Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place review – Philip
Marsden’s love letter to Cornwall
A thought-provoking exploration of Cornish lives and landscapes has an
affinity with the work of Richard Mabey and Simon Armitage
Kate Kellaway
The Observer, Sunday 12 October 2014
The coast near Penwith: ‘Philip Marsden’s book is, above all, a
tribute to Cornwall and its enduring beauty.’ Photograph: Alamy
There must be a moment in many a traveller’s life when there is a
sudden awareness that the unexplored place – as deserving of attention
as any distant destination – is home. This is what happened to Philip
Marsden – author of books about Ethiopia, Russia and Armenia – after
he moved, with his family, to a creek-side house in Cornwall. He fell
in love with the place. He writes about it with a historian’s eye and
singular sensitivity. At one point, he acknowledges that his ancient
farmhouse is bordering on uninhabitable but seems to rejoice at the
wisteria thrusting its way through the bedroom window and the
unexpected bramble that has invited itself into the sitting room. It
is only when his son, Arthur, announces that “there is like a big
mouse in the hall” that he sees the feral has gone too far. Yet, at
the same time, he struggles with an unease about the overhaul the
house is about to receive at his hands. He wonders what the people who
built it would feel about “our planned ceiling lights”. Happily, he
does not listen to his doubts. Houses, after all – like languages –
change. And besides – one cannot help but speculate – the people who
built the house might have loved the electricity and thoroughly have
approved of the ceiling lights.
In a wider context, Marsden’s respect for the past is the book’s great
strength. The book is, above all, a tribute to Cornwall and its
enduring beauty. It is, in part, a tour of tors and a reminder that
stonescapes outlive literary wayfarers. Marsden heads westward towards
Land’s End, taking in Bodmin, Tintagel and the strange white landscape
of china-clay country. His book has an affinity with the work of
Jonathan Raban,Richard Mabey and Simon Armitage – each writer able, in
his different way, to take on landscape as close work. And there is no
self-serving romanticism here. Marsden writes in an elegant, retiring
way (he could actually get away with keeping himself on a slightly
looser rein and include more personal detail). HBut that is not his
way: he is more likely to introduce someone else warmly than to show
his own hand or heart.
While the book’s aim is to discover the spirit of place, what it
reveals and celebrates best is the spirit of people – reaching back to
neolithic man. He is superb at describing walkers and scholars united
in topophilia (love of place): figures in a landscape. There is John
Whitaker (1735-1808), a most unusual vicar with green eyes and false
teeth made of ebony (imagine the smile) who wrote a parochial history
of Cornwall. Then there is the remarkable antiquarian Charles
Henderson (1900-1933), Cornwall’s answer to Nikolaus Pevsner, who
started recording as a child. (One is relieved to read that, aged 12,
he was noting his consumption of chocolate biscuits alongside the
obsessive detailing of Cornish churches). Most fascinating is his
portrait of Cornwall’s poet Jack Clemo (1916-94) who was
intermittently blind and whose voice is described as “the conscience
of the post-industrial age, crying from the white wilderness of
Cornwall’s clay dumps”. (I didn’t know of him – and look forward to
reading his poetry.) An incidental postscript: one cannot help
noticing that the walkers and recorders are, without exception, male.
And almost as if to suggest that this situation is unlikely to change,
when Marsden returns from his wanderings, his wife is at work on one
of their garden’s raised beds, a planted figure in contrast to his
own.
But perhaps the most striking thing of all about the book is that its
contemporary details seem anachronistic in their ancient context. The
modern age seems paper-thin, lightweight, even faintly ludicrous. In
Penwith, Marsden observes a poster for salsa courses and another for
the Alpha course “Life is Worth Exploring” outside the church hall.
The invitations come across as incongruous. It seems clear that
exploring this fine book would be the superior alternative with its
reminder that it is “diligent attention to the world” that “makes life
worth living”.
Rising Ground is published by Granta Books (£20). Click here to buy it for £16
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/12/rising-ground-review-philip-marsden-search-for-the-spirit-of-place