I’ve just added this image and a story to Cornwall Culture, a campaign to find out what Cornwall means to you, us, them. In the section ‘What does Cornwall mean to you‘ there is a virtual pin-board of images each with stories, keywords and comments made by various people who have joined the campaign. You can also agree or disagree with whether a particular keywords or add your own. Browsing around what some people had to say was compelling. The strength of feeling among many of the contributors about being Cornish and about Cornwall’s heritage and history was more vehement at times than I might have expected, with for example, the supression of the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 likened to an ‘ethnocide’ or ‘Cornish Holocaust’ perpetrated by imperialist overlords (the English) and how tinners who didn’t pay their dues to the Duchy were ‘forced’ to eat molten tin.
As a historian I am both fascinated and disappointed at such comments. Fascinated because I am experiencing the Cornish history of tomorrow. Disappointed because it seems that the claim on historical ‘fact’ seems to be anybody’s to promulgate as they wish without recourse to the evidence. I don’t see as much disputation of Boyle’s Law among such people. But then the way history is understood is as much about what people want to believe and how it makes them feel as it is about the painstaking labour of evaluating and interpreting the sources.
As for me, I was walking from Padstow to Harlyn Bay with Tom last summer on the South West coastal path in search of burials of iron age ancestors. They did it differently in Cornwall, you know. (No, they really did.)
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