After we left St Agnes, Mum said our next stop would be the seaside resort of St Ives. That had me very confused, as I knew of two places called St Ives – and neither of them was in Cornwall or even near the sea.
One was a lovely park with woodland, an open moor and a wild flower meadow, just a few miles from where we live in Yorkshire. Covering an area of around 550 acres/220 hectares, it used to be a private estate, but now belongs to Bradford City Council and attracts around 300,000 visitors a year…
…and the other was a small town in Huntingdonshire where Oliver Cromwell – Lord Protector of England from 1648 to 1658 – lived for five years from 1631 to 1636 and which I’d passed through when going on the train to London…
But Mum explained that there was also a third St Ives in England and that was the one we were going to that day.
To get there, however, we first had to go round the town of Hayle on the estuary of the river which has the same name. In earlier times it had been a busy port and industrial centre, but as mining and metal-working had declined, it had gradually become a seaside resort with beautiful beaches.
And across the river from Hayle we went through the village of Lelant, which had also been an important port during in medieval times, before part of it was buried beneath shifting sands and the river began to silt up. Now it just has a small harbour which can accommodate little local boats, but -amazingly for its size – it also has two railway stations. (St-Uny-Lelant-Church)
But Mum said it was also famous as the birthplace of the novelist Rosamunde Pilcher who lived there in a house overlooking the estuary and the ocean from 1924 until 1946 when she married and moved to Dundee.
In 1949 her first novel was published under the pseudonym Jane Fraser and this was followed by nine more in the same name. Then in 1955 she started writing as Rosamunde Pilcher, which was her married name. However, it was only with her 14th novel – The Shell Seekers which was published in 1987 and sold around 10 million copies in 40 different languages – that she achieved international fame.
She was especially popular in Germany, where her novels and short stories – which were all set in Cornwall – were dramatised for television and filmed on location in places not far from Lelant, including Lamorna Cove…
…Bedruthan Steps…
…Lanhydrock House…
…and Pencarrow House
A combination of the books and the television dramas encouraged people to come to the area around St Ives to see the settings for themselves and, because of this, Rosamunde Pilcher was given a British Tourism Award the year after me, Mum and Granny Betty visited Cornwall.
Another famous author who used this part of Cornwall as a background for her novels was Virginia Woolf.
She was born in London in 1882, but, together with her parents and siblings, she spent three months of every summer in the 1880s and 1890s at Talland House in St Ives…
…and this would be the inspiration for her novel To The Lighthouse, first published in 1927.
By the time Mum had told us all this, we were nearly in St Ives which Mum said had taken its name from the Irish Saint Ia. Legend says that she sailed across from Ireland on a leaf…
…and landed at what is now St Ives where she built an oratory from which she could preach and pray. This later became the site of the parish church.
St Ives itself was originally a fishing village, built around a harbour…
But after the railway arrived in 1877 tourists began to visit to see its beautiful beaches and crystal-clear sea-water and soon tourism became its main industry.
It also attracted many artists, photographers and sculptors, of whom perhaps the best known is Barbara Hepworth. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1903, she went to art college in Leeds, before moving to London, but at the outbreak of World War II in 1939 she and her family – along with several more artists – moved to live and work in St Ives where she would stay until her death in 1975.
Mum said that, apart from the village itself, it was the quality of the light there that attracted so many creative people – but I had to take her word for that as a great downpour of rain arrived there as exactly the same time as we did and it was very gloomy indeed.
In fact, it rained so hard that we didn’t even stop the car, but just drove around a couple of times, seeing as much as we could through the steamed up windows…
And with that I’ll have to leave you for today, as Mum’s really busy getting ready for Christmas and she wants me to help make some lunch. So, please take care and stay safe – and look out for some more tales from me soon!
Follow my next blog: 293. WISHING YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS
21/12/2023
Wilf the bear-faced blogger 