A journey through Cornwall as it was in the golden age before the motor car transformed everything, Charles G. Harper leads readers along the wild southern coast and out to the luminous Isles of Scilly in prose that feels plucked from another century. Beginning at the Tamar, where the river runs like a silver thread between Devon and Cornwall, Harper walks ancient routes that locals still remembered as the only way to travel: on foot, by horse, along cliff paths that plunged toward crashing waves and the distant call of gulls. This is not a guidebook in any modern sense. It is an elegy for a landscape Harper sensed was already vanishing, a Cornwall of smuggling caves, tin-mining ruins, and fishing villages where the language itself still carried the lilt of old Cornwall. The Isles of Scilly receive their due: that archipelago of isles scattered like emeralds in the Atlantic, where shipwrecks and history lay tangled together. Harper writes with the peculiar tenderness of someone who knows he is documenting something precious and perishable.
