Be inspired by the sights & sounds
of the Coast Path
See
the Walks
for Everyone pages to find descriptions of Coast
Path walks which are especially good for culture. You can
search for a walk that is known for its cultural interest
as well as by area, length and degree of difficulty.
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| Soak up... the
coastal myths and legends - King Arthur
or the mermaid of Zennor. Share in the
inspiration this wonderful coastline has
given to generations of artists and writers. |
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Generations of artists, craftspeople, writers and musicians
have chosen to live near or visit the coast of South West
England, its inspiration reflected in their work. Why not
add an extra dimension to your Coast Path walk by tracking
down some of them? It's an opportunity to see and
hear the coastal landscape through a different pair of
eyes or ears, or even at a different time.
Coastal Inspiration
One evening. when the ebb-tide was
leaning the channel buoys to the west, and the gulls were
flying silent and low over the sea to the darkening cliffs
of the headland, the otters set out on a journey. The
bright eye of the lighthouse, a bleached bone at the edge
of the sandhills, blinked in the clear air. They were
carried down amidst swells and topplings of waves in the
wake of a ketch, while the mumble of the bar grew in their
ears. Beyond the ragged horizon of grey breakers the day
had gone, clouded and dull, leaving a purplish pallor
on the cold sea.
- from Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
There's a wealth of art, music and writing to choose from
- here are just a few of the people who have been inspired
by places along the South West Coast Path.
Poets:
John Betjeman, who is buried at St. Enodoc's Church, Trebetherick,
North Cornwall, often wrote about the beauty and harshness
of the Cornish landscape:
The seagulls plane and circle out of sight
Below this thirsty thrift-encrusted height,
The veined sea-campion buds burst into white...
And gorse turns tawny orange, seen beside
Pale drifts of primroses cascading wide
To where the slate falls sheer into the tide.
From Cornish
Cliffs
Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote his famous poem Morte d’Arthur after visiting Tintagel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived and
worked in Devon and Somerset and often walked the Exmoor
coastline, Charles Causley, who died in 2003, was born in
Launceston and drew his inspirations from the North Cornwall
countryside, the poet and playwright Ronald Duncan lived
on a remote farm on the North Devon coast, and the poet and
novelist Thomas Hardy lived and worked in Dorset for most
of his life. After the death of his wife, Thomas Hardy revisited
Cornwall to retrace the steps of his courtship with his beloved
Emma. It was here that he wrote a collection of intensely
personal poems, 1912-1913, which includes Beeny Cliff (a
true location near Boscastle).
Novelists:
Jane Austen regularly visited Devon and Dorset and briefly
stayed in Lyme Regis, which features in her novel Persuasion and Henry Fielding, the author of Tom
Jones, was from Lyme
Regis. Rudyard Kipling set some of his work Stalky and
Co.,
a story of mischievous 19th century British schoolboys, along
the South West Coast:
"Are we going to Clovelly?" he puffed at last,
and they flung themselves down on the short, springy turf
between the drone of the sea below and the light summer
wind among the inland trees. They were looking into a combe
half full of old, high furze in gay bloom that ran up to
a fringe of brambles and a dense wood of mixed timber and
hollies. It was as though one-half the combe were filled
with golden fire to the cliff's edge.
Agatha Christie, Daphne Du Maurier,
John Fowles and Charles Kingsley were all inspired by the
dramatically diverse nature of the coastline. As were Rosamund
Pilcher, John Cowper Powys, Winston Graham, Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch, EV Thompson, Mary Wesley, Henry Williamson.
Virginia Woolf, a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group,
adored Cornwall. It was the setting for Jacob's Room, The
Waves, and her novel To The Lighthouse which drew on memories
of childhood holidays at St Ives in Cornwall. The lighthouse
on Godrevy Island is reputed to be the lighthouse on which
she based her modernist novel:
"At night she watched the beam of the lighthouse cross
her bedroom floor… watching it with fascination,
hypnotised, as if it were stroking her with its silver
fingers some sealed vessel in her brain, whose bursting
would flood her with delight..."
Topographical writing:
Many
good writers have described the landscape of the Coast Path
including WS Hudson, Rev. CA Johns, Arthur Norway, AL Rowse
and Derek Tangye. On arriving at Land’s End in
winter, the novelist Leslie Thomas wrote in his The Hidden
Places of Britain.
"I was all at once confronted with the wide and utter
magnificence of the untrammelled sea. It was spread gloriously
around Cornwall, shining like new, incredibly and unjanuarably
blue...".
Artists and sculptors:
Stanhope Forbes, the founder of the Newlyn School (a group
of painters who worked in the fishing village of Newlyn
in Cornwall), landscape painter Kurt Jackson, Barbara Hepworth,
Lamorna Birch, Beryl Cook, Patrick Heron, Laura Knight,
St Ives born painter Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, the war
artist John Piper, JMW Turner and the artist and mariner
Alfred Wallis.
Composers:
Malcolm Arnold (composer of Cornish Dances who lived in Padstow),
Arnold Bax (composer of the tone poem Tintagel the inspiration
for which was “The castle-crowned cliff of Tintagel,
and more particularly the wide distances of the Atlantic
as seen from the cliffs of Cornwall on a sunny but [N.B!]
not windless summer day”.
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