BEGINNING WHERE?
After driving for what seems like forever with the sensors on my hire car emitting one continuous alarmed note, I turn into the hamlet of Bolenowe and park up. Maybe I should have left making my first visit of the trip until Sunday, but the temptation to turn off from the A30 at Tolvaddon in the last of the light to take a look at the Red River proved too great: it’s been over a year since I last walked the full seven or so miles of it while planning the project. The weather’s wild, an Atlantic gale rushing over the top of the valley; a single overhead electricity cable catches hollow whispering notes out of the wind; shouting from a rugby field somewhere comes and goes. With the mild air and sense of impending rain, it feels so familiar: a Cornish winter Saturday afternoon out of my childhood. But I don’t really know this river valley, even though I grew up no more than ten miles away. The loose papers on the front of the car lift and flutter as I open the boot; an old ticket flies off the dashboard and out the window, tumbling off up the road into the gloom.
I’m about as close to the source of the Red River as a car and public footpath will get me. It seemed right to focus on the origins of the river at the beginning of the project, but now I’m not so sure. The river’s beginnings, like so much of its length, are hidden in a low, dark cloud of gorse, alder, sycamore, somewhere up the valley in an area marked ‘Forest’ on the OS map. As I walk down to the river, I pass the old Men’s Institute (1932), a faded collection of odd Crocs on a bench under its wooden awning. Looking for the river’s source suddenly feels obvious and questionable, as if I’m caught up in a literary convention rather than my own understanding. Surely the river begins in rain across the fields, in all of the valley’s seeping and dripping stones and woods. Everything feels silent and scattered beneath the sound of the wind as I head down the hill. Close to the valley bottom I turn left onto a farm track, past buildings and wooden sheds that have the kind of improvised ‘backwoods’ quality that’s getting rarer in Cornwall. There’s useful junk beside some of them: the parts of someone’s unrealisable long-term plan. Logs are stacked in the lee of walls; woodsmoke leaks from a stove pipe poked through a clapboard wall. I don’t see anyone as I pass by an old green Land Rover and then edge between two new, white SUVs parked by a gate. Over it, I can just make out the Red River running downstream along the edge of a raw earth ramp bulldozed across marshy ground—my first glimpse of it and it’s still being shoved around. How fitting: a disturbed river running over disturbed ground; a river people have always felt able to manipulate.
I back out and head on. Stupidly, I’ve not put my wellies on: hoof and boot prints are being slowly swallowed in the flabby mud that covers the little bridge. Upstream, through a patched and rotten fence, I can see the river has been split in two: a leat takes half the flow and pours it over a series of concrete steps that look like a muddy chocolate fountain: first an industrial tool for the recovery of tin and disposal of mine waste, now a garden feature. A bit further up the path there’s a black pool of water with a willow growing out of its mute, unreflecting surface; it feels rich in dormant, hidden life; a halfway place; an entrance into the neither solid nor liquid. Later, I’ll discover it’s marked as Vincent’s Well on the OS map. For now, it’s as close as I’m going to get to the source of the river. Maybe it’s the momentum of the journey still in me, but while I can read the well’s obvious qualities, I don’t feel the quiet excitement I’d hoped for—early days, I tell myself, as I head back to the car.
While I’m scrawling a few comforting notes, a woman with a hard South-Eastern accent comes out of the granite farmhouse at the corner of the track and asks me if I’m looking for someone. No, I say, just for the Red River. But you were looking at the jeeps, she says; if you were looking for the river, you didn’t need to look at the jeeps. I wasn’t looking at them, I say, I was looking at the earthworks to see what’s being done to the river. She looks at me in disbelief. It’s a public right of way isn’t it, I say, beginning to bridle. Not that bit, she says; why did you go there? She’s tough. I want to say to to her that I’m from around here and that this isn’t the way we behave. But of course that’s rubbish on a number of counts: I’ve been chased out of fields by farmers many times; I’m from St. Ives (a world away); and I’ve not lived in Cornwall properly since I left for London at 18. So I tell her I’m doing research into the river—I don’t feel able to say I’m writing a poem about it. Well, she says, unconvinced, we have to be careful; and she stares at me in a way that clearly indicates she’ll be able to identify me if she needs to. Is it that bad, I ask? We get all sorts up to no good round here, she says. As I walk away, I shake my head and raise my eyebrows. I feel strangely, irrationally hurt, as if the place were rejecting me and I’ll not be able to write about it. I don’t know if she sees my face-pulling, but as soon as I’ve walked away I know I should have used the moment to introduce myself properly. Did I think I owned the place? That I had the right to assert my desire to wander and look no matter how suspicious my behaviour might seem to others—and in retrospect I certainly must have looked suspicious to anyone glancing out of their window in this quiet valley. By the time I walk back to explain, she’s gone.
I’m out of practice, I tell myself, by way of excuse. I’ll soon get back into talking to everyone I meet. But my sense of hurt and dislocation troubles me. Why should I want to make that territorial claim? Maybe it’s connected to all kinds of ambivalent feelings I’ve had about being ‘from’ Cornwall: I was born and raised here, and yet sometimes I’ve not felt like I’m from the place; that I’m not authentically Cornish enough; and perhaps as a consequence, at times I’ve longed to be from it all the more. In my early teens, I can remember finding the name Clarke on a gravestone in Barnoon Cemetery and feeling pleased that it was possible for a Clarke to come from St. Ives, even through the Clarke in question had nothing to do with me: such are the powerful myths of roots. My subsequent reaction was to hate all locals-only, emmet-hating, Cornish nationalism, which so nearly bordered on xenophobia and racism. But Cornishness now has the added dimension of being a valuable brand, with all kinds of proper-job-wozz-on-dreckly elements of Cornish idiom traded in for commercial advantage with varying degrees of irony. For along time, Cornwall has had to perform Cornishness to make ends meet, but who is doing the current performance and for what gain; and how do people feel about Cornishness commodified in this way? The money made out the stereotypical images of Cornwall as a rugged, pure, romantic holiday-elsewhere are immense and the economic disparities stark. With the mouth of the Red River entering St. Ives Bay, one of the touristic epicentres of money-making, the river’s course forms a squiggly transect through areas of extreme of wealth (there’s a beach chalet on the market for £1.5 million at Gwithian) and poverty.
Maybe the hunt for a starting place was getting to me: surely there’s no beginning, no ‘authentic’ connection to place other than the one we invent for ourselves by returning again and again to ask it questions (and to question the very idea of place itself), and to allow ourselves to be disturbed by its changing responses. Maybe it is also a personal thing: I like to get lost and to find my thoughts; and when someone breaks in on that transient growing world of thinking with things, it breaks apart and I feel disoriented. When I think about my experience of origins, I think of qualities of attention and engagement with material things. I’m from the intertidal zone of Carbis Bay beach; from the rock pools of Porthminster Point; from the numerals carved into stones by the steps at the end of Smeaton’s Pier; from my hands digging holes in the sand on the at low tide, which filled with water, the marks of my finger incision melting away. But perhaps these are my touchstone memories, which are, in themselves, shaped by cultural and literary values.
As I drive back round to Hayle via Praze-an-Beeble, down narrow lanes behind a convoy of JCB diggers, I realise this project has to be a personal journey as much as a wider cultural exploration the significance of the river. This will be complicated. Mixed. Seeking a natural spring as the source of the Red River is like privileging one ancestor over another and declaring we are descended from them, ignoring the hundreds of others who are not useful to the narrative of our identity. In addition to the fields and trees, the river’s origins are as much the adits that feed in polluted water from a vast network of drowned mine shafts and levels as any black, alder-fringed pool. It’s all the more interesting for that, I think, as I drive back to see my parents.
