Cornwall
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Locator map for the English administrative region of Cornwall.
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Standing at the head of the Fal estuary, Trelissick is one of the largest gardens in Cornwall. It was first created in the early 19th century and has grown to include a wide range of exotic plants that thrive in the mild Cornish climate. The garden is especially famous for its large collection of azaleas and rhododendrons.
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The Helford river estuary is the site of Frenchman's Creek, made famous by the novelist Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) in her 1942 novel of that name. Although born in London and educated in Paris, she settled and spent most of her adult life in Cornwall, where the majority of her books are also set.
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The Welsh cob has existed as a separate breed of pony since before the Middle Ages. Traditionally used to haul carts loaded with timber or for general farm work, their gentle disposition and compact size make them ideally suited to drawing small, private carriages, such as this stick-back gig at the Tregony Horse Show in Cornwall.
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Pendarves tin mine, Cornwall. Tin has been mined in Cornwall for thousands of years, but the Cornish tin-mining industry peaked during the 19th century, and has since declined. Foreign competition in the 20th century made Cornish ore increasingly unprofitable. The last working mines, including this one at Pendarves near Camborne, closed a few years ago. A few sites have been reopened as heritage centres.
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Men an Tol in Cornwall. The name of this megalithic site is a corruption of the Cornish words maen, meaning stone, and tol, meaning hole. Archaeologists have speculated that these stones may have formed part of a stone circle or even the entrance to a burial chamber.
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Tregerthen Cottage, at Zennor in Cornwall, where D H Lawrence and his German wife Frieda moved in March 1916, at the height of World War I. Lawrence's reputation was at a low ebb after damning reviews of The Rainbow (1915). In October 1917, with the war worsening and suspicion falling on all German nationals in the UK, Lawrence and his wife were ordered to leave Cornwall.
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Cornish hedges, or stone hedges, are a type of dry-stone wall found most often in Cornwall. An earth bank around 1.4 m/4.6 ft high, though sometimes 1.8 m/6 ft or more in height, is faced with stones of different sizes and topped with turf. The width of the base is usually equal to the height of the wall. These constructions are very durable; a stone hedge built with concave walls might stand for two hundred years.
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The River Tamar rises only 6.4 km/4 mi from Bude, on the north Devon coast, flowing south for almost 80 km/50 mi before emptying into Plymouth Sound and the English Channel. It accounts for most of the boundary line dividing the counties of Devon and Cornwall and is crossed by, among others, the Brunel Railway Bridge and the Tamar Suspension Bridge.
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A thousand years ago, St Michael's Mount, off the southern Cornish coast, was a monastery owned by the island abbey of Mont St-Michel, off the coast of Brittany. Like its French counterpart, it can only be approached by boat or, at low tide, via a long granite causeway connecting it to the mainland.
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One of a pair of standing stones sited in a field near Lamorna in Cornwall, jointly known as The Pipers. The function of standing stones in the prehistoric societies that erected them is unclear, although they may have had specific cultural or religious significance.
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Glendurgan Valley Garden, in Cornwall, was created in the 1820s and 1830s by Alfred Fox. His successful Falmouth-based shipping company brought him exotic specimens from all over the world, many of which are still growing. The low-growing laurel maze, planted in 1833, has recently been restored.
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Lanyon Quoit is believed to be the burial chamber of a long mound. In megalithic times, when the dolmen was built, it would have been covered with earth, which has been steadily worn away over millennia. Before 1815, when it collapsed during a storm and was rebuilt, it was said that a man on horseback could pass underneath the capstone.
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A plaque commemorating the work of the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) at the Poldhu Wireless Station, near Lizard Point in Cornwall. Lizard Point is the most southerly point on mainland Britain.
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The bungalow at Lizard Point in Cornwall where the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) lived around 1900. Just along the coast is the site of the Poldhu Wireless Station from where, on 12 December 1901, Marconi transmitted the first radio signal, a letter ‘S,’ across the Atlantic to St John's in Nova Scotia.
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Wind turbines at the Delabole Wind Farm, in Cornwall, the first wind farm in the United Kingdom. Its ten turbines have a total generating capacity of 4 megawatts. There are now six wind farms in the county of Cornwall, with a combined total output of more than 31 megawatts of electricity, enough to meet the annual needs of 19,500 homes.
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The gatehouse of Lanhydrock House in Cornwall, together with the north wing, are all that survives of the original 17th-century mansion. In the mid-19th century, the leading architect of Victorian Gothic Revival, George Gilbert Scott, was commissioned to modernize the house. Twenty years later Scott's mansion was destroyed by fire. The house has since been rebuilt in a neo-Jacobean style.
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The Blue Room, the Gothic drawing room in the castle on St Michael's Mount in Cornwall. This is one of the most visited stately homes in the UK, and has been home to the St Aubyn family for more than three hundred years. The building was converted from a castle into a house after 1659, when it was sold to John St Aubyn.
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The Levant Beam Engine, near Pendeen in Cornwall, is more than one hundred and fifty years old. Originally used to pump water out of the tin mine below ground, and to bring ore and miners up to the surface, the engine lay idle for 60 years, before being restored to full working order in the 1990s as a tourist attraction.
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Rock climbing at Sennen Cove, near Land's End in Cornwall. There are two main recognized rock-climbing methods. In free climbing, climbers must rely solely on their strength, ingenuity, and skill. Aid climbing is any form of ascent that entails the use of equipment.
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Bedruthan Steps on the north Cornish coast in England. Erosion of the cliffs has left massive rock stacks standing in the sea. This site is managed by the National Trust, and the cliff-top walk is part of the 800 km/500 mi Southwest Peninsula Coast Path.
County in southwest England including the Isles of Scilly (Scillies).
Area
(excluding Scillies) 3,550 sq km/1,370 sq miTowns and cities
Truro (administrative headquarters), Camborne, Launceston; Bude, Falmouth, Newquay, Penzance, St Ives (resorts)Physical
Bodmin Moor (including Brown Willy 419 m/1,375 ft); Land's End peninsula; rivers Camel, Fal, Fowey, TamarFeatures
St Michael's Mount; Poldhu, site of first transatlantic radio signal (1901); the Stannary or Tinners' Parliament; Tate St Ives art gallery; the Mineral Tramways Project, which aims to preserve the mining landscape, once the centre of the world's hard-rock mining industry; Eden Project, two ‘biomes’ (tropical rainforest and Mediterranean) built in a disused china-clay pit near St Austell, formed a Millennium Commission Landmark Project, the first part of which opened in 2000; the ‘Lost’ Gardens of Heligan; the Minack Theatre, carved from the cliff face at PorthcunoAgriculture
crops are early in some places: fruit, oats, and vegetables, including swedes, turnips, and mangolds (a root vegetable used as cattle fodder); spring flowers; cattle and sheep rearing; dairy farming; fishing (Mevagissey, Newlyn, and St Ives are the principal fishing ports)Industries
tourism; electronics; kaolin (a white clay used in the manufacture of porcelain; St Austell is the main centre for production)Population
(1996) 483,300Famous people
John Betjeman, Humphry Davy, Daphne Du Maurier, William GoldingTopographyCornwall is bounded on the north and northwest by the Atlantic Ocean, on the east by Devonshire, and to the south and southwest by the English Channel. The Scilly Isles are 38 km/24 mi west of Land's End. |
| The northern coastline is formed of rugged cliffs, and is famous for its wild scenery. Although it has only two harbours of any importance – one formed by the estuary of the River Camel (where Padstow is situated), the other at St Ives bay – there are numerous small creeks, formerly used by smugglers. |
| The southern coast is also rocky, but to a lesser degree, and has headlands covered with luxuriant vegetation; the most important harbour is at Falmouth. |
| The surface of Cornwall is extremely irregular; from the River Tamar (on the eastern border) to Land's End it is a series of rugged hills, alternating with wide stretches of moorland. The Tamar is the county's chief river; it is tidal, and navigable for 30 km/19 mi. |
Plant lifeThe climate is mild, particularly in the south, and vegetation there grows prolifically; fuchsias, geraniums, camellias, myrtles, and hydrangeas flourish around Penzance and Falmouth during the winter. Exotic plants that would normally have to be grown under glass in Britain grow in the open in the Scilly Isles. |
Prehistoric remainsThere are several types of prehistoric remains in Cornwall: cromlechs, such as Lanyon, Mulfra, and Zennor (all in the Land's End district; the Lanyon cromlech is high enough for a person to ride under); rough monoliths, found in all parts of Cornwall; stone circles, of which the principal one is the Hurlers, near Liskeard; stone avenues, an example being the Nine Maidens near St Colomb Major; and the remains of hut dwellings. |
| Cornwall's historic remains include many ruined cliff-top and hill-top castles; famous examples are the castles at Tintagel and Launceston, parts of which date from Norman times. |
HistoryTin was mined from the Bronze Age until 1998, when the last mine, at South Crofty, near Camborne, was closed; the Stannary, or Tinners' Parliament, has six members from each of the four Stannary towns: Losthwithiel, Launceston, Helston, and Truro. It was established in the 11th century, ceased to meet in 1752 but its powers were never rescinded at Westminster, and it was revived in 1974 as a separatist movement. The flag of St Piran, a white St George's cross on a black ground, is used by separatists. |
MiningCornwall's mines were formerly a great source of wealth, yielding the elements arsenic, bismuth, copper, iron, lead, tin, and zinc. At one time Cornwall supplied half of the world's copper, and all of Britain's tin. The long decline of copper mining, brought about by international competition, began in the 1860s. By 1880 two-thirds of Cornish miners had emigrated to work in the mines of the Americas, Australasia, and South Africa. The tin industry declined in the first half of the 20th century, because sources in Malaysia were found to be easier to work. However, following renewed interest in Cornish tin in the 1960s, production increased greatly in the 1970s; Cornish mines supplied Britain with nearly a quarter of its tin ore requirement in 1974, but the collapse in world tin prices in the 1980s led to rapid decline, and the last mine closed in 1998. Serpentine rock is also quarried, mainly in the Lizard district; ornaments are produced from it. |
Cornwall
| City in eastern Ontario, Canada, 88 km/55 mi southeast of Ottawa, at the foot of the long Sault Rapids of the St Lawrence River; seat of the united counties of Stormont, Dundas, and Glengarry; population (1991) 47,100. Industries include textile and chemical plants, furniture, pulp and paper, and there is a large power plant in the city. |
| Cornwall was founded in 1784 by United Empire Loyalists, and became a town in 1848. Originally it was the commercial centre of an agricultural area that exported potash, grain, and masts for sailing ships. The city lies on the main line of the Canadian National Railway, and on the Canadian Pacific and New York Central railways. |
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