… on the arts and the outdoors
Tuesday, 26 February 2013 1 Comment
A bracing walk from the house onto the moor last Saturday afternoon. The natural ‘cheesewring’ formations are a marvel of nature, especially those that seem to defy gravity. Here are three on three separate tors.
Tuesday, 1 January 2013 1 Comment
There’s nothing quite like a New Year’s Day walk with friends, climbing steep roads riddled with gullies from recent rain, striding along old granite railway sleepers, ending up with a good pub lunch at the highest village in Cornwall.
On the way back, we peered into a huge hole that’s opened up over a mine shaft, were too late to find gold in a prehistoric barrow, and scrambled over the ruins of a disused chapel once surrounded by a drunken shanty town.
Best of all were the views, when the sun shone between the heavy showers and the rusty corrugated roof of an old barn glowed in a deep raddle reddle ruddle.
Tuesday, 6 November 2012 Leave a comment
[reprinted from The Telegraph, 5 November 2012]
The people of Cornwall, or some of them, want to change the name of Brown Willy on Bodmin Moor, at 1,378ft, the highest point in the Duchy. The motive is to stop people sniggering. It is pointed out that in Cornish the name is Bronn Wennili, “hill of swallows”, which has pleasant associations. But can place names simply be changed? This is not the Soviet Union. Places are what people call them. If we are the first generation of adults who, like the comic book character Finbarr Saunders, see double entendres everywhere, what is to become of Great Cockup and Little Cockup in Cumbria; Crapstone, Devon; Penistone, South Yorkshire; Brokenwind, Aberdeenshire; Shitterton, Dorset; North Piddle, Worcestershire; Nether Peover, Cheshire; Slack Bottom, West Yorkshire; Pratts Bottom, Kent; and Titty Hill in West Sussex?
…….
[cornishadrian] … and, while we’re about it, let’s revert Bodmin Moor to the original ‘Foweymoor’ (= Fo’ymoor) and name it after its river like ‘Exmoor’ and ‘Dartmoor’. For one thing, ‘Bodmin Moor’ was an Ordnance Survey invention of 1813. For another, linguistically ‘Foweymoor’ flows, while ‘Bodmin Moor’ is lumpy.
Cornish Adrian 