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