Artist
I’ve lived in Cornwall for more than thirty years and in that time have written a number of books about far-off places – the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, the territories of the old Soviet Union.
But always I come back to Cornwall, not just to write but to draw from its wealth of stories. Something in its landscape, its sea-surrounded shape, its people and their long and tenacious history, favours unusual experience and flights of the imagination. Just as Cornwall’s geology is a diverse and potent mix of minerals and metals, so the stories gathered here glint with colour and strength. More and more I find myself concerned with – and writing about - our relationship with nature and with place, and Cornwall delivers material by the spadeful. Here is a corner of the world where lives have always been lived in a very physical context, where the natural world asserts its presence at every turn. Cornwall distils something elemental about the planet as a whole, about the perennial range of human longing and endeavour, and I never tire of exploring it.
Philip Marsden and Claire Ingleheart with Femmes de la Mer
A magical medley of readings and music celebrating our relationship with land and sea