Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor: a land of megaliths, ghosts, solitude – and literature

12.10.2023 - 21:37 / theguardian.com

Forget satnav, the best way to find your way around the wild granite uplands of Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor is to invest in an old-fashioned Ordnance Survey map. That’s exactly what writer Louis de Bernières did when he was exploring the setting for his new novel Light Over Liskeard, a “heartwarming” dystopian fantasy in which the hero (a quantum cryptographer called Q) seeks refuge and self-sufficiency in a remote moorland farmhouse while waiting for the collapse of civilisation.

The author of the best-selling Captain Corelli’s Mandolin chose Bodmin Moor, he says, because “it’s one of the furthest places from any centres of population”. The moor is ringed by small towns (including Liskeard) and scattered with tiny huddled villages, but there are no cities for miles, no handy motorways and not much in the way of reliable phone reception (the notion of life off-grid seems very real up here among the craggy tors of the High Moor). And in one of Cornwall’s least-visited regions, it is easy to find yourself completely alone.

On a recent return to my moorland roots (I was born in Liskeard), I walked to the top of deserted Leskernick Hill. Standing among sheep and gorse and the littered remnants of ancient hut circles, I watched clouds darken over the rocky summit of Brown Willy (Cornwall’s highest point, at 419 metres). There was a short sharp shower– then a rainbow. I was a long way from the Cornwall most of us think we know.

Like many of the county’s visitors, Louis de Bernières had his first introduction to Bodmin Moor in glimpses of bewitching scenery from the A30. Then, a few years ago, he attended the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival. “I took some walks around the moor,” he told me. “I found it bleak and mysterious, a land of ghosts and ruins – full of abandoned mines and quarries – a spooky, atmospheric and very strange place to set a story in. It was almost like being in another country.”

An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Bodmin Moor bristles with stories of its own: the place is awash with tumuli, bronze age standing stones, cairns and quoits (the Cornish word for megalithic tombs). On craggy granite tors, relics of prehistoric settlements rub shoulders with the remnants of 19th-century engine houses and broken mineral railways, mapping the passage of the region’s tin and copper mining booms (the area forms part of the Cornish Mining world heritage site). The rivers Looe, Lynher, Fowey and Camel all rise on the moor.

According to legend, the stack of granite plates known as the Cheesewring is the work of giants. And in nearby Minions, the three rings of standing stones they call the Hurlers (probably the best examples of ceremonial circles in the south west, say English Heritage) are men turned to