The Greatest Cornish Myth

A few weeks later I was fortunately given the opportunity to present my research and formulate my argument with greater clarity. Coincidentally, at he time of the Scottish referendum I was down in the Pays Basque once more I’m glad to say Farm Swap is in the can as they say ( LINK HERE more on this later) and Jonty and of Taw Tarka Film and Video services thought they’d have a wrap party down with the Marsauds the French farmers involved in the programme. Of course the Basques have a great sense of historical, geographical and cultural identity so they were all very interested in the Scottish debate and it as it turned out appeared very disappointed with the outcome.They evidently saw it as some sort of benchmark. Over dinner one evening outside on the patio as the sun set in the Western skies beyond the Pyrennees I had the opportunity to give my thoughts on such matters an airing before a more discerning audience than the Lunch Club, Monsieur Marsaud had bought along Inaki his neighbour. This fella is a Spanish Basque a small dark gruff bloke  who has been exiled in France, or more exactly the Pays Basque, the Northern Basque country or Ipparalde in their language for what became increasingly obvious but never stated reasons for many years. I'd met him on my previous visits but he’d viewed me with suspicion and we didn’t get on.

Never ever say "Atletico"

I gather from young Jean Paul Marsaud it was all to do with me calling Athletic Bilbao Atletico as in Atletico Madrid and I hadn't realised the error of my ways until the emphatic difference was pointed out later. Anyway this Inaki turns up primed to have a good go at the English and after a discussion on Scottish nationalism which became increasingly lively as the patxaran got passed around. Inaki spoke English with a Irish accent and had married an Irish girl and lived in Ireland for few years until he had to leave. Infact, he spent honeymoon on a tour of Cornwall and seemed particularly fond of Looe. So given his innate nationalistic tendencies it was inevitable that the Cornish question would arise. He thought that Cornish independence was nigh, the Cornish as a distinct people had been too long under the yoke of the English Imperialists and that they’d had enough of being ruled by a hegemonic elite governing from an alien city state 300 miles away. I don’t know how he’d picked this up  from a few nights in Looe but evidently Inaki was extremely convinced of his own opinions and his notions of Cornish sovereignty became more and more insane. He's a madman, mazed.

His boggled eyed views, and a couple more sniffs of patxaran, made my bleddy blood boil and I couldn’t hold back. I couldn't let him get away with it. I'd done with was trying to be polite and humour him but I soon found myself giving it to him with both barrels.

Firstly, I had to point out to him that the notion of a separate Cornish people, a distinct racial “Celtic" type was a nonsense as DNA evidence shows that people who have antecedents in the West Of Britain and up North (basically you draw a line from the Tyne down to Bournemouth) share the same markers which they share chromosone to chromosone with those from Ireland, the West of Scotland, Brittany and Wales. Infact it has been claimed recently there was no Celtic racial type these folk were Ancient Britons, people who first settled Britain 10,000 years ago, later beaker people who migrated up through Spain and France to our damp largely uninhabited Isle who had taken on board a Celtic culture which had crossed Europe during the Bronze age and Iron age. This culture became more prevalent and more enduring on the fringes, lasting as it did in these outer limits until the medieval times as they became cut off from the East of Europe by the Romans, who incidentally didn’t colonise anything West of Exeter but traded for tin with the Britons and then even more so by the barbarian hordes and the Anglo Saxon invader. In ancient history the West of Britain as a whole shared a sophisticated culture derived from a knowledge of the Mediterranean civilisations due to trading links with the Pheonecians  who came up from Gadir Cadiz and the Algarve to trade tin at a place they called Cassiteredes the Tin Islands. Previously The Beaker People, also Iberians, even built a wall across Stonehenge to keep the lumpen invaders from the East at arms length. Of course by now I was on automatic pilot and was not really that convinced of my own historical veracity but it all sounded bleddy plausible. I told the Basque that during the dark ages the whole of Southwest England was inhabited by the Dumnomii tribe who in the face of invasion from the east retreated back to the furthest reaches of the peninsular establishing themselves in North west Somerset, North and West Devon and Cornwall.In North Devon, which was never a part of Wessex, the Anglo Saxons didn’t arrive until a generation before the Norman Conquest. and didn't get around to renaming many settlements in their alien tongue,  to such an extent that place names with origins in our indigenous Southwestern Brittonic language

were inscribed in the first records ie. the Doomesday book. Ilfracombe, Combe Martin, Petrockstowe, Braunton, Parracombe, Woolacombe, Tawton; the rivers Taw and Torridge amoung many other place names are all derived from Celtic, Devonian/Welsh topographical terms or Celtic saints, St Brannock and St Petroc. I then triumphantly stressed that Devon is actually the only county in England that has a strictly Celtic language name coming as it does from Dumnom after the Dumnomii. Infact place names with a celtic toponomy are more frequent in Devon than they are in Cornwall!

I told him that I thought that this notion of Cornwall as a separate, defined Celtic nation was invented by 18/19th Century antiquarians, Romantic writers and in recent times Daphne bleddy Dumaurier, that Mary Wesley and her Camomile Lawn and John Betjeman, lovely bloke though, and other members of the cultural elite going on about finding their own unique magical corner of Britain while broadcasting it to the world. The middle classes yapping on about secret coves in Cornwall and getting all misty eyed about golden memories of Cornish childhood holidays all butterfly catching, lemonade on the veranda and colourful but smelly local characters. The Sunday Supplements articles propagate these myths and commodify them, Cornish porn, puffing out guff with phrases like celtic charm usually accompanied with a picture of St. Michael's mount a former Benedictine monastery or summoning up allusions to the mythical land of Lyonese which  features in Arthurian legend but actually probably a land bridge sunk into the sea about 10,000 years ago. All bleddy utter rubbish. Today New Age type blow ins and the tourist industry both of whom have had their own agenda to serve persevere with this nonsense. These new agers seem to place King Arthur in about 500BC and if evidence from contemporary Launceston, Totnes and Glastonbury is anything to go by, he believed in faeries, crystal healing and took lessons from a reiki master. All a bit confused in my book given that he was a Romano Briton so more than likely a good Catholic with a dash of the old ways thrown 

The once and future King - a good Catholic boy.

This evidently tickled Inaki as he laughed and spat pout "bloody hippies"

It's all bleddy daft in the end. And we headed off sort out our differences in the time honoured Basque tradition of a tree trunk chopping contest or Aizkolaritza. I didn't want to offend the bey too much so I let him win even though he kept falling off his log. Ultimately I respected his deeply held beliefs formed as they were from many years of repression and exile
So, I had to compromise and amicably explained that all these things are relative, but the Scots and Cornish bandying about terms like freedom really did get my goat. This led to a quizzical expression the Basques have a lot of maxims proverbs involving goats but this obviously wasn't one of them

A miracle of the Sands

Wes's van - up for sale

A while back now I was down in France for a couple of weeks staying with the Marsauds my fellow my other half in Reality TV's Farm Swap so I'd been out of the loop for a bit. However, Wes Twardo turned up as he had also gone down there to Jonty of Taw and Tarka Video Services mother's place which is across the valley from the Marsaud's. They have always extended an invitation to all and sundry to come down and stay so he thought he might just take 'em up on the offer.  From what I could gather something happened with Jonty's mother and he was asked to leave so he rattles along in the old Fiat and turns up in the Marsaud's yard. You could tell he was on the way as the van runs on vegetable oil and it smelt like the Silver Cod in Bear Street was coming down the lane. I was glad to see that he'd brought a copy of the Journal with him. So later, with the evening drawing in I sat down by the fire to digest the latest news from home. I was taken by one story in particular. Something didn't quite ring true in the way the Journal tells it or at least if it did happen that way then it was a bleddy miracle and the story should be trending far and wide.

It tells the tale of a surfer, more likely a floater or a man who went surfing, who lost his wedding ring in the waves but was reunited with it after a metal detecting enthusiast spent six hours searching the beach. This chap Darren was on holiday with his wife Michell and he forgot to take the ring off before hitting the water.( Any foool knows you loose rings like this all your digits shrink in cold water. Any true surfer is well aware of this fact! So to my mind this confirms the fact that he wasn't an actual surfer rather a bloke who happened to give surfing a go on his holiday. Anyway, as he was paddling out to meet the sets, or more likely in this fella's case sticking his ass out to meet an oncoming wavelet, the ring slipped off his finger and vanished into the sea. Yeah, bleddy likely story, Wes and I concluded, knowingly looking at each other, more likely he'd slipped it off in order to appear single and unattached, a free spirit of the waves, to the surfer girls and other weekend warriors. Payback time as legend has it that Neptune always takes what he think he is owed, snaffling away his prize deep down into the briny depths, or in this case the shallows. The couple then claimed to have launched a three hour search for the ring. If, as the reader is led to believe, he was in the depths  this really would be a remarkable feat of strength and endurance and since he didn't appear to be a Polynesian pearl diver but actually a rep for a vending machine company from Berkshire this would have been a truly superhuman endeavour!

The extensive and ever shifting sands of Saunton

“Emotions were running high,” said Darren. I bleddy bet they were! Turns out it was Michelle's birthday and the couple had booked a meal in a nice restaurant to celebrate but this mishap had put them in two minds as to whether to go or not as poor Michelle was distraught. This conjures up an image of the maid on hers knees in the shallows flailing around in the waters, throwing handfuls of sand all around and screaming up into the heavens, " why oh why Lord? Why must it always be me!" A wild look in her eyes as she is dragged away from the perilous incoming tide by concerned day trippers who settle her down above the tideline and stand about looking at her shivering and muttering under a huddle of beach towels. It was a lovely day ruined.
Wes and I tried to think where they would have booked to go for dinner and whether, if we found ourselves in a similar dilemma, we would turn down the chance of a slap up dinner there. In such circumstances you'd probably think twice if it was The Sands or The Boardwalk, although personally speaking I quite like both those establishments,  as you really wouldn't want want to look out at the sea and be constantly reminded of your los,s even if you faced the appetising prospect of a surf and turf platter. It obviously must have been a somewhere a bit more special than Wetherspoons as they'd made a booking and I don't think a Squires' Fish and Chip supper would have sufficed. You have to imagine that they would have pushed the boat out a bit. So maybe it was The Thyme Restaurant at Trimstone Manor and, we agreed, you really wouldn't want to give up a  table at The Watersmeet nor at Kentisbury Grange. In the end Wes and I settled on the Blue Groove down at Croyde which, "oozes unique personality and refuses to be put in a box". That seemed more like it. Then again your getting into Kings Arms Georgeham territory if you head down that road. Nope the Blue Groove it had to be. Of course, The Journal failed to mention where they were going.

Cool The Blue Groove - It's not of the box

At some point Michelle recovered some mental clarity and had the brilliant idea of going online to a metal detecting forum and getting in touch with a dectectorist from Fremington who upon hearing the story was glad to be of assistance and eager to take up the challenge and he could empathise with their situation as he had faced a similar predicament having recently found his wife's ring. Doesn't say whether it was lost at sea or not as it could of course just been down the back of the sofa. So off he goes, in the early hours of the morning, in the dark. amid an Atlantic gale down to Saunton and undertakes a methodological search using his extincts and skills. The first search proved to be fruitless. Although, amazingly, they just keep coming. he did find a ring! Bleddy hell it jgets better and better, However, this one was engraved with "Vinny and Toni 4eva X" Sounds like it washed up from the shores of New Jersey, Oh we had a laugh. Wes knows a bloke called Vinny who for a time was the barman at the Dolphin Inn down at Combe Martin and he happens to be of Italian extraction, but his wife is called Barbara. I told Wes he should have a discreet word with him next time he's out that way. There cold be a reward. Mind you you he might open a right can of worms. As this Vinny happens to being of Italian extraction and it does say "Toni" Well, you never know. Stranger things have happened; like this old yarn for a start!
Anyway, As we all know time and tide wait for no man so undeterred, Paul launched a second search.
“The bigger swell predicted for the following day would move the sand and the ring would have sunk too deep to be found.” So once more he took bearings from where the ring had been lost, marking a search area with little flags and digging furiously in the worsening elements and as he was about to abandon the search, on his penultimate sweep of the zone, he only goes and finds the ring. Ten days after it was lost or to put it in starkly oceanographic terms twenty tormentuous tides later and given  that it it was also dark and in the middle of the night, a true miracle in all senses of the word, defying as it does the laws of nature and physics. A happy end to a slightly skewrd and rather inconsistent tale although none of us were able quite fit the Journal's account squarely with any sort of reality. Incredulous. Wes and I reckoned that if it this really was the case the talents of the Fremington detectorist were wasted beachcombing and mudlarking along the coastline and estuaries of North Devon as he must possess some sort of power of divination to find precious metal in the dark and in the perpetually shifting sands of our beaches. Mysterious, archetypal powers which would be best employed by professional treasure hunters searching for sunken Spanish galleons in the warm waters of the Caribbean, not mudlarking down at Yelland. He could make a fortune.

A hermit crab

Of course miracles can happen and I must confess to a similar happening in my own family. It was a baking day in the summer of 1976, Whitsun weekend or early summer at any rate and us lot had all gone on a trip down to Croyde. Of course us blokes swiftly took ourselves off down to The Carpenters Arms where we  slaked our thirst with a few pints of cool dry cider. It really was bleddy baking but lovely and cool in the pub. So we made the most of it at closing time. 2.00pm back then we all waddled back down the path to the beach to join the rest of the family and a leeky pie lunch. As we trudged across the burning sands Granfer Furse starts taking off his shoes and socks shirt and trousers. stripping off down to his vest and long johns he then dashes down to the sea and dives straight in. Of course although the air temperature was in the eighties and being early in the season the sea was still bleddy freezing he immediately came thrashing out up of the water in shock, coughing and spluttering before wheezing and gasping for air and in doing so his dentures came flying out of his mouth, before plopping into the swell and a rip must have carried them away as for love or money we had no luck finding them on an initial search. The lifeguards knowing as they do the prevailing currents suggested that they could have been swept towards the rocks down at the Baggy end. So we put out a hue and cry and Granfer offered 50p to anyone who could find the errant false teeth. On hearing of this kids swarmed down to the water and began searching all sorts of waifs and strays turned up like Victorian urchins down on the banks of the banks of the Thames. 50p that would have got you two bottles of Corona. At the time there was a scout jamboree going on in the fields behind the beach and they turned up and undertook a more methodological investigation, organising themselves into packs and setting up a central command point. It wasn't bob a job week so the y must have seen this as a keen opportunity to get their beachcombing badges. Luckily. the tide was on the way out and after an hour or two and just as the Thermos's were being uncorked and the rock cakes were coming out. a cry went up from a lad over on the rocks. We all hurried to the spot where he was pointing excitedly into a rockpool and there they were grandfer's teeth looking like some mutant hermit crab or deeply flawed yellowing pearls poking out between some sea anemones.
The little boy didn't want to touch them so I fished it out with his net and returned them to Grandfer bearing them on the end of a bamboo stick as I wasn't too keen on touching them either. So Granfer was able to enjoy his cake hungrily gobbling it down while slurping his tea of course this set him to coughing and spluttering so much so that the teeth came flying out once again. This time they fortunately landed in the sand so all we had to do was to get the stick out and send one of the kids off over to the stream and rinse 'em out. Oh happy jolly days out down at Croyde



Thinking about it  I also lost some surfer beads down there in 1972 and Wes told us how he always keeps an eye open for his cousin's sovereign medallion three hundred quids worth that. I remember when he lost that. That cut him down a peg or two, Cor he fancied himself that bloke, A real seventies man he was, a right flash harry. He worked on the oil rigs in the early days and when he was home he liked to flash the cash a bit and he'd drive up the high street day in day out in a yellow Triumph Stag with a couple of dolly birds, a seventies thing that, sitting up on the back seat. His girlfriend at the time was rumoured to be a page three model and had been a centrefold in Penthouse. So they say. Looking back, I think she was just a model for Codd's Auto Parts calender or Edes nuts and raisins. You removed the packets to reveal her ample self underneath, Although I have to say she was very attractive but I can't really imagine anyone sitting at a bar eating packet after packet just to get a peak of her bosoms. Perhaps there were people like that back then who got some sort of thrill out of eating all the nuts. They wouldn't have done it otherwise, would they. Anyway Shane when he wasn't tearing about the town would be down the Beach Club sitting on the wall with all the local fast kids, you had to graduate to the wall above the beach and once you got there you were really in with the in crowd. He rarely ventured down to the water as it would play havoc with his perm and he'd have to reapply coconut oil to his glistening hairy chest. However, one maid was able to tempt him down there and after frolicking in the waves and as they patted a beach ball gayly between each other Shane noticed that the pendant was missing. He dived around trying to find it pretending to show of his prowess as he had to keep up his act but all to know avail, Back up at the Beach Club it was all, "What comes around goes around", " It was only money. Plenty more what that come from". But inside it was killing him. He furtively sidled up to our gang as we were playing pinball and offered a tenner to anyone willing to search for it. We gave it a go but found nothing. Seeing him about these days, now he's lost some of his lustre, he looks haunted by his past.  I told Wes when we got back we should get in touch with Paul out at from Yelland as he was bound to bring his superhuman powers to bear upon it and as well as recovering the treasured coin we could also recover some of Shane's former glory. "Bugger that" said Wes, "I'm having it".