The Cornwall Coast

Salmon works round the Cornish shore in eighteen chapters, setting off from the Plymouth district and finishing at Morwenstow, by way of Polperro, Fowey, Falmouth, the Lizard, Mount’s Bay, the Scilly Islands, Land’s End, St Ives, Padstow and Tintagel. Published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1910, it mixes geology, parish history and legend: why a granite backbone let Cornwall outlast the Atlantic where softer coasts wore away, how far the drowned land of Lyonesse can be believed, and what Plymouth Sound meant to Drake and the Armada. A prefatory note lists the Ordnance Survey sheets worth carrying and warns cyclists and motorists that the roads touch the sea only at chosen points, so the finest stretches have to be walked. Photographs by Gibson of Penzance run throughout, and a full index makes it usable as a gazetteer too.