 52n.41 and n.42 sand 82, 125 Schmitt, Cannon 75–6, 79, 106

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Scotland 6–8, 59–60, 68, 71–2, 77, 79–83, 115, 137, 225–6 Edinburgh Castle 6–7, 22n.22 and n.24. Scottish National Party (SNP) 6–7, 25n.46, 166 second homes 19, 166, 168–9, 171, 229 Secord, James 50n.13, 52n.42 Sedgwick, Adam 46 serpentine 40, 105, 108 sexual violation 179–80, 187 shipwrecks 112, 121 see also wreckers Simpson, M. E. 177–8 slate 29, 45–6 Smit, Tim 200 Smith, Anthony D. 13–14 Smith, William 26–7, 52n.42 smugglers 112–13, 117, 138, 178 Society for Psychical Research 145 soil 77, 80–1, 89, 204 Soper, Kate 2, 187–8, 190 sounds 141–7, 150 echoes 116 of the sea 108–9, 116–17, 143 sound recording 145, 179 supernatural sounds 141, 144–5 of the wind 109, 120 sport 105, 170 Stevenson, R. L. 112, 115 Stoker, Bram Dracula 106, 114, 119–20 The Jewel of Seven Stars 103, 110, 114–19, 120–1, 123–5, 140–3 passim storms 118–19 see also windy weather Straffon, Cheryl 181–2, 185–90 strata 9–10, 82, 125 sublime 27–32, 34, 44, 48–9, 63–5, 71, 75, 80, 100, 102, 111 Summers, Rowena 213–14, 216

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superstition 73–4, 88, 106–7, 110–11, 123, 144, 146, 169, 175, 178, 220 Thomas, Charles 183–5, 188–9 Thompson, E. V. 214 Tibet 7–8 time travel 65–6, 126–7, 175–6 tourism 19, 91, 100–2, 110–13, 127–8, 135–44 passim, 165–6, 184–5, 200–1, 214, 226, 228–9 see also travel writing travel writing 27–8, 39–40, 44–5, 63, 77–8, 82, 100, 103–7, 108 see also tourism

Vernon, James 69, 110, 125, 142, 151 vibrations 109–10, 116–17, 118–19, 125, 141–3, 154, 179 Vidler, Anthony 140–1

UK Independence Party (UKIP) 2, 6 see also British National Party uncanny 136–7, 139–41, 144, 146, 154 Urry, John 142

Wales 5–6, 37–8, 77–8, 166, 171, 226–7 Welsh 106, 111, 172, 183 see also race Werner, Abraham Gottlob 29, 64 Westland, Ella 113–14, 151–2 Willett, Joanie 183, 229–30 Williams, Mary 216–17 Williams, Michael 174, 176–7 Williams, Raymond 38, 216, 230 windy weather 77, 108, 119, 143–4, 148, 171, 199 Wordsworth, William 29–31, 45–6 wreckers 85, 112–13, 138–42, 157–8n.9 Wyatt, John 50n.18, 51n.20

Val Baker, Denys 167, 172–3, 177 vampire 114, 119–20

Yorkshire 6, 120 see also Whitby