We do love to be beside the seaside

In the garden of my house in Cornwall there is a smooth granite stone about the size and shape of a goodly pumpkin. In the middle, where the stalk would be, there is a hole filled with rusting iron. The day I moved in, a neighbour told me that the hole was drilled and filled with molten iron to attach a hook, long since rusted away, to make a ‘sinking stone’. Smuggled cargo could be submerged just off shore if there were any danger of meeting King George’s men, to be harvested when the coast was clear.

About a year later, another Cornish neighbour saw it and told me that, actually, the hole was for an iron hook by which the stone could be hung from a pilchard press – a large bellows-shaped contraption which squeezed as much of the evil-smelling oil out as possible, so the fish could be preserved and exported to the Continent where there was a readier market. I want to believe that my house was a smugglers’ base of operations, but sober reflection – and the house next door being called ‘The Old Pilchard Works’ – led me to the sad realisation that the second amateur historian was probably right.

Most books about Cornwall make a choice of which of these tendencies – the Jamaica Inn or the Genuine – they are going to tack towards. There is a habit among writers from London to take the chair in the Swordfish or the Star or some other fishermen’s pub, and believe everything they’re told. (Or, if they don’t believe what the fishermen say, ignore it – like the author who wrote 300 moving pages about the noble workers in the contemporary fishing industry and didn’t once mention their views on Brexit.)