A Book of the West. Volume 2, Cornwall: Being an Introduction to Devon and Cornwall

At the turn of the twentieth century, Cornwall still pulsed with an older magic. This volume captures a kingdom of saints and smugglers, of holy wells bubbling in forgotten valleys and Celtic crosses standing sentinel beside tin mines worked since antiquity. S. Baring-Gould was an indefatigable documenter of English particularity, and here he turns his considerable learning to the westernmost tip of Britain, producing something between a gazetteer and a love letter. The book moves through Cornwall town by town, from Launceston's Norman streets to the savage cliffs at the Land's End, but its true heart lies in the saints who brought Christianity to a stubbornly pagan people, in the well-worship that persisted beneath the surface of village life, in the smugglers who made the coast a law unto itself. Baring-Gould writes with an antiquarian's precision and a storyteller's instinct, slipping in the devil's musings on Cornish saints alongside careful accounts of mining traditions. For readers who want the real Cornwall, the one that existed before tourism and time remade it, this book is a time capsule. Part history, part folklore, part vanished England.