Cornwall writers St.Ives to St.Just with its breathtaking scenery and wildlife of Cornwall

Cornwall art and culture from genius loci

ANY REGRETS? by Clies Stevens

click on any picture to enlarge

I thought about this today as I looked over some photo’s of the walks I took along my most favourite stretch of coastal hills and gullies in the world I have known, that of the stretch of magical coast and hills from St.Ives to St.Just, with its breathtaking scenery and wildlife.

So do I have any regrets? Well yes, a few. In a lot of those photos there are those well-thumbed pictures of the four-legged companions who are now waiting over the Rainbow Bridge for me, patiently as ever. Others show me the scene from atop hills such as Carn Brea near Sennen.(Please to note the Cornish way of writing CARN?)

Carn Uny, Bartine Castle and others so far down the magical way to the Lands End.

I am afraid that the incredible years of my youth spent abroad, and drinking local fluids that NASA would dearly love to know about for rocket fuel, and of course eating things that would disgust the European palette has left me with heart disease and problems with circulation.

Of course the best part of going away to work and see life was the coming back to the Homeland again, the time spent here would refresh the mind and body and prepare me for another foray abroad somewhere.

But this is about regrets, and one of the biggest is that lately I find that the beloved hills of my youth where I took the lovely ladies I met, have become steeper and the darn legs will not obey the commands the brain is making.

photography by phil aston click to enlarge

(Perhaps because there are no longer any fair maidens with flashing eyes and sun browned limbs and magical laughter to take me up there?)

I know of places, secluded spots that have the short rabbit nibbled turf that is so soft it feels like a feather bed, where the scent of wild flowers in the summer’s heat is intoxicating and the drone of insect’s soporific. Other places I found show that man had been there long ago, long before this century. The lines of his ancient dwelling just discernible but as the years go by they become softer and eventually will become as one with the scenery; but isn’t that the way of all life?

I feel privileged to have witnessed these places, and now we have our new Greyhound Bella I should really try to show her these to me sacred places of my heartland, these places I have dreamed of when mining way down in Tierra del Fuego while Antarctic winds almost froze my fingers as I scrabbled in the frozen dirt.

For a while down there I lived in a frozen mud shanty like all the others, and ate seal meat and wild birds that were easy to catch, and fell asleep at night shivering dreaming of the soft Cornish Sun that seduced the brain with its heat and encouraged the young women to bare white bodies to its life force.

Any regrets? No, not one.

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