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Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place
Why do we react so strongly to certain places? Why do layers of mythology build up around particular features in the landscape? When Philip Marsden moved to a remote creekside farmhouse in Cornwall, the intensity of his response took him aback. It led him to begin exploring these questions, prompting a journey westwards to Land's End through one of the most fascinating regions of Europe.
From the Neolithic ritual landscape of Bodmin Moor to the Arthurian traditions of Tintagel, from the mysterious china-clay country to the granite tors and tombs of the far south-west, Marsden assembles a chronology of our shifting attitudes to place. In archives, he uncovers the life and work of other 'topophiles' before him - medieval chroniclers and Tudor topographers, eighteenth-century eighteenth-century antiquarians, post-industrial poets and abstract painters. Drawing also on his own travels overseas, Marsden reveals that the shape of the land lies not just at the heart of our history but of man's perennial struggle to belong on this earth.
From the Neolithic ritual landscape of Bodmin Moor to the Arthurian traditions of Tintagel, from the mysterious china-clay country to the granite tors and tombs of the far south-west, Marsden assembles a chronology of our shifting attitudes to place. In archives, he uncovers the life and work of other 'topophiles' before him - medieval chroniclers and Tudor topographers, eighteenth-century eighteenth-century antiquarians, post-industrial poets and abstract painters. Drawing also on his own travels overseas, Marsden reveals that the shape of the land lies not just at the heart of our history but of man's perennial struggle to belong on this earth.
348 pages, Hardcover
First published October 2, 2014
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About the author
Philip Marsden
43 books49 followersPhilip Marsden is the author of a number of works of travel writing, fiction and non-fiction, including The Bronski House, The Spirit Wrestlers and The Levelling Sea. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and his work has been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Cornwall.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
April 3, 2016
Some very nice writing indeed, but not much of a storyline. The book is something of a jumble of mythology, geology, prehistory, and more recent biographical information about some famous Cornish residents, overlaid on a gentle travel memoir. I enjoyed learning about the meanings of Cornish place names, in particular, and spotting locations I’ve visited.
Favorite lines:
• “Ask your way and you receive a litany of landmarks – pass the hill like a woman’s breast, the rock like a rabbit, the ridge like the neck of a horse.”
• “All rivers are stories – connecting places, carrying history”
Favorite lines:
• “Ask your way and you receive a litany of landmarks – pass the hill like a woman’s breast, the rock like a rabbit, the ridge like the neck of a horse.”
• “All rivers are stories – connecting places, carrying history”
August 9, 2015
The well-known phrase of the estate agent; location, location, location; where the right spot can be very beneficial to your financial position. But in this book, Marsden is looking for something much, much deeper in meaning than that superficial statement, and what he wants to consider is the word place.
Certain places affect people in very different ways, some are what they call home, and that isn’t always where they are currently living, others are where people feel great spiritual meaning or significance. There are places that have a long history of ritual activity, and as he travels around places near his home in Cornwall, he starts to peel back the layers of time, even going as far back as the Mesolithic.
He visits the still visible Neolithic landscape on Bodmin Moor, and with the help of an expert learns what it may have meant to the people then. In Tintagel, home of the Arthurian legends, it is packed full of myths but very little in the way of solid evidence and yet still draws the crowds to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the place. The granite Tors that spike the skyline on the Cornish moors have held men’s gaze for millennia. There is even evidence of bronze age stone rows on the Scilly Isles, the islands far from the end of Cornwall. Lands End too comes under his gaze, it is a more contemporary place, a focus for end to enders these days, but it is a remote place of dramatic cliffs.
It is such a lovely book to read too, not only is the prose careful and measured, almost haunting at times, but he has a way of weaving the history, the landscape and the sacred into a beautifully written book. I like the way that each chapter begins with a place name, a definition and an image to set the scene of the next location; it is a clever addition to the book to set some context.
The evocative way that he describes the landscapes makes you want to go too, absorb the atmosphere as others have done before, and contemplate the personal and real meaning of that place to you. All these places are deeply ingrained in our culture and psyche now, and as much as we have formed them, they have moulded us too.
Certain places affect people in very different ways, some are what they call home, and that isn’t always where they are currently living, others are where people feel great spiritual meaning or significance. There are places that have a long history of ritual activity, and as he travels around places near his home in Cornwall, he starts to peel back the layers of time, even going as far back as the Mesolithic.
He visits the still visible Neolithic landscape on Bodmin Moor, and with the help of an expert learns what it may have meant to the people then. In Tintagel, home of the Arthurian legends, it is packed full of myths but very little in the way of solid evidence and yet still draws the crowds to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the place. The granite Tors that spike the skyline on the Cornish moors have held men’s gaze for millennia. There is even evidence of bronze age stone rows on the Scilly Isles, the islands far from the end of Cornwall. Lands End too comes under his gaze, it is a more contemporary place, a focus for end to enders these days, but it is a remote place of dramatic cliffs.
It is such a lovely book to read too, not only is the prose careful and measured, almost haunting at times, but he has a way of weaving the history, the landscape and the sacred into a beautifully written book. I like the way that each chapter begins with a place name, a definition and an image to set the scene of the next location; it is a clever addition to the book to set some context.
The evocative way that he describes the landscapes makes you want to go too, absorb the atmosphere as others have done before, and contemplate the personal and real meaning of that place to you. All these places are deeply ingrained in our culture and psyche now, and as much as we have formed them, they have moulded us too.
April 24, 2015
4.5
"There have been times writing this book, trying to reach the meaning of a place across the ages, when I have felt a shadow pass over my desk"
Absolutely excellent book, thoroughly enjoyed it. A mixture of personal history, cultural history, travelogue and wonderful nature writing.
How difficult it is to try and explain why we feel so strongly about certain places. Marsden tries to explain why we might feel the way we do, but never goes into whimsy.
I loved the way he writes about characters from the past who also explored the ancient Cornish landscape trying to make sense of what they saw, characters all but forgotten, their work lying in dusty archives. I feel it is the shadows of these people that are passing over his desk - his admiration for their work shines through.
Most of the book is about the landscape of Cornwall where Marsden lives. I read the book whilst holidaying in Cornwall, so I could visit some of the places he writes so evocatively about. Recommended.
"There have been times writing this book, trying to reach the meaning of a place across the ages, when I have felt a shadow pass over my desk"
Absolutely excellent book, thoroughly enjoyed it. A mixture of personal history, cultural history, travelogue and wonderful nature writing.
How difficult it is to try and explain why we feel so strongly about certain places. Marsden tries to explain why we might feel the way we do, but never goes into whimsy.
I loved the way he writes about characters from the past who also explored the ancient Cornish landscape trying to make sense of what they saw, characters all but forgotten, their work lying in dusty archives. I feel it is the shadows of these people that are passing over his desk - his admiration for their work shines through.
Most of the book is about the landscape of Cornwall where Marsden lives. I read the book whilst holidaying in Cornwall, so I could visit some of the places he writes so evocatively about. Recommended.
November 6, 2018
Philip Marsden's Rising Ground concerns itself with discovering ritual landscapes. Stonehenge is one such example, though much less subtle than those he brings to our attention. And farther north, too, because he's writing about Cornwall and the traces of human history he finds there. He sets out on a long-planned walk westward down that long finger of England jutting into the Atlantic. He begins near Cornwall's eastern border with Devon and walks to Land's End searching for the mythologies the landscape carries. The chronology of his ramble passes by Neolithic monuments erected in prehistory and by sites heavy with Arthurian legend to places noted for early industry to the very recent. His interest is the beliefs of Cornwall's inhabitants, ancient arrangements of stones, the myths concerning particular sites, folk memories and tales. The book's title shoulders his central idea, that sacred places, the spirit of places, are at the higher elevations of topography. As he walks the countryside to Land's End he tries to see landscapes as a manifestation of the divine. He seems to believe that a moral geography can be found through discovery of and reflection on a landscape encountered. This is an interesting book, part travelogue in its course through Cornwall, part philosophy in its explanation of how people find meaning for their lives, part history in its tales of lives lived and the many shapes the past can take.
July 30, 2015
This proved to be a fascinating account that deals with one of my long term interests: the power and meaning of place and landscape with emphasis upon spiritual experiences. In the course of the book Marsden walks to various places in the South West of England exploring ancient monuments as well as recounting more recent history including the lives of those antiquarians who painstakingly chronicled aspects of the landscape in earlier times.
I took my time with this book, reading a chapter or two a session while sitting in the garden enjoying the summer afternoon. Its format, with each chapter dedicated to a site or place, suited this approach. Marsden's writing conveys his deep respect for the past as well as for the land. I am not usually that drawn to travel writings but this was so interesting that I was carried along.
I took my time with this book, reading a chapter or two a session while sitting in the garden enjoying the summer afternoon. Its format, with each chapter dedicated to a site or place, suited this approach. Marsden's writing conveys his deep respect for the past as well as for the land. I am not usually that drawn to travel writings but this was so interesting that I was carried along.
December 14, 2014
This is a bitter-sweet book for me. The last present my Dad bought me before he died. It's a testament to his thoughtful, caring nature that it was so spot on.
Dad read the reviews and decided that it would be right up my street, how right he was!
My own books are rooted in Cornwall, the subject lovingly described in 'Rising Ground'.They too feature the ancient moors, (although as a setting for Arthurian fantasy) because once Cornwall sidles into your heart, it's there to stay.
I absolutely loved Philip Marsden's interweaving of history, landscape and wildlife; I was captivated by his words and passion, by the way he burrowed into the bones of this wild and wonderful county. What a triumph.
Thank you Mr Marsden.
Thank you Dad, I love you.
Dad read the reviews and decided that it would be right up my street, how right he was!
My own books are rooted in Cornwall, the subject lovingly described in 'Rising Ground'.They too feature the ancient moors, (although as a setting for Arthurian fantasy) because once Cornwall sidles into your heart, it's there to stay.
I absolutely loved Philip Marsden's interweaving of history, landscape and wildlife; I was captivated by his words and passion, by the way he burrowed into the bones of this wild and wonderful county. What a triumph.
Thank you Mr Marsden.
Thank you Dad, I love you.
Read
April 4, 2020Another book I'd been sitting on for far too long, and which was nearly reaching its renewals limit before the Event obliged the library to extend all due dates to late August (and fingers crossed even that isn't rank optimism). But suddenly, with my orbit confined to the garden and a few local parks and woodlands, even this metropolitan liberal elitist was in the right state of mind for a book about being rooted in a particular place.
Marsden starts strongly, introducing us to Aveline's Hole, a place of youthful explorations for him which has since been revealed as the oldest ritual burial place in Europe. As he looks at the relics found there, he muses that a cranium implies a brain, and that implies the things that brain once remembered, perhaps including trips to the same place where they would themselves be found all these centuries later. And it's moments like this which are Rising Ground's greatest strengths – that vertiginous plummet through the observed fact to the thing behind that, and then the thing behind that. At its best it reminded me of Urne-Buriall, and that's not a comparison I bandy about lightly. This sense of deep time is crucial to one of the book's recurring ideas, the notion that, according to recent archaeology, monuments which seem ancient and mystical to us, often exist because the spot already seemed ancient and mystical to the builders. Why so? Well. Conversely, the subsequent historical assembly work done by a scholar such as John Leland is itself now fragmentary and decayed, in need of a restoration of its own and still fragmented even then. The past, as we can sometimes forget, is not one substance, but has has its own past.
Into which, of course, a publication date of 2014 now also falls. The times when Marsden talks about the rooted particularity of 'place' versus the airy, abstract 'space' can't help but read a little more uneasily from the other side of 2016, the 'citizens of nowhere' speech and associated torrent of nativist shite. None of which is to suggest that Marsden himself has any blood and soil tendencies, only to note ruefully how quickly a book can feel like it was definitely written in another time.
But turning from that melancholy prospect, let us not overlook one key detail: this is a book with a map in the front. Not the history book sort – a proper hand-drawn one, the kind that promises adventure. And this is an adventure close to home (there used to be a club or something called that, didn't there? Back when there were clubs), a travel writer bringing the skills and experience gained from Ethiopia to Abkhazia to bear in his home county of Cornwall (with occasional trips elsewhere in the West Country, such as Glastonbury, because doing a book down in that corner about sacred landscapes and how they fit together and omitting there would just be perverse). It's mystical without taking itself too seriously, though I think it may be me more than Marsden who couldn't get over the sentence about "filling the chainsaw with lube", let alone all the mentions of Brown Willy. It ties together history, archaeology, myth and science: we learn about the geological kinship of the Lizard and Mount Olympus, not to mention the devastation wrought by the china clay industry, whose spoil heaps now occlude sightlines unchanged for millennia – something the which would doubtless distress William Cookworthy, Quaker chymist and unwitting father of the trade, as much as it does Marsden.
It's not all on that level, admittedly. No amount of discussion of the etymological and conceptual kinship of building and dwelling can make me altogether care about the saga of someone else's home improvements, though the bit about the pheasant in the bed was very cute, and the sensation of walking a once-known house now empty is elsewhere caught very well. The book's second section can at times run a little close to formula; it's basically a series of walks interspersed with potted biographies of curious Cornish figures who were rooted in the place: a pugnacious ebony-toothed antiquary; a precocious child historian of the county; an artist who, when dissatisfied, would drive over his canvases in his car ("'Usually improved it,' he'd say."). And it verges on the ridiculous once it reaches the bleak exhortations of clay-fixated, flower-loathing deaf-blind poet Jack Clemo, who comes across like a character Max Beerbohm dropped from his gloriously silly Arnold Bennett parody for being a bit much (and insufficiently Midlands). It's still good reading, but good rather than great. Yes, I was amused by John Thomas Blight, who sounds like a veneral disease rather than an antiquary, and who eventually lost it altogether - he "grew convinced that the Anglican clergy has been inflitrated by Druids, who were just biding their time before reintroducing human sacrifice". Chance'd be a fine thing. And yes, when Sabine Baring-Gould inevitably hoves into view, even he seems positively colourless compared to this company. But this parade of oddballs isn't what will stay with me here like the sense of place will.
Thankfully, the book picks up again in the third and final section as it reaches Penwith, which Marsden describes as having the same relationship to Cornwall that Cornwall has to England – the odd bit down at the extremity. "A hideous and wicked country, sloping to hateful sunsets and the end of time" to the poet John Heath-Stubbs - and even to those who love it, a strange and haunted place. Not that Marsden does anything so obvious as finish at Land's End, instead carrying on across lost Lyonesse to the Scilly Isles – which themselves give credence to the notion of Lyonesse by existing within the historical record as Scilly Isle, singular. He closes "out here where the sun sets, the western-most place where land was no more than a whisper in the silence of the ocean, a flat-topped hill already half-way to eternity." Which is a lovely place to leave it, even if it does mean I'm now desperate to put the Indelicates' Point Me To The West on repeat and go striding off into a sunset forbidden for the foreseeable.
Marsden starts strongly, introducing us to Aveline's Hole, a place of youthful explorations for him which has since been revealed as the oldest ritual burial place in Europe. As he looks at the relics found there, he muses that a cranium implies a brain, and that implies the things that brain once remembered, perhaps including trips to the same place where they would themselves be found all these centuries later. And it's moments like this which are Rising Ground's greatest strengths – that vertiginous plummet through the observed fact to the thing behind that, and then the thing behind that. At its best it reminded me of Urne-Buriall, and that's not a comparison I bandy about lightly. This sense of deep time is crucial to one of the book's recurring ideas, the notion that, according to recent archaeology, monuments which seem ancient and mystical to us, often exist because the spot already seemed ancient and mystical to the builders. Why so? Well. Conversely, the subsequent historical assembly work done by a scholar such as John Leland is itself now fragmentary and decayed, in need of a restoration of its own and still fragmented even then. The past, as we can sometimes forget, is not one substance, but has has its own past.
Into which, of course, a publication date of 2014 now also falls. The times when Marsden talks about the rooted particularity of 'place' versus the airy, abstract 'space' can't help but read a little more uneasily from the other side of 2016, the 'citizens of nowhere' speech and associated torrent of nativist shite. None of which is to suggest that Marsden himself has any blood and soil tendencies, only to note ruefully how quickly a book can feel like it was definitely written in another time.
But turning from that melancholy prospect, let us not overlook one key detail: this is a book with a map in the front. Not the history book sort – a proper hand-drawn one, the kind that promises adventure. And this is an adventure close to home (there used to be a club or something called that, didn't there? Back when there were clubs), a travel writer bringing the skills and experience gained from Ethiopia to Abkhazia to bear in his home county of Cornwall (with occasional trips elsewhere in the West Country, such as Glastonbury, because doing a book down in that corner about sacred landscapes and how they fit together and omitting there would just be perverse). It's mystical without taking itself too seriously, though I think it may be me more than Marsden who couldn't get over the sentence about "filling the chainsaw with lube", let alone all the mentions of Brown Willy. It ties together history, archaeology, myth and science: we learn about the geological kinship of the Lizard and Mount Olympus, not to mention the devastation wrought by the china clay industry, whose spoil heaps now occlude sightlines unchanged for millennia – something the which would doubtless distress William Cookworthy, Quaker chymist and unwitting father of the trade, as much as it does Marsden.
It's not all on that level, admittedly. No amount of discussion of the etymological and conceptual kinship of building and dwelling can make me altogether care about the saga of someone else's home improvements, though the bit about the pheasant in the bed was very cute, and the sensation of walking a once-known house now empty is elsewhere caught very well. The book's second section can at times run a little close to formula; it's basically a series of walks interspersed with potted biographies of curious Cornish figures who were rooted in the place: a pugnacious ebony-toothed antiquary; a precocious child historian of the county; an artist who, when dissatisfied, would drive over his canvases in his car ("'Usually improved it,' he'd say."). And it verges on the ridiculous once it reaches the bleak exhortations of clay-fixated, flower-loathing deaf-blind poet Jack Clemo, who comes across like a character Max Beerbohm dropped from his gloriously silly Arnold Bennett parody for being a bit much (and insufficiently Midlands). It's still good reading, but good rather than great. Yes, I was amused by John Thomas Blight, who sounds like a veneral disease rather than an antiquary, and who eventually lost it altogether - he "grew convinced that the Anglican clergy has been inflitrated by Druids, who were just biding their time before reintroducing human sacrifice". Chance'd be a fine thing. And yes, when Sabine Baring-Gould inevitably hoves into view, even he seems positively colourless compared to this company. But this parade of oddballs isn't what will stay with me here like the sense of place will.
Thankfully, the book picks up again in the third and final section as it reaches Penwith, which Marsden describes as having the same relationship to Cornwall that Cornwall has to England – the odd bit down at the extremity. "A hideous and wicked country, sloping to hateful sunsets and the end of time" to the poet John Heath-Stubbs - and even to those who love it, a strange and haunted place. Not that Marsden does anything so obvious as finish at Land's End, instead carrying on across lost Lyonesse to the Scilly Isles – which themselves give credence to the notion of Lyonesse by existing within the historical record as Scilly Isle, singular. He closes "out here where the sun sets, the western-most place where land was no more than a whisper in the silence of the ocean, a flat-topped hill already half-way to eternity." Which is a lovely place to leave it, even if it does mean I'm now desperate to put the Indelicates' Point Me To The West on repeat and go striding off into a sunset forbidden for the foreseeable.
Read
February 6, 2023I'm still not quite sure what the point of Philip Marsden's extended essay/series of essays on place was. And I normally adore this kind of belles-lettres musing. I suppose I was entertained well enough, because Marsden is quite capable as a writer, and I have an interest, albeit a vague one, on the Celtic fringes of Europe. It's not really dreamy enough for my taste though. So is this essential reading? No, not even remotely. But I suppose it was rather pleasant, and if you like nature writing sort of stuff you'll probably enjoy it.
July 28, 2015
Ok, so I am beginning to get the hang of books like this. Apparently the fashion is to write admiringly of people who wrote in great detail about a place in the past but not, in fact, to do so yourself. Mix 1 part picturesque, 1 part memoir of my walks or house renovations, 1 part prehistoric speculation and 1 part vignettes of antiquaries, artists and characters and you have a sacred landscape. I was irritated when the author conveniently replaced anything about medieval Cornwall with a ramble near parents home in Glastonbury!
Marsden writes about finding the meaning of a place yet I'm not sure for me that this managed to convey spirit.
Also, I have some reason to think his research may not have been very in depth: in the prehistoric section he seemed to be conflating average life expectancy with life span (my understanding is that infant mortality skews the average significantly). This was in a section where he was reporting someone else's beliefs, but it stood out as contrary to what I have read in other sources.
But this is churlish, it is a beautifully written book. And it is good so long as I stopped wishing for it to be more than it is.
Marsden writes about finding the meaning of a place yet I'm not sure for me that this managed to convey spirit.
Also, I have some reason to think his research may not have been very in depth: in the prehistoric section he seemed to be conflating average life expectancy with life span (my understanding is that infant mortality skews the average significantly). This was in a section where he was reporting someone else's beliefs, but it stood out as contrary to what I have read in other sources.
But this is churlish, it is a beautifully written book. And it is good so long as I stopped wishing for it to be more than it is.
January 30, 2025
The Celtic wanderer within my DNA applauds this archeological tour across the southwestern tip of Britain. But the watcher of "Poldark" (not mentioned herein), the observer that there's a "Market Jew Street" in the county capital (not commented upon), and the Irish-speaker in me that frequent notes about this language family that might have enlivened this are absent (no cameo by the fabled supposed last speaker of Cornish, Dolly Penreath, 250 years ago, and a "native speaker" then in his eighties Marsden meets doesn't stay around to get the author to ask about his bonafides, as I aver supposedly nobody his age would have grown up with Kernow, but would have had to acquire it as a second tongue). So, as with his "Crossing Place' account among the Armenian diaspora I reviewed, I again am let down a bit. His erudition rewards even as his accumulation of facts distances energy.
However, Rising Ground works better as its rooted in the landscape of Marsden's entire life. He's but a month older than me, and although he doesn't mention his baronet lineage nor his Bristol birth, he does show the restoration of his haunts from his earliest memories. I think (as with the related lands of Wales and of Ireland) that an examination of the erosion of domestic stability, of folklore, and of the ability of those who were raised in the region to afford it as holiday-homes and retirees, expats and EU emigres all move in to displace the locals are germane concerns in this era when open borders, migrants, wealth, and globalizing shifts (and digital nomads) loom very large.
The introductory snippets to each section based on a particular place show the Cornish etymology. I found this sometimes the most engaging part. I was rewarded by the depictions of blind poet John Clewo, the eccentric parson-scholar Sabine Baring-Gould, and the antiquarians who roam about. I was surprised John Cowper Powys gets only a passing nod, as his novel about ninety years ago had played a large role in the New Age marketing of Glastonbury (known for its muddy rock festivals, again a pop culture element not discussed) as well as spreading the allure of lucrative selling of the Arthurian balderdash at Tintagel and the other sites to appeal to the starry-eyed pagan magick'd.
The early Christian era, full of saints who speckled this rocky region with shrines and healings, gets cursory attention. I would have expected fleshing out the connections between post-Roman Wales, the flight of the Celts to Brittany under the Saxon incursions, the loss of Devon, to have weighed in.
So, the inconsistency of his treatment remains odd. Buccas and knockers emerging in stories by the miners don't pop up, and neither does the industry itself get much depth in these pages. I guess Marsden felt himself drawn more to the donnish types who dug into barrows and invented their own tall tales instead, maybe for academic journals rather than pub crawls or fireside chats. It's therefore an uneven survey of this legendary peninsula, but still, worth a trawl by a patient pilgrim.
However, Rising Ground works better as its rooted in the landscape of Marsden's entire life. He's but a month older than me, and although he doesn't mention his baronet lineage nor his Bristol birth, he does show the restoration of his haunts from his earliest memories. I think (as with the related lands of Wales and of Ireland) that an examination of the erosion of domestic stability, of folklore, and of the ability of those who were raised in the region to afford it as holiday-homes and retirees, expats and EU emigres all move in to displace the locals are germane concerns in this era when open borders, migrants, wealth, and globalizing shifts (and digital nomads) loom very large.
The introductory snippets to each section based on a particular place show the Cornish etymology. I found this sometimes the most engaging part. I was rewarded by the depictions of blind poet John Clewo, the eccentric parson-scholar Sabine Baring-Gould, and the antiquarians who roam about. I was surprised John Cowper Powys gets only a passing nod, as his novel about ninety years ago had played a large role in the New Age marketing of Glastonbury (known for its muddy rock festivals, again a pop culture element not discussed) as well as spreading the allure of lucrative selling of the Arthurian balderdash at Tintagel and the other sites to appeal to the starry-eyed pagan magick'd.
The early Christian era, full of saints who speckled this rocky region with shrines and healings, gets cursory attention. I would have expected fleshing out the connections between post-Roman Wales, the flight of the Celts to Brittany under the Saxon incursions, the loss of Devon, to have weighed in.
So, the inconsistency of his treatment remains odd. Buccas and knockers emerging in stories by the miners don't pop up, and neither does the industry itself get much depth in these pages. I guess Marsden felt himself drawn more to the donnish types who dug into barrows and invented their own tall tales instead, maybe for academic journals rather than pub crawls or fireside chats. It's therefore an uneven survey of this legendary peninsula, but still, worth a trawl by a patient pilgrim.
April 17, 2020
I loved this book. I picked it up because it describes itself as 'a search for the spirit of place'. Even though I hardly know Cornwall at all, I was drawn into his research about past lives, past explorers and lovers of the county he himself has explored exhaustively. This book offers cultural history, nature writing, a bit of personal history, all of which combine to make a richly satisfying account of a county now for me definitely worth exploring. And which goes some way to accounting for the 'spirit of place', so strongly evoked in the county he loves.
September 27, 2016
This book, which is subtitled "A Search for the Spirit of Place," is part memoir/travel writing, part history, and overall pretty pleasing. In Chapter 2, Marsden and his wife and kids move from a seaside house in Cornwall to farmhouse by a creek, farther inland, and the house and the land around it, combined with his memories of childhood explorations of the landscape around his parents' house, prompt Marsden to think about and write about Cornwall and the landscape and its history, particularly in terms of it being a ritual landscape, a place of standing stones and barrows and graves. (A cave he visited in childhood, he learns in adulthood, has been identified as the oldest known burial place in Britain.) Each chapter is preceded by a black & white image, many of which are photos Marsden took, and each chapter is about a specific place (mostly in Cornwall but not entirely).
I picked this book up partly because the blurb says that Marsden decided to walk across Cornwall to Land's End, and he did, but I was imagining it as a single trip, which this isn't: it's a number of different excursions, punctuated by side trips or work on the farmhouse or its land. Which is fine, but it's a different kind of narrative than I was expecting. I like the details about the farmhouse, though, which needs some work:
On the page after that, Marsden writes about finding a pheasant in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and then finding one of her eggs amidst the bedsheets. And later, there's this:
The parts about ritual landscape were interesting, too, about how ritual landscapes react to or frame elements of the view, and I liked the parts about Marsden's visits to Glastonbury and Tintagel and the clay-producing area around Hensbarrow, and his visits to the Scilly Isles (which used to be one island—he write about snorkeling in water and knowing the bottom beneath him used to be dry land) and Land's End.
I picked this book up partly because the blurb says that Marsden decided to walk across Cornwall to Land's End, and he did, but I was imagining it as a single trip, which this isn't: it's a number of different excursions, punctuated by side trips or work on the farmhouse or its land. Which is fine, but it's a different kind of narrative than I was expecting. I like the details about the farmhouse, though, which needs some work:
I did nothing about the wisteria shoots that grew through the window of our bedroom, pushing towards the furniture with their slender fingers. A tiny bramble – thorns still pliable, leaves innocent green – had sprouted from a crack in the sitting-room wall, and although a good part of my day was spent cutting back its cousins, this one had a rarity that made me treasure it. (45)
On the page after that, Marsden writes about finding a pheasant in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and then finding one of her eggs amidst the bedsheets. And later, there's this:
There wasn't much snow, but when it did come, light and dry one dusk after everyone had left, it blew through the kitchen door where I was standing waist deep in a pit. I watched the flakes drift down like feathers, to rest on the bare earth, on the muddy toe of my boots – unmelting. In that moment I found it hard to imagine the house ever being habitable again (68).
The parts about ritual landscape were interesting, too, about how ritual landscapes react to or frame elements of the view, and I liked the parts about Marsden's visits to Glastonbury and Tintagel and the clay-producing area around Hensbarrow, and his visits to the Scilly Isles (which used to be one island—he write about snorkeling in water and knowing the bottom beneath him used to be dry land) and Land's End.
May 20, 2015
n dit boek maakt de auteur een tocht door Cornwall, het graafschap waar hij woont en is opgegroeid.
Het boek maakt een cirkel, hij begint bij Bodmin Moor en eindigt bij het soortgelijke doch verdronken landschap van the Scilly Islands.
Wat ik (o.a.) zal meedragen uit dit boek zijn de mensen die de geschiedenis van dit deel van de wereld trachtten te achterhalen en die er een eigen invulling probeerden aan te geven en die in verschillende gevallen ook krankzinnig geëindigd zijn. Ik denk hierbij bvb. aan de man die voor Henry VIII het land rondreisde en verslag uitbracht en die de schoonheid van Glastonbury beschreef, John Leland. Ik was ook geraakt door het verhaal van de abt van Glastonbury en hoe zoveel schoonheid en troost op 1 plaats vernietigd werd voor/door de macht van 1 man.
In het boek komt ook dikwijls naar voor hoe wij als mensen nood hebben aan rituelen, aan dingen die we in het landschap plaatsen om datgene te benoemen wat we niet kunnen verklaren, om datgene te eren wat we groots vinden, en dat ons verbindt met wat we niet kennen, zoals de vele stenen cirkels maar ook bvb Madron Well. Ik heb al een aantal stenen cirkels gezien in UK (Avebury - Stonehenge) maar nooit eerder heb ik er bij stilgestaan hoeveel hier achter schuilt, wat dit reflecteert. De plaats Madron Well herkende ik beter, het is zoals het kaarsje aansteken in een kerk, of uw zorgen neerleggen bij de bron in Lourdes. Gebaren die we nu meestal ongemakkelijk weglachen, maar die hun oorsprong al veel eerder kenden.
Ook de passage van de zon die zakt in het westen (Land's end) en wat dat voor de mens al die duizenden jaren geleden betekende, vond ik erg mooi.
Er zijn plaatsen waar je je meer thuis voelt dan op andere, waar je steeds opnieuw naartoe trekt, dichtbij en verder weg, plaatsen die je koestert en die verbonden zijn met wie je bent/was en waar je wortels liggen, misschien wel generaties terug, die plaatsen zitten in onze genen, die zijn wie wij zijn. Ja, ik zal nog wel terugdenken aan dit boek.
Het boek maakt een cirkel, hij begint bij Bodmin Moor en eindigt bij het soortgelijke doch verdronken landschap van the Scilly Islands.
Wat ik (o.a.) zal meedragen uit dit boek zijn de mensen die de geschiedenis van dit deel van de wereld trachtten te achterhalen en die er een eigen invulling probeerden aan te geven en die in verschillende gevallen ook krankzinnig geëindigd zijn. Ik denk hierbij bvb. aan de man die voor Henry VIII het land rondreisde en verslag uitbracht en die de schoonheid van Glastonbury beschreef, John Leland. Ik was ook geraakt door het verhaal van de abt van Glastonbury en hoe zoveel schoonheid en troost op 1 plaats vernietigd werd voor/door de macht van 1 man.
In het boek komt ook dikwijls naar voor hoe wij als mensen nood hebben aan rituelen, aan dingen die we in het landschap plaatsen om datgene te benoemen wat we niet kunnen verklaren, om datgene te eren wat we groots vinden, en dat ons verbindt met wat we niet kennen, zoals de vele stenen cirkels maar ook bvb Madron Well. Ik heb al een aantal stenen cirkels gezien in UK (Avebury - Stonehenge) maar nooit eerder heb ik er bij stilgestaan hoeveel hier achter schuilt, wat dit reflecteert. De plaats Madron Well herkende ik beter, het is zoals het kaarsje aansteken in een kerk, of uw zorgen neerleggen bij de bron in Lourdes. Gebaren die we nu meestal ongemakkelijk weglachen, maar die hun oorsprong al veel eerder kenden.
Ook de passage van de zon die zakt in het westen (Land's end) en wat dat voor de mens al die duizenden jaren geleden betekende, vond ik erg mooi.
Er zijn plaatsen waar je je meer thuis voelt dan op andere, waar je steeds opnieuw naartoe trekt, dichtbij en verder weg, plaatsen die je koestert en die verbonden zijn met wie je bent/was en waar je wortels liggen, misschien wel generaties terug, die plaatsen zitten in onze genen, die zijn wie wij zijn. Ja, ik zal nog wel terugdenken aan dit boek.
October 23, 2020
(FROM MY BLOG)
In his Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place (2014), Philip Marsden concludes that much of British history, and especially pre-history, cannot be understood apart from the geographical surroundings in which it occurred. He argues, moreover, that since the Renaissance, we have increasingly lost our sense of "place," and have treated all spaces as equivalent, ignoring not only the geography, but the history peculiar to every locale.
Hence, the monotonous uniformity of our shopping malls and suburbs, functional spaces divorced from the very distinct geographical areas in which they have been created.
Philip Marsden grew up in Somerset, a county not far north of Cornwall. In the first chapter of Rising Ground, he tells of his boyhood adventures climbing about the Mendip hills, and exploring caves. One such cave, Aveline's Hole, was later found to have contained the oldest known human remains in Britain -- dating back to about 8400 B.C. There is evidence that the cave may have been used as a burial place -- for unknown mystical reasons related to its location -- thousands of years before that.
Once his house's renovation was completed, Marsden decided to explore not only the near area, but Cornwall in general. He began with Bodmin Moor, near the border with Devon, and its many Neolithic monuments; he then visited Tintagel on the north Cornwall coast and Glastonbury (of King Arthur fame) in Somerset.
In a later section of the book, he describes in detail his exploration, by rather strenuous off-path hiking, of the entire area of Ruan Creek and the River Fal, ending finally at Falmouth. From Falmouth, he hiked westward to Porthleven -- a port on the opposite, western side of the Lizard peninsula. A year ago, I hiked westward, from Porthleven to Falmouth, but on the well-traveled coastal hiking route, a route that took me out onto the Lizard-- the southernmost point in England. Marsden, as usual, took a more adventurous overland route.
Each of Marsden's rambles, described in physical detail, is also an occasion for not only meeting local residents, but for discussing interesting people in Cornwall's history, people who give Cornwall its character -- its sense of "place" -- as much as do the peaks and tors and the Neolithic monuments.
I realize how little of Cornwall I saw in 2019, limited as I was to hiking the scenic coast from St. Ives to Falmouth. I didn't touch the great interior of the county at all. But Marsden describes areas more familiar to me in his book's third section, describing the Penwith peninsula, between Penzance and St. Ives, which extends to a point at Lands End.
Rising Ground is a guide of sorts to selected areas of Cornwall -- from the haunted moorlands, to the banks of tidal rivers silted and passable only at high tides, to the well-touristed coast. It provides short biographies to Cornish writers and scholars. It gives a humorous account of Marsden's own struggles to renovate a derelict farmhouse, making it his family home. And it gives a picture of a writer who has an ability to meet and draw out stories from the many people he meets, but who also has a craving for solitary hiking, for camping alone on desolate moors, for sailing in barely navigable waters, for touching and caressing, in the chilly moonlight, standing stones erected by unknowable people who lived their lives out many millennia ago.
Always, he asks himself what thoughts passed through the minds of these ancient peoples as they lived out their lives, lives that were in some basic ways little different from our own? How were their lives affected by the same physical landmarks we see before us today? He wonders at the
"Only by knowing our surroundings, being aware of topography and the past, can we live what Heidegger deems an authentic existence."In my mandatory freshman Western Civilization course, we studied how the rugged and irregular geography of the Greek peninsula and islands formed not only the nature of government in classical times, but the character of the ancient Greek people themselves. Archeologists today might call this the primacy of "place."
In his Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place (2014), Philip Marsden concludes that much of British history, and especially pre-history, cannot be understood apart from the geographical surroundings in which it occurred. He argues, moreover, that since the Renaissance, we have increasingly lost our sense of "place," and have treated all spaces as equivalent, ignoring not only the geography, but the history peculiar to every locale.
Hence, the monotonous uniformity of our shopping malls and suburbs, functional spaces divorced from the very distinct geographical areas in which they have been created.
Philip Marsden grew up in Somerset, a county not far north of Cornwall. In the first chapter of Rising Ground, he tells of his boyhood adventures climbing about the Mendip hills, and exploring caves. One such cave, Aveline's Hole, was later found to have contained the oldest known human remains in Britain -- dating back to about 8400 B.C. There is evidence that the cave may have been used as a burial place -- for unknown mystical reasons related to its location -- thousands of years before that.
...far back in the ninth millennium BC, the site may have been used because it was already considered old. The astonishment we feel at people performing these rites so long ago might simply be a version of what they felt.These early experiences led Marsden to thoughts about the importance of "place." As an adult, he and his wife remodeled a farmhouse on the shore of Ruan Creek, a tidal tributary of the upper River Fal, north of Falmouth. He discovered that the farmhouse lay on the medieval site of the estate of a wealthy Norman family. He uncovered a small piece of an ancient chapel, which suggested to him that "place" was determined not only by the physical landmarks that surrounded it, but also by the people who had lived and died on the same land, and had, in turn, been affected by the same landmarks.
Once his house's renovation was completed, Marsden decided to explore not only the near area, but Cornwall in general. He began with Bodmin Moor, near the border with Devon, and its many Neolithic monuments; he then visited Tintagel on the north Cornwall coast and Glastonbury (of King Arthur fame) in Somerset.
In a later section of the book, he describes in detail his exploration, by rather strenuous off-path hiking, of the entire area of Ruan Creek and the River Fal, ending finally at Falmouth. From Falmouth, he hiked westward to Porthleven -- a port on the opposite, western side of the Lizard peninsula. A year ago, I hiked westward, from Porthleven to Falmouth, but on the well-traveled coastal hiking route, a route that took me out onto the Lizard-- the southernmost point in England. Marsden, as usual, took a more adventurous overland route.
In the mid-morning I lost the path. I doubled back, took a short cut and it ended the way it usually does -- crawling through a hedge, unpicking brambles from my hair. I tumbled out of the thicket and into an open field. I brushed myself down. An old Massey tractor on the far side was topping docks. In its cab sat an elderly man in clear-rimmed glasses.As chance would have it -- for Marsden at least -- the old farmer was an Oxford graduate, a gentleman who had led classes in Cornish and was at the time reading a fifth volume of Byron's letters and journals. He had ended up a farmer because he had inherited the farm -- what choice did he have?
Each of Marsden's rambles, described in physical detail, is also an occasion for not only meeting local residents, but for discussing interesting people in Cornwall's history, people who give Cornwall its character -- its sense of "place" -- as much as do the peaks and tors and the Neolithic monuments.
I realize how little of Cornwall I saw in 2019, limited as I was to hiking the scenic coast from St. Ives to Falmouth. I didn't touch the great interior of the county at all. But Marsden describes areas more familiar to me in his book's third section, describing the Penwith peninsula, between Penzance and St. Ives, which extends to a point at Lands End.
The Penwith peninsula is to Cornwall what Cornwall is to the rest of England -- a loosely connected appendage stuffed with the residue of a thousand stories and mythical projections. Every rock, every hill and cliff has its tales, lore and sprites. The peninsula has a mood all its own.Or, as he quotes Katherine Mansfield: "It's not really a nice place. It is so full of huge stones." And I felt I struggled over every one of those stones on my hike last year.
Rising Ground is a guide of sorts to selected areas of Cornwall -- from the haunted moorlands, to the banks of tidal rivers silted and passable only at high tides, to the well-touristed coast. It provides short biographies to Cornish writers and scholars. It gives a humorous account of Marsden's own struggles to renovate a derelict farmhouse, making it his family home. And it gives a picture of a writer who has an ability to meet and draw out stories from the many people he meets, but who also has a craving for solitary hiking, for camping alone on desolate moors, for sailing in barely navigable waters, for touching and caressing, in the chilly moonlight, standing stones erected by unknowable people who lived their lives out many millennia ago.
Always, he asks himself what thoughts passed through the minds of these ancient peoples as they lived out their lives, lives that were in some basic ways little different from our own? How were their lives affected by the same physical landmarks we see before us today? He wonders at the
...urge that drove our Neolithic ancestors to arrange the moorstone into circles at the Hurlers, to build the wall around the tor -- the same questions that tease us now: what law, what force, what patterns exist in the vastness of space? And always behind the questions, the doubt, the depth-sounder beam probing the emptiness for something solid, the fear that there might be none of these things at all.Philip Marsden is an adventurer, a careful observer, a story teller. And an excellent writer.
December 8, 2016
I love books which take a place or a time or a person or a natural phenomenon, and then uses that as a springboard into a wide-ranging meditation on art, history, science, poetry, or any manner of things. And I have always wanted to go to Cornwall.
So I was interested in Rising Ground as soon as I heard about it.
Philp Marsden has a degree in anthropology and has written a number of books about his travels in Ethiopia and Russia, as well as numerous essays for The Spectator. He was, however, raised in Cornwall and recently bought a farmhouse on a creek there with his wife and children. The book is not a memoir of the renovation of this old house, though some of his personal experiences are woven into the narrative. It is more about ‘topophilia’, a lovely word which means ‘love of place’, and examines some of the little-known but interesting people of the past who have loved Cornwall and studied it and written and painted about it.
It’s the sort of book that you can pick up and enjoy, then put down and not pick up again for a few weeks, as each chapter is an essay on a particular aspect of Cornwall. I was particularly interested in the chapters on the standing stones and barrows and graves and other ancient monuments, and on the blind-and-deaf Cornish poet Jack Clemo, who I had never heard of before.
A really interesting read.
So I was interested in Rising Ground as soon as I heard about it.
Philp Marsden has a degree in anthropology and has written a number of books about his travels in Ethiopia and Russia, as well as numerous essays for The Spectator. He was, however, raised in Cornwall and recently bought a farmhouse on a creek there with his wife and children. The book is not a memoir of the renovation of this old house, though some of his personal experiences are woven into the narrative. It is more about ‘topophilia’, a lovely word which means ‘love of place’, and examines some of the little-known but interesting people of the past who have loved Cornwall and studied it and written and painted about it.
It’s the sort of book that you can pick up and enjoy, then put down and not pick up again for a few weeks, as each chapter is an essay on a particular aspect of Cornwall. I was particularly interested in the chapters on the standing stones and barrows and graves and other ancient monuments, and on the blind-and-deaf Cornish poet Jack Clemo, who I had never heard of before.
A really interesting read.
October 11, 2017
In Rising Ground Philip Marsden explores our sense of place. He travels through Cornwall via Bodmin Moor, Clay Country and Penwith and ends his journey on the Isles of Scilly. His travels are rooted in his own place - the farmhouse he is renovating at Ardevoroa on the Upper Fal.
He explores the landscape by way of the sacred places of prehistory, those ancient ritual sites, the quoits and cliff castles, the standing stones, the fogous and holy wells. He tells us about the antiquarians who first started to uncover this ancient past and lay their own meaning on these sites. He meets artists, writers and poets - those who attempt capture the landscape in paint and words. We learn about the origins of Arthurian myths and legends and about William Cookworthy - the Quaker who first discovered the secret of Cornwall's rich reserves of China Clay.
It's a beautifully written and evocative book that perfectly captures the tug on your soul from the place you belong to.
He explores the landscape by way of the sacred places of prehistory, those ancient ritual sites, the quoits and cliff castles, the standing stones, the fogous and holy wells. He tells us about the antiquarians who first started to uncover this ancient past and lay their own meaning on these sites. He meets artists, writers and poets - those who attempt capture the landscape in paint and words. We learn about the origins of Arthurian myths and legends and about William Cookworthy - the Quaker who first discovered the secret of Cornwall's rich reserves of China Clay.
It's a beautifully written and evocative book that perfectly captures the tug on your soul from the place you belong to.
May 29, 2024
You could easily overlook it or miss it if you weren’t looking for it. Nobility background, Bristolian, public school boy i.e. rich, monied, privileged, self-confident, supported background.
Cornwall really needs another incomer romantic mystic upper middle-class writer like a trouser pocket needs a hole. Sells up somewhere the property prices are even higher than Cornwall; buys outright with enough left over to live off. Trustafarian lifestyle compared to locals. Totnes is full of ‘em. The Fal / Truro River might be Cornwall’s own River Dart attracting them types, the offspring of privilege and its cheaper than over there in Padstein unless you want to open an old pigsty Air B ‘n’ B in West Penwith that is. You can’t move in St Just these days for feckin ‘artists’ and St Ives is a foreign country.. Ideal Marsden country you might say – built for ‘em, maintained specifically for ‘em. We’re all living in a county given over to R ‘n’ R for the middle class of the South East and to which we have to maintain the illusions they demand.
What Cornwall needs isn’t another pair of these laptop daddies and yummy mummy couples – its jobs and industry and affordable housing that hasn’t been snapped up by incomers-with-more-than-one-boat ready to pontificate on the ‘mystic aura’ of the place to their similarly stationed friends around firepits on their respective demesnes quaffing their own ethnic hooch from their own trees. We know all about that bollix. We’ve lived with it for generations; made a lot of it up in fact. If this bugger was a painter he’d be ‘searching for the sublime, the liminal edge of transcendence’ or some other suitable art bollix. But he’s not. He’s a wordsmith; but NOT a journo, oh no. Anyway he does ‘something’ to convince publishers to put this stuff out there and pay him enough ackers to put rashers in the pan and sourdough on the table. Unlike many residents in Bodmin and St. Austell. Whydoncha go and write about unemployment, deprivation and foodbanks in Cornwall? No…. didn’t think so. Not the kind of stuff you can readily sell to the agent to flog to the publisher to get all them Oxbridge luvvies in Blackwells all wet and prepping up for their next Air B ‘n’ B adventure in ‘darkest legend-filled’ Cornubia. Let’s face it … if Bob Macfarlane (the grandaddy of this style) hasn’t tried it then it’s not worth approaching.
Just F** Off!!!This makes me want to vomit. Its so full of unspoken privilege. This is Class War by other means.
From just nine pages in we know what we’re gonna get (and we haven’t even got across the Tamar yet!). Macfarlane’s got a lot to answer for. They all graduated from their extended gap year travels to writing this bollix. It’s verging on the realms of mytho / psycho – geography bollix said to be Fine Art these days as practised by Iain Sinclair and Cecile Oak(Phil Smith, dramturge) with literary pretensions in that it does a lot of name-dropping just like that charlatan Claudio Magris. So we get Martin Heidegger and I’m just waiting for the references to Margaret Mead, Walter Banjamin and Hannah Arendt to drop in (surprisingly they don’t – he sticks to obscure locals à la Magris). So he goes to look at some old bones ‘hidden away behind the faculty high-rises of Bristol University’ (mate…. the only high-rises in Bristle are out in the boonies to house the great unwashed non-hipsters). It’s the self-confidence of the hereditary privileged upper middle class where they all sniff each other out like dogs and arseholes and decide that, yes, they’re both on the same level / know the same kind of people / do the same kind of thing / shop at Waitrose. When he holds the piece of cranium in his hand we don’t quite get the hack ‘frisson of electrical connection to my soul’. Its even more flouncy and florid than that. And there’s more to come. A lot more.
Finding the Shangri-la up the creek on the Fal is all ”crept up on a spring tide”, “oaks with their lower branches underwater”, “the cackle of shelduck, perched egrets”, “felt like pushing into some tropical river system like the Orinoco or the Congo”.Yeah… all ‘Heart of the Darkness’ Conradian mega-bollix. Don’t think yer likely to be waiting to get the late-nighter back to the housing estate outside St Austell after a payday on the lash or even trying to catch a bus or hitch a lift to do a back shift cleaning the wards for minimum wage for an American firm with no union representation or rights.
Btw….. granite isn’t black and living on it gives you arthritis and lung-cancer
BTW2…. Get a real chainsaw, not a kiddie-on Efco meat trimmer.
I despise this book.
Cornwall really needs another incomer romantic mystic upper middle-class writer like a trouser pocket needs a hole. Sells up somewhere the property prices are even higher than Cornwall; buys outright with enough left over to live off. Trustafarian lifestyle compared to locals. Totnes is full of ‘em. The Fal / Truro River might be Cornwall’s own River Dart attracting them types, the offspring of privilege and its cheaper than over there in Padstein unless you want to open an old pigsty Air B ‘n’ B in West Penwith that is. You can’t move in St Just these days for feckin ‘artists’ and St Ives is a foreign country.. Ideal Marsden country you might say – built for ‘em, maintained specifically for ‘em. We’re all living in a county given over to R ‘n’ R for the middle class of the South East and to which we have to maintain the illusions they demand.
What Cornwall needs isn’t another pair of these laptop daddies and yummy mummy couples – its jobs and industry and affordable housing that hasn’t been snapped up by incomers-with-more-than-one-boat ready to pontificate on the ‘mystic aura’ of the place to their similarly stationed friends around firepits on their respective demesnes quaffing their own ethnic hooch from their own trees. We know all about that bollix. We’ve lived with it for generations; made a lot of it up in fact. If this bugger was a painter he’d be ‘searching for the sublime, the liminal edge of transcendence’ or some other suitable art bollix. But he’s not. He’s a wordsmith; but NOT a journo, oh no. Anyway he does ‘something’ to convince publishers to put this stuff out there and pay him enough ackers to put rashers in the pan and sourdough on the table. Unlike many residents in Bodmin and St. Austell. Whydoncha go and write about unemployment, deprivation and foodbanks in Cornwall? No…. didn’t think so. Not the kind of stuff you can readily sell to the agent to flog to the publisher to get all them Oxbridge luvvies in Blackwells all wet and prepping up for their next Air B ‘n’ B adventure in ‘darkest legend-filled’ Cornubia. Let’s face it … if Bob Macfarlane (the grandaddy of this style) hasn’t tried it then it’s not worth approaching.
Just F** Off!!!This makes me want to vomit. Its so full of unspoken privilege. This is Class War by other means.
From just nine pages in we know what we’re gonna get (and we haven’t even got across the Tamar yet!). Macfarlane’s got a lot to answer for. They all graduated from their extended gap year travels to writing this bollix. It’s verging on the realms of mytho / psycho – geography bollix said to be Fine Art these days as practised by Iain Sinclair and Cecile Oak(Phil Smith, dramturge) with literary pretensions in that it does a lot of name-dropping just like that charlatan Claudio Magris. So we get Martin Heidegger and I’m just waiting for the references to Margaret Mead, Walter Banjamin and Hannah Arendt to drop in (surprisingly they don’t – he sticks to obscure locals à la Magris). So he goes to look at some old bones ‘hidden away behind the faculty high-rises of Bristol University’ (mate…. the only high-rises in Bristle are out in the boonies to house the great unwashed non-hipsters). It’s the self-confidence of the hereditary privileged upper middle class where they all sniff each other out like dogs and arseholes and decide that, yes, they’re both on the same level / know the same kind of people / do the same kind of thing / shop at Waitrose. When he holds the piece of cranium in his hand we don’t quite get the hack ‘frisson of electrical connection to my soul’. Its even more flouncy and florid than that. And there’s more to come. A lot more.
Finding the Shangri-la up the creek on the Fal is all ”crept up on a spring tide”, “oaks with their lower branches underwater”, “the cackle of shelduck, perched egrets”, “felt like pushing into some tropical river system like the Orinoco or the Congo”.Yeah… all ‘Heart of the Darkness’ Conradian mega-bollix. Don’t think yer likely to be waiting to get the late-nighter back to the housing estate outside St Austell after a payday on the lash or even trying to catch a bus or hitch a lift to do a back shift cleaning the wards for minimum wage for an American firm with no union representation or rights.
”Such delusions are only possible for the besotted.”or the uber-romantic with more money than eyesight to what’s going on around him amongst the mere mortals. Travels in hyper-reality. Faux-romance at one remove for the Oxbridge reader. Your two-week holidays paying each other for escape are built on a county slaving at bullshit summer jobs or McDonald’s. But yes, the charms of a quaint, oldy-worldy, falling down, over-priced, cut-off shithole has its attractions to the privileged ‘alternative income’ brigade of Trustafaria where you can get a craftsman to do all the work cheap. It’s the stuff of Romantics that don’t have to make their croust grafting making blisters. Their blisters are ‘lifestyle’ choices; their cuts are from paper edges.
Btw….. granite isn’t black and living on it gives you arthritis and lung-cancer
BTW2…. Get a real chainsaw, not a kiddie-on Efco meat trimmer.
I despise this book.
September 8, 2019
I really wanted to like this book. I didn't. The title gives the totally wrong impression in relation to its contents. There was very little about the spirit of any of the sites he visits, rather quoted texts from other sources, which became predictable like some drab academic text. This book was extremely disappointing. No spirit, no connection and very impersonal.
September 28, 2017
This was a wonderful book that was strongest at the beginning and the end. Philip Marsden explores much of Cornwall starting in the north east and working his way south and west until he reaches Land's End and the Scilly Isles beyond.
In the first section he focuses on the Neolithic ritual sites of bodmin moor and the surrounds. He tries to understand what made that area sacred and drew people to arrange stones and monuments in the way they did. Marsden's beautiful descriptive writing gives you the sense of each place described, and you soon begin to feel the same sense and wonder that must have inspired the Neolithic builders so long ago - really giving substance to his thesis that everywhere has its own sense of place that talks to us in a similar, if not the same, way across many different ages.
In the central portion of the book he changes his focus to look instead at different historical figures who all explored the sense of place evident in Cornwall in different ways. Perhaps because much of the landscape in central Cornwall is dominated by industry, tin and clay mining, as opposed ritual significance. This was interesting but felt weaker and less purpose driven than the earlier and later sections.
Finally he take us to Penrith and Scilly, refocusing on the Neolithic landscape and the call still felt by people today when visiting. If you are at all interested in the stone age, Arthurian myth, cornish history or just excellent description of place then this book is well worth reading.
In the first section he focuses on the Neolithic ritual sites of bodmin moor and the surrounds. He tries to understand what made that area sacred and drew people to arrange stones and monuments in the way they did. Marsden's beautiful descriptive writing gives you the sense of each place described, and you soon begin to feel the same sense and wonder that must have inspired the Neolithic builders so long ago - really giving substance to his thesis that everywhere has its own sense of place that talks to us in a similar, if not the same, way across many different ages.
In the central portion of the book he changes his focus to look instead at different historical figures who all explored the sense of place evident in Cornwall in different ways. Perhaps because much of the landscape in central Cornwall is dominated by industry, tin and clay mining, as opposed ritual significance. This was interesting but felt weaker and less purpose driven than the earlier and later sections.
Finally he take us to Penrith and Scilly, refocusing on the Neolithic landscape and the call still felt by people today when visiting. If you are at all interested in the stone age, Arthurian myth, cornish history or just excellent description of place then this book is well worth reading.
August 18, 2025
I loved this book from start to finish, and as a geographer, I know exactly what it is about, but it's really hard to put that into words.
It's about the author and his exploration of Cornwall and his exploration of others like him who, over the centuries, also explored Cornwall and sought to describe, define, and understand it and share their passion/obsessions with others.
It's also about things much bigger and harder to grasp than that, like the meaning of places and people's relationship to them. Or the meaning of that as populations shift and the world changes, but elements of past landscapes remain.
Jacket blurb version: The breadth of geography and the sweep of time come together, and the author ponders the meaning of it all as he settles into an historic home and sets off on foot across Cornwall.
I think you could say he approaches Cornwall and ideas about people, place, and history in the way we might look at the night sky with its constellations and Moon and planets, seeing and knowing and enjoying every one, while simultaneously wondering what it all means, what it tells us about ourselves, and what looking at it and wondering about what it all means tells us about ourselves. The subtitle says it best - it's a search for the spirit of place.
It's about the author and his exploration of Cornwall and his exploration of others like him who, over the centuries, also explored Cornwall and sought to describe, define, and understand it and share their passion/obsessions with others.
It's also about things much bigger and harder to grasp than that, like the meaning of places and people's relationship to them. Or the meaning of that as populations shift and the world changes, but elements of past landscapes remain.
Jacket blurb version: The breadth of geography and the sweep of time come together, and the author ponders the meaning of it all as he settles into an historic home and sets off on foot across Cornwall.
I think you could say he approaches Cornwall and ideas about people, place, and history in the way we might look at the night sky with its constellations and Moon and planets, seeing and knowing and enjoying every one, while simultaneously wondering what it all means, what it tells us about ourselves, and what looking at it and wondering about what it all means tells us about ourselves. The subtitle says it best - it's a search for the spirit of place.
February 1, 2022
My improving reading to support a weeks January holiday in Cornwall. Marsden has written a love letter to Cornwall, describing through long walks, and a series of short visits to towns and various ancient features of the landscape, the rough beauty of the county. He and his family live in a renovated farm cottage near Bodmin, and the early part of the book talked about the challenges that presented, with comfort, utilities and access. The narrative included life stories of many of the researchers and artists who over the centuries have catalogued the features of the Cornish landscape, and painted or sculptured their own impressions of it. The book was not so much a travelogue (too disjointed for that), more a loosely arranged catalogue of interesting things about Cornwall and its ritual landscape that Marsden wanted to communicate, with his rather beautiful prose, to his reader.
December 27, 2017
Serendipitous mix of history, geology, language, folklore, local characters, natural history, and personal travelogue/memoir, all told with a lovely turn of phrase and well-crafted, wandering prose. A nice gentle read made all the more fascinating because it focuses on one of my favourite parts of the country. Having spent most of my childhood summers exploring Cornwall and sharing similar interests with the author probably make me the perfect reader for this particular book.
I went to a discussion event, featuring the author, titled "Rising Ground - Place Writing Now" at the London Review of Books Bookshop in 2014, which you can read more about here :"What is Place?".
I went to a discussion event, featuring the author, titled "Rising Ground - Place Writing Now" at the London Review of Books Bookshop in 2014, which you can read more about here :"What is Place?".
March 26, 2021
This is the second book I've read by Philip Marsden and I enjoyed his writing just as much this time as with The Summer Isles. This book consists of snippets, images captured to bring together the spirit of place, and it works beautifully - though I personally enjoyed his own travels the most, especially towards the end of the book. Regardless, he is great at spotting small details and elevating them to create an atmosphere, and his view of how life should be lived - especially when it comes to his new home, described in this book from purchase through renovation to move-in - is one that is close to my heart. Very enjoyable read.
July 1, 2022
I’m glad I read this book. It grew on me. The author moved to an old, old farmhouse in Cornwall in 2010 and begins to explore the place, the land, the history, the people of the place where he was making his home. The writing was a bit dense for me, but there were real jewels in here. The form was good and it made sense. The author really does write about this place that he is falling in love with - in joy and insight.
November 11, 2023
Beautifully written. Part travelogue, part memoir, fusing cultural history with nature writing, Marsden journeys on foot around Cornwall seeking to understand why layers of meaning and stories build up around particular features in the landscape.
Loses a star for the use of 'man' to mean humankind or person. Grating enough to see the usage in quotes from centuries past. Unacceptable in the 21st century.
Loses a star for the use of 'man' to mean humankind or person. Grating enough to see the usage in quotes from centuries past. Unacceptable in the 21st century.
May 13, 2017
I really enjoyed this love letter to Cornwall and its archaeological history. There was so much to take in and it got me rushing to get out our maps to look things up.
If you like Robert MacFarlane's books then this should appeal too. It has a similar feel with its combination of natural history, archaeology, history and literary references.
If you like Robert MacFarlane's books then this should appeal too. It has a similar feel with its combination of natural history, archaeology, history and literary references.
February 26, 2021
Philip Marsden tries to bring out the spirit of Cornwall in southwestern England by bringing out its history and prehistory, key figures who helped interpret it and his own walks across much of his home territory. He explores what place means in the context of Cornwall. I enjoyed his ramblings about and through this area and left feeling like I knew it all quite well.
October 3, 2020
I'm sure the thing is accurate, but I can't ken anything.
I really tried, but I know my ignorance when it's presented. For the unlearned, like me, this book is like eating mixed sawdust. Sorry, I've failed somebody.
I really tried, but I know my ignorance when it's presented. For the unlearned, like me, this book is like eating mixed sawdust. Sorry, I've failed somebody.
April 14, 2021
Excellent book. The authors writes powerfully of his home in Cornwall. He also explores what sense of place means, especially spiritual essence of place. It makes me want to understand more of the history of my home, including the native history.
May 7, 2024
[5 Sep 2020] An easy read, entertaining and informative, but surely we have reached peak fascination with Cornwall. Another middle-class English person moves to Cornwall and then tells everyone how quirky it is - an example of rubbing out a picture to point your own on the page.
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