The Ballad of Trago Mills

Cornwall is that other Eden. It’s that elongated thin sliver of land at the end of the country. Although my mother was born in Sri Lanka, she grew up in Cornwall. I’ve lived here now for over half of my adult life. I’ve lived here for all but one year of this current millennium.

I don’t claim to be Cornish because I am not. I was not born here. I am not the son of someone who was born here. None of that matters. Cornwall is my home.

For seventeen years I lived in Penzance. The end of the line. I didn’t fall asleep on a Great Western train and find myself there, but there are surely worse ways to lead your life. Beyond Penzance are the moors of Penwith. Beyond Penzance are small villages and remote communities. Wide empty spaces. Farms. Stone circles. Megalithic sites.

Out on the moors the winds blow strong. At the top of Carn Kenidjack (the hooting carn) you can see across to three separate coastlines. In summer when every square inch of beach is taken by visiting tourists, there are places where you can still be alone. Lost in the eternity of it all. Hidden artist communities near Zennor. Stray streams that flow across the remotest parts of the moor.

I’ve encountered everything and nothing in these wild spaces. Poachers with guns and the carcass of a rabbit slung over their shoulder. Riders trekking their horses across the many bridleways. Abandoned engine houses – climb inside and sample their strange acoustics.

One winter the roads around Penzance turned white and out on the moor I found snow drifts twice as tall as myself. I forged a route out in the wilds as a blizzard engulfed me. Whiteout.

But it rarely snows this far west.

Climate change means that somewhere later in this millennium, Penzance, and an area west of Hayle to the north coast and Marazion to the south coast, will become an island. The sea levels are rising. It is only a matter of time.

The towns and villages here are gifted names that sing of poetry. Castallack.  Lamorna. Rosemergy. Portheras. Treen.

When I worked within the planning department of Penwith District Council (abolished in 2009), one of my responsibilities was the monitoring of all granted planning permissions – to register those where work had been commenced, those where work had been completed and those where no work had yet been started. Every spring this entailed me and my colleague Polly driving around the district to visit these sites, often barn conversions found on remote farm sites at the end of mud tracks you might never have known existed.

Driving the coast road through Morvah, past Gurnard’s Head, Zennor and on round to St Ives in piling rain, the rock formations of the moors looming over you from out of the murk and gloom. Trying to read maps, despite incipient car sickness.

All memories lead me to these places.

The reservoir at Drift where the remnants of an abandoned village can still be found under the surface. The flooded quarry near Sheffield (not the steel city of Yorkshire, but a one road village in West Cornwall). Magic happens here, and on a misty day the dead sometimes rise up and dance among the waterlilies that cover the centre of the pool.

In winter our ancestors lit bonfires to celebrate the solstice – the bone of winter, the hope of spring to come. The festival of Montol in Penzance is the modern day reimagining of those events (it launched in 2007). Preceding that was Chewiden (white Thursday) - a festival celebrated by the tin miners of West Cornwall on the last clear Thursday before Christmas.

This is a land of myths and legends. A place apart. That other Eden.

*

Cornwall is of course not just scenery and beaches and tourism. Ordinary people live and work here. For better or worse we have much of the same stores and fast food outlets and facilities as you might reasonably find in any other town, city or village throughout the United Kingdom. Myths and legends will not generally put food on the table. Views may feed the soul, but that alone cannot sustain us.

Parts of Penzance are amongst the poorest areas to be found in northern Europe. As a member of the EU we received funding that recognised this deficit, but of course those days are now long gone. There is a fierce sense of independence among certain parts of the local population. When I moved here there was a weekly column (paid for as part of their advertising campaign by independent retailers Trago Mills) in the local newspaper, that wrote of the perceived ills of being tied to the EU.

The author of these pieces went by the pseudonym Tripe Hound. Upon their death, the column ceased, but Trago Mills continued to advertise. Eventually I – and I imagine a lot of others – stopped purchasing these weekly local newspapers. (The same news was now accessible online). And then of course a vote was held. A majority in Cornwall voted to leave the EU. We subsequently left. We subsequently lost a lot of funding. The UK government pledged to cover those losses, but of course such promises were hollow ones.

Independence did not set Trago Mills free to flourish without the perceived red tape and bureaucracy of Brussels. On the contrary, although still in business, there have been recent rumours of closures to at least their smaller outlet in the centre of Falmouth.

Be careful what you wish for…

*

I came to Penzance via a guesthouse in Truro. Painted a distinctive pink colour on the outside, it was situated next to a more recognised yellow property (also a guesthouse) and when the yellow house was booked out they recommended travellers consult their neighbours to see if they had rooms available.

So that was where I first arrived a month or so after redundancy from my job in Bristol. Truro is a small city, plain, as many inland parts of Cornwall tend to be. Its tidal river is mud at all but the highest of tides. The cathedral dominates the skyline. Some of the smaller streets are picturesque, but you’d find better elsewhere. It’s a fair base for exploring in all directions, I’d give it that. It’s not a city for lovers though.

I’d go with Cath for the cheese shop (sadly long since gone) and the second hand bookstore. But we’d rather be roaming St Ives or escaping to the charming harbour at Porthleven, perhaps lunching in the atmospheric Ship Inn. Further south was The Lizard Peninsula, another area ripe for myths and legends. The cliffs above Kynance Cove where we’d lie out in the sun and miss bus after bus as the real world slowly receded from our consciousness. (The Goodbye Look song Sleep For a While celebrates this memory).

After 100,000 words all memories eventually blend together. The sense of narrative and time is lost. I am beyond time, looking down as though space and time have become one. It’s like that theory that we live in a single moment, we experience everything at once, but our brains parcel this information out in a linear form to stop us from going mad. After all, we are machines of a kind.

Cath left. I left (or lost) my job. I left Penzance. I moved to the borders. I am here. I type, therefore I am.

As a child, many summers were spent in Devon, out on Dartmoor where our uncle had a farm. This was also a remote place with its own myths and legends. The nearest village was several miles away. Electricity was generated from a stream that ran at the rear of the property. When you turned a kettle on, all the lights in the house would dim.

I had three siblings, but they were older than me and by the time I’d turned ten or eleven they had all left home. Those summer trips to Dartmoor were spent with my parents and my uncle and aunt. A lot of the time they were spent alone. I’d fill my hours by following the course of the stream up to where it began life out on the moor. Sometimes I’d build dams or float sticks down the water. Life was simple then.

This explains why I have no truck with real (or mostly inflated) talk of rivalries between the two western most counties. I live on the border now and can allocate my time equably in both. Life is less wild here, any magic is of a tamer kind. But I don’t mind that. As you get older, life shrinks in on you. Small things are simple pleasures. A viaduct. A colony of swans. A quiet creek. A tidal river. The stories that any landscape can conjure in your head.

And I still have all the memories of the wilder places I’ve been. I’ve not lost them yet – they stick much firmer than the names of people or bands or other parts of my life that are unreliably recounted in these pages.

I’m not rich financially, far from it. And I don’t claim to be rich in other ways. But I make the most of what I have. The landscape is free. Books from the local library are free. My mind wanders, also free. You don’t need much to make a day. Days become months. Years are a life. The rest is noise that I do my best to tune out.

I won’t live to see the island of Penwith, but I’d rate it highly against any rivals you might care to name. Wherever humanity is headed, the Earth will outlive us all, however much damage we inflict upon it. We are no more worthy than the dinosaurs. Our ruins may be our prettiest legacy. It is only the dying sun, billions of years from now, or a rogue celestial body, that will ultimately finish this planet for good.

*

I ventured from the pink house and I sampled Falmouth and Newquay and Penzance. Falmouth was lively, home to a university which Penzance had chosen to spurn when offered the chance to house it. Falmouth was nice, but pricier than my budget wanted. Newquay was more remote. The day I first visited there were flakes of snow in the air and a gaggle of surfers on Fistral beach. Penzance benefitted from its place on the mainline – direct to London, although my London years were long behind me by then. I found a flat with a view across to St Michael’s Mount. A view out to the sea, where a full moon would reflect itself on the waves and pour an eerie light into my bedroom.

It felt like the end of the road, geographically and in life. It was also a fresh start and it led me to unexpected spells in Manchester and Montreal. Without it I’d have led a different life, just as if I’d stayed in Southampton instead of returning to Bristol. In other universes, I chose differently. Those other versions of myself are living in North Wales or overseas or down on the south coast or somewhere remote in Scotland. Who knows? If I could find those memoirs and compare them to these, what fun I could have.

But this is my reality. It’s spring and the light stays longer these days, but it’s gone now. I type, therefore I am. But eventually I have to stop. For the night. Eventually, forever.