Before the Railway: How Perran's Iron Ore Reached the Sea
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.
WRITING
What I’m thinking about while I’m actually making things.
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From Waterwheel to Railway: The Industrial Landscape Hidden Around Holywell
Behind the beach were people managing water, grinding grain and moving heavy loads. Follow their work through a landscape that kept changing jobs.
Before the Beach: Perranporth Was a Mining Town
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.
Perran-in-the-Sands: The Two Churches the Dunes Nearly Swallowed
The lost church on Perran Sands turns out to be two buried religious sites—and a centuries-long argument with a moving landscape.
Langarrow: The Lost City Under the Dunes — and the Real History Inside the Legend
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.
Seven Churches Under the Sand? The Crantock Story That Keeps Changing
Seven churches, seven churchyards and a real religious community: how much of Crantock’s most persistent story can we put back on the ground?
St Piran: The Saint Who Floated to Cornwall — and the History Beneath the Legend
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.
Four Saints at the Crossroads: The Lost Chapel That Linked Piran, Carantoc and Cubert
A farmer’s wife, a sacred stone and four communities meeting inland from the coast: the lost chapel with an unusually practical afterlife.
The Railway to Holywell Bay That Never Was
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.