Minimalist Structuralist Exegetical Theory and The West of England

Or, "Why did we come here? What the hell is there to see?"

Main -- House -- History -- Cornwall -- Getting There -- On the Road -- The Roads -- London -- The Far West -- Boring Details -- Updates

Almost everything English that has a name and that really exists (sorry, "Downton Abbey") and which American tourists have actually heard of is either in London or within a few miles of it. Yes, people have heard of Stonehenge, the white cliffs of Dover, and York Minster, but the list of major attractions that draw Americans into the countryside is pretty thin after that. Godolphin Cross isn't exactly London. It's a five-hour drive from Heathrow and is well beyond the end of the Motorway system. Pass it by too many miles, and you plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.

So, perhaps you'd like to know: is this going to be like Deliverance? What kinds of hillbillies do they have in England? Is scrumpy just another name for moonshine corn whiskey? They don't really eat "clotted cream," do they? And why the hell are we going to this place beyond the moor, anyway?

The Far West: it's not just for Smugglers Anymore

Well, it's rural out thataway. I'm not sure whether English people say "thataway," though, so if you use that word do put a little Gabby Hayes accent on so that people will know that yer not from 'round these parts (though, interestingly, they do say "round" where we would say "around" and you will find that the English do a great deal more "reckoning" than you'd thought possible outside of Tennessee). The rural character of the far west does mean that you'll find a shortage of shopping malls, superstores, and hair spray which would kill the average American teenager as surely as a lack of oxygen would. But then, we didn't come for the shopping malls, did we? And a few days in the English countryside might be all it takes to make you spend a lot of time over the coming years scheming to find a way to come back and spend more time in this "green and pleasant land," as Blake famously called it. They've even gotten rid of most of those "dark Satanic mills" he was not too pleased about.

Food Fit for a Hobbit The British are admittedly somewhat infamous for food, and there are times when the reputation is deserved, as when you find that your salad has been boiled in lard. Well, okay. That might be a slight exaggeration. But food can in fact be one of the great pleasures of the countryside. This is farm country, and fresh and traditional foods abound. Farmhouse cheeses, lovely greens, rutabagas which are mysteriously known as "swedes." True free-range eggs can be bought at the roadside from tiny farms. Simple cooking, simple ingredients, fresh, wholesome meals...great stuff. Have a nice ploughman's lunch at the pub. And then there are the regional specialties. Cornwall is home to the "pasty," which, though it can be eaten in a strip club, is more of a traditional food for the men who used to work the mines out west. And then there's Devon's famous "clotted cream" which is lovely with jam on scones. Have tea with that, but after the meal, consider washing it all down with a cider; this here is scrumpy country.

And Then There's Beer...

There's also beer. Lots of beer. The British never succumbed to the conversion of the Continent to lager beer, and instead the traditional British drink is "bitter," which despite the name is not particularly so (though much more so than, say, a Budweiser). All of the traditional British beers are one sort of ale or another, and in a good pub they are not served by pressure-dispense from a keg but by pump or, occasionally, gravity from a cask. Cool, not cold, lightly carbonated, not flat, a fresh pint of ale is a glorious thing. If you need to find some really nice pubs with really nice beer, the best resource is the Campaign for Real Ale, an organization which started in the 1970s when a handful of beer purists, unhappy with the arrival of pressure-dispensed keg beer, decided to push for the retention of traditional beers. If you love microbrewery ales of the United States, well, this is a treat; England is the home of the beers those styles are modeled after. CAMRA publishes the annual "Good Beer Guide," and if you'll be doing some pub-hopping you may want to pick up a copy. Avoid cheap competitors pretending to be the real CAMRA guide...if it ain't by Roger Protz, don't buy it.

Nelson at Trafalgar

The West, and the Royal Navy: The far west of England holds a significant place in the history and traditions of the maritime world. Why was Britain once the greatest power in the world, center of an empire upon which the sun never set? It wasn't size--plenty of countries are larger--and while it can't all be summed up as flowing from one simple cause, there is one cause which everyone agrees is central: sea power. From the earliest times when professional navies came into existence to patrol the seas, Britain's strength was in its fleet, which gave it the power to project its force anywhere in the world. Today there is doubt whether the Royal Navy could retake the Falkland Islands if the Argentines went nuts again; but in our parents' generation the Royal Navy was the second greatest fleet in the world, and a generation or so before that it was the greatest.

But navies aren't just made out of ships--they are above all made out of men and the far west supplied much, much more than its fair share of those. The people of the west have always been seafarers--their ports were hubs of commerce and homes to fishing fleets, as well as to the dark sides of commerce--smuggling and piracy. The book Treasure Island is set in Cornwall for a reason; and the reason we think of pirates as saying "Ahr" (not, for the luvvamike, "Argh") is that the West is -- as we've pointed out above -- one of the few places in Britain where the letter R really comes into its full flower. The American accent owes something to this West-Country talk, too--because Britain's American colonies were also settled heavily from the West. Remember Plymouth Rock? Well, it was named after the port from which the pilgrims departed England: Plymouth, in Devon.

Sir Francis Drake--remember him? A West-Country man, from Tavistock (on the Cornwallish side of Devon). Sir Walter Raleigh--another Devonshire lad. There are more--many more--and when you're there you cannot help but understand why. The sea is never far away. Great old port cities and fishing villages of the west were centers of marine industry. And France, ever the foe of the British until post-Napoleonic days, is faintly visible on clear days across the waters of the English Channel. The rewards of commerce, the threats of war, and the thirst of small-town boys for adventure on the high seas...

Raleigh and Drake: Ahr.

St. Ives. Remember yer smugglin' sack.

This maritime history can be seen and felt all over the West. In Devon and Cornwall the sea is often clearly a dangerous but beautiful place with rocky shores and hidden hazards. Fishing villages where the trade has been plied for thousands of years are tucked into every sort of spot around the coast, and are delightful places to visit today. Penzance--home of the pirates of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta-- is here, as is St. Ives, famous for cats, sacks, kittens and wives. How many are going to St. Ives? I dunno, but you might be one of 'em. Bring a wife and a sack.

Prehistory. Lots, and lots of it.

Cornwall is loaded with prehistoric monuments, as is really the whole West. Wiltshire is home to Stonehenge and Avebury and the Uffington White Horse; Dorset to Maiden Castle; Devon to the many strange monuments of Dartmoor; and this is just a small sampling of a rich assortment of interesting sites.

The Undiscovered Country

What the heck else is out there in the West? Dartmoor, of course; Bodmin Moor; Exmoor; villages of uncommon cuteness, sheep in great numbers, oddities by the dozen. People trying to resurrect the Cornish language. Peace and comfort, and summer afternoons. There are of course a zillion guidebooks on this sort of thing; we strongly recommend that you find one which is specific to the West as general UK guides will cover a lot of stuff which is, to say the least, inconveniently situated from this remote corner of the land of cheese and beer.

Back to Home Page