Cornwall's Maritime Churches
Tintagel and the picturesque ideal: exploring identity and the rise of domestic tourism
Soon to complete a Master’s Degree in eighteenth-century British and French Decorative Arts, Victoria Jenner has been spending the last two years specialising in nineteenth-century collections with the National Trust. During this time, she has worked as a digital content editor for Waddesdon Manor, a Rothschild House and Garden in Buckinghamshire, disseminating her interest in historic French interiors and revival architecture via digital mediums. Victoria’s mentorship role within the Cornwall’s Maritime Churches project, brings together her passion for digital engagement as well as her interest in the nineteenth century as a period of social change that dramatically impacted the architecture, design and identities of churches across Cornwall. Her article here micro-analyses how a well-known tourist destination in Cornwall can be understood as a product of travel literature during the rising popularity of the Picturesque movement. She uses this study to gain further insight into the ‘travelling’ mentality that not only exploited Tintagel’s maritime identity, but usurped it as part of the ‘British Grand Tour’. This article is part of Victoria’s portfolio as an emerging scholar, who aims to expand her analyses of Cornish maritime churches from both an art and social history perspective.
Whilst it is undeniable that Cornwall has experienced some of the highest levels of in-migration across Britain since the 1960s, this article seeks to demonstrate how the ‘picturesque’ phenomenon besieged the identities of Celtic maritime communities from as early as its emergence in the eighteenth century. [1]
It is widely considered that mass tourism took hold most intensely across the maritime communities situated across the Celtic peripheries (Cornwall, Scotland, Wales and Ireland) in the 1960s. [2] Neatly packaged holidays by the sea had become an expected and integral social ritual for the everyday, working-class person and considered by renowned author Daphne Du Maurier, to have reached an agonising peak by the time she had published her critical work Vanishing Cornwall in 1967. Du Maurier created the first shift of Cornish landscape criticism, considering 1960s Cornish identity as purely commercial and sensationalistic. Du Maurier’s ‘eloquent elegy’ mourns a past where Cornwall operated from secluded inlets and quant fishing villages, and chides the deteriorated ‘ruinous’ state that it had succumbed to beneath the hegemony of mass tourism.[3] Yet which time period does Du Maurier’s image of a ‘perfect’ Cornwall return to? We must here remind ourselves that despite Du Maurier being an early member of Mebyon Kernow, she was born and raised in Hampstead in London. When she nostalgically reminisced of Cornwall’s ‘vanished’ past, Du Maurier was evoking her own personal and idyllic version of the Cornish landscape and it’s heritage. This article will demonstrate how Du Maurier’s perception is problematic and corrupted by the picturesque phenomena that dominated how British landscapes were interpreted from the mid-eighteenth century.
What is also significant about Du Maurier’s work, is the belief that she reiterates a common feeling from this decade, in which commodification of the Cornish landscape and its heritage was simply a sad and unwanted capitalist device. [4] Both these nuances are what I aim to question, and especially the assumption that members of the local community have always resisted the ‘idealised’ make-overs of their sea-side villages and towns. As we shall see with this case study of Tintagel, a small slate mining and maritime community ‘turned seaside retreat’ by the late nineteenth century – many facilitators of this transition were indeed business owners or mining-related investors. However, a small quantity of local individuals also encouraged tourists to visit the town, with the request they paid attention to the local community. This emerges explicitly from as early as the 1870s, and from 1897 excels with such fervour until Tintagel’s local stores not only double in number, but are renamed to associate King Arthur in some form. [5] Evidence thus suggests the local inhabitants of Tintagel have not always well-received the Arthurian narratives that pervaded the castle ruins sitting on their coastline, but have welcomed travellers and the fashion for seaside tourism. By 1898, Delabole Slate Quarry had cut back on employing local labour, alerting the community to a monopoly of inevitable changes that were required to make Tintagel a fully-fledged holiday venue.
Tintagel’s local church vicar of St Materiana’s from 1950 to 1976, A.C. Canner, looks back to how Trevena presented a ‘very different appearance from what it does today’ in the early 1890s. [6] Canner describes a multitude of building conversions taking place post 1890, including the Methodist chapel into a bakery, then shop which sat next to a ‘string of picturesque old cottages’ of which some still interestingly survive. [7] Trevena House, he goes onto say, was converted from the holiday home of Sir Arthur and Lady Hayter into a partition for King Arthur’s Halls thirty years later. A series of hotels were also created from high-street buildings, as were all types of shops and boarding houses. But what specifically do we attribute Tintagel’s facial renovation to, and most importantly, to whom? To answer, this article examines the emergence of travel literature and ‘merchandise’ inspired by Tintagel, drawing on the impact of periodicals, newspaper articles, poetry, travel guides and postcards. In turn, it devotes this close analysis of travel literature to the wider context of the picturesque movement and then how it was politically and economically rendered to ‘shape’ tourism in Britain during the Napoleonic wars, a hundred years earlier. [8]
The Picturesque – from Tivoli to Tintagel
The Picturesque aesthetic was propelled to the height of fashion throughout the eighteenth century, as Grand tourists returned from their Italian adventures with the seventeenth-century landscape paintings of Claude Lorraine, Nicholas Poussin or Salvator Rosa. Their landscapes revealed ‘edited out’ imperfections of the natural world, instead replaced with idyllic scenes, perfectly applying tonality, composition and balance to demonstrate an unwittingly tamed wilderness. These scenes included, most often, ruinous historic structures that would evoke a ‘return to antiquity’, as a means of demonstrating the ancient character of the landscape. For the British aristocracy, the opportunity to display explicit evidence of their worldly travels in their grand picture galleries at home, was made even more attractive when they could simultaneously emphasise their own family’s antiquity. Quite naturally, these artworks confined to picture galleries made their way outside and into the extensive gardens of the wealthy. [9]
The notion of recreating Italianate landscapes both in landscape architecture, developed from the experimentations of British artists, those at home and those studying abroad. Individuals began to portray places across Britain that would suitably fit into the picturesque mould, promulgating their enthusiasm for natural scenery in poetry, paintings and novels that would soon feed the designs of notable landscape architects. As James Thomson’s poem The Seasons rose to nationwide success, Welsh painter Richard Wilson’s widely published mezzotint ‘View of Maecenas’ Villa in Tivoli’ was the catalyst to the waterfalls, ruins and temple pavilions populating the country gardens of the wealthy. Sir William Chambers, William Kent and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown are three key landscape architects who facilitated these designs. [10]
For those who could not afford the luxury of visiting these perfectly composed estates, there was the option to visit the wildernesses of Britain. From the late 1760s, the essays and guides of Reverend William Gilpin served as a great advocator of many British picturesque landscapes that had until now, been deemed disagreeably ugly. From the Lake District, the Welsh mountains to the Cornish coast, they all possessed certain characteristics to be admired and likened to the picturesque ideals debated about by enlightenment theorists. Travel literature and associated merchandise swept the nation, urging a domestic Grand Tour. From guides to purchasing your very own ‘Claude Glass’, the act of travelling to Cornwall became a seriously intellectual and patriotic business. Since the 1707 Act of Union brought Scotland to England, Wales and Cornwall, the idea of ‘Great Britain’ was indeed becoming popularised in the national consciousness. [11] What’s more, this new vogue for domestic tourism no longer confined the activity to simply the elite, encouraging the middling sorts to also spend domestically, providing an income for the more secluded rural communities. [12] The patriotic sentiment surrounding domestic tourism grew to its zenith by the end of the eighteenth century, where war with France had prevented members of the aristocracy in fulfilling their Grand Tour of Europe. Certain landmarks of Britain were hence promoted as equally, if not more enticing as those abroad. Although Herculaneum, Pompeii, Florence and Rome could offer insights into Graceo-Roman civilisation, the northern lakes of Britain to the dramatic coastline of Cornwall could offer exciting histories of the ancient Britons.
Tintagel became part of this broader arena of ‘travel performance’ that urged British travellers to explore their heroic indigenous past.[13] Their earliest form of picturesque travel literature originated with The Complete English Traveller, or A New Survey of England and Wales Containing a Full Account of Whatever is Curious and Entertaining in 1771. [14] An abundance of ‘informative’, scripted travel literature followed, with Dugdale’s weekly periodicals The New British Traveller in the 1780s. By 1799, Thomas Gray’s Travelling Companion directed visitors to Tintagel’s nearby ‘Nathan’s Cave near Bossiney’ to experience the ‘inspiration of visceral natural beauty’. [15] By the turn of the century Tintagel was not only a legendary landmark, but offered artists and writers alike a quaint community and an idyllic setting to further exploit. St Materiana’s church was described as possessing ‘an ancient dovecot in the Vicarage garden’ in Picturesque Excursions and later on, described as having to sell its bells to a London buyer who considered them the same as those that had ‘tolled for King Arthur’.[16] J.M.W. Turner also published a ‘highly fanciful engraving of the castle’ in 1819, and six years later is referenced in Thomas Hogg’s The fabulous history of the ancient Kingdom of Cornwall. [17] The ruins of the ‘Dark Age’ castle were no longer acquainted with ‘Earl Richard’ but instead the magical King Arthur and suitably fit the Claude Lorraine-style landscapes so beautifully populating the route for the British Grand Tour. Indeed it was during Lord Alfred Tennyson’s own Grand Tour visitation almost twenty years later that led to his famous works Morte D’Arthur and then Idylls of the King in 1859. Tennyson was tapping into the images conjured by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, written circa 1135 to 38. [18] All of a sudden Tintagel was advertised as an ‘ancient attraction’ in Cornish, Scottish, Welsh and London newspapers.
Tintagel also fit the sublime characteristics endorsed by Gilpin and Edmund Burke. From the violent waves crashing against Merlin’s cave beneath the castle’s ruins to the black smog rising from Delabole’s slate mine – the scene resembles Gilpin’s description in His Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales (1782):
‘Many of the furnaces on the banks of the river consume charcoal which is manufactured on the spot, and the smoke (which is frequently seen issuing from the sides of the hills, and spreading its thin veil over a part of them) beautifully breaks their lines, and unites them with the sky.’ [19]
Where the first half of the nineteenth century saw huge wealth derive from copper and tin mining, the second half reaped the benefits in a building boom that catapulted Cornwall to the height of ‘gothic picturesque’ fashion. [20] From Horace Walpole’s Gothic Strawberry Hill House in the 1750s, the Gothic style had risen to popularity nationally by the late-1800s, aided by the promotions of A.W.N. Pugin declaring it ‘as especially British and Christian’. [21] This is introduced into the Cornish architectural vocabulary (on a grand scale) by John Loughborough Pearson, who in 1880 built Truro Cathedral, famous for its gothic vaulting.[22] George Edward Street, William White, Silvanus Trevail and the Sedding family (John Dando Sedding, Edmund Sedding, Edmund Harold Sedding) followed Pearson’s ‘crowning glory’ and became the key Cornish protagonists of the gothic revival style. They thenceforth contributed to the ‘explosion’ of 900 Methodist chapels built in 1900 and the replacement of pre-1850 styled-chapels – all under the ‘picturesque gothic’ model. [23] The Anglican Church responded with an energetic vigour, replacing its churches with modern Arts and Crafts gothic features. For example at Ladock, a beautiful display of Morris & Co. glass showcases Street’s innovative collaboration with William Morris and the emergence of Arts and Crafts Gothic being applied to Cornwall’s Anglican architecture. The Sedding brothers similarly endorsed this particular strand of revival gothic, applying it to 63 new and restored churches. The gothic aesthetic was evidently developing its own myriad of strands. [24]
These architects were all instrumental in the reinvention of Cornwall as a modern picturesque holiday retreat. As both John Musson and Peter N. Lindfield suggest, the breadth of the nineteenth century saw medieval-inspired gothic revival interiors being applied to new houses or newly refurbished rooms as a means of modernising a space. [25] We see a similar treatment with Silvanus Trevail’s ‘King Arthur’s Camelot Hotel’, built between 1898 and 1899 in the medieval gothic revival style. As the hotel’s symmetrical castellated towers ‘rise into the skyline’ from the clifftop, adjacent to castle ruins and overlooking Merlin’s cave, it seems that Trevail was harking back to illustrations and ideas of Sir Richard Payne Knight and Sir Uvedale Price, almost a hundred years earlier. Both gentlemen architects come collector appealed for a new type of ‘painter-architect’, who would approach the composition of a building much like a landscape painter. [26] Both believed in ‘accommodating’ the building to its surroundings, like those depicted in the works of Claude, Poussin or Rosa. Knight studied his own collection of 273 Claude drawings, drawn to how gothic structures appeared so naturally yet dramatically amongst the scenery and Price stated in his 1794 essay:
‘In Gothic buildings, the outline of the summit presents such a variety of forms, of turrets and pinnacles, some upon, some fretted and variously enriched, that even where there is an exact correspondence of parts, it is often disguised by an appearance of splendid confusion and irregularity.’ [27]
Trevail’s hotel appears to recreate the same amount of drama described by Price, and dominates the horizon by manipulating the fall of natural light upon its castellated exterior. [28] We can assume that Trevail is drawing on well-known visual gothic tropes to endorse his hotel as in the ‘modern taste’, but also as an exciting, theatrical experience. The hotel was funded by Sir Robert Harvey, an interesting character who had risen to wealth via saltpetre production in Bolivia, Peru and Chile. By 1883, Harvey had returned to Truro, his town of birth, and became a prominent landowner in Cornwall and Devon, funding various financial schemes that encouraged travel to the south west. Evidently Harvey saw a financial opportunity when it came to building a neo-gothic Castle-Hotel upon the adjacent cliffs of the site most recently declared as King Arthur’s birthplace, by famous poet Lord Alfred Tennyson in his republished Idylls of the King four years prior. Increasingly more travellers flocked to the famous site described by Tennyson, whose republished poem had responded to such a national demand to consume mythical, British ‘history’ that it sold 10,000 copies simply within its first week. [29]
Visitors now desired to climb the ruinous castle and peer down upon where the legendary figure was supposedly discovered by Merlin, Tennyson’s book in hand:
‘But after tempest, when the long wave broke/
All down the thundering shores of Bude and Bos/
There came a day as still as heaven, and then/
They found a naked child upon the sans/
Of dark Dundagil by the Cornish sea
And that was Arthur…’ [30]
So why not immerse themselves in the full experience, and spend a night at King Arthur’s Camelot Hotel? The theatrical experience didn’t stop there. Sea water cures were advertised by The Royal Cornwall Gazette and many more local newspapers in December 1898, offering the hotel’s customers ‘hot and cold sea-water baths from Merlin’s Cave with electric motors’ on Tintagel’s beach. [31]
Exciting ‘gimmicks’ such as these were all the result of concerned business owners, who required a ‘boom’ in business. We know they were the key agents behind ‘The Cornish Magazine’, a periodical published between 1898 and 1899 which discussed how to respond to the rapid decline in the Cornish economy. [32] Joannie Willett suggests this periodical reflected the divide between the wants of society leaders and their workers, evident through descriptions of how they perceived the landscape as ‘clean’ – untainted by several centuries of intense mining activity that could be repurposed for the ‘invalid’ or the ‘physic’ visitor.[33] They indeed wanted to tap into an ongoing fascination with the healing properties of sea water that had grabbed the British aristocracy since Dr Richard Russell’s declarations in the Georgian period from 1750. [34] Brilliant case studies such as Brighton had offered a success story, attracting hordes of the wealthy elite to bathe in the cold sea water and at the same time, inject the maritime town with a new burst of cash. However when this was attempted in Tintagel, some anti-tourist sentiment had already developed amongst the local townspeople, and even the tourists themselves.
Anti-tourist sentiment?
As the influx of travellers began in the 1850s, a local voice complains in various local newspapers that a flag has been erected on the keep to guide the travellers’ way. The individual describes the tourists as ‘the pomp’ who ‘detachedly wander and watch’ the ruins without engaging with their historical value, nor the village of Trevena. [35] Some years later, a letter of complaint from a ‘tired and angry traveller’ is circulated again across multiple local newspapers. In the letter, the traveller suggests Trevena lacked the infrastructure to look after their new guests. The stores along the high street were apparently deficient in the usual requirements and the local community were far from welcoming – prohibiting his access into the ruins due to their new safeguarding rules. Interestingly, a responding letter written from ‘The Constable of Tintagel’s Castle’, conveys his mortification that the traveller did not ask anyone in Trevena for the key. This amusing account does indeed highlight how Tintagel’s village of Trevena was not yet ready for a high influx of ruin-hungry travellers by the time Tennyson was publishing his first round of Arthurian-centred poetry.
However by the 1870s, the selling of Tintagel merchandise suggests a positive growth in visitors. Francis Frith started selling postcards with photographs of the derelict ruins grazed upon by sheep – the perfect desolate place for a summer adventure. In response, a local Trevena woman named Catherine Johns started to sell her own illustrated postcards, yet showing the Old Post Office as the heart of the community and a symbol which should be saved from neglect. Johns’ raised the funds to repair the old building, circulating a competing image to Frith’s postcards. Instead of ruins, Johns’ presented local children playing in front of the Old Post Office amongst many other scenes capturing everyday community life. Needless to say, Johns was playing Frith at his own game and presenting an alternate picturesque scene that would have been much approved by Humphrey Repton – the rustic, country cottage. Whether Johns was attempting to encourage tourism and attract more people into the village itself, is not clear. Perhaps she was simply taking advantage of the passing trade in order to save a prestigious building. Either way, Johns’ shows how it was not strictly the business owners of the town who were fuelling a new age of travelling merchandise.
Tintagel’s community identity today
Just as Johns had once elevated her voice against Frith’s commercial agenda, a memory event in early 2017 provided individuals living in the Tintagel community to raise their concerns and discuss their local history. It was particularly interesting to question whether the local people bore any resentment towards the emergence of the ubiquitous ‘Cornish Riviera’ image, in which the Duchy had been repeatedly represented as offering wide seascapes, golden beaches and a compelling legendary history. [36] Yet during this session, it became apparent many local residents were the result of the tourist narrative. They had, like many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers, been captured by the travel art and literature selling the picturesque beauty of the town. In all their transcripts, it was clear that their enthusiasm for the natural world was at the centre, and had been an encouraging factor when they had decided to retire to the town, transplanting themselves from neighbouring areas or a different part of the United Kingdom altogether. Likewise, those representing English Heritage were intent on raising awareness of the fishing and mining history that had once been the predominant income for those living in Trevena. They were keen to discuss how University research alongside experts, had contributed to the signs and digital interpretation that three-dimensionally retold the emergence of the Castle. Although understanding why some may feel bitterly towards a displacement of their local industrial heritage, conclusions from this memory event suggested that without English Heritage, the National Trust and the enduring Arthurian image that still prevails the town today, these other local histories may be lost to the wider world. Likewise, incredible stories that tell of shipwrecks, trading and the movement of peoples in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, can be told simply by venturing into the interior of St Materiana’s church, or walking around its graveyard. So without the mass-flocking of tourists in their coach-loads, these nuanced local histories, artefacts and local buildings may not have received the attention nor the financial support to survive.
Tintagel – a microcosm to the bigger picture?
This article has sought to demonstrate how Tintagel could serve as an accurate example to what was happening in the wider context of Cornwall, during the rise of domestic tourism and its intrinsic link to the Picturesque aesthetic. Business owners and tourist agencies in the 1960s were not only jumpstarting a nineteenth-century strategy to transform Cornwall into a holiday venue, but continue its popularity as a picturesque tourist destination. Indeed the unique character of Tintagel has been evidently exploited repeatedly, and by not only ‘Grand tourists’ but the local community. [37] It is slightly ironic that Du Maurier’s own renderings of Cornish locations in her novels, could be argued as equally exploitative and contributing to the tourism industry by planting picturesque scenes of Cornwall’s countryside into the minds of future travellers. In Vanishing Cornwall, not only does Du Maurier criticise the emergence of the tourist trade, but unknowingly the local Cornish inhabitants too, for facilitating the transformation of their local landscapes into a sort of ‘domesticated wilderness’. [38] This becomes more apparent as the article ventures into the entrepreneurial practice of Catherine Johns, who in 1870 competes against Francis Frith postcards to establish Tintagel as a community invested town that centres their identity on the Old Post Office. By selling her self-illustrated postcards to new faces travelling through, Johns unwittingly supported the tourist trade whilst asking her customers to consider Tintagel as something more than the Castle written about in Tennyson’s poetry.
We see a similar parallel with Ralegh Radford’s first guidebook published by the local castle’s custodians, English Heritage, in 1985. Although encouraging travel to the historic site, the guidebook no longer depended on fanciful renditions of the Arthurian legend written and circulated by the Tintagel Parish Council since 1932. [39] Radford dismissed the notion that Tintagel had been an early residence of King Arthur and instead emphasised its ‘protected monument status’, provided by the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act of 1979 as a testament to it being a truly significant archaeological site. Since this point, English Heritage assert their utmost to portray the authentic histories associated to the town and site. For instance only six years later, Radford’s theories of the Celtic Monastery were contested by Charles Thomas, and subsequently republished by English Heritage, now mentioning the adjacent church of St Materiana and the Old Post Office. All in all, Tintagel today serves as an example of how the picturesque movement heavily influenced the physical transformation and the perception of Cornwall.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people, whose generosity and kindness contributed immensely to this article. Firstly, my supervisors Dr Garry Tregidga and Dr Jo Esra whose expertise and kindness have truly made them lifelong friends and incredible colleagues. Not only did both support the collection of oral histories by participating in multiple sessions, but have repeatedly offered guidance and kind words of wisdom. My personal friends and undergraduate colleagues have likewise been valuable, offering their time to help with memory sessions and various research trips. I am grateful to Natalie Wragg, Abigail Catchpowle, Angela Sharma, Frances Doran, Amy Beaumont, Sophie Liggett, Edwin Miles, Katie Ray, for aiding in the collection of photographic information and oral histories.
This article would not have at all been possible without the support and willingness to help by multiple organisations. The National Trust’s Old Post Office in Tintagel, and in particular the expertise of archaeologist and custodian Rhodri Davies.
English Heritage’s Tintagel Castle was equally as supportive, allowing me full access to their archives and the site, with a guided tour with expert Lynda Aldridge.
I did not request the appropriate permission to articulate each member of Tintagel Parish of Materiana explicitly online, but would like to take this opportunity to thank those in the Tintagel community who aided with the memory session and the hiring of the local Old School Room hall. Your memories will forever be cherished in the Cornish Audio Visual Archive.
The following institutional groups and societies have also gifted me their valuable time. I am grateful to Tintagel Methodists and in particular Rev Bryan Ede, Tintagel Women’s Institute with particular thanks to Jill Reynolds, Cornwall Heritage Trust with particular thanks to Garry Tregidga, Bob Keys, Andrew Langdon, Sebastian Averill, Malcolm Gould, Lesley Trotter, Ed Groome, Tomas Ven Den Heuval, Sarah Chapman, Kim Hopewell, Paul George Hopewell, Ros Hayward and J.R. Boxen. I would also like to thank Thomas Fidler, PhD student for his support of the Institute of Cornish Studies and guidance for cataloguing the oral histories. Lastly, the Institute to Cornish Studies, directed by Garry, has again been a source of knowledge and expertise, and a great inspiration.
References and notes
[1] For the purposes of this micro-study the phenomena will be discussed with reference to tourism in particularly Tintagel, Cornwall yet will remain understood has operating across the ‘Celtic peripheries’ (Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Cornwall) during the periods described.
[2] Payton, Cornwall Since the War: The Contemporary History of a European Region (Redruth: Institute of Cornish Studies: Dyllansow Truran, 1993)
[3] Du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall (1967)
[4] Timothy Cooper, Anna Green, The Torrey Canyon Disaster, Everyday Life, and the “Greening” of Britain. Enviro Hist Durh N C 2017; 22 (1): 101-126. doi: 10.1093/envhis/emw068. p. 107.
[5] ‘The Cornwall and Devonshire Trades Directory’, 1897-1933
[6] Canner. The Parish of Tintagel: Some historical notes, ‘Chapter thirteen: Of Poets and Painters’. Middlesex, Friary-Clark Ltd (1982), p. 89
[7] Ibid.
[8] Buzard, The beaten track: European tourism, literature, and the ways to culture, 1800-1918, (Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 19
[9] This period often witnesses the intermingling of the outside ‘wilderness’ and the interior, and is discussed most interestingly by the recent research of Rebecca Tropp, a fourth-year PhD student in History of Art at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. To see more about her research, go to the Paul Mellon Centre website which discusses her investigations into recurring spatial arrangements and patterns of movement in the country houses of John Nash.
[10] It is important to maintain that at the centre of the Picturesque movement was indeed the enthusiasm for the natural world, articulated most clearly by the Romantic ideologies stemming from enlightenment thinkers. Other significant instigators of the movement, such William Gilpin and Edmund Burke, alongside the many Romantic poets who disseminated ideas of the sublime, will not be discussed in this article yet are recognised as integral to the Picturesque movement.
[11] Thompson, ‘The Picturesque at Home and Abroad’, British Library online article here >
[12] Sweet, ‘Domestic Tourism’, British Library online article here >
[13] Adler, ‘Travel as Performance Art’, American Journal of Sociology, 94, 6 (May 1989) p. 1375
[14] Sanders, & Spencer, The Complete English Traveller, or A New Survey of England and Wales Containing a Full Account of Whatever is Curious and Entertaining (J Cook, 1771) pp. 719
[15] Canner, 78
[16] Williams, Picturesque Excursions in Devonshire and Cornwall. Part 1: Devonshire (Murray and Highley, 1804) p. 139
[17] Canner, 79
[18] Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Idylls of the King (1859)
[19] Gilpin, William, Richmond Blamire, Robert Faulder, and B. Law. 1782. Observations on the river Wye, and several parts of South Wales, &c. relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the summer of the year 1770. London: Printed for R. Blamire in The Strand. Access here >
[20] Beacham, ‘Pevsner Revisited in Cornwall’ in National Trust: Art, Buildings, Collections bulletin, (summer, 2014), pp 5-7:
Beacham takes his sources from a 1948, revised 1974 publication by Nikolaus Pesvner who published a volume of his monumental The Buildings of England dedicated to uncovering the pioneering work of local Cornish architects designing in the Gothic revival style.
[21] Musson, ‘Introduction’, English Country House Interiors, p. 17, pp. 17-18
[22] Ibid, p. 7
[23] Ibid, p. 6
[24] Garnett, Living in Style, 152-58; Gore, The History of English Interiors, 123-31 and 142; see also Aldrich, Gothic Revival, and Wainwright, The Romantic Interior
[25] Musson, N. Lindfield also see: Garnett, Living in Style, 152-58; Gore, The History of English Interiors, 123-31 and 142; see also Aldrich, Gothic Revival, and Wainwright, The Romantic Interior
[26] Batey, ‘Regency Architecture’, Regency Gardens, (Shire Publications, 1995), p. 7
[27] Price, Uvedale, Sir, 1747-1829, and James Robson. An Essay On the Picturesque, As Compared With the Sublime And the Beautiful: And, On the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape. A new edition, with considerable additions. London: Printed for J. Robson …, 1796.
[28] See more about the topic of ‘lumiere mysterieuse’ by Le Camus de Mezieres, a theorist who experimented with light, illusion and sensation in theatrical buildings by reading Helen Dorey’s research. She discusses how this notion was first anticipated by certain charismatic ‘gentlemen’ architects, most notably Horace Walpole, Sir John Soane and William Beckford who sought to enshrine their personal collections (and self-designed furniture) amongst a gothic-style lit setting. Dorey also discusses how all three individuals purchased panels of ancient stained glass and incorporated them into the windows in their gothic residences of Strawberry Hill (1749 – 1797), Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1792 – 1823) and Fonthill Abbey (1796 – 1813): Dorey, Helen. “’Exquisite Hues and Magical Effects’ Sir John Soane’s Use of Stained Glass at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.” The British Art Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, 2004, pp. 30–40. JSTOR. Accessed 5 Feb 2020.
[29] Taylor, Brewer,The Return of King Arthur: British and American Arthurian Literature Since 1800, (Cambridge Press, 1983), p. 127
[30] Tennyson, The Idylls of the King, (1859)
[31] “King Arthur’s Castle Hotel, Tintagel, Cornwall.” The Royal Cornwall Gazette Falmouth Packet, Cornish Weekly News, & General Advertiser (Truro, England), Thursday, December 31, 1896; pg. 3; Issue 4875. British Library Newspapers, Part II: 1800-1900
[32] Quiller-Couch A, 1898/9, The Cornish Magazine, vols 1 and 2, John Pollard, Truro
[33] Willett ‘Cornwall’s Experience of the Experience Economy; Longitudinal Impacts’ (2009), p. 3
[34] Russel, A Dissertation On the Use of Sea Water In the Diseases of the Glands: Particularly the Scurvy, Jaundice, King’s-evil, Leprosy, And the Glandular Consumption. The fourth edition revised and corrected. London: printed for W. Owen (1760)
[35] ‘POETS’ CORNER . F. C. H’ in The Royal Cornwall Gazette, Falmouth Packet, and General Advertiser (Truro, England), Friday, August 26, 1853; pg. 6; Issue 2618. British Library Newspapers, Part II: 1800-1900. Lines 1-17.
[36] Payton, Kennerley, and Doe, The Maritime History of Cornwall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2014)
[37] Cooper, Green, The Torrey Canyon Disaster, Everyday Life, and the “Greening” of Britain. Enviro Hist Durh N C 2017; 22 (1): 101-126. doi: 10.1093/envhis/emw068. p.104.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Tintagel Parish Council, Tintagel Castle Guidebook First Edition, ‘Tintagel Castle’ (Historical Publishing department, Tintagel: 1932)