The Cornish have another eloquent champion in Sir John Betjeman, Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984. Originally from London, Betjeman spent the summers of his childhood on the north coast and later moved there permanently, though he always considered himself something of a foreigner in Cornwall, maintaining that it wasn’t truly part of England. The poet’s favourite walk took him along the stretch of clifftop — “this turfy mile” — between Trebetherick and the average and intensely crowded beachbreak of Polzeath, via the church where he is now buried. In Betjeman’s prelapsarian Cornwall the beginner hordes were yet to descend, enabling him to write, in ‘Delectable Duchy’, of “The golden and unpeopled bays, / The shadowy cliffs and sheep-worn ways; / The white unpopulated surf, / The thyme-and-mushroom scented turf.”

Naturally, Betjeman was familiar with Brown Willy (see: Nomenclature), and even granted it a mention in one of his poems, titled — not inappropriately — ‘Summoned by Bells’:

Here, in his deafness and his loneliness,
My father’s sad grey eyes in gathering dusk
Saw Roughtor and Brown Willy hide the view
Of that bold coast-line where he was not born

Coleridge, originally from the Devon town of Ottery St Mary, explained in the preface to the poem that he had been returning to his Somerset lodgings when he stopped to rest for the night at a farm house. A dose of opium prescribed to treat “a slight indisposition” — he later developed a serious addiction to the drug — caused the poet to fall into a profound sleep lasting about three hours, during which he “could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines”. On waking he retained the lines complete in his memory, and had hurriedly transcribed perhaps a third of them when he was interrupted by some pillock on business from the neighbouring town of Porlock. By the time he returned to his room over an hour later, the remainder of the poem had mostly vanished from his mind.

Wordsworth also spent time in Lynmouth, often joining Coleridge on his walks through the region’s hills, but it was Percy Bysshe Shelley, following in their footsteps some 15 years later, who developed the deepest attachment to the place. He honeymooned in Lynmouth in 1812 after eloping with 16-year old Harriet Westbrook, and it was there that he wrote much of his long poem ‘Queen Mab’, as well as the radical pamphlet ‘Declaration of Rights’.

It was summer at the time so it’s unlikely he ever saw the point firing, but that’s not to say Shelley didn’t get wet. He set about distributing his insurrectionary propaganda sealed inside corked bottles or borne by toy ships, which he let out to sea from Lynmouth’s rocky shore. (They weren’t called the Romantics for nothing.) Several of these vessels were intercepted by revenue cutters, one even turning up on the other side of the Bristol Channel, and the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth was duly informed. The reporting naval officer, possibly overestimating the danger, warned that “this novel mode of disseminating their pernicious opinions [could reach] many hundreds . . . and do incalculable damage.” It’s a nice thought. The prospect had seemed both real and intolerable, however, to certain Lynmouth residents, who went out in boats — real ones — specially to retrieve Shelley’s messages.

The newlyweds found the village enchanting and spent the entire summer there, but their stay came to an end when Shelley’s servant was arrested in Barnstaple for circulating his master’s works, and sentenced to six months in jail. Under observation and fearing for his own freedom, Shelley journeyed west to Ilfracombe, and from there boarded a boat across the Bristol Channel to Wales.

HONOURS: DEVON

 

The Verdict

That makes the whole thing a draw, by my count — a winning draw for Devon, seeing as Norfolk took out the pasty category and they weren’t really playing. Chalk it up as a Devon moral victory. Soz Cornwall.

Oh sure, it’s been pointless, this little exercise, but no more pointless than arguing over the precise number of degrees in Albee Layer’s latest air, and so much more edifying. Think of all we’ve learnt. Think of all the girls and boys that will melt at your feet when you explain to them the mechanics of the Brown Willy Effect.

 

READ PART I HERE
READ PART II HERE