THE STORY OF CORNWALL
Stand on Bodmin Moor’s Rough Tor, with the wind soughing in the granite blocks at your feet; face a little south of west, and the essentials of Cornwall’s story stretch out before you. It is a physical story, of the landscape and diverse geology and minerals, and the dramatic meeting of land and sea. It is there in the vast moor below and in the man-made hills some 20 miles away – those white waste-tips of the china-clay quarries – and it is in the glimpses of ocean that lie both to the north and to the south.
Cornwall’s tapering shape is everything. The name itself reflects it – ‘corn’ is from ‘horn’ while the ‘-wall’ has the same Celtic root as ‘Wales’, meaning ‘foreigner’. A place apart, an almost-island – Cornwall offers visitors and residents alike the sense of somewhere separate, surrounded not by other people, other towns and regions, but by water.
