St Ives Harbor
“This is not an English pub. This is a Cornish pub." he snapped at me with a half smile behind the bar **when I asked him what it means to work in England's last public house**.
“Cornwall is different” , she added. I took in the answer like a certainty, dazed as it came, groggy as a boxer, from the light and the natural beauty that he had just seen in Land's End, the British Finistere, two kilometers from the pub.
The Standard Bearer of Singularity Cornwall – or Kernow, as he took pains to point out in honor of the few who still speak Cornish, the local ancient Celtic language – It was Sam, a waiter who, in the absence of more customers, was chatting us up.
Land's End Cliffs
Located in Sennen, Britain's westernmost town, the First and Last Inn had been there since 1620 , the young man illustrated for me, being, since the beginning of the 19th century, the raqueros headquarters, whose lanterns placed on the cliffs attracted ships to cause their shipwreck and take everything useful as loot.
“Together with brandy or tobacco smugglers, they dug tunnels through which to escape when the authorities persecuted them. In fact, you are stepping on the mouth of one that was built by Ann George, the leader of a gang of raqueros, ”he explained to me.
I couldn't help but imagine the human fur that must have hydrated its throat in this pub a couple of centuries ago before going out into the storm to place its apocryphal headlights, its fireflies of death.
It must not have been very different from the one that met, apparently, in Cornwall's most famous public house, on Bodmin Moor, the desolate wilderness I had traversed in my early days in Cornwall searching for the legendary traces of King Arthur, the most illustrious son of the dukedom.
Discover the architecture of the fishing villages
The writer Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), who lived and wrote most of her life here, portrayed that micro-universe in her novel Jamaica Inn, versioned in the cinema by Alfred Hitchcock in 1937.
“Cornwall is different”. I wrote down the innkeeper's phrase in my notebook, not so as not to forget it, but as a moral to my trip for a handful of days through those lands. Trip that ended right there, in the “end of the world” of the place. A strip of land between the north and west of the Celtic Sea and the south with the English Channel, where the magical Celtic aura still beats strong. And with which one runs into, one way or another, at every step.
Perhaps it is the mist or the violence of the ocean against its shores or its inclination to dress reality with supernatural tints, but the truth is that this would explain why it was in Cornwall and not elsewhere. r where the merveilles (wonders) of the matter of Brittany germinated: Arthur, Camelot, Merlin...
That is why we chose the Tintagel castle ruins as the first coordinate of the itinerary, on the north coast, where Arthur was conceived.
We arrived at the first light of day, when there was still no sign of tourists and the streets were deserted. My almost childish emotion, the one that makes you believe that the solitude of a mythical place makes it a little yours, he ran into what seemed like a medieval Disneyland. B&B, restaurants, pubs, everything exuded Arthurian myth : The Avalon, King Arthur's Inn...
Tintagel Castle Ruins
**“Where history meets legend” (and marketing, I thought) ** read the sign before we entered the small peninsula surrounded by cliffs and escarpments on which it was raised a castle in 1150.
A scene from The Idylls of the King, by Lord Tennyson, with Merlin taking center stage, illustrated the motto. We discover why. After wandering through the ruins, the low tide allows you to approach a small cove where the Cave of Merlin is located , a natural hollow from where tradition assures that the magician cast his enchantments.
It's not hard to imagine actor Nicol Williamson , the masterful Merlin from the movie Excalibur, invoking the spell with which King Uther Pendragon could take on the appearance of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, and thus possess the beautiful Igerna. From that mixture of magic and passion, Arturo would come to us.
With the saddlebag full of Arthurian sensations from the north, the objective for the following days was to travel to the south, so the fishing village of Fowey becomes the perfect base camp.
View of the Eden Project
That allowed me to run into a good string of local merveilles. The first, with a more than evocative name: ** Eden Project .** From the A390, a detour leads to a hill where you can see the huge and futuristic geodesic domes pregnant with all the biodiversity of the planet.
Waiting by the entrance Dan Ryan, biologist and one of the young pillars on which this project is based, started in 2001 by the visionary Tim Smith . In the 1980s, Smith amassed a fortune as a songwriter and producer of pop music. But, far from retiring to a life of relaxation, he embarked on this titanic project.
Dan places me in front of a large photograph: the obscene crater left by a kaolin mine. “Here, where everyone would see a wasteland, Tim saw an opportunity. Not an abstract idea, but a place where plants could change the world." And so, in the beginning, a Cornish icon.
What remains of the day I decide to invest in discovering a labyrinth of delicious corners between its Edwardian houses and its steep streets on the estuary. My ride ends at church of st fimbarrus , surrounded by centuries-old tombs and a thick gothic atmosphere that I suppose helps the dialogue of the crows.
After a morning wandering around the Roseland Peninsula I decided set course for the city of Falmouth, one of the gastronomic coordinates of the Stein empire.
Famous for his television shows, chef Rick Stein made the city of Padstow the capital of his kingdom, later expanding it to cities like Falmouth.
Located in the mouth of the river Fal , the explorer and pirate Sir Walter Raleig had a good eye when at the end of the 16th century he turned his natural harbor into the epicenter of English corsican during two centuries.
What if we stop at Rick Stein's?
path surrounded by cute cafes, pubs and renowned restaurants and bakeries where the star national dish shone, the famous empanadillas (cornish pasties) from Cornwall. In one of them, a man in his thirties sticks a sign on the door. "Learn Cornish now," he prays.
Jason is a medical student at the University of Exeter and passionate about local history and language. “The school is in Truro and it is one more attempt to revitalize a language that is almost in danger of extinction”, he explains. Barely 3,000 people know and use Cornish on a regular basis, despite the fact that, as Jason insists, language was the factor that "made Cornwall a separate entity, different from England".
Following Jason's advice, I travel the 40 kilometers that separate me from Lizar Point , the southernmost point in the UK. Before visiting its mythical lighthouse, the most powerful in England, I follow the path to Kynance Cove beach traversing open trails through tall undergrowth.
There is another one of those Cornish pictures that are not easily forgotten: the white sand shimmering among all the imaginable shades of blue, the blood color of the rocks and the purple heather dappling the mount.
The sharp coastline near Lizar Point
My last days would have the southwest coast as a stage, a piece of land sewn to the sea full of treasures. And there was one of them: St Michel's Mount. Lying in front of Marazion, the imposing castle , like its Normandy counterpart, stretches upright on the huge rock mass.
It's mid-morning and in front of the pier a queue has already formed to get on the boats that save the high tide. Back on solid ground from Penzance, one of the favorite coordinates of the British jet set, ascending the B3283 to one of those unexpected hallucinations that Cornwall is always drawn from the sleeve.
“Greek-style amphitheater built on the cliffs and famous beach of Porthcurno,” he had read in a guidebook. say that about The Minack Theater it is like saying that the Parthenon is a shed over Athens. Because each granite ashlar, each wall or grandstand is the result of the passion and sweat of Rowena Cade, the extraordinary woman who designed and built it with her hands.
From the August 16, 1932 , when the first batch of spectators enjoyed here, facing the ocean, the first performance, shakespeare storm, this sublime theater is the best tribute to its creator.
It's not bad to say goodbye to Cornwall with St Ives in the retina : a demonstration that not everything is exuberant nature. All roads here lead to Tate St Ives, an extension of the Tate Gallery in London.
Arwen Fitch, my guide for the renovated facilities –in October 2017, after four years of work, the new gallery was reopened–, allows me discover the British masters of contemporary art, but also another magical space: the Barbara Hepworth Museum. The studio and the house where the sculptress worked for 26 years, key figure of abstract art in Europe , is today a trickle of visitors who decode her works exhibited by her.
St Michel's Mount
Lyn, in her sixties with gleaming white hair, pencils the Hepworth work in front of her. She “titled it Conversation with Magic Stone. Don't they look like bronze menhirs in a Celtic forest? ”, She asks me in perfect Spanish.
Celtic, mythical, wild… it is as if she has invoked the Cornish finister, Lands’End, my last visit in Cornwall. Sitting in the First and Last Inn, where this story began, I reviewed my journey. And that resounding certainty: I came here looking for the merveilles of Arthurian novels, but I returned home knowing that this windswept peninsula of lonely moors and rugged coastline was so much more.
A place in whose landscapes, like Merlin's spells, enchantments follow one another; a land where extraordinary people, visionaries, landed. A free verse in the bosom of England where a prodigy awaits at every turn.
_*This article was published in the number 116 of the Condé Nast Traveler Magazine (April) . Subscribe to the print edition (11 printed issues and digital version for €24.75, by calling 902 53 55 57 or from our website ) and enjoy free access to the digital version of Condé Nast Traveler for iPad. The April issue of Condé Nast Traveler is available at its digital version to enjoy it on your favorite device. _