Bernard Deacon's Blog, page 45

Cornish Town Councils save local services!

With the UK Government and regional and local authorities recently at daggers drawn, devolution is in the news. It’s timely therefore to consider current relations between the different tiers of local government in Cornwall. A recent article by Jane Wills, Professor of Geography at Exeter University, Tremough, does exactly that. During the austerity decade of … Continue reading Cornish Town Councils save local services! →

Surname origins and maps of early distributions: three examples

The early distribution of these three surnames provide us with some good clues concerning their points of origin You can compare these with maps of their nineteenth century distributions here. Anstis is from a medieval first name. The origin of Argall is unclear but the map below suggests that the place Argal (near Falmouth) may …

A year of Cornish studies resources

Time trundles remorselessly onwards. I was shocked to realise it’s been over a year now since I began adding two or three blogs a week to this website. Maybe it’s because people had nothing better to do during the covid lockdown but the number of visitors in 2020 is already almost double that of 2019, … Continue reading A year of Cornish studies resources →

Cornish beaches the most littered in the UK

A recent academic article has discovered that beaches in Cornwall are among the most litter-strewn in the UK. Using beach clean data going back 25 years, they found those beaches bordering Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) at the Land’s End, Mount’s Bay, Padstow Bay and Newquay & the Gannel were among the ten most polluted in … Continue reading Cornish beaches the most littered in the UK →

Three Cornish language surnames

Here are maps of the early geography of three surnames that are the Cornish equivalent of Smith, White and Long. You can find maps of their nineteenth century distributions here.

Bridging the Tamar

At the very margins of Cornwall, the River Tamar is nonetheless central to Cornish identity. Countless books refer to the river ‘almost’ extending far enough to make Cornwall an island. When Brunel’s railway bridge spanned the estuary at Saltash in 1859 it was widely viewed as ending Cornwall’s remoteness. Even sober industrial archaeologists have written … Continue reading Bridging the Tamar →

Pisky-led? Piskies and Cornish difference

Pixies or piskies are little people, about knee-high. They live in the otherworld and are usually invisible to humans. But if you look very carefully you might just spot them cavorting around in circles on a remote moor at the dead of night. Sometimes they will help farmers and others with their chores; sometimes they … Continue reading Pisky-led? Piskies and Cornish difference →

Cornish surnames in the 1500s

From this point on in my weekly surname blogs, I intend to work through the names in The Surnames of Cornwall, providing maps of their distribution in the sixteenth century, if not already covered in previous blogs. I’ll deal with one to four surnames (depending on their frequency) in each blog. If such maps already …

Why don’t the English speak Cornish?

Or at least a version of Brittonic Celtic, the language that was spoken, along with Latin, when the Romans left Britain in the early 400s. Within a relatively short time the whole of what became England, or at least its southern part, was speaking English. We know this because the number of Celtic placenames in … Continue reading Why don’t the English speak Cornish? →

Bottom-up heritage projects?

Too often conservation projects are imposed from the top onto local communities with little genuine local involvement. A recent article compares an area of common land at St Breward on the edge of Bodmin Moor with a community in western Galicia. It calls for more understanding of local knowledge and traditional management practices when undertaking … Continue reading Bottom-up heritage projects? →