Penwith isn’t an island, but it feels like one. The heathland above the cliffs is filled with mine workings and Iron and Bronze Age relics: menhirs, fogous and quoits. To most visitors Cornwall is as simple as the GWR posters: gaudy pastels, happy children, ice cream. This Cornwall exists for six weeks in the summer holidays, the setting for a visitor’s bourgeois childhood – Enid Blyton’s Cornwall, principally – but it’s not the essential one.
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