Fifty years ago this summer, an ancient rusting Ford Cortina estate named Henrietta drove into the streets of Falmouth after a long journey from the Romney Marsh in the southeast corner of Kent. Aged nine and a half, I sat in the front seat beside my mother who was driving. My five year old brother and our little sister, not yet two, were in the back. Dad had already arrived at our new home with the removal men in the big furniture van. This was the big move that would define the rest of our lives, Dad returning to his Westcountry roots with his young family. He was far more interested in boats than cars and never bothered learning to drive, and while Mum was perfectly competent behind the wheel, she drove everywhere with a panic stricken expression on her face. So poor old Henrietta was left outside the front door, barely used and slowly disintegrating in the Cornish salt air until she was sold to an enthusiast for fifty pounds some years later. Little did I imagine then that I'd still be living here half a century on, a father and now a grandfather too, all of them born, raised and proudly rooted in Cornish soil.
I don't mind telling you that I didn't want to come here. Nor did Mum, who was born and brought up in the Midlands, as far away from the sea as you can be in these islands. I didn't want to leave my small town school and the friends I'd known for most of my life at the edge of the Marsh, the only place I knew and loved. But our Dad, who grew up in North Devon, was the breadwinner and he'd somehow persuaded Mum that we were moving to Cornwall. We didn't have a say. For a long time I maintained an uneasy truce with our new home. Ok, Godrevy was a done deal at first sight, but that was just one place on the opposite coast and I couldn’t get there under my own steam as a teenager. Growing up, Cornwall felt so remote from the rest of the world, and then in adulthood as a young parent it was a difficult place in which to manage on low wages and a relatively high cost of living. There was a reality to life here often overlooked by visitors that stared people like us right in the eyes. Surely we could have a better time of it somewhere else with more prospects than were on offer in our starved local economy? Even in my thirties and forties with the lean years behind I harboured plans to escape to one place or another. Dartmoor, The Lake District, Southern Europe, Australia all lingered in my thoughts at one time or another. I've never even been to Australia or anywhere near it for goodness sake. Even a year or two before retirement it was going to be Spain or Portugal, but the summers down there seem to be on an unstoppable rising heat curve these days.
It was only when I picked up a camera that I began to see Cornwall more clearly. Only as I pointed my new toy at the wild coast of this wind beaten peninsula did I begin to recognise the beauty of the place at last. It's a love that continues to grow as in retirement, we explore its hidden depths and come to know it ever more intimately. So many years of searching for something that was right under my feet all the time, if only I'd cared to reach out and embrace it. This passion we have for photographing the land and sea is a powerful thing. It takes us to places we think we know and invites us to see the hidden depths we’d never noticed before.
And now, fifty years after arriving, I’m still discovering new places. Take Bosigran Head, for example. I only knew it through some of my photography contacts, past and present. And until today, we’d been here just once, which was without the camera. Ever since that solitary visit, a little more than two years earlier, I’d been wanting to make a return, and now we were here, taking the rarely used third exit from the big roundabout at Penzance and heading along the quiet lanes towards Morvah near the coast. I planned to stop here for sunset, but was distracted by the heather on top of Carn Galver, a twenty minute uphill hike from here, and in retrospect that was a good thing. Because on the headland, a couple of hours before sunset, everything glowed softly in the washed out silence, broken only by the shrieks of seabirds and the clear voices of unseen climbers on the sheer granite surfaces of Bosigran Head and the heroically titled Commando Ridge. A couple of miles south lay Pendeen Lighthouse, almost invisible in the haze. If I’d stayed down here for sunset, this shot would probably never have made it off the cutting room floor, which would have been a terrible shame. It would also have been far too easy to dismiss the view as a winter shot when the sun will set comfortably within the frame - on the rare occasion it bothers to make an appearance of course.
What a place! What a county! We’ve long since made our peace thanks to this hobby that brings me to the coast time and again. Without it I’d probably still be blind to the delights of the home I was brought to as a reluctant young boy all those years ago. Landscape photography has brought many good things to my life, yet perhaps this newfound passion for my home county is the greatest gift of all.
