Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall

There is no other book quite like this, because there was no other man quite like Robert Stephen Hawker. Arriving at the remote parish of Morwenstow in 1834, this Plymouth-born vicar proceeded to transform himself into something wholly Cornish, dressing in a fisherman's blue jersey with a red cross woven into its side, wearing waders above the knee, and sporting a brimless hat atop his white hair. He wrote Arthurian poems so convincing they were accepted as genuine medieval ballads. He claimed the parish as his peerage. And he populated his corner of North Cornwall with ghosts, saints, and the footprints of former men. Footprints of Former Men is Hawker's prose meditation on this wild stretch of Atlantic coastline where he made his home for three decades. These are not conventional travel writings but something stranger: part memoir, part folklore collection, part impassioned argument that Cornwall belongs to a different world entirely, one where the Tintagel cliffs still echo with Arthur's hall and the old saints walked paths now lost to the modern age. Hawker mourns what is vanishing even as he records it, tracing the boundaries of a culture that the railway and the industrial age are rapidly erasing. The prose veers from tender local history to boisterous anecdote to genuine mystical reverie. For readers who crave English eccentricity at its most brilliant and unapologetic, for those who love a landscape thick with story, Hawker remains an indispensable companion.