Excursions in the County of Cornwall

In 1824, Cornwall was still largely untouched by the railways that would transform English tourism within decades. Frederick Wilton Litchfield Stockdale's guide offers something rare: a portal into the county as it appeared to educated travelers nearly two centuries ago. This is not mere guidebook utility, though it functions admirably as such. Stockdale records the great houses of the gentry, the standing stones and ruins that hinted at deeper histories, the fishing villages where daily life continued in patterns centuries old. He captures a Cornwall on the cusp of change, still aristocratic in its orientation, still rich with the physical remnants of its Celtic, Saxon, and Norman past. The book organized excursions as a traveler might undertake them, moving from town to town with the slow deliberation of stagecoach and foot. What emerges is a Cornwall that exists now only in fragments and memory, preserved in these pages like a specimen under glass.