Culture

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.

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.

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”.

Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?
- from Beeny Cliff by Thomas Hardy

Mary Anning - early fossil collector at Lyme Regis
King Arthur - many North Cornwall associations including the castle at Tintagel
Sir Francis Chichester - completed his single-handed circumnavigation of the world at Plymouth in 1967. His sailing time of 226 days was twice as fast as the previous record for a small boat.
Arthur C Clarke - born at Minehead
D'Oyly Carte family - built Coleton Fishacre near Dartmouth, now a National Trust property
Sir Francis Drake - completed his circumnavigation of the world at Plymouth in 1580
George III - took 14 holidays at Weymouth
Admiral Thomas Hardy - of 'Kiss me Hardy' fame was born and died at Portesham on the Inland Coast Path where he has a landmark monument
TE Lawrence - stationed at RAF Mountbatten, Plymouth
Sir Bernard Lovell - worked at experimental radar station at St Aldhelm's Head during WW2
Marconi - sent first Transatlantic radio signals from Poldhu
Odda the Saxon - defeated a large Danish force in the vicinity of Wind Hill, Exmoor - the only occasion when the Saxons ever captured a Danish Raven banner.
William of Orange - landed at Brixham in 1688
Sir Christopher Wren - used 60,000 tons of Portland Stone to rebuild St Paul's Cathedral

Holywell Bay, Cornwall - a location in the Bond film Die Another Day.

Stunning scenery, picturesque villages and harbours and a wealth of historical features. The Coast Path has them all, so it’s no surprise that places along the route have provided the backdrop for many films and TV features. In some cases they are the setting of the original story as well. Did you know that as you walk the South West Coast Path you are also walking sites visited by Hercule Poirot, Dracula, Moll Flanders and The Three Musketeers to name but a few?

Here are a just a few of the film and television locations that may be on your next Coast Path walk-

For more fascinating information about Film and TV locations in the Westcountry visit www.visitsouthwest.co.uk.