What I’m thinking about while I’m actually making things.
“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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
