When my wife Louise and I first arrived for a week’s stay this past September in a rented cottage in St. Breward, in Cornwall, on the edge of Bodmin Moor and not far from Tintagel on the north Cornish coast, I thought we had come to a place as lifeless as Lison in Normandy, where we had stayed in a gite a decade earlier, near the French coast a short distance from Omaha and Utah beaches, on which American troops had landed on D-Day. Both villages seemed devoid of inhabitants, and upon arrival in Lison, we could not even find the gite we had booked through Brittany Ferries. Despite its location on the rail link from Caen to Paris, the dilapidated Lison station was deserted, and no-one we met in a local estaminet knew where our cottage was until we said it was opposite the church, and a taxi driver from Cherbourg drove us there. We subsequently discovered once we had moved in that there was no village shop, and the church itself had long been inactive, Lison’s population having declined gradually from 1600 in 1860 to the present enclave of a mere 500 souls. Many houses we passed were empty, and some derelict. A farm had an A Vendre sign on its property. It had the defeated look of a place in sad decline, which is why we were startled to hear church bells, which regularly marked the passing of each hour, toll frenetically at 7pm and then again at 7am 105 times at each interval, until we realized no-one had turned the recording off, for there was no priest, and no congregation ever appeared, although the bells tolled like this daily– for a week! Perhaps no-one complained because no-one was there to complain, and there was no-one to complain to. In fact, the place most alive in Lison was the churchyard, where relatives came faithfully, presumably from some distance, to lay flowers on the graves of loved ones slumbering there.
Fortunately, I was wrong about St. Breward’s apparent lifelessness. It was very private, not very dead. Named after a Celtic saint, with a population of 700, its Christianity is very much alive. We went to the parish church, built in the Norman period following Duke William of Normandy’s successful invasion of England in 1066, for the Harvest Thanksgiving service, to discover a church full of families singing rousing hymns, with a popular priest in charge. His first predecessor is listed as having been the incumbent in 1189. A little boy in a pew in front of us proudly told us his grandfather was churchwarden there, and was astounded we had come from so far away as Canada. It is true that St. Breward is not easy to reach and thus, like Lison, not on a foreign tourist’s itinerary, being approached from all sides by narrow roads that either climb through dense forest up to the moor it sits upon, or meander away from the main coast road, and across the open moor itself, past wandering clumps of grazing sheep oblivious to traffic, with drivers taking care to negotiate projecting outcrops of rock at blind corners. The visitor soon discovers the village has a lively pub and a thriving local shop and post office. Houses and gardens are well-maintained, and the prospering economy is largely sustained by farming. Large delivery trucks make frequent appearances, clearly accustomed to driving safely and carefully on roads that are at times merely paved cart tracks. Meeting an enormous tractor coming downhill towards us once meant I had to back up a considerable distance to turn into a farmyard, whose gate was conveniently left open, in order to let it lumber by.
A short distance from St. Breward, and below the moor via a winding narrow road to Wenford Bridge is the end of the Camel Trail, where Louise and I hired bicycles to take advantage of the bike path which follows the Camel River to its estuary at Padstow 17 miles away. This ‘cycleway’ was originally a railway, in use until 1967, to transport china clay from Padstow to the Wenford Clay Dries where it was dried before being further processed into porcelain. Today the Dries are a forlorn abandoned factory, its roofless walls open to rain and graffiti-inclined vandals, and its shell glimpsed from the cycleway itself. The railway track was replaced by the bike path quite easily, as the climb to the factory was never steep, and even septuagenarians like ourselves managed to cycle to Wadebridge, where the Camel River widens into its estuary on its way to the sea, and then pedal back again. We cycled 24 miles in total, although the return uphill was more arduous due to the slight incline, as rivers do not flow uphill. On the way, we passed a tea garden doing a roaring trade in cream teas, as well as a small part of the railway line still in operation, complete with its own station, and now maintained by enthusiasts. In Bodmin itself we saw the ludicrous eighteenth-century Bodmin Jail, bought and owned by a Russian oligarch, perhaps, one is tempted to suspect, for money-laundering purposes, and subsequently converted into a cringe-making “luxury hotel” complete with obsequious staff, grimly funereal corridors, and “fine food,” not bread and water. It was unclear if guests are locked in at night.
