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The English Unitary Authority County of Cornwall

 

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The Unitary Authority of Cornwall is located in The Far South Western Counties of England, it covers an administrative area of 3,547Km² and in 2001 was home to a population of 499,094 persons, that represents 1.02% of that of England and 0.01% of the population of the entire United Kingdom.

 

More detailed information including visitor attractions and event venues in Cornwall is available on this site by following the links below to the Historic Boroughs and/or Districts or follow this link to select a different County.

 

 

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Boroughs/Districts of the County of Cornwall

Unitary Authorities and Metropolitan Areas are shown below as these locations are historically associated with this county. These areas today are self-governing and are no longer responsible to the County Administration.

Location Type
   

Caradon

Historic District

Carrick

Historic District

Isles of Scilly

Unitary Authority

Kerrier

Historic District

North Cornwall

Historic District

Penwith

Historic District

Restormel

Historic Borough

   

 

Books about Cornwall*

 

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RSS Local News Feed for Cornwall from the BBC

BBC News | England | Cornwall | UK Edition Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:01:12 GMT

Get the latest BBC Cornwall news: headlines from across Cornwall plus video and audio news bulletins. Includes links to other Cornwall news sites.

Source Logo News Items
Tax fears for holiday let owners

Tax break changes for holiday lets could cost the South West thousands of jobs and up to £110m, tourism bodies warn.

Cancer-check camera for hospital

People with undetected cancer are to benefit from specialist camera equipment to be installed at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.

Jobs to go in day centre closure

A Penzance day care centre which is used by more than 40 people is to shut with the loss of nine jobs.

Cornish eco-town given £9m start

Cornwall is to get £9m to help get the St Austell eco-town project started, the government announces.

Rural lottery outlet threat fear

A sub-postmistress in Cornwall fears Camelot could take away the only lottery outlet for seven miles because of sales targets.

CCTV released over gun threat

Police issue CCTV image of a man possibly from Cornwall whom they want to speak to about a violent threat made to a rail worker.

Improvements made to bus stop

Improvements are being made to a bus stop in Cornwall to make it easier for people with mobility issues to board buses.

How to contact us

How to contact BBC News Interactive's Cornwall team

 

Historical notes about The English Unitary Authority County of Cornwall

CORNWALL in 1950

In the most south-westerly of the counties of England there is still current and cherished an old saying that the Devil never ventured to cross the River Tamar from England into Cornwall for fear of being put into a Cornish pasty.

Now, although the Cornish housewife is avid of variety in the fare she provides, she is also extremely fastidious in her choice of ingredients for a pasty, her "national" dish; but let that pass. The point is that the Devil, in having selected the left bank of the Tamar as the south-western limits of his goings up and down the English land, may well have had in mind other considerations than the possibility of an ignominious end in the roaring oven of a Cornish kitchen.

Indeed, he may have been versed in precedents. For in thus neglecting Cornwall he was following the example of some quite notable representatives of human kind. In high summer nowadays, when Cornwall accommodates with great difficulty the hosts of eager holiday-makers who come, chiefly, to explore her incomparable coast, it is odd to recall that for long centuries she was left almost completely to her own devices.

The Romans did not carry their great roads westwards beyond Exeter, and they merely infiltrated into Cornwall, the most highly mineralized portion of the land they has conquered, in order to ensure for themselves a supply of tin and antimony.

It was nearly four centuries after the arrival of the heathen English into Britain that they turned westwards to subdue the denizens of the narrow, tapering peninsula that thrusts our for some eighty miles into the restless Atlantic. The subjugation was no easy task, quite apart from the quality of the Cornish Celts as warriors of dash and fire. A contour map will show clearly that, before the invention of gunpowder at any rate, the conquest of Cornwall required ample time and overwhelming forces. And the English never wholly accomplished their purose.

What they did, among other things, was to foster in the Cornish the long-prized legend of their semi-mystical Celtic champion, King Arthur, whose cult has ever since been associated with Tintagel and to a lesser degree with Camelford and Dozmare Pool; and to leave in the peninsula, except perhaps its extreme eastern portion, a heightened consciousness among the Cornish of their land themselves, their language, traditions and customs, as being apart and distinct from England and the English. Not even yet has that sense of being "different" vanished from Cornwall.

Indeed, the Cornishman returning to his native county, has a feeling which is not fully shared by the sons and daughters of any other county of England on their homecoming. When he crosses the Tamar, by Brunel's superb viaduct between Plymouth and Saltash, or by the broad-beamed ferry to Torpoint, or by the road over a lovely fifteenth century bridge which spans the river at its upper reaches, the Cornishman feels that he is doing more than pass from a neighbouring county into his own. To him, crossing into Cornwall is one out of England into his "own dear country."

Not that there is, as the phrase is commonly understood, a Cornish nationalism. In every period, in fact, from the time of Queen Elizabeth onwards when England has been threatened from without, your Cornishman has proved himself as good an Englishman as the next. For one thing, Cornwall has been closely linked with the royal family since the fourteenth century, when the Black Prince was created Duke of Cornwall, a title ever since borne by the king's eldest son. But although there has been this special inducement to loyalty, Cornwall has not, through the intervening centuries, been uniformly quiescent. There were three risings in Tudor times, the last, in 1549, being occasioned by the issue of the first English Book of Common Prayer and the Act of Uniformity.

The Cornish, who had hitherto been allowed by a wise and benevolent Church to use their own Celtic language, with a certain amount of Latin, in their churches, has no liking for the new service. For one thing, only a few of them could speak or understand English. For another, they were then, and have been ever since, sticklers for "what do belong to be," and they did not like the new form of worship. It was, they said, "lyke a Christmas game." With a perfectly sincere profession of loyalty to the English crown, they yet protested that they must "utterly refuse this new service." This protest many of them sealed with their blood in battle, while others who escaped death on the field perished on the gallows. Since the crushing of the Prayer Book Rebellion there has never been from Cornish people any serious opposition, manifest or latent, to conformity with the broad, general pattern of English life. There never will be now.

The Cornish, however, have retained, woven into that general pattern, one that is distinctively their own. Though the quick ear can detect the inverted commas in their tones, Cornish people still refer to the English as "foreigners." In their own county, and more especially the eastern portion, where place-names are Saxon more commonly than anywhere else, the Cornish have happily inter-mixed and inter-married with the English; but for the most part they have retained the qualities peculiar to, or usually found in, people of Celtic stock. The English Prayer Book, the fact that the Bible was never translated into Cornish, the lapsing of the old Cornish miracle plays, the new commercialism of Tudor times, and the new place assigned to Cornwall in the defence of the country before the war with Spain in which Cornish seamen played such a gallant part - all these contributed to the decay of the Cornish language. By the beginning of the eighteenth century nearly everybody in Cornwall could speak English, and not many could also speak Cornish, though the language lingered on in the west for many years. It has, indeed, never completely died out, and it cannot while Cornish place-names and surnames, some of them the most bewitching sounds in any language, endure. As a language of the people it is finished; but it must be recorded that many more Cornish people can speak and write their own language than could do so even twenty years ago.

In that period, too, there has been a revival of the ancient Gorsedd of the Cornish Bards - a picturesque and impressive ceremony among the hills and moors - and of such pagan rites as the Midsummer Eve bonfires, into which are tossed garlands of flowers, herbs and weeds. Immediately after the First World War there sprang into being all over the county Old Cornwall Societies, pledged to gather up and preserve the fragments that remained of Cornwall's past. Within a year of the conclusion of the Second World War these societies, mainly adult, were augmented by Young Cornwall Societies.

Why this pre-occupation with the past? The answer probably is that the Cornish have such a rich heritage. There are few areas, for example, of greater interest to the archaeologist. Charles Henderson, first among Cornish scholars, once declared that there was scarcely an acre in the county which, to the skilled field worker, would not yield up some interesting relic of bygone age. This is particularly true of the Land's End peninsula and the Bodmin Moor, where are grouped or scattered stone circles and massive dolmens, wind-swept barrows, hill-forts and cliff-castles, and remains of villages of as long ago as three or four thousand years.

Among the sand-dunes of Perranporth is a Celtic church of fifteen hundred years ago: it is the oratory of St Piran. Today its comelier walls are encased for protection in concrete, though it is never likely again to be buried in the sand as it was for many centuries. St Piran was one of over a hundred Celtic saints who came, in miraculous ways, by sea to Cornwall, where they gave their names to parishes, villages, churches and holy wells, and an origin to the saying that there war more saints in Cornwall than there are in heaven. A similar oratory is known to lie buried under the sand at Gwithian, across the bay from St Ives. (This wild and rugged north coast of Cornwall has suffered much from blown sand - the introduction of marram grass at length kept it reasonably stable - and for years the priest who had charge of the chapel-of-ease of St Enodoc, across the Camel Estuary from Padstow, had to reach the interior by descending a ladder through the roof.)

It is thanks largely to the Celtic saints of Cornwall that Christian worship has had there from Roman times an unbroken continuity of which England generally cannot boast. "If St Augustine had come to Cornwall," Archbishop Benson once remarked, "he would not have had to have made his way through crowds of heathen people who wondered what he was come for: for here in Cornwall he would have found people to meet him with the full knowledge of the Gospel, worshipping here day after day, as well as from Sunday to Sunday." From that Age of the Saints have come down a hundred holy wells, the water of many of them even in recent times believed to have miraculous properties, including the cure of many of the ills that flesh is heir to. Then there are some three hundred Cornish crosses, the granite of some of them elaborately carved, and the largest, at Mylor, near Falmouth, seven feet in the ground and ten feet out of it.

Celtic Legends

But as interesting a legacy as any from the Celtic saints is the store of legend accumulated during the centuries after their passing; of the dwarf, St Neot, for example, standing on the base of the churchyard cross and throwing the key into the church door lock, which it then turned of its own accord; of the jovial Piran, patron saint of Cornish miners, stumbling over the sand-dunes from his experiments in tin-smelting, with a head buzzing from over-much tippling; or of the battles fought with slabs of Cornish granite as weapons, between neighbouring holy men, whose tempers were quick and whose lives were preserved only by Divine diversion of their lustily flailing missiles.

To these legends of the saints must be added many more. Some of them, such as those relating to Tristan and Iseult and to King Arthur, which have been narrated by bards, poets and story-tellers, have now passed into the realms of immortal romance. And the Cornish have also a fascinating store of folk-lore, much of it peculiar to themselves.

Why should this be? There are doubtless several answers, and one almost certainly is that through the ages the Cornish have been chiefly a fishing and mining people. (Agriculture was shockingly neglected until, in late Tudor times, a temporary decline in mining "drave them to play the good husbandmen.") Than fishing and mining there are few occupations more fraught with many and great dangers.

Dangerous Occupations

A tremendous storm suddenly sweeps the Cornish coast; a fishing fleet is destroyed and a fishing village bereft of most of its men-folk. There is a cloudburst over a tin mine and the water rushed down the main shafts so that scores of miners below perish by drowning. Or there is a fall of ground and miners are buried; or premature explosions rock the galleries underground - the safety-fuse had yet to be invented - and Death stalks through the acrid smoke. In a famous mining parish which, in the course of a century, had produced over ten million pounds' worth of copper, one out of every five miners met a violent death. And the remaining four were always threatened by a premature end from "miner's trouble," consumption or silicosis, which made theirs the shortest working-lives in British industry.

Leading such an arduous and insecure existence, is it so very strange that these old miners were prone to look to the Little People of their own imagining as allies in the dangerous struggle for survival? Even nowadays a Cornish miner, though he will sing as only a Cornish miner can, will never whistle at his work. Nor will he, in that dark underworld of his, make on the face of the rock at which he is working any sign resembling a cross. It may be nonsense - he will admit it - but deep in his heart the Little People, who must not be offended by these things, still have life, and he listens, when the roarings of the pneumatic drills have subsided for the faint "knocking" that indicates the friendly, protective presence of the Little people, as his forebears, between the blows of their picks, listened long ago.

For mining, like fishing, goes back to the very beginnings of things in Cornwall. It was for tin that the dark-eyed strangers of the Mediterranean shores came to this peninsula, which they thus brought into contact with civilization before it reached the fest of England. Through the clay-slate sur-race of Cornwall ages ago, in the course of terrific convulsions deep below, where erupted big "islands" of granite - the Cornish hills, the broken backbone of the county, having round their bases a variety of minerals: a little gold and silver; some lead, iron and zinc; cobalt, antimony and manganese; bismuth, tungsten and arsenic; and much tin and copper. Production of tin, which has taken the Cornish miner as deep as two thousand feet "below grass" and even far out under the sea, dominated the Cornish economy until the eighteenth century. Then copper, hitherto so despised that field hedges were made of it, came into its own; and at one time in the nineteenth century Cornwall was producing the bulk of the world's supply. One in every five persons in the county was engaged in tin or copper mining, and fathers clambered up and down hundreds of feet of ladders in the shafts with their sons on their shoulders: co-workers in an industry which, although it sometimes yielded fantastic profits, ill repaid the mass of working miners.

Decline of Mining

In the most prosperous period of the industry there were over three hundred mines at work. Now there are only three; two producing tin and one wolfram, which is used for hardening steel. The explanation of the virtual extinction of the mining industry is not that Cornwall's abundance of minerals has been exhausted, but that tin and copper can be produced much more cheaply elsewhere. And so thousands of Cornish miners, whose forefathers were the world pioneers of deep mining, have gone reluctantly from their native towns and villages to all parts of the world, giving rise to the saying that wherever a hole has been dug in the ground in the quest for minerals, there a Cornishman will be found. Still active are the engineering and fuse-making industries of Camborne-Redruth, the largest town in Cornwall and one which shows how little men thought of planning and the graces in days when mining absorbed most of their time and energy. At Camborne, too, there is still a School of Mines which feeds Empire and other counties with first-class mining-engineers. And what else remains? Hundreds of mine-shafts, their stone walls now covered with bramble and grasses and wild flowers, and besides these, perched on lonely headlands, scattered over the heath-clad downs, or grouped at the foot of granite hills from Chapel Carn Brea in the far west to Caradon near the Devon border, scores of slowly crumbling engine-houses, from which almost every vestige of human activity has vanished.

Cornwall's other principal industry through the centuries has also fallen upon evil days; though it has vitality still and may yet, with wise fostering, flourish again. The decay of Cornish fishing is a story too long and complicated to be told here; but its beginnings can be ascribed to that time not so long ago when the pilchard suddenly changed its migratory course and came no longer to Cornish waters in its scores of millions. Pilchard fishing was the basis of a lucrative export trade to the Mediterranean countries, particularly Italy; and the home market in Cornwall - English "foreigners" have never given this tasty, nutritive little fish its due! - was steady and remunerative. Given a good pilchard season, the fisher-folk could rub along though all else failed. They have never recovered from the blow of that change in pilchard migration. Instability of markets and prices for other fish has also been a factor in the melancholy diminution of fishing-fleets, as has been the unwillingness of young Cornishmen of the coves and ports to follow their forebears into an industry in which so much is risked for returns so small and uncertain.

Farming Methods

To the stranger from fat, rolling plains of England, Cornwall's multiplicity of small farms and tiny fields, with their thick, stone hedges, is a source of wonder and surmise. But they are perfectly approachable to a hilly county much of which is downland and moor with granite under the thin, acid soil, and great tracts of which, until comparatively recently, were laid waste - as, alas, was so much Cornish woodland! - in the quest and production of minerals. In al, a large acreage has been reclaimed for cultivation; but by degrees and in small pockets. So the county is one predominately of smallholdings, there being three times as many farms of fifty acres and under as of a hundred acres and over. Thus confined, the farmer has had to put his land to the best advantage. He has done this by pasturing more cows to the acre than are found in any other county, and by rearing a pig population more numerous than elsewhere, at the same time maintaining large poultry flocks. The Second World War and its aftermath have been sadly disrupted this economy, and the acreage under the plough has been more than doubled - a remarkable achievement by farmers many of whom felt they were flying directly in the face of providence by giving over the plough land that was so clearly ordained for the pig, the hen and the cow.

The war seriously disturbed also the even and profitable course of the specialists in fruitful valleys of the south-running rivers and in those "golden acres" north and east of Mount's Bay from which England obtains her earliest spring flowers, new potatoes, and up to seventy thousand tons of broccoli each season. There is a normal export trade to England of about five thousand tons of Cornish blooms every year; but this, of course, dwindled to minute proportions as the war went on and from flowers the growers turned to vegetables. At one time during the war some three thousand acres in the Penzance district were laid down to new potatoes, which were followed by either broccoli or sugar-beet and cabbage. This three-crop production is made possible chiefly by the mild and equable climate and a humid soil, but another important factor is the liberal use of seaweed as manure. And Cornwall's extensive coast - the longest of any county - contributes in another way to the fertility of land between the hills and the sea, for the sea-sand of the north coast is immensely rich in carbonate of lime, and farmers for centuries have been legally free to take away as much as they require.

China Clay Industry

How completely agriculture and horticulture have ousted mining from its old proud position may be deduced from the fact that for every person now engaged in mining there are thirty occupied on the land, almost a precise reversal of the position in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Just before that period, around the granite mass of Hensbarrow, north of St Austell, a new industry had its beginnings. This was the china clay (kaolin) industry. The traveller by road or rail through mid Cornwall must often have been puzzled by the enormous greyish-white pyramids of the district. The hills are composed of china clay waste, from which a special form of concrete block is now being manufactured for use in what is known as the Cornish Unit House, a most suitable prefabricated house for Cornwall. China clay itself is a carefully processed product of Cornwall's weathered granite, which is washed and baked and, ultimately emerging as a pure white powder, is used in an ever-increasing variety of articles, ranging from pottery and paper to textile fabrics and linoleum, cosmetics and toilet powders, and medical supplies. The industry in its best year produced nearly a million tons, much of which was exported to all parts of the world. In normal times, indeed, china clay comes second only to coal in bulk among British exports. The future - in which mechanization will play a much larger part than ever before - seems assured; for there are almost illimitable supplies of china clay still under the surface, and the deeper the pits go down the whiter and purer the clay becomes.

Granite Quarries

Before the war some four thousand men and youths were employed in this industry based on the weathered granite - many more than were occupied in the quarrying of granite in its extremely durable form. Even so, the Cornish granite quarries north and east of Bodmin, the county town, and between Redruth and Penryn, comprise an important undertaking, the product of which has found its way to the streets, embankments, bridges and monuments of London, and as far distant as India and the Far East. It brings in annually about a million pounds. Much of the granite is of the lovely silver-grey that it seen at its best in such buildings as Truro Cathedral (the first cathedral built in England since the Reformation) and the County Museum and Art Gallery in the same city - which, though not the capital of Cornwall, is the nerve centre of its administration. The County Hall there is of another pleasing Cornish stone, a warm-coloured elvan found in dykes near the granite. Like most Cornish buildings, the hall is ideally roofed with native blue-grey slate, which is quarried at Delabole in north Cornwall. The quarry there has been worked for about four centuries, and it is now a mile in circumference and about a quarter of a mile deep. Some four hundred men and youths win and fashion Delabole slate which is still "the best to cover houses that is within this Region."

Work in the slate and china clay industries, though onerous, is healthy; but granite workers share the miner's liability to contract silicosis. For the prevention and cure of this disease medical science has been experimenting with a method tried out successfully in Canada: the inhalation of aluminium dust with which the men's changing-rooms are sprayed. Should every other source of aluminium fail, Cornwall could yet produce her own - from the very accommodating china clay; but although this was accomplished experimentally in the stress of war, it is not a normal commercial proposition.

In the past fifty years, and mainly during the past two or three decades, a new industry has grown in Cornwall. It is one upon which the Cornish, shaken and depressed by the decline in their traditional fishing and mining, and foreseeing "the end thereof as a bitter day," embarked with misgivings and reluctance. From the earliest times the Cornish have had a reputation for hospitality and courtesy, and the people of the peninsula have been delighted to find their county a potent source of attraction to "foreigners." But when it came to "making money out of the visitors," that was a different matter. Hitherto, in a variety of occupations in which individual skill and initiative were prime requirements, the Cornishmen had retained the sturdy independence and the good manners of his forebears. Could he go on combining these when he began, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch put it, "to take pay for entertaining strangers," "Q" was not the only one who was troubled because it would be a hard reputation to keep.

Yet kept it has been, and in circumstances which "Q" fifty years ago, could not have foreseen, since it was chiefly between the two Great Wars of our time that the entertainment of strangers for pay established itself as a basic industry of Cornwall. Why do people from all over the country and farther afield flock in such great numbers to Cornwall every summer? Chiefly, of course, because of its incomparable coast, one hundred and eighty square miles of which - made up of the whole of The Lizard and Land's End peninsulas and a belt of the north Cornwall coast three miles deep from Padstow Bay to the Devon border - were once earmarked as a National Park. The selection was modest enough, for the Cornish coast is remarkably varied and presents some quite astonishing contrasts. In general, the north coast is more towering and majestic than the south, and cliffs from four to five hundred feet high are not uncommon there. They reach a climax of grandeur in the north-east, where they attain a height of seven hundred feet, about half the height of Brown Willy, the county's highest hill. These northern cliffs are the haunts of in-numerable sea-birds and of such rare species as the Cornish chough, the buzzard, and (this family sadly reduced, during the late war) the peregrine falcon. Deep down from the cliff tops one may sometimes see a grey seal disporting itself or floating, solemn and shinning, in the green water which fills a sanded gully; but the grey seal - not unjustly, it must be said - has been branded the enemy of fishermen and its numbers systemically reduced.

Along this north coast, except in a few sheltered places, there is scarcely a tree to be seen, and all the more welcome therefore are the cool, dark green of the tamarisk that fringes the bays and the grey-green of the marram grass among the sand-dunes - which, by their softness, provide such an element of welcome contrast when you come suddenly upon them from the majestic cliffs. There are only two harbours of any consequence in the north, neither of them a harbour of refuge such as a coast of this wildness and ill-repute in autumn and winter really needs. The harbour of St Ives is small and exposed, and Padstow's, while it is spacious, it all but choked with sand - the outcome, it is said of a mermaid's curse.

The south coast has more and better harbours, and in Falmouth's has one of the finest land-locked harbours in the world. There are several memorable headlands along this coast, but although it lacks altogether the peculiar charm of the sand-dunes it is much softer, as a whole, than the north. Nearly all Cornish rivers run south to the sea, so that there is along the south a succession of enchanting wooded valleys sheltered from the gales that sweep across the peninsula and dwarf the wild flowers and grasses of the north, causing the wild rose there to creep close to the ground and trimming the clumps of furze as though with an enormous razor. The south has a profusion of tropical and sub-tropical plants and shrubs, and at Falmouth bananas have been cultivated in the open. Presumably it is the mild climate of the sheltered and picturesque south, in particular, that has fostered the illusion during the past thirty years of Cornwall as England's Riviera. It is, of course, not a Riviera. By comparison with the rest of the country, Cornwall has warm winters and cool summers; in other words, its climate is remarkably equable, which the Riviera's is not. Moreover, even south Cornwall shares, though no so abundantly as north Cornwall, the exhilarating breezes of the Atlantic, compared with which the Mediterranean air, as "Q" once remarked, is as stale soda water to freshly poured champagne.

The coast is the chief glory of the county - where else is there a cove as beautiful as Kynance, near The Lizard; a stretch of cliffs as grand and impressive as the granite that confronts the sea near Land's End; or a bay as blue and gold and spacious as Perran's or Newquay's? But the wise stranger will neglect the inland scene, a succession of hill and valley which has its own dramatic qualities and its own small delights: a village like Blisland, on the edge of Bodmin Moor, or Mawgan-in-Pydar, deep in the lovely Vale of Lanherne; a shade-dappled sun-spangled moorland stream rippling under a little fourteenth or fifteenth century bridge; a winding lane, topped with the bright fire of furze and flanked with tall foxgloves, and dropping suddenly to the valley where rare and varied ferns grace the hedgerows; or (that uncommon spectacle in Cornwall) an exquisite little church spire thrusting upwards from the familiar cluster of slate-grey roofs which, from a distance, are like one of Cornwall's also familiar pearl-grey mists enwrapping the feet of the hills.

If church spires are rare in Cornwall - though not so rare as the nightingale, which has only recently been authenticated among the county's three hundred different species of birds - so also are magnificent parish churches with richly ornamented towers. For the most part Cornish parish churches are long, low buildings with tall and simple western towers; the kind one would expect in a comparatively poor county and that is so much exposed to stress of weather. The churches are mainly of the fifteenth century, though Norman work has been traced in more than half of them. Among their chief delights are the towers of St Austell and Probus; the richly-coloured windows of St Neot; the frescoes of St Breage and Poughill; and some of the old bench-ends upon which the medieval craftsmen exercised their wit and devotion.

From their forebears the Cornish have inherited a love and talent for singing, but they are no longer using the dialect in talking as commonly as their grandsires did. The decline set in after the Education Act of 1870 and has been most marked since secondary education happily became available to large numbers of Cornish children. But the dialect - like many a peculiarly Cornish dish, with names like "star-gazy pie" and "figgy-obbin" lingers resolutely in the country districts and fishing-coves: a dialect full of apt and memorable similes and racy and salty phrases.

Popular pastimes from the earliest days have survived. Hurling has now a firm hold only at St Columb, where play with the silver-cased ball attracts large crowds every year. Wrestling in the Cornish style has at times lost its old place, but there has been a remarkable quickening of interest in it since the early 1900's, and in the aftermath of both World Wars it acquired a new buoyancy. The Puritans and John Wesley and his followers doubtless expunged from the Cornish calendar many a joyous ritual and observance from the old times; but at Padstow the Hobby Horse, with its mingled grotesqueness and beauty and its un-remarked fertility rite, still prances through the streets on May Day, linking the little town with the ancient British settlement near the harbour mouth; and a week later at Helston an altogether more decorous and elaborate festival brings together crowds from a wide area as in the days of the medieval fair, though even then the Flora (Furry) Dance must have been an ancient custom.

How long will these and many another old pastime and custom survive into the Atomic Age? And for how much longer will the Cornish people retain their individuality? - the character in which naïveté is mingled so charmingly with subtlety, sturdy common sense with native superstition, forthrightness with the oblique, enormous vitality and energy with the manana of the Iberian peninsula whence their early ancestors came. Nobody can say, but it may safely be said that nowhere is a more determined resistance being offered to the featureless hosts of uniformity in the byways of the life - and youth is flocking to this resistance movement.

In the end, perhaps, the sea will be the chief factor in preserving Cornwall's individuality, as it has been the dominating factor in her history. By many miles to the north and south it separates the county from the nearest land, and the west stretch two or three thousand miles of rolling ocean. So the sea may, with its own savour and integrity, preserve Cornwall's also, and with them, Cornwall's magic.