The Greatest Cornish Myth

A few weeks later I was fortunately given the opportunity to present my research and formulate my argument with greater clarity. Coincidentally, at he time of the Scottish referendum I was down in the Pays Basque once more I’m glad to say Farm Swap is in the can as they say ( LINK HERE more on this later) and Jonty and of Taw Tarka Film and Video services thought they’d have a wrap party down with the Marsauds the French farmers involved in the programme. Of course the Basques have a great sense of historical, geographical and cultural identity so they were all very interested in the Scottish debate and it as it turned out appeared very disappointed with the outcome.They evidently saw it as some sort of benchmark. Over dinner one evening outside on the patio as the sun set in the Western skies beyond the Pyrennees I had the opportunity to give my thoughts on such matters an airing before a more discerning audience than the Lunch Club, Monsieur Marsaud had bought along Inaki his neighbour. This fella is a Spanish Basque a small dark gruff bloke  who has been exiled in France, or more exactly the Pays Basque, the Northern Basque country or Ipparalde in their language for what became increasingly obvious but never stated reasons for many years. I'd met him on my previous visits but he’d viewed me with suspicion and we didn’t get on.

Never ever say "Atletico"

I gather from young Jean Paul Marsaud it was all to do with me calling Athletic Bilbao Atletico as in Atletico Madrid and I hadn't realised the error of my ways until the emphatic difference was pointed out later. Anyway this Inaki turns up primed to have a good go at the English and after a discussion on Scottish nationalism which became increasingly lively as the patxaran got passed around. Inaki spoke English with a Irish accent and had married an Irish girl and lived in Ireland for few years until he had to leave. Infact, he spent honeymoon on a tour of Cornwall and seemed particularly fond of Looe. So given his innate nationalistic tendencies it was inevitable that the Cornish question would arise. He thought that Cornish independence was nigh, the Cornish as a distinct people had been too long under the yoke of the English Imperialists and that they’d had enough of being ruled by a hegemonic elite governing from an alien city state 300 miles away. I don’t know how he’d picked this up  from a few nights in Looe but evidently Inaki was extremely convinced of his own opinions and his notions of Cornish sovereignty became more and more insane. He's a madman, mazed.

His boggled eyed views, and a couple more sniffs of patxaran, made my bleddy blood boil and I couldn’t hold back. I couldn't let him get away with it. I'd done with was trying to be polite and humour him but I soon found myself giving it to him with both barrels.

Firstly, I had to point out to him that the notion of a separate Cornish people, a distinct racial “Celtic" type was a nonsense as DNA evidence shows that people who have antecedents in the West Of Britain and up North (basically you draw a line from the Tyne down to Bournemouth) share the same markers which they share chromosone to chromosone with those from Ireland, the West of Scotland, Brittany and Wales. Infact it has been claimed recently there was no Celtic racial type these folk were Ancient Britons, people who first settled Britain 10,000 years ago, later beaker people who migrated up through Spain and France to our damp largely uninhabited Isle who had taken on board a Celtic culture which had crossed Europe during the Bronze age and Iron age. This culture became more prevalent and more enduring on the fringes, lasting as it did in these outer limits until the medieval times as they became cut off from the East of Europe by the Romans, who incidentally didn’t colonise anything West of Exeter but traded for tin with the Britons and then even more so by the barbarian hordes and the Anglo Saxon invader. In ancient history the West of Britain as a whole shared a sophisticated culture derived from a knowledge of the Mediterranean civilisations due to trading links with the Pheonecians  who came up from Gadir Cadiz and the Algarve to trade tin at a place they called Cassiteredes the Tin Islands. Previously The Beaker People, also Iberians, even built a wall across Stonehenge to keep the lumpen invaders from the East at arms length. Of course by now I was on automatic pilot and was not really that convinced of my own historical veracity but it all sounded bleddy plausible. I told the Basque that during the dark ages the whole of Southwest England was inhabited by the Dumnomii tribe who in the face of invasion from the east retreated back to the furthest reaches of the peninsular establishing themselves in North west Somerset, North and West Devon and Cornwall.In North Devon, which was never a part of Wessex, the Anglo Saxons didn’t arrive until a generation before the Norman Conquest. and didn't get around to renaming many settlements in their alien tongue,  to such an extent that place names with origins in our indigenous Southwestern Brittonic language

were inscribed in the first records ie. the Doomesday book. Ilfracombe, Combe Martin, Petrockstowe, Braunton, Parracombe, Woolacombe, Tawton; the rivers Taw and Torridge amoung many other place names are all derived from Celtic, Devonian/Welsh topographical terms or Celtic saints, St Brannock and St Petroc. I then triumphantly stressed that Devon is actually the only county in England that has a strictly Celtic language name coming as it does from Dumnom after the Dumnomii. Infact place names with a celtic toponomy are more frequent in Devon than they are in Cornwall!

I told him that I thought that this notion of Cornwall as a separate, defined Celtic nation was invented by 18/19th Century antiquarians, Romantic writers and in recent times Daphne bleddy Dumaurier, that Mary Wesley and her Camomile Lawn and John Betjeman, lovely bloke though, and other members of the cultural elite going on about finding their own unique magical corner of Britain while broadcasting it to the world. The middle classes yapping on about secret coves in Cornwall and getting all misty eyed about golden memories of Cornish childhood holidays all butterfly catching, lemonade on the veranda and colourful but smelly local characters. The Sunday Supplements articles propagate these myths and commodify them, Cornish porn, puffing out guff with phrases like celtic charm usually accompanied with a picture of St. Michael's mount a former Benedictine monastery or summoning up allusions to the mythical land of Lyonese which  features in Arthurian legend but actually probably a land bridge sunk into the sea about 10,000 years ago. All bleddy utter rubbish. Today New Age type blow ins and the tourist industry both of whom have had their own agenda to serve persevere with this nonsense. These new agers seem to place King Arthur in about 500BC and if evidence from contemporary Launceston, Totnes and Glastonbury is anything to go by, he believed in faeries, crystal healing and took lessons from a reiki master. All a bit confused in my book given that he was a Romano Briton so more than likely a good Catholic with a dash of the old ways thrown 

The once and future King - a good Catholic boy.

This evidently tickled Inaki as he laughed and spat pout "bloody hippies"

It's all bleddy daft in the end. And we headed off sort out our differences in the time honoured Basque tradition of a tree trunk chopping contest or Aizkolaritza. I didn't want to offend the bey too much so I let him win even though he kept falling off his log. Ultimately I respected his deeply held beliefs formed as they were from many years of repression and exile
So, I had to compromise and amicably explained that all these things are relative, but the Scots and Cornish bandying about terms like freedom really did get my goat. This led to a quizzical expression the Basques have a lot of maxims proverbs involving goats but this obviously wasn't one of them