This book, which is subtitled “A Search for the Spirit of Place,” is part memoir/travel writing, part history, and overall pretty pleasing. In Chapter 2, Marsden and his wife and kids move from a seaside house in Cornwall to farmhouse by a creek, farther inland, and the house and the land around it, combined with his memories of childhood explorations of the landscape around his parents’ house, prompt Marsden to think about and write about Cornwall and the landscape and its history, particularly in terms of it being a ritual landscape, a place of standing stones and barrows and graves. (A cave he visited in childhood, he learns in adulthood, has been identified as the oldest known burial place in Britain.) Each chapter is preceded by a black & white image, many of which are photos Marsden took, and each chapter is about a specific place (mostly in Cornwall but not entirely).
I picked this book up partly because the blurb says that Marsden decided to walk across Cornwall to Land’s End, and he did, but I was imagining it as a single trip, which this isn’t: it’s a number of different excursions, punctuated by side trips or work on the farmhouse or its land. Which is fine, but it’s a different kind of narrative than I was expecting. I like the details about the farmhouse, though, which needs some work:
I did nothing about the wisteria shoots that grew through the window of our bedroom, pushing towards the furniture with their slender fingers. A tiny bramble – thorns still pliable, leaves innocent green – had sprouted from a crack in the sitting-room wall, and although a good part of my day was spent cutting back its cousins, this one had a rarity that made me treasure it. (45)
On the page after that, Marsden writes about finding a pheasant in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and then finding one of her eggs amidst the bedsheets. And later, there’s this:
There wasn’t much snow, but when it did come, light and dry one dusk after everyone had left, it blew through the kitchen door where I was standing waist deep in a pit. I watched the flakes drift down like feathers, to rest on the bare earth, on the muddy toe of my boots – unmelting. In that moment I found it hard to imagine the house ever being habitable again (68).
The parts about ritual landscape were interesting, too, about how ritual landscapes react to or frame elements of the view, and I liked the parts about Marsden’s visits to Glastonbury and Tintagel and the clay-producing area around Hensbarrow, and his visits to the Scilly Isles (which used to be one island—he write about snorkeling in water and knowing the bottom beneath him used to be dry land) and Land’s End.
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