What I’m thinking about while I’m actually making things.
Newest first. Pick a topic to find more of what interests you.
In September 1888, somebody in Newquay was sufficiently irritated by an argument about smuggling caves to write a letter. Another correspondent had apparently said there were no such caves.
You could mistake Newquay’s Huer’s Hut for something built to improve a postcard. A little white building on the headland. The sea behind it. Just enough character to make you point a camera at it.
“Barrowfields” sounds like one of those place names you can use for years without ever stopping to ask what it means. A place to cross. Some grass by the coast. A name that tells you where to meet somebody.
Most of us, faced with an awkward delivery, complain about the delivery company. Joseph Thomas Treffry’s approach was rather more expensive. He became involved in mines, harbours, waterways and tramways.
Before the Headland Hotel could sell anybody a peaceful sea view, there was a considerable argument about what should happen to the land underneath it. This was not a disagreement over the breakfast menu.
A sewage pipeline beside Atlantic Road in 1998 cut through a Romano-British settlement beneath Pentire — stone buildings, a hearth, shell middens, cultivated soil and evidence of an earlier Iron Age landscape.
Newquay Golf Links looks like open ground. Archaeology, aerial photography and old maps suggest it is anything but: prehistoric enclosures, possible settlement, old mine shafts and a buried landscape beneath the turf…
Meet the man behind Newquay’s unfinished harbour, follow the cargoes that made it worth attempting, and imagine the town that might have grown around it.
In 1987, roadworks for a Newquay housing development exposed pottery and burnt ground. What followed was the excavation of a remarkably well-preserved Bronze Age settlement that had been buried for more than three…
The coast path is very good at exposing nonsense about pace. What it can teach founders and freelancers about workload, focus and finishing without burning out.
You are not late because you did something else first. In consulting, judgement, communication and understanding a business can matter just as much as technical syntax.
Working from Newquay is not a laptop-on-the-beach fantasy. The freedom is real, but it only works if the operating system behind your life is better than the Instagram version.
Cornwall has a long history of people making a living outside the obvious centre of power. What that can — and cannot — teach modern bootstrappers about independence.
Gravel Hill’s ore had the Atlantic at its feet. Reaching a ship still meant going up a cliff, along a road and into somebody else’s working day.
The families who built ships, the merchant who fought the mud, and a working river with very little interest in anyone's timetable.
Behind the beach were people managing water, grinding grain and moving heavy loads. Follow their work through a landscape that kept changing jobs.
Ore from Newquay crossed the Gannel to be processed near Crantock. A forgotten works connects the town’s mines to the opposite bank.
The car-park name remembers a copper mine. A carpenter’s workshop, a chapel commission and changing mineral fortunes help put people back into the town around it.
Between Poly Joke and Holywell, flints, burial mounds, imported pottery and cliff castles reveal thousands of years beneath an apparently quiet landscape.
The lost church on Perran Sands turns out to be two buried religious sites—and a centuries-long argument with a moving landscape.
The woman, the horse and the verse at Piper’s Hole look like one tragic story. Their chronology tells a more complicated—and rather revealing—one.
A ruined chapel turns up in a property record. Follow it into a village of working clergy, hopeful visitors, buried neighbours and buildings that had to be repaired.
Small transformers can learn internal maps of games and algorithms. What changes when those representations gain memory, tools, actions and a history?
A strange cry on the Gannel acquired a surprisingly useful ghost story. Its real setting was a crossing where the tide decided when the journey ended.
Seven churches, a corrupt city and three days of divine weather: Langarrow is a magnificent legend, rooted in a landscape that really did disappear beneath sand.
The hollows beside Fern Pit have attracted explanations for more than a century. Their history is easier to establish than their purpose.
The August 2026 rockfall hid Holywell’s cave. Its pools, healing traditions and rival inland well tell a history which survives the loss of access.
Seven churches, seven churchyards and a real religious community: how much of Crantock’s most persistent story can we put back on the ground?
A floating millstone is an excellent entrance. The harder question is how much we can recover of the man behind Cornwall’s most enduring saint story.
A farmer’s wife, a sacred stone and four communities meeting inland from the coast: the lost chapel with an unusually practical afterlife.
A childhood warning about St Newlyn East’s fig tree leads into a saint’s staff, newspaper scepticism and the surprisingly difficult question of how a local curse becomes ancient.
St Newlyn East’s Preaching Pit looks ancient. Hay Close really is. Their different histories reveal how the same landscape kept finding new reasons to gather people together.
Porth Island held a defended settlement and an ironworking industry long before Newquay grew around it. Later storytellers supplied a Danish chieftain.
A pub with a tunnel story sits beside a landscape of old mineral routes. The interesting part is working out which connections belong together.
Watergate Bay’s hotel was built for an expected railway arrival. The railway failed to turn up; the building found several other futures.
A mine beneath a familiar view, children whose wages went straight home, and a hillside that kept finding new jobs after the digging stopped.
I started building a website to share my music. Then the software became an enormous project of its own. This is how I am trying to keep both in view.
I grew up walking this coast with a surfboard. A Victorian railway and harbour scheme makes me wonder whether I might have caught the train instead—and what would have been waiting when I got there.
Do not ask an AI agent whether it finished. Ask for the tests, diffs, screenshots and state changes that make the claim checkable.
Good client work starts by treating the requested solution as evidence, then listening hard enough to find the problem underneath.
One agent makes the thing. Another attacks the evidence. Separating those jobs produces fewer agreeable reports and more useful corrections.
I remembered a smugglers’ tunnel under a Cornish pub. The records confirmed the building, not the smuggling—and that became the more interesting story.
Iteration should narrow uncertainty. Without agreed criteria, ownership and boundaries, it becomes a machine that produces versions forever.
On curiosity, the boredom of knowing the answer, and learning to finish the final twenty per cent without losing the part that opens doors.
A clever product is only the start: it has to work, earn real use and support a viable reason to keep existing.
AI makes production faster. The work clients pay for is deciding what to make, challenging the brief and standing behind the result.
Every twenty minutes I get out of the chair and do something definite. It is not a medical protocol; it is how I interrupt circular thinking.
A polished verification report turned out not to verify the thing that mattered. The failure was not confidence; it was missing evidence.
AI can make the first eighty per cent arrive quickly. The remaining work is verification, correction and taking responsibility for what ships.
