Siloed away at the far corner of England, Cornwall is one of the few locales that makes this small country feel rather vast, a county of sinister lore and berserk history.
‘If it were up to me,’ announced the old man, Doom Bar spraying between his teeth like a broken shower head, ‘I’d put a bleddy great Gatling gun up on the Tamar Bridge. That’d bleddy show ‘em.’
It was the first day after lockdown, and the pubs had reopened – either inside or outside; I forget which. The country was breaking from months of solitude, but this man had obviously enjoyed all the splendid isolation. And because this was Cornwall, the ‘em’ he wanted to obliterate with a 19th-century artillery weapon wasn’t limited to Londoners, gentrifiers or migrants or students – it was everyone. Anyone who wasn’t Cornish; the emmets, ‘em’, blood and sand.
I was used to this kind of rhetoric by now. I’d been in the county for over two years and hadn’t made a single friend beyond a few pissheads at my local and some of my then-girlfriend’s coworkers. We’d moved to Cornwall because of a work opportunity that came out of the furthest reaches of nowhere, and assumed this would make us less annoying than those who came here to enact some pastoral fantasy – the grow-your-own, ‘no logos please’, dungarees-and-child-named-after-a-beach crowd. We were better than them, right?
Wrong. There is no slack in the Cornish identity. Much like rural France or the Metropolitan Police, it’s a place where you can live and die entirely unaccepted, where ‘up country’ blood can mark a family as outsiders for generations.
Today, nearly two years after I left and five-and-a-half since I first moved to Kernow, I still can’t make head nor tail of the place. I look back on it now, and parts of it feel like a dream: running along deserted beaches, then swimming in the frothing sea with abandoned Russian cargo ships floating in the distance. Becoming acquainted with places like Goon Gumpas and Indian Queens, feuding with my trustafarian neighbours and watching helicopters scour the bay for missing fishermen.
Cornwall passed through me without ever fully revealing itself. It slipped through my fingers and changed shape on the other side. Sometimes it kicks up in my thoughts, presenting new questions and theories about my time there. I go back there every so often, bathing in the light, humid, silky air, eavesdropping in damp old boozers and trying to make sense of that strange chapter of my life.
Siloed away at the far corner of England, Cornwall is one of the few locales that makes this small country feel rather vast. Like a lot of Londoners, I grew up thinking it was just past Exeter, but Truro is further from Charing Cross than Bruges and Rouen are.
The current cliché goes that there are two Cornwalls: one that is Poldark postcards and beach barbecues with Rick Stein’s son, and another that is broken, forgotten – on the edge of the British economy. Parts of Cornwall are among the poorest in the UK, and if it were an independent state (as many would wish), it would be worse off than Lithuania.
It’s important, this broad difference, but really, there are infinite Cornwalls. It is too binary to look at it as purely coastal v. inland, rich v. poor, old v. new, outsider v. authentic. That would ignore the sheer scale of the place, the array of microcultures all pushing for their place in the sun, and that peculiar magnetism that forces many locals to call it ‘the anchor’.
In Falmouth, where I lived for most of my time there, the dominant mood was ‘maritime Walthamstow’: all Scandi rainwear, ribbed beanies, forest schools, and collages about climate change. But even with their financial clout, these types could never truly conquer the town, what with the 5,000 pissed-up students and the perpetually aggrieved locals.
In Truro, just ‘up the line’, you’ll find something more befitting the standard British high-street experience. The kids loitering outside Primark wear tapered trackies and play Central Cee songs off their phones, just like they do in Blackburn and Broxbourne. In Newquay, it often seems like Y2K never left, with all the wind-bitten blonde surfer dads in Billabong board shorts. In Redruth and Camborne – two of the poorest parts of the county – you will find the alienated and the dispossessed, and a raft of social issues just as bad as they are in Stockton or Greenock. In Wadebridge you may find middle-class wiccans; in Penzance, Latvian fishermen. Nowhere will you find a Nando’s.
You’ll meet more ‘eccentrics’ here at one bus stop or supermarket queue than most British towns could produce in a decade. Take Sazzadur ‘Prince’ Rahman, a Truro businessman who started up the Single Mingle Bar, a converted Indian restaurant that took the unusual step of discriminating against people in relationships, forcing them to show their relationship status on Facebook (and pay £20) to enter.
Some of these characters are more notorious, like John Mappin, a jewellery scion turned scientologist MAGA psycho. Mappin owns Camelot Castle, an enormous mansion-hotel that sits high on the hills above Tintagel. A colleague of mine once went to a New Year’s event at Camelot, and was at one point ushered into a separate room, where the guests were shown a video message from Donald Trump himself.
Most curious are the Robertson family, owners of the retail chain Trago Mills. The Robertson’s stores are genuinely behemothic, with some branches even featuring mini-theme parks and steam railways. The Falmouth store is apparently the smallest of the lot, but remains one of the biggest and weirdest shops I have ever stepped into – a place where you can buy a chainsaw, a piano, a pair of pants and a Persian rug, all under the same roof.
The Robertson family is highly controversial. It all began when founder Mike Robertson became a columnist for several newspapers across Devon and Cornwall in the eighties and nineties. Using the nom de plume ‘Tripehound’, Robertson used the papers to espouse his forthright political views. He libelled Edward Heath, calling for the castration of gay men. Robertson Senior died in 2001, but son Bruce has taken over the family business in more ways than one – recently stoking controversy at the Merthyr Tydfil store, describing Welsh language signage as ‘visual clutter’. But, of course, the weirdest part of the empire lies in Cornwall, where the Liskeard store boasts Alice in Wonderland sculptures and bizarro portraits of Mike sticking it to Harold Wilson.
There is all manner of sinister lore in the region, a berserk history that goes right back to tales of buccas and Tommyknockers and Barbary Pirates patrolling Mount’s Bay for human cargo. That sense of rural horror is never too far away in Cornwall. Aleister Crowley had a house here (still a site of pilgrimage for Satanists), and in the eighties there was even a Pagan paedophile ring scandal – a story that sounds carved out of the imagination of Clive Barker but was, in fact, grimly real.
Organised crime is also present, with An Gof, a kind of drug dealer’s union, supplying the ranks of the lost and broken addicts who so often slide down to this end of the country. I once met a man in a Penzance pub, muttering to himself about how his life had gone to shit after losing out on a deal with ‘the Colombians’ years before, and how a young crabber’s heart gave out at 25 due to all the uncut yayo he’d been consuming.
But there were also real heroes around. I used to see Aphex Twin occasionally, usually in Falmouth coffee shops – once twice in a day. I spent a lot of time driving across the myriad landscapes on strange, pointless errands, pumping out Heliosphan, and Richard D. James always seemed to get what Cornwall sounds like better than anyone else.
A junior doctor I once got drunk with told me the county hospital had a big problem with patients who either didn’t come in for treatment or tried to sort out their ailments in an ad-hoc, agricultural fashion. You can see a similar stubbornness in the driving, which is an experience in itself. In 2023, 48 people were killed on the roads in Devon and Cornwall, with another 700 or so seriously hurt – and those numbers are actually trending downwards.
When lockdown arrived, this stubbornness combined with a latent sense of nativism, sending many folk slightly insane. There weren’t enough police to enforce regulations – and plenty of fear about up-country deserters spreading the virus – so people turned to their own measures, including the three men who held a sign reading ‘turn around and fuck off’ on an A30 overpass. There were all kinds of threats blurted out on local radio and on Facebook. In the end, no Gatling gun was ever mounted on the Tamar Bridge, but one pub landlord in the village of St Just did install an electric fence around his bar, telling the BBC it was ‘just a normal electric fence that you would find in a field’.
The Cornish have their reasons to loathe mainline Britain, though. There are vast problems with second homes in the county – many with QR codes on the front door and names like ‘Sandy Toes’ – all contributing to a sickening and well-documented housing crisis. The second home brigade remains criminally oblivious to the issues they have caused, instead seeing it as a kind of Boden Benidorm – and I can only see relations getting worse.
There was often trouble in the air, and issues would be sorted out within the community. I saw plenty of punch-ups around Cornwall and heard whispers of an incident where a man in a wheelchair was dumped into canals around Truro. There were several murders in my time – mostly drug debts and domestic abuse cases – but you were far more likely to die in an accident. The sea was always a reliable source for mishaps. One summer afternoon, I stood on Gyllyngvase beach as a man was dredged from the waves. Another guy, a local at my pub, drowned alongside his dog as he made the mistake of kayaking home across the harbour.
It often felt like death was all around. Some of the characters I met passed away in the short time I was there, including ‘Sticky’, a street drinker well-known around town who lost his spot outside the shuttered M&S and died in a Camborne flat, loaded with heroin and vodka. A man who always requested ‘Alvis’ Presley on the jukebox at Finn M’Coul’s also conked it, and three people nearly met their maker when a 94-year-old woman crashed into a bus stop in nearby Mylor.
For a city boy like me, it was all very odd – that sense that you may not be entirely in control. I thought about this when swimming in the sea sometimes – the mortal power of nature that is so often absent in urban areas.
I went back there recently, on a flying trip to the town of Newlyn. I encountered the scope of the place: craggy-faced crab fishermen, overbearing couples in fleeces, a moustachioed young barman who’d been punched twice in the face that week. Walking along the South West Coastal Path, wind lashing my ears, I thought once more about my time there. It may have passed through me, but that is perhaps the beauty of the place. There is always a new Cornwall, and a very old Cornwall, to contend with.
