In my mandatory freshman Western Civilization course, we studied how the rugged and irregular geography of the Greek peninsula and islands formed not only the nature of government in classical times, but the character of the ancient Greek people themselves. Archeologists today might call this the primacy of "place."
In his Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place (2014), Philip Marsden concludes that much of British history, and especially pre-history, cannot be understood apart from the geographical surroundings in which it occurred. He argues, moreover, that since the Renaissance, we have increasingly lost our sense of "place," and have treated all spaces as equivalent, ignoring not only the geography, but the history peculiar to every locale.
Hence, the monotonous uniformity of our shopping malls and suburbs, functional spaces divorced from the very distinct geographical areas in which they have been created.
Philip Marsden grew up in Somerset, a county not far north of Cornwall. In the first chapter of Rising Ground, he tells of his boyhood adventures climbing about the Mendip hills, and exploring caves. One such cave, Aveline's Hole, was later found to have contained the oldest known human remains in Britain -- dating back to about 8400 B.C. There is evidence that the cave may have been used as a burial place -- for unknown mystical reasons related to its location -- thousands of years before that.
...far back in the ninth millennium BC, the site may have been used because it was already considered old. The astonishment we feel at people performing these rites so long ago might simply be a version of what they felt.
These early experiences led Marsden to thoughts about the importance of "place." As an adult, he and his wife remodeled a farmhouse on the shore of Ruan Creek, a tidal tributary of the upper River Fal, north of Falmouth. He discovered that the farmhouse lay on the medieval site of the estate of a wealthy Norman family. He uncovered a small piece of an ancient chapel, which suggested to him that "place" was determined not only by the physical landmarks that surrounded it, but also by the people who had lived and died on the same land, and had, in turn, been affected by the same landmarks.
Once his house's renovation was completed, Marsden decided to explore not only the near area, but Cornwall in general. He began with Bodmin Moor, near the border with Devon, and its many Neolithic monuments; he then visited Tintagel on the north Cornwall coast and Glastonbury (of King Arthur fame) in Somerset.
In a later section of the book, he describes in detail his exploration, by rather strenuous off-path hiking, of the entire area of Ruan Creek and the River Fal, ending finally at Falmouth. From Falmouth, he hiked westward to Porthleven -- a port on the opposite, western side of the Lizard peninsula. A year ago, I hiked eastward, from Porthleven to Falmouth, but on the well-traveled coastal hiking route, a route that took me out onto the Lizard-- the southernmost point in England. Marsden, as usual, took a more adventurous overland route.
In the mid-morning I lost the path. I doubled back, took a short cut and it ended the way it usually does -- crawling through a hedge, unpicking brambles from my hair. I tumbled out of the thicket and into an open field. I brushed myself down. An old Massey tractor on the far side was topping docks. In its cab sat an elderly man in clear-rimmed glasses.
As chance would have it -- for Marsden at least -- the old farmer was an Oxford graduate, a gentleman who had led classes in Cornish and was at the time reading a fifth volume of Byron's letters and journals. He had ended up a farmer because he had inherited the farm -- what choice did he have?
Each of Marsden's rambles, described in physical detail, is also an occasion not only for meeting local residents, but for discussing interesting people in Cornwall's history, people who give Cornwall its character -- its sense of "place" -- as much as do the peaks and tors and the Neolithic monuments.
I realize how little of Cornwall I saw in 2019, limited as I was to hiking the scenic coast from St. Ives to Falmouth. I didn't touch the great interior of the county at all. But Marsden describes areas more familiar to me in his book's third section, describing the Penwith peninsula, between Penzance and St. Ives, which extends to a point at Lands End.
The Penwith peninsula is to Cornwall what Cornwall is to the rest of England -- a loosely connected appendage stuffed with the residue of a thousand stories and mythical projections. Every rock, every hill and cliff has its tales, lore and sprites. The peninsula has a mood all its own.
Or, as he quotes Katherine Mansfield: "It's not really a nice place. It is so full of huge stones." And I felt I struggled over every one of those stones on my hike last year.
Rising Ground is a guide of sorts to selected areas of Cornwall -- from the haunted moorlands, to the banks of tidal rivers silted and passable only at high tides, to the well-touristed coast. It provides short biographies to Cornish writers and scholars. It gives a humorous account of Marsden's own struggles to renovate a derelict farmhouse, making it his family home. And it gives a picture of a writer who has an ability to meet and draw out stories from the many people he meets, but who also has a craving for solitary hiking, for camping alone on desolate moors, for sailing in barely navigable waters, for touching and caressing, in the chilly moonlight, standing stones erected by unknowable people who lived their lives out many millennia ago.
Always, he asks himself what thoughts passed through the minds of these ancient peoples as they lived out their lives, lives that were in some basic ways little different from our own? How were their lives affected by the same physical landmarks we see before us today? He wonders at the
...urge that drove our Neolithic ancestors to arrange the moorstone into circles at the Hurlers, to build the wall around the tor -- the same questions that tease us now: what law, what force, what patterns exist in the vastness of space? And always behind the questions, the doubt, the depth-sounder beam probing the emptiness for something solid, the fear that there might be none of these things at all.
Philip Marsden is an adventurer, a careful observer, a story teller. And an excellent writer.
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