Psychogeography Walk: Truro, March 2019

Second year students studying Creative Non-Fiction met with their lecturers Cathy Rentzenbrink and Rupert Loydell on Lemon Quay, Truro in March to undertake, and then map, a walk across the city.

Crossing to the back of Tesco, students were shown two rivers and then asked to follow the course of the River Allen upstream. En route students discovered the smallest police station ever, an island nature reserve, absent elephants in a mill pond, a set of disused viaduct piers, a ruined steam laundry fed by a complex system of leats (water channels or ditches to you) with gates and weirs, and a boggy muddy park with wooden bridges.

This last challenged the notion of the requested ‘sensible footwear’ mentioned on the health and safety form, but those who squished through the mud or clung to trees and branches to (almost) evade it were rewarded with a rope swing, a makeshift bridge and, well, more mud. A week later and most people had washed their clothes, cleaned their shoes and drawn their own personal maps of the walk, highlighting what they had noticed, whether obvious, obscure, imagined or projected. Somehow, one map even featured a doughnut shop…

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by Falwriting