Cornwall art and culture from genius loci

STONES CAN TALK! by CLIES Stevens

When you take the coastal path from St.Ives to Zennor, you have a vast treat in store. The scenery here is almost beyond description, and it never fails to move me each time I see it. 200 foot high plus cliffs with tiny dots wheeling and screaming in the updrafts in competition with the other gulls.

Majestic swells roll in against the foot of the black cliffs of volcanic basalt rock, breaking into the purest white foam. The sea looks empty, but it never is for as you study the water the birds appear, a boat then two, three then four the men working at the mackerel lines.

stones of west cornwall geniusloci.co.uk

In a sheltered cove an angler, enduring the glare of the cormorant as he intrudes on the birds territory. All of this is a sight to see and watch all day because it is full of movement and colour, the deep green emerald giving way to the perfect aquamarine blue of the deeper water, flocks of tiny diving birds busy feeding on the shoals of sandeels, and from up high on the cliffs the water is so clear you can actually watch them UNDER the water as they go about their living.

All of this is part of a landscape that anyone can see, and enjoy. But the real treat is usually overgrown in a cloak of ivy and taken for granted as you pass by! Can you guess what it is? Thousands will have walked by them with not a thought as to how they got there, they ‘just have always been’ and always will be! Yet I wonder how many folk have taken their ease under the shade of them on a hot day, watched the rabbits shooting in and out of the holes they have formed in the serried ranks of stone and the little Wren singing her wonderful fluid song, an absolute delight to all who hear it.

Do you give in? Well I shall tell you anyway, it is the huge stone walls, so carefully built way back in the Bronze age with blood sweat and tears, broken bones perhaps as well. Made by ancient man alone for the most part, perhaps with help at times from the tribe who were clearing the land anyway. You see, my country of Cornwall was always a royal place, the coast would have had scrub oak and gorse, heather and bramble and all kinds of other weeds that back then would have been either a part of the staple diet or used as medicine. Nothing was allowed to go to waste.

So we have a man, his wife and a couple of oxen say. Perhaps the woman is expecting a child, she is as full of life as the land around her, and she can feel the expectation but is unable to describe it fully. She is comely, dressed in warm woollen cloth perhaps the dress hitched up to the buckler around the waist, showing strong legs. Her man is all muscle, hands like soup plates and muscles like a coiled spring, naked to the waist the sweat streaking the dirt from the hole he has dug with a wooden shovel and bare hands. In the hole is a stubborn lump of Granite that will break a precious plough blade if left and forgotten. He has been digging at this stone for several days now, and at last it is moving as he grunts and sweats at the fulcrum pole under it. This is his land. He and his woman have cleared every square foot of it from the strangling vine and weeds, burnt away the scrub oak and gorse and spread the stinging white ash over the soil, for they have seen how things grow sweetly after moor land fires in the past.

They have a huge investment here in this soil, an investment of labour, torn muscle and broken knuckles.

He will not give in, neither will she because she has the driving force of the child yet to come, and as she looks around she can see the carefully built hedges that they have raised between them, the emerald grass growing sweetly in the shelter from the bulwark of stones as high as a man can stand. Some of those stones weigh over a ton, today it would be all a mechanical digger could tackle to get them from the soil the ancient Volcano spewed them into. Yet this puny man had dug them out, carefully placed them in a line and made perfect 90o corners and erected gateposts and shelters from them, built the houses they needed to raise the family in.

Yet today we walk by and give them not a second glance except when we go to climb over them.

But those old ones loved the land, loved it protected and nurtured it. They handed to us today a richly evocative landscape that inspires all who can feel the power of it, this royal land of mine.

Clies stevens. back to Cornwall arts and culture