A Review - The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey

Text: The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey
By Tim Hannigan
London: Head of Zeus
374 pages
£27.99

Written by: Julia Webb-Harvey
PhD candidate, Exploring J M W Turner’s Cornwall
School of Communication

Edited by: Eoin Murray

Hannigan’s The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey opens with the sentence, ‘you are in a place that does not exist.’ That’s a bold opening, I thought to myself. I had assumed he was referring to the whole idea of Cornwall that visitors come with; this fantastical construct of ideas and fantasies projected onto it. It turns out, it’s an astute observation of an unchartered (unchartable) area of Cornwall. Hannigan explains about the spoils of clay country foiling the cartographers, so that even today, the sky tip is uncharted. Yet you can stand on it and see Cornwall stretching out around you. It is a perfect opening to this book. 

The jacket cover positions The Granite Kingdom as an examination of various elements (images, projections and tropes) and their intersection with the real Cornwall. Hannigan hasn’t set himself an easy task in writing this book, one that he acknowledges has been a long time coming. It is, he says, the place that mattered most. He’s no stranger to travel writing as a practitioner and as an academic and yet this reads as something deeply personal. Hannigan set himself the task of addressing not only the myths, legends and representation of Cornwall, but what it means to be Cornish. His work is not only a kind of travelogue, but a deep cultural enquiry. 

The Granite Kingdom follows the structure of Hannigan’s journey, on foot across Cornwall. The jacket cover describes it as east-west, but it is much more meandering as he walks towards his home in West Penwith - his own Granite Kingdom. It is on granite that he feels most at home and it has shaped his Cornwall. Hannigan’s Cornwall is formed by his childhood in West Penwith as he evocatively recalls. My husband’s (Cornish-born but lived most of his life in the Midlands) is formed of the fjord-like Carrick Roads, of mucking about on boats over countless summers spent at his granny’s in Mylor Bridge. Mine would be the outline, the hazards, tidal races, lighthouses, the safe harbours shown by the navigational charts, of cruising in a yacht before we moved here ten years ago – and now it’s the paths walked with the dog, often heading to the sea. It begged the question to this reader – what is Cornwall and can there even be a singular ‘real’ Cornwall? Hannigan picks his way through these ideas on his journey serving up anecdotes, histories, and provocations.

Hannigan’s book opens with him criss-crossing the Tamar in a bid to traverse Cornwall’s eastern boundary. Shortly after Hannigan’s book launched, Cornwall unveiled a defined path, The Tamara Coast to Coast Way, funded by The National Lottery. In years to come, walkers may read his account of bog-hoping, fence scrambling and idle trespass with amusement. Hannigan’s book will slot into the historiography of Cornwall and is part of the challenge for the Duchy - the challenge, and joyous intrigue of what Cornwall is, was, and will be.

Hannigan’s meandering route is deliberate. One that takes in the granite outcrops of the Cornubian Batholith, and in that respect, the name of the book is a misnomer. Cornwall really isn’t mostly granite but is mostly slate and shale – killas, the mining term for metamorphic rock, rather than the igneous granite. There is an intriguing parallel in the cultural shaping of Cornwall, both are rock and culture altered by things outside of it. Hannigan explores the global reach out of Cornwall, and its influences upon it in its industrial and maritime past; it becomes part of his argument for where Cornwall begins and ends.

The Granite Kingdom is a book that positions itself within other narratives about Cornwall. From early studies, such as Defoe, Wilkie Collins, through to Du Maurier and John Betjemen, Hannigan shows the reader the texts that have contributed to perceptions and inaccuracies about Cornwall. Hannigan also layers in his own stories, sometimes as ‘childhood memory’ inserts, which add to the tapestry he weaves as he moves towards the ambitions of the book; it is skilfully done, his threads well tied in. Hannigan is a gifted writer, he is generous, engaging, and entertaining. 

Like the compressed slate and shale, Hannigan layers folklore (like Jan Tregagle, King Arthur, or Ann Jeffries) and projected narratives (mostly from early travel writers) that have shaped the perception of Cornwall and the Cornish. Hannigan devotes a chapter to The Wrecker, drawing on the work of Cathryn Pearce’s brilliant Cornish Wrecking 1700-1860: Reality and Popular Myth. Perhaps the fault lines in the book are most visible when Hannigan strays into the territory of art and art history. There are no inaccuracies, but simplifications. Hannigan tries to compress the whole St Ives movement into a few pages, which makes it a little thin. Hannigan’s experience in St Ives clearly irritated him, and that exasperation perhaps shaped his own gaze. In art history terms, biography is a huge part of interpreting a painting, whether it is Stanhope-Forbes, Turner or Wallis. On the latter, had the artists not been in St Ives, then it is unlikely that Wallis would have picked up a brush. He didn’t paint for anything other than to occupy himself (at the age of 72) for the deep loss he felt for his wife, painting from memory from his small front room. With the artists came other writers and poets, including W. S. Graham who penned extraordinary tributes to both Wallis and Lanyon (whom Hannigan acknowledges as being Cornish born). We have a phenomenal cultural legacy borne out of and because of it – the past, but also those who came, stayed and made Cornwall their home. If Du Maurier can be accepted, why not the artists that came to St Ives?

At the book’s denouement, you can almost sense Hannigan squirming, as he turns to the thorny question of what it means to be Cornish. The insider – outsider construct can be a bruising one, and Hannigan takes time to examine it. There are no generations of Hannigans that lie in the Cornish ground. Conversely, there are for my husband who spent most of his life outside of Cornwall. Does that matter? Hannigan writes, ‘this shouldn’t matter, doesn’t matter, but if I’m writing about Cornwall and Cornishness, I have to mention it.’ It doesn’t matter, and yet, it is something that rubs constantly. It is acutely felt in high season when Cornwall is besieged by visitors seeking out the constructed version of Cornwall that they have – whether from cliched drama, documentary TV, or the pastel-covered books that Hannigan observes. 

Hannigan’s The Granite Kingdom is already one of my favourite books about Cornwall. It is an inland journey, both introspective and expansive. It wrestles with the complex issue of what it means to be Cornish, where Cornwall begins and ends, how it was seen and how it is now seen, and how it sees itself.  Ultimately, this is the book I want to put in someone’s hand and tell them to read it so that it can be talked about, mused over, and talked about some more. It is a gem of a book.