Journal of Material Culture

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Landscaping Death: Resting Places for Cornish Identity Patrick Laviolette Journal of Material Culture 2003; 8; 215 DOI: 10.1177/13591835030082005 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/2/215

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L A N D S CA P I N G D E AT H Resting Places for Cornish Identity

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PAT R I C K L AV I O L E T T E

University College London Abstract This article explores the cultural construction of death and revival in Cornwall. In examining the ways in which these issues intertwine with the affirmation of local landscape identities, it surmises that an obscure and diffuse sense of ‘deathliness’ exists that generates collective and contested topographical memories and perceptions. By offering ethnographic interpretations of how people relate to contemporary burial places as well as a material culture analysis of prehistoric and derelict industrial environments, the article reveals three ways in which Cornishness rests in iconographical settings and material elegies. (1) from a prehistoric pedigree, where death and ancestry connect to expressions of folklore and custom; (2) through the ties that mortality has with the past’s dangerous local industries; and (3) from the symbolic death brought about by the extensive emigrant diaspora or the dissipation of identity from tourism and immigration. These factors illustrate that enduring tangible aspects of identification are perpetuated by a partial relating back to dying-out ways of life. I thus propose that the prominence of death itself becomes a significant yet ambivalent material metaphor – a motif for shaping personhood and advocating solidarity. Key Words ◆ Cornish identities ◆ death and resurgence ◆ landscape ◆ material metaphor INTRODUCTION

Perceptions of Cornwall clash. For some, it is a place that is alive and buzzing with a vigorous tourism industry that capitalizes on an active leisure zone of youthful surfers and other holidaymakers. Similarly, many people also see it as a place where language, customs and rituals Journal of Material Culture Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 8(2): 215–240 [1359-1835(200307)8:2; 215–240;033945] Downloaded from http://mcu.sagepub.com at Massey University Library on April 7, 2008 © 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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are being reborn or reinvigorated. Cornishness, if not the Cornish nationalist movement, is alive and well. It adapts. For others though, this peninsula exudes death. The language died in the 18th century, the place’s traditional industries have followed suit and it has therefore been left in socio-economic turmoil ever since. From their perspective, the vitality of the local population dynamics has equally reached a dead end. A centre of exodus flooded by waves of retired immigrants results in an unviable notion of Cornishness. This article addresses these paradoxical views. Death itself is a ritualized process. It is a moment that extends into many other social spheres, so that one can speak not only about social death but also about the death of a society. The actions, experiences and sufferings associated with death shape the social identities of those persons living through the process that surrounds dying. Mortuary ceremonies help define these new forms of identification for both the survivors and the dead. As the collectivity gradually desegregates itself from its deceased members via such rituals, the weakened social cohesion is re-established (Seale, 1998). This revival denies the extinction of individuality and serves to reassert cultural bonds. This is possible because even if life appears as a limited resource, its ending nonetheless mingles with various notions of fertility and regeneration. These adjunct symbolisms of fecundity and death differ significantly throughout history and across cultures, provoking Bloch and Parry (1982) to call for a concerted effort to account for such variations. It is therefore relevant here for us to question how the cultural construction of death relates to the contestation, creation and procreation of landscape identities in Cornwall. An important cultural variation in this peninsula is that these relationships are part of a more obscure and diffuse sense of ‘deathliness’ that infiltrates the local culture. For example, the Cornish scholars P.A.S. Pool and Charles Thomas explicitly reference death in the titles of their books about the Cornish language The Death of Cornish (Pool, 1975) and Scillonian archaeology Exploration of a Drowned Landscape (Thomas, 1985). At a larger scale, a similar metaphorical allusion appears in the figure of speech ‘going ‘round land’. Further, death is present in the local rhyme ‘from Padstow Point to Hartland Light, is a watery grave by day or night’ as well as in the refrain of one of the region’s most popular songs, The Song of the Western Men, which goes: ‘And shall Trelawny live? And shall Trelawny die?’ This slogan commemorates the Cornish Army’s march to London in response to King James II’s incarceration of Sir Jonathan Trelawny for protesting against the Declaration of Indulgence (the restoration of Catholic rights). This resistance emanated from several decades of regional dissent beginning with the Cornish rebellions of 1497 and culminating with the oppositions against the English Reformation of 1549 (Payton, 1993).

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Laviolette: L A N D S C A P I N G D E AT H

Hence it is pertinent for us to examine how people in Cornwall revive several rueful myths about death and despair or optimistic messages about cultural resurgence. Popular instances include numerous stories and legends about piracy, piskies, witches, haunted manor houses and the Beast of Bodmin Moor. In such cases, the view comes across that this is a region of enchantment, where it is not uncommon for strange or morbid things to take place. The coast, the moors, the very fabric of the remote hamlets all harbour a potential danger. Outsiders are therefore thrown into a situation where they need to make inter-textual interpretations about the Cornish after-life (McGreevy, 1992 offers analogous death metaphors for Niagara Falls). Such expressions equally take root from a teeming dialogue about death and dying buried in a contemporary cultural context. In the words of one key informant: ‘there’s more to being proper Cornish than being born and bred there, you also have to have known someone who has died Cornish’. Though these literary and discursive examples are revealing, this article examines how the material segments of the Cornish way of life have themselves ‘gone ‘round land’ or transformed into new cultural configurations. The objective is to examine the material relationships between death and the revival of Cornish identities – to look at their pervasion through the regional topography. By presenting ethnographic and material culture interpretations of burial places both past and present as well as an analysis of the environments of derelict industries, this article focuses on the ways in which certain elements of identity rest or lie dormant in the cultural landscape. As an emblem of identity, the landscape harbours regional and national sensibilities that do not reproduce themselves in the same way in everyday milieus. Indeed, Cockerham’s (2000) recent work corroborates this postulate. He examines the historical role of memorialization in relation to social distinction both within class divisions in Cornwall as well as between the Duchy and other British regions. By demonstrating that this region saw a significant escalation in the building of memorial monuments subsequent to the Reformation, he claims that this factor distinguishes the fields of mourning west of the Tamar. Such sites are iconic artefacts that endure in a revered layer of the Cornish environment’s past and present. Tangentially, death also becomes one of the landmarks of this peninsular identification because Cornwall exists through the lamentations for its own lost population. Departure and death are close cousins here. Both must be mourned in the hope of taming them. This cultural identification with the departed abides by a situation in which migration and diaspora have become defining characteristics of Cornishness. As a result, we are led to consider how the notion of death creeps into the materiality surrounding tourism, immigration and retirement since these


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phenomena intimately relate to both the loss and reaffirmation of local forms of Cornish identity. Such examples partly appear as the result of the actual life-threatening dangers of this territory’s traditional industries as well as because of an embodied historical struggle for the assertion of social identity. Consequently, this article argues that prehistoric and post-industrial locales as well as church grounds and cemeteries are metaphors of materiality in a way reminiscent of Tilley’s (1999) recent work on ‘solid metaphors’. Such sites/sights stand as an important but neglected part of a material culture that links death and resurgence with an ongoing search for distinction. Three sections distil this assertion. The first looks at how prehistoric and folkloric insignia of death are important parts of the contemporary collective memory in Cornwall. The second outlines the impacts that the decline of traditional industries has had on the social constitution of multi-vocal landscape identities. And the third examines some of the ways in which various forms of symbolic death and the restoration of distinction derive from an extensive emigrant diaspora as well as from the dilution of local expressions of identity caused by tourism and immigration. R ESEARCH S ETTING The Cornish peninsula lies at the most south westerly edge of mainland Britain. It is recognized for possessing a rich prehistoric heritage and for having had its own Celtic language. Additionally, it was a principal cradle of industrialization and engineering in the UK, boasting one of the world’s largest mining industries during the 18th and 19th centuries. With over 240 miles of coastline, fishing is also central to this territory’s socio-economic identity, now mostly known for its traditional local customs, minority nationalist movements and the promotion of coastal tourism with a rural touch. Despite this diversity and legacy – to which many claims of distinction are ascribed – this constituency is still one of Europe’s poorest (having received European Objective 1 level funding in 1999). To an extent, this economic impoverishment results from the area’s rapid de-industrialization, socio-political marginality and dependence on a fluctuating and seasonal tourist trade. Many of Cornwall’s claims to social difference are grounded in various elements of landscape and material culture. These relate for instance to foodstuffs, religion, sport, Celtic imagery and ritual, industrial and seafaring traditions as well as to an affiliation with significant art and literature influences, especially the progressive art scenes of West Penwith which span over 150 years. Many perceptions thus clash as to whether Cornwall exists as a land apart or as a quintessentially British periphery. My research has

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investigated the diversity of social identities that promote such contesting views. My fieldwork in the Cornish peninsula, from May 1998 until October 1999, has taken place within an inter-disciplinary rubric of multi-sited ethnography. Methodologically, this consisted of living and working in a variety of places in the area so as to participate in the lifeworlds of disparate groups of informants. Generally it was amateur footballers, artists, farmers, fisherfolk, immigrants, landscape gardeners, scholars and tourists that best presented themselves as groups of informants. My research methods equally included extensive interviews, walks and focus sessions with such persons. From the information that these informants provided as well as from my own observations, personal experiences, intuitions and analyses of items of popular culture, I have begun to interpret the metaphors embedded within the materiality of Cornwall’s landscape. This has demanded a questioning of the ways in which landscape icons shape cultural identities and premise the character of environmental experiences; a questioning that addresses the relationships that exist between subject and object as well as amongst anthropologist, field site and the anthropologist’s sight of the field. By actively participating in the everyday realities of these different groups of insiders, outsiders and those in between, I have endeavoured to phenomenologically investigate the relationships between landscape as an artefact of material culture and the creation or contention of social identities. Informed by various theories and practices of social anthropology, cultural geography and material culture studies, this existentially based line of investigation attempts to advance the understanding of the diverse culturally construed meanings attributed to the Cornish countryside and coastline. Indeed, this article is based on a phenomenological rationale that focuses on various domains of the lifeworld – with all their biographical particularities, embodied attributes, vernacular characteristics and visual complexities. That is, the present article offers a description of the ways in which landscape icons shape personhood and premise experiences of place – a portrayal which unearths an avid representation of death and the revival of a counter-culture. (1) FROM PREHISTORY TO POST-MODERN FOLKLORE

The most substantial remnants of Neolithic activity to persist in contemporary British landscapes consist of thousands of earth and stone monuments. Perhaps their most important feature is their permanence. What such monuments offer is the chance to encounter the prehistoric other in our immediate surroundings, that is, to experience the past in our various multi-faceted lifeworlds (Thomas, 1991). Neolithic monuments were particular in defining a specific social formation that invariably


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related to ritualized landscapes bound with the realm of the dead ancestors. In this way, the prehistoric past saw death and regeneration everywhere. The division between the land of the living and the land of the ancestors was tenuous. Tomb construction acted as a catalyst whereby part of the realm of sociality came to establish the negotiations and cultural constructions of landscapes. Narratives of a spatial sort were thus acted out via an exacting interplay between the monuments of the dead and their geographical surroundings (Tilley, 1994). The early Neolithic saw a restructuring of the relationship between culture and landscape. The building of cairns, chambered tombs and long barrows allowed these ancient people to establish new meanings and ancestral powers in the landscape. Large monuments fastened and fixed one’s visual perception. They also secured and guided one’s physical embodiment of place. By emphasizing the relationship between people and land, such features were mnemonic of locales and the connections between them. They emphasized a prehistoric conception of ‘whereness’. According to Tilley (1994), the cultural appropriation of pre-established ancestral powers in the Neolithic landscape through monument building served to increase the symbolic potency and power of place. Tombs served to objectify the landscape’s ancestral importance and to give agency to the past. Such powers allowed subjects of knowledge to transform into objects of knowledge. They became cultural resources, appropriated for social cohesion, positioning and control. Hence, these artefacts materialized perception through architectural channels. Through the configuration of their entrances and exits, their placement in the environment and their linearity and inter-visibility, these sites structured experience. Perception, as structured through monuments and the relations between them, turned into something much more rigid, disciplined and politically charged. The interest in the sites themselves became paramount rather than the particular identities of the dead. But, through the movement of bodies and ritually cleansed bones, death was invariably a focal issue in the land. In Cornwall, this intermingling between the realm of the ancestors and the land of dead relatives continued well past the Neolithic and Bronze Age. William Borlase (1769) was one of the first antiquarians to connect the ceremonies of the ancient Celts to stone monuments. His account of the religion of the Druids linked these early earthworks to the folklore of Cornwall and suggested that the contemporary inhabitants of Cornwall were the remains of the original Celtic population of Britain. Such early preoccupations with Cornwall’s ancient stone structures fuelled speculations about ancient Druidic rites. In the view of his great-grandson, these so called Celts and Druids associated the long term presence of death and ancestry to more recent prehistoric icons as well, like Celtic crosses and sacred springs (which would later become Holy

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Wells). Allegedly then, these early Britons enforced such associations to the point where these iconic features came to symbolize the abstraction of death through the implications of sacrifice, healing and eventually organized religion (W.C. Borlase 1893). These links have survived in the contemporary landscape because the low levels of both population density and agricultural intensity have meant an unusually high proportion of well preserved prehistoric sites. As the archaeologists at the Cornish Archaeological Unit confirm ‘there are more nationally designated protected monuments (Scheduled Monuments) in Cornwall than in any other county in England’ (Johnson and Rose, 1990: 1). The region’s numerous quoits, cairns, barrows, standing stones and stone circles are obvious examples of the types of landscape features that link with death, ancestry and the symbolic rituals associated with cultural resurgence. As Bradley reminds us, ‘they dominate the landscape of later generations so completely that they impose themselves on their consciousness’ (1984: 9). Some authors further suggest that in their contemporary settings, megalith monuments are environmental art forms. They have unique colours, individualities, shapes, structures and sizes. The argument here is that such earthworks are effective because they personify place. If indeed these sculptures become part of their surroundings and create spatial identities, then our experiential encounters of these ruins are part of a process whereby sociality becomes naturalized and the natural becomes socialized. Tilley (1996) offers the means by which this is possible when discussing how Scandinavian long dolmens line up one’s visual field and create a perceptual spatial path through the landscape. By revealing that the most imposing factor is the visual linearity of the mound, which cuts across the land and needs to be seen from a side angle, he demonstrates that the orientation of their long axis instils a: sense of directionality with which to perceive the space beyond the mound itself. These tombs thus channel views across the landscape but do not themselves directly establish an orientational axis in it. The long dolmen itself imposes a form, establishes a direction through space. The round dolmens and passage graves perform a similar role but a sense of directionality is instead created in relation to the people using them. (Tilley, 1996: 197)

The significance behind the endurance of such topographic aspects of material culture is complex. In this section, I nonetheless argue that a patterned relationship between monumental directionality and death still exists in the embedded physicality of many Cornish landscape icons. Because of their persistence, these artefacts have confronted generations of residents and visitors with a broad continuum in which culture can unfold. In large part, prehistory and its association with ancestry have


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been active factors in shaping a regional collective memory. That is, in the present much of the prehistoric landscape still directly or indirectly designates the realm of the dead. Through numerous ancient landmarks, insiders and outsiders address the links that bind the end of life to a reassertion of place and the past. For instance, ancient Celtic crosses continue to stand for death and cultural resurgence because of their use as modern symbols, especially as burial tomb markers. Indeed, Celtic crosses have become such important artefacts of identity that they are locally known as Cornish crosses. Though they occur throughout the west of the British Isles, nowhere are there as many in number or variety as in Cornwall (Balchin, 1983). The plan to build a 40 ft Celtic cross in Saltash, standing guard over the Tamar next to the Carkeel roundabout (the first road junction to the A38), at a cost of £25,000 and funded by the Millennium Festival Fund, is a clear indicator of the cultural significance of these landmarks in Cornwall. Further, the example of Jeane, one of my visiting informants in her early 30s, who was in the process of making a photographic collection of Celtic crosses during her working holiday in the peninsula, also illustrates the point. She repeatedly commented that her reasons for an extended stay in the South West were motivated by ‘a desire to explore my Celtic side’. Inasmuch as she felt that it was a slightly morbid hobby to be taking pictures of these icons, she equally believed that their repeated sighting helped her ‘question and ultimately come to terms with the eventuality of death . . . they’re so permanent and this constance is comforting when life sometimes seems so short lived. They show us how the fragile beauty of human creativity can endure and this makes life seem less absurd somehow’. From a less existential and more politically weighted perspective, the local Celtic cross enthusiast Andrew Langdon feels that the neglect of these artefacts is symptomatic of a larger dismissal of Celto-Cornish identity. For him, the restoration and study of these stone markers goes hand in hand with the promotion of symbols of local distinction such as the revival of the Cornish language. In June 1999, I attended a Celtic cross walk in the parish of Altarnun hosted by Mr Langdon and an environmental officer of the North Cornwall District Council. The fourhour walk covered 9 km of the area and visited 23 crosses dating from the 6th to the 13th century. The 13 participants knew each other from previous ‘historic theme walks’ or because of their involvement in similarly related issues. It is particularly noteworthy that five of them were Cornish speakers, one of whom teaches it at Liskeard College. They took this occasion to converse in Cornish especially during moments where the etymological nature of place-names was raised and discussed. As one of them explained, ‘it’s actually part of the walk’s agenda to deliberate over how the crosses relate with wider local issues: prehistoric heritage,

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FIGURE 1

Ancient Celtic cross walk, Upper Trewen, June 1999.

Photograph by the author

Cornish history and the expression of our culture’. In this sense, it is the assertion of social identities that actually guides these walks. And it does so through a diversity of material and nationalistic trails (Figure 1). The folklore surrounding the Merry Maidens and Hurlers stone circles in West Penwith and Bodmin Moor are other commemorative expressions of material culture. Both embody legends about the mortal punishment for religious misbehaviour. The stones, said to be dancers and sporting hurlers who were petrified for disrespecting the Sabbath, are contemporary monumental landscape icons of death. They serve to remind people that the past and place merge with local patterns of folklore and superstition. Indeed, the importance of these types of prehistoric sites further extends into the realm of local folklore since until recently such moorland monuments even had their own type of fairies ‘springgans’ as supernatural guardians (see Burl, 1976 for a discussion about stone circle legends). One of the lessons to draw out at this point is that the impacts of the past on the countryside allow certain groups to assert regional difference. Prehistoric sites become a source of benediction and prosperity for future descendants. Monuments often enshrine family genealogies. They stand as tombstones for a dying identity in the vast public cemetery that is the Cornish countryside. In such a scenario, the celebration of death is a source of group regeneration that extends beyond the local. Indeed,


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the importance of heritage tourism in Cornwall means that in many circumstances this might be a generic regeneration for British society as a whole. Hence, a contestation of identity arises because the mortuary symbols of past kinship systems are taken to divide society into exclusive groups. The idea of a corporate past comes to exist through ritual landscapes that fall under the auspices of bodies like English Heritage or the Cornish Heritage Trust (Robb, 1998). The issues of how such sites contribute to the fabrication or demise of local identity thus becomes a major concern for many special interest groups that would otherwise have little claim over the regional or national importance of ancient resting places. Because Cornwall’s prehistoric heritage is so exceptionally tangible and conspicuous, it is a prime agent in the transmission of nostalgia, folklore or nationalistic ideologies. As Rowlands points out: A mode of transmission which emphasises the duration of objects as a mnemonic device is perhaps more familiar to heirs of a monumental built environment tradition than one where objects are deliberately lost and destroyed and their imagery recalled at a later date. Building memorials and monuments are part of the material culture of remembering – a fetishised form of duration. They form an important site for the resolution of the religious force of nationalism within the secularised ideal of remembering. (1993: 141)

A- WAKING ‘N ATION ’ The long term collective memory that surrounds death in Cornwall thus stems in part from the impacts of prehistory. This distant memory is also acted upon in the present through the contemporary celebration of certain local festivals. Many Cornish feast days act as regional vigils in which identities in one form or another are commemorated, celebrated or mourned. One instance of this is midsummer’s bonfire night. Various sections of the Old Cornwall Societies have done much to renew the interest in this evening, which sees sheaves of wild flowers and herbs thrown onto bonfires. These are set alight on the top of hill cairns, in an order that starts at the onset of the setting sun over Land’s End and proceeds through many parishes to finally reach Callington’s Kit Hill, near the eastern border. This action is meant to signify the destruction of evil and the strengthening of good across the land (Williams, 1987). May Day in Padstow is another good example of a recurring event where certain elements of custom and folklore survive in a consistent fashion. This local festival intertwines the issues of death, fertility, homeland and cultural distinction. It consists of a continuous dancing procession of musicians, participants and two ‘Obby Oss’ hobby horses. This carnival is meant to re-enact the passing of winter and rebirth of summer, an expression of the desire to invite life-giving spirits into the

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town and to banish life-taking ones. The symbolism of these black Oss’ goes further as well – to an extent they stand as manic beasts, pure expressions of the unruly. Yet they are a tamed, controlled evil. The Cornish historian A.K. Hamilton Jenkin described the Oss as: . . . a fearsome creature, constructed out of black tarpaulin. It has a tall painted cap, a ferocious face-mask, flowing plume, and savage-looking jaws or ‘snappers’. In front of the man who carries it dances another who is dressed in comic costume. In his hand he holds a painted ‘club’ with which he beats time to the music of the band as it strikes up the merry ‘Morning Song’. (1934: 123)

The attire of the Padstownians, reputed for dressing in white from head to toe, illustrates this controlling force of society. The collective good, the light and purity of the masses, drape around these two sinister and frantic creatures. Citizens and return guests equally wear red or blue ribbons and bandannas to assert their allegiances to either the red or blue Oss (red is supposed to be reserved for true Padstownians since it is the colour of the original Oss). Of most interest to us here is that throughout the day these town folk also don a mini corsage of fresh flowers which they gather and make themselves. This bouquet consists of bluebells, cowslips and primroses, which are wrapped in tin-foil and fastened to one’s clothes with a safety pin. As the day wears on, the flowers wither in the heat of the action, which incidentally serves as another powerful visual analogy for the passing of spring and the onset of summer. The local importance vested in sporting these flowers during the day is undeniable. What I find even more noteworthy, however, is that during the following day, many of these bunches of flowers make their way onto certain recent graves and commemoration plaques in the local cemeteries. There is no mystery as to how this happens but local residents have never spoken to me about it and one would be very hard pressed to find any written formal record or discussion about this behaviour (Figure 2). Regardless of the weather, the day that follows May Day continues to see many festivities. Musicians still parade through town and people still sing Cornish anthems in the pubs. Despite these celebrations, dozens of Padstownians nevertheless piously venture to the local cemeteries to commemorate those loved ones who have more or less recently passed on. One of the main ways in which they do so is by laying their May Day flowers to rest in the churchyards with their resting colleagues. May Day is Padstow’s biggest day and for many local people who have lost someone close to their hearts, it would be inconceivable to continue to invest their joy in this event without also sharing it with departed companions who themselves once enjoyed this occasion. By doing so, they are including these friends and relatives into the festivities –


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FIGURE 2

Said with flowers: May Day corsage, Padstow cemetery, May 2000.


Padstow’s dead are in constant presence. These May Day flowers thus act as significant intermediaries between the great beyond and the promiscuous realm of the carnivalesque. That is, they mediate between the cultural construction of place and the reaffirmation of selfhood and

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community. Indeed, this covert ritual beautifully illustrates the strong relationship that binds death, identity and landscape into a web of meanings that is particularly local-cum-Cornish in design and configuration. Additionally, such a custom also tells of how this relationship is not directly conscious since Padstownian informants were generally unable to articulate any specifics about the origin or legacy of this behaviour. In other words, this is a truly ingrained cultural action. It is habitual, traditional and handed down from generation to generation but not reflected upon or even considered to be particularly interesting. This is not only true of insiders but also of those scholars who have examined Padstow’s May Day and who have completely overlooked this phenomenon (Hall and Plunkett, 1959; Rawe, 1971). In failing to report on this aspect of the festivities, insiders and students of the procession reinforce the notion that the realm of the dead and the identities that link to it are not only marginal or repressed but are also virgin territory in the consideration of Cornishness. In a sense, the symbolic killing of many folkloric belief systems reflects a widespread denial of death brought on by the advances of modernity. Moribund tales of piskies in Cornwall suggest that, like other marginal or peripheral areas, this region has still not wiped away all its superstitious associations with fairylore (Laviolette and McIntosh, 1997). Interestingly, as is the case throughout the British Isles, the decline of many traditional folklore beliefs is itself voiced in a terminology that surrounds death, as for example in the ‘dying out’ of the Cornish knockers (a type of mining dwarf or fairy). This scenario results directly from the closure of the tin mines. In many instances in Cornwall, the decline in active support of folklore traditions stems from the shift of an industrial base economy to a service based tourist economy. The demise of the Little People parallels the extinction of the industrial era. Such customs are, however, still commodified to a certain extent in a production of difference that is geared both for the tourist trade and for the potential of asserting a distinct cultural heritage. (2) DERELICTION VS INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE

In part, much of what people have traditionally seen as local signs for Cornwall, like language, superstitions or certain industries, appear to have themselves died. The impact of de-industrialization is of particular relevance in understanding the human environment and its relationship with that ‘otherworld’ which exists beyond life. For centuries, small fishing and mining communities were the twin pillars of the economy and revealed two of the main patterns of life west of the Tamar. Fishing and tin mining features still figure predominantly as icons in the minds and movements of residents and tourists alike. Informants often


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reference images of such communities when forming their symbolic constructions of place and heritage. Based on a popular local song, graffiti on the wall surrounding the South Crofty tin mine outside Camborne reinforces the association between the unsustainability of industry and the Duchy of Cornwall. It reads: ‘Cornish lads are fishermen and Cornish lads are miners too, but when the fish and tin are gone what are the Cornish boys to do?’ T INSEL T OWN This public outcry implies that it is the resources themselves that have vanished and not the need for them. The objects of Cornish subsistence have disappeared from the territory. By association, Cornish people must go as well. The slightly erroneous nature of this protest statement reinforces the feeling of desperation. Indeed, at least with regard to tin, it is not the depletion of the local reserve that is problematic but the changes in the ore’s global market prices that make its production non-competitive in Britain. Yet regardless of the reasons for Cornwall’s de-industrialization, the result is still the creation of a scenario in which to be Cornish demands a certain reminiscence for a long gone industrial era – to take pride in dying forms of subsistence and to bemoan a population exodus. These become traits that help define contemporary forms of regional identification. The realm of dereliction becomes an indicator of social distinction. Something singular exists about this homeland that is not only historical but is actually tangible and clearly discernible. Though tin mining relics span much of Cornwall, the most physically imposing mining ruins knackt bals (the Cornish word for disused tin mines) occur in West Penwith, such as at Botallack or in the mining districts of Camborne and Redruth. Their association with fatality has always been high; numerous lives have been lost to mining, especially before the Cornishman William Bickford invented the safety fuse to stop uncontrolled explosions when goose quill and rush were used as fuse for detonating underground blasts. Falls from ladders and stone-fall also contributed significantly to the loss of life in mines. According to Berry ‘. . . one in every five miners in the former industrial parish of Gwennap met a violent death’ (1963: 105). Yet residents in these regions still associate prosperous social values with these historical settings. Despite the economic hardship that this industry faced in its final decades, local people talk of this activity with the highest affinity. This ongoing, almost sacred, affiliation with mining has established itself in part by sustaining the link that has existed between religious vocation and the labouring identity grounded in a unique type of working environment. Moreover, long-term inhabitants are keen to recount stories of past mining activities. Those who best

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associate significant historical events with specific scenes reinforce their social status. The referencing of mining activity is a method of appropriating the territorial organization of the recent and not forgotten past. It acts as a sorting device for those places with which one rarely happens upon without searching through an extensive local knowledge. Abandoned engine houses, stacks and pit entrances thus function as symbolic icons for joining history to tradition. They are demonstrations of what the Cornish working classes nostalgically feel their society ought to return to wholeheartedly or at least preserve working examples of for posterity. Restoring them is akin to personifying this departure from the past – an activity that shows respect but which also reveals an acceptance of their fatality. Consequently, the majority of those ex-mining families who are not directly linked with the heritage industry claim that they would prefer it if such landmarks were left alone. Most are of the same opinion as Mr Pascoe of St Day when he states ‘everyone I know thinks they’re beautiful as they are. They have a decadent grandeur about them. Of course we want to preserve our past . . . want people to see what Cornwall is all about. But, not if it means turning that heritage into a Disneyland theme park. There’s enough of that tourist trap shite here already!’ Mr Pascoe (aged 71) is one of the few people alive today who was able to retire from a full tin mining career. He has been involved in numerous protests and rallies to save South Crofty. His attitude is an indicator that the collective Cornish memory has developed a diversified historicity for most of these sites. Cornwall therefore seems to be experiencing a form of social denial of tin mining’s demise. This is reinforced by the vigour with which clay mining is locally promoted as the last real working Cornish industry. The solidarity that gives mining permanence exceeds most other factors. Abandoned industrial artefacts stand as unmarked graves in a blanketed landscape of death in which residents affirm their allegiances to an idealized way of life. Balchin’s description of tin mining is telling of these relationships between people, industry and death: Elsewhere the old mining areas are characterised by acres of derelict land, or gorse and briar, with crumbling engine-houses and stamping mills: all now roofless, with vacant spaces for windows through which the wind blows mournfully throughout the winter months . . . The lonely silhouette of a ruined engine-house and its stack beside it, seen on the skyline in the setting sun, is one of the abiding memories of the Cornish landscape. (1983: 157)

If certain groups create themselves and seal their association by the restoration and maintenance of these sites, then it is because they involve themselves in a new industry driven by a desire to promote heritage tourism – to generate new networks with outsiders. This is not


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simply a question of sustaining traditional ties between insiders with a shared vocational history. It is more a matter of transforming them into something local that can stand up to external pressure. Such a rationale leads to activities that support the maintenance of large memorials. These are dedicated to industry and stand for the world to see instead of being erected as local tombstones that exist for past participants in mining activities to embody. It does not therefore seem unusual that Jeane, our working holidaymaker described earlier who collected Celtic cross images, would also be buying pewter brooches of engine houses as souvenir gifts for people back home. Her contemplation vis-à-vis these symbols finds solace in a local image of dereliction and despotism. Consequently, destitute industrial landmarks become accepted signifiers of death in a discourse about traditional vocational activities. By transforming ‘wasteland’ into resource, they strive to be the most conspicuous and dominant shapes of a post-industrial environment. From the foregoing discussion it is obvious that an important factor in the ideology of Cornish dissent centres on mining landmarks. The ambiguous value of these vocational landscape features – a link with the past and equally a link with western industrialization, capitalism and migration – is of local, national and even international significance. They allow for the formation of solidarity amongst certain residents as well as an antagonism between them and special interests groups often associated with the promotion of all things heritage. The sense of protectionism regarding tin mining sites is an attempt to extend the conventional understanding about the notion of ancestral lands so that a communal feeling of belonging has better chances of surviving. It also reveals a malaise towards the sharing of historical information about these working milieus, the benefit of which is precarious. Indeed, the outcome of communicating this type of knowledge could go either way. It could be locally favourable and provide an opportunity for ex-miners and other residents to regain a degree of control over the countryside. Conversely, it could result in divesting what remains of the local authority over the industrial past. W HITE G OLD Cornwall’s mining regions in general offer excellent examples of how materiality and perception merge to form consistent and contesting identities. The mining environments of the past and the present have recently begun to host an unprecedented historical romanticism. For instance, Kent (1997) shows that not only do many long-term Cornish residents feel quite passionately about the azure pools caused by residual copper deposits but that essentially such relics have even contributed towards the production of cultural heritage for the Duchy. The contemporary

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impact of clay mining has followed suit and we see how the white clay tips of this industry, locally referred to as ‘burras’, equally hold considerable importance in the sentimentality of many local residents. Indeed, the district of Restormel, the hearth of the clay industry, boasts as part of its green tourism programme, the possibility of living a ‘Cornish Alps Experience’. Consequently, Kent is able to substantiate his claim that ‘the white mountains are a landscape charged with emotion and energy, and as historical romance has emerged elsewhere in Britain . . . so it has in Cornwall’ (1997: 59). My own research generally supports this view. Nevertheless, I would add that this malleable environment of mining illustrates my overall argument about the symbolic forms of death and resurgence in Cornwall. Although fewer than 40 clay pits currently operate in the area, they are still large-scale endeavours that produce over half a million tonnes of clay a year. In fact, this industry is the single largest job provider in the territory, employing over 6000 people. In many respects these places epitomize the contemporary embeddeness of inland family histories into the land and its minerals. The result is that granite and clay become substances central to the population’s sense of identity. As one gentleman from Bugle in his early 40s who works for the Cornwall County Council roads’ improvements division claims ‘obviously the essence of the Cornish character is formulated through a rash common sense, as sharp as granite and as steep as a sea cliff face but tamed by the softness of less harsh materials like China Clay’. Despite these social importances, many processes are reclaiming these mining lands. The gradual change where tiny fields extend over ground that once stood under the influence of mining is symbolically significant. This slow and laborious reclamation of mining lands to farming explains why many people in these regions see the countryside as an array of bloodstained handkerchiefs. That is, analogies of these undulating landscapes in terms of battlefields are recurring; ‘the farmer and the miner occupying the country in something like the confusion of warfare’ (Berry, 1963: 111). Such views inform us that to a certain extent Cornwall is a contested battleground and both clay workers as well as the farming community are victims to a national, even global conflict about employment, de-industrialization and ecological restoration. In this sense, many residents, like conservationists or members of the local intelligentsia, see this industry as pretty unsustainable. They claim that its scarring of the landscape is akin to the act of killing the countryside. Such people are happy to see the clay mining ‘blights’ on the land disappear. Recent plans for habitat reclamation have thus come to the fore. ECC’s (English China Clay) Caerloggas Downs heathland restoration project is one example. Another is the development of


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heritage sites such as the Weal Martyn China Clay Village in Carthew (near St Austell). Often, these endeavours become part of a righteous dialogue that parallels the Christian discourse about resuscitation and resurrection. Indeed, certain policy planners and environmentalists appropriate the vestiges of the Methodist and Catholic past in order to play on the religious sensibilities of long-term inhabitants. The past comes to appease the ecological worries for the future. The very name ‘The Eden Project’ (a tropical bio-dome facility in the St Austell China Clay area that opened during the holiday period of Easter 2001) supports this notion that a public preoccupation with the salvation of nature is currently taking shape. Basically, it centres around the message that if the Cornish people are to prosper, their history needs to be redeemed and their land needs to be saved. This anxiety with socio-ecological deliverance reveals a flagrant contradiction – a local love/hate attitude towards these white mountains. A paradox that is complicated because such issues are never very far away from those concerning employment, identity and place. In a similar line to what Morris (1997) says of British war cemeteries abroad, the management of horticultural projects of this type has more recently come across as forms of land restoration that can both add and remove significance and identity to local derelict lands. They designate enclosed settings that acquire national historical importance as emblems of the victory over post-industrialization. Iconographically, landscape gardening and habitat reclamation become part of a wider concern with rural environmental salvation, or as some might call it, ecological redemption. Part of why death is so important in Cornwall has to do with the relationship that this notion has with fecundity and the need here to be hopeful for the revival of a better future. In this sense, this peninsula desperately searches for a sustainable economic regeneration. The nationalist position is often that this region needs a revival in political autonomy. Many members of the local intelligentsia believe for their part that the Duchy needs a rehabilitation of identity and cultural distinction. Stretching these arguments further then, the significance of ancestry, death and the revival of identity partially relates to how Cornwall is made to be closer to the ‘otherworld’. Its population has generally suffered and this subsumes the idea that it is the archetype of a meek body politic – a group that deserves better and should one day be rewarded. Local poets, authors and artists repeatedly interpret Cornwall’s clay district. Their work sustains the idea that the materiality of this area connects to the experiences that occur there. The topography of the clay mines provides a significant source of inspiration. It acts as a postmodern illustration for the landscaping of experience. The importance of this environment thus rests in its tangibility since some of the

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experiences that it allows are so extreme that it acquires a local sense of purity for the creatively minded. (3) DEATH FROM A DISTANCE

There are many examples of members of the extensive diaspora as well as outsiders with a history of family visits who immigrate to Cornwall upon their retirement. In this way, a popular belief exists in which people see this region as a place where it is good to grow old. And it follows, as a place where it is good to die. For thousands of retired people, Cornwall has become death’s door. As an 88-year-old female Breton informant puts it: ‘pour la france c’est la bretagne, pour l’angleterre c’est la cornouaille. Au dela, il n’y a plus rien de ce monde’ – ‘for France it’s Brittany, for England it’s Cornwall, beyond there’s nothing of this world’. In this case, these western regions are more than peaceful, picturesque peninsulas. The fact that water surrounds most of their borders alludes to a powerful visual metaphor about the role of crossing over water to reach the great beyond. In this sense, many elderly people could be anticipating and preparing for death. They cross this threshold and embark on a pilgrimage to end life before their time is up. The migration to the extreme west similarly acts as a preliminary to death. Alternatively, what might be at work here is the fighting off of death. Indeed, many aspects of western culture communicate images of elderly people as dry and arid (Kramer, 1988). The voyage of life is a slow process of desiccation which culminates in burial or incineration – ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. As such, the journey towards death in Cornwall figuratively parallels a return to the womb, a final journey to the primordial essence of life. The notion that moving to Cornwall is sometimes a physical and spiritual pilgrimage for the dying or a redemption of survival for the living is well illustrated by Rita James (aged 82), an artist who has been living in the Isles of Scilly for over 50 years. She firmly believes that the slow pace of life on St Mary’s has ended up slowing the onset of what was to be her untimely death. She claims to have achieved an environmental empathy with the ways of the islands that has allowed her to overcome an illness which was supposed to put a premature end to her life when she first moved to the Scillies half a century ago. As a young nurse in London just after the Second World War, Rita fell seriously ill for several weeks and was given six to twelve months to live. Having been to Cornwall and the Scillies several times as a child she decided that this was where she wanted to end her days. This was the place of her first memories and it would be the place of her last. She moved to Hugh Town with her husband and waited for death. In her words:


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As soon as we arrived, I knew that I’d broken free from that horrible diagnosis. It wasn’t really that I knew I’d outlive it but that once here it didn’t seem to matter as much. After weeks of staring out over the Atlantic, I came to terms with mortality. The years passed by and my health gradually improved, although I could never return to the nursing profession. I was still passionate about helping people but I wasn’t strong enough so I turned to art.

According to her spouse Terry, it was not long before she excelled as a local landscape and still-life artist: ‘people could see and respect in her work that she had become attuned to the rhythm of the place’. The embodiment that helped to sustain her life spoke through canvases of colour. Rita was a survivor and it was the islands that gave her some of the strength that she needed. Through her new lease on life, she has sustained a belief that her duty to help people could still be met by communicating the beauty and healing powers of nature. A similar mentality of regional purification was also responsible for fuelling Cornwall’s hyped-up international role during the total eclipse of the sun on 11 August 1999. This event provides a telling example of how the region’s appropriation by various (often contesting) groups launched the Duchy into a confused state of ambivalence by attempts to reconcile Cornish hospitality with a hodgepodge of contemporary mythological issues. If a pattern emerges from this disjointed discourse, it is perhaps that the eclipse helped reinforce the relationships between healing, death, society and place. Indeed, the themes that conveyed themselves most coherently at the time orbited around how the moon’s shadow over Cornwall for two minutes would provide the opportunity for a turning point at both personal and social levels. By highlighting the importance of rurality, prehistory and folklore, the promoters and participants of this event were often unwittingly and sometimes consciously involved in a process of producing a regional aura of distinction – reinforcing the creation of social difference – elevating Cornwall to an otherworldly status. Jeff, an emigrant in his late 30s who was raised on the outskirts of Newquay and visits regularly from London, spoke for many when he said: The eclipse is all about dying and being reborn. It’s a natural form of emptying the old and bringing in the new. Time to start again, a once in a lifetime chance at self-purification . . . the potential for this isn’t the same in other places. Only here is all this astrological stuff going on. The date and time of the eclipse [11:11 on 11/08/99] must be more than coincidental, it’s all about a new beginning which is so meaningful here because dates, time, the sun and moon were crucial in the development of this countryside. In prehistoric times, occasions of this magnitude would have so completely marked how they perceived the world and their understanding of nature. What we’re going to witness would have changed their

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world-view for generations and that’s surely a big reason for these stone megaliths.

The feeling is thus that Cornwall offers many escape spaces in which to conceal oneself from the inevitable. The region becomes a safe haven where people search for embodied mystical healing experiences. This extends itself to the realm of Cornish identities, which also relentlessly fight off their own demise. Such identities therefore strive towards stubborn survival: pure determination against all odds. Hence, for many local residents like Mr Pascoe, introduced earlier, theme parks, tourist destinations and popular immigration areas are polluted by the mortality that invasion brings. His reactions quoted earlier suggest that most apprehensions towards holidaymakers are not, as it might appear at the surface, related to xenophobic distrust. Tourism is not always frowned upon locally. Quite the opposite, most residents believe it to be an essential component of the region’s economic survival. What is unwelcome, however, is the leisure industry’s suppression of the local in favour of development schemes that do not fit with tradition. That is, projects which suffocate ‘agencies’ of belonging, to use a term reminiscent of Gell’s recent work (1998). It is interesting to note here that the tourist industry is itself often referred to as if it were an objectified other. In this sense, Cornwall defines itself through the dilution of localness that occurs from both excess infiltration as well as from the loss of its own population. One can consider this form of grievance as a running social commentary about social distinction – a method of generating cultural cohesion around a discourse that seeks to apportion bereavement. Consequently, the cultural dialogue about the departed abides by a situation in which migration and diaspora have come to characterize and caricaturize some of the essential ingredients in the recipe for Cornishness. In a similar vein, Herzfeld (1996) argues that laments do not strictly foretell passive submission to the inevitable. Instead, they hold the potential to subvert authoritative structures. Mortuary ceremonies are classic occasions for gender dissidence. Moments of lamentation metonymically assert a generic anguish for the plight of women suffering. The wailing process is thus a form of social protest which, by its very ambiguity, leaves open the opportunities for social change in the future. Laments are therefore a collective form of representing grief and loss with the subconscious desire to change reality. As in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, the absentee nature of Cornish expatriates grounds identity to loss through a process of communal sorrow. Contrarily, certain obvious spatial icons of death such as postindustrial sites and cemeteries become locations for life and renewal. As Seale (1998) reminds us, participation in culture often consists of


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selective bids for symbolic immortality. For him, nationalism is a key stream in the social defence against death and the prolongation of a collective commitment to life. These deliberations of distance inevitably summon a consideration of time, a conceptual frame that ties most of the aforementioned themes about death, revitalization and landscape together. Giddens (1985) develops a battery of concepts, which address just how the life processes of individuals, including their daily, weekly and monthly paths, are linked to the longue durée of social institutions. By and large, he does not conceptualize time as a resource. Instead, time is a measure of chronological distance, a measure of stretching across societies, a measure by which cultural memories are stored and weigh upon the present. A measure by which the long-term durée of major social institutions draws upon contingent social acts to create insignias and icons of identity. I would suggest here that the landscapes of death and resurgence described in this article are exactly the types of iconographical artefacts that Giddens is referring to when he describes the social construction of regionalism through the deconstruction of time and space. Ingold (1993) takes this framework one step further when he suggests that the longue durée of time is the currency of our labour vested in the land. He stresses that landscapes embody socio-cultural forms. They are structures of actions and performances collapsed into a matrix of cultural landscape features that incessantly shift due to their constant reconstruction brought about by our dwelling in locality. Our being in the world – the very nature of our daily actions – are part of a process in which the world transforms itself. That is, our activities are inseparable from our surroundings, from the generation of our habitus and the creation of our life-worlds. In and of themselves, they and we belong to time. They produce ‘. . . visible proof that all of these forms, from the most permanent to the most ephemeral, are dynamically linked under transformation within the movement of becoming of the world as a whole’ (Ingold, 1993: 168). By highlighting that movement is the body and soul of perception, Ingold demonstrates how the process of dwelling is intrinsically spatio-temporal; how it exists as a phenomenon wherein the past helps to shape the present and outline possible futures. New temporal fixtures for the world transpire as the deceased are removed from the social time to which they belonged in life. Most cultures do not situate the dead unambiguously in one place or time. They exist simultaneously in the vestiges of their bodies, in celebratory monuments dedicated to them and in other realities where their spirits venture (Humphreys, 1981). This temporal cessation may occur through burial monuments (not simply in the sense that any inorganic representation portrays a sense of immobility and immortality) but also via the representation of death itself as a metaphorical social icon of distinction.

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CONCLUSION

We have therefore come full circle to the point raised at the beginning of this article about death and identity in Cornwall, that is, what does it actually mean to die Cornish? The insinuation is that there are indeed proper Cornish deaths and others that fail to meet whatever criteria define such a termination. From the evidence presented here, we see that to a degree there exists a prominent belief in Cornwall that the culture and land themselves are dying. This affects people more than at the individual or community level. It is as if an entire society is on the route towards extinction. This region mourns a disappearing cultural past through the social landscape. A complementary concern also exists in which local traditions survive, are reborn or are even conceived from scratch (Figure 3). The relationship that death and regeneration have with landscape is thus another one of the threads that tie through disparate Cornish identities. It is an alliance that is analogous to a landscaping of cultural identities, situating and localizing individuals and groups with topographic permanence. As it does with the region’s language and rich artistic legacy, it weaves a tighter conception of Cornishness and cultural coherence (Laviolette, 1999, 2002). In short, the notion of deathliness that we have considered here helps keep Cornwall alive. Death is itself a metanarrative about cultural survival. For example, we have seen that even though they are perhaps more subtly displayed than they were in prehistoric times, markers of death are nonetheless everywhere present in Cornwall because prehistory and its link with ancestry have actively shaped a regional collective memory. They have done so through many landscape features such as cairns, quoits, fogous, Celtic crosses and stone circles. From this ancient pedigree, the world beyond life has connected to many folklore traditions, legends and customs. Certain vocational identities have come to bind mortality to the dangerous Cornish industries of the past and indeed a form of symbolic death has also manifested itself, both through an extensive diaspora brought about by the disappearance of local people as well as by a fear of the dilution of identity from external forces like immigration and tourism. Hence, the enduring aspects of Cornishness are partially construed and perpetuated by a constant relating back to dying-out ways of life – whereby the very prominence of death itself becomes a significant motif for identification and group solidarity. In this sense, the portrayal of death in Cornwall may be seen as the key point from which many different levels of social life can be understood. It is just as much a part of this world as it is of the ‘otherworld’. In this way, the Cornish environment fundamentally proclaims that it is itself an artefact linked to the realm of the dead through prehistoric structures,


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FIGURE 3

Reviving through dying: Cornish epitaph, Truro cemetery, July 1999.


folklore, industrial vestiges, migration and various mortuary elements of material culture. Consequently, the notions of death and resurgence are, in toto, ambivalent metaphors about the decline and reaffirmation of social identities that constitute and are constituted by the material landscape. Indeed, the local saying that ‘wherever you find a hole in the ground,

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you’ll find a Cornishman at the bottom of it’ finds new material meaning when bound to the notion that the Cornish landscape is a large scale tomb, a convivial resting place, a hole in which the complex and multi-vocal Cornish identity is buried and which this article has begun to exhume. Acknowledgements For their comments on earlier drafts of this article, I’d like to thank Barbara Bender, Phil Crang, Tim Ingold, Jean Sébastien Marcoux, Chris Pinney, Mike Rowlands, Chris Tilley and two anonymous referees. I am also grateful to the Québec Ministry of Education for post-graduate research funding as well as to the University of London Central Research Fund for financial support in the latter stages of my fieldwork. References Balchin, W.G.V. (1983) The Cornish Landscape. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Berry, Claude (1963) Portrait of Cornwall. London: Robert Hale. Bloch, Maurice and Parry, Jonathan, eds (1982) Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borlase, William (1769) Antiquities and Monuments of the County of Cornwall. Borlase, William Copeland (1893) The Age of the Saints: a Monograph on Early Christianity in Cornwall, with the Legends of the Cornish Saints. Truro: Pollard. Bradley, Richard (1984) The Social Foundations of Prehistoric Britain: Themes and Variations in the Archaeology of Power. London: Longman. Burl, H.A.W. (1976) Stone Circles of the British Isles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cockerham, P. (2000) ‘On my Grave a Marble Stone: Early Modern Cornish Memorialization’, Cornish Studies 8: 9–39. Gell, Alfred (1998) Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Giddens, Anthony (1985) ‘Time, Space and Regionalisation’, in David Gregory and John Urry (eds) Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan. Hall, Reg and Plunkett, Mervyn (1959) ‘May Day – Padstow’, Ethnic 1(3): 4–23. Hamilton Jenkin, Alfred K. (1934) The Story of Cornwall. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons. Herzfeld, Michael (1996) ‘In defiance of Destiny: the Management of Time and Gender at a Cretan Funeral’, in Michael Jackson (ed.) Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Humphreys, Sally C. (1981) ‘Death and Time’, in Sally C. Humphreys and Helen King (eds) Mortality and Immortality: the Anthropology and Archaeology of Death. London: Academic Press. Ingold, Tim (1993) ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology 25(2): 152–74. Johnson, Nicholas and Rose, Peter (1990) Cornwall’s Archaeological Heritage. Truro: Twelveheads Press. Kent, Alan (1997) ‘The Cornish Alps: Resisting Romance in the Clay Country’, in E. Westland (ed.) Cornwall: the Cultural Construction of Place. Penzance: The Pattern Press.


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Kramer, Kenneth (1988) Sacred Art of Dying: How World Religions Understand Death. New York: Paulist Press. Laviolette, Patrick (1999) ‘An Iconography of Landscape Images in Cornish Art and Prose’, Cornish Studies 7: 107–29. Laviolette, Patrick (2002) ‘Cornish Landscape Metaphor: Directionality as Cultural Catalyst’, conference paper presented in the workshop The Uses of Language: Ideologies, Politics, Policies at the EASA conference, Copenhagen University, August 2002. Laviolette, Patrick and McIntosh, Alastair (1997) ‘Fairy Hills: Merging Heritage and Conservation’, Ecos: A Review of Conservation 18(3/4): 2–8. McGreevy, Patrick (1992) ‘Reading the Text of Niagara Falls: the Metaphor of Death’, in Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (eds) Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London: Routledge. Morris, Mandy S. (1997) ‘Gardens “for ever England”: Landscape, Identity and the First World War British Cemeteries on the Western Front’, Ecumene: A Journal of Environment, Culture, Meaning 4(4): 410–34. Payton, Philip (1993) ‘“A . . . Concealed Envy Against the English”: a Note on the Aftermath of the 1497 Rebellions in Cornwall’, Cornish Studies 1: 4–13. Pool, P.A.S. (1975) The Death of Cornish. Penzance: Wordens. Rawe, Donald R. (1971) Padstow’s Obby Oss and May Day Festivities: a Study in Folklore and Tradition. Padstow: Lodenek Press. Robb, John G. (1998) ‘The “Ritual Landscape” Concept in Archaeology: a Heritage Construction’, Landscape Research 23(2): 159–74. Rowlands, Michael (1993) ‘The Role of Memory in the Transmission of Culture’, World Archaeology 25(2): 141–51. Seale, Clive (1998) Constructing Death: the Sociology of Dying and Bereavement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Charles (1985) Exploration of a Drowned Landscape. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd. Thomas, Julian (1991) Rethinking the Neolithic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilley, Christopher (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, Monuments. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Tilley, Christopher (1996) An Ethnography of the Neolithic: Early Prehistoric Societies in Southern Scandinavia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilley, Christopher (1999) Metaphor and Material Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Williams, Douglas (1987) Festivals of Cornwall. Bodmin: Bossiney Books. ◆ PAT R I C K L AV I O L E T T E is working as a teaching and research associate in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His PhD dissertation, entitled Meaning Towards Metaphor: Creating and Contesting Identity Through Cornish Landscape Icons, explores various cultural perceptions of Cornwall’s landscapes. In addition to the anthropological and geographical study of British identities, other research interests include the ways in which alternative forms of art, housing, sport and transport relate to the material conditions of social movements and cultural awareness of place. Address: Department of Anthropology, University College London, WC1E 6BT, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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