Bodmin Moor

There were twelve rocks in all. They had been used before and were fairly round. The smallest was hurled first,  and Uther pitched it one hundred feet. St Tue's knees shook. What if his faith should fail now? He cast his eyes upwards. Then, oh, blessed miracle the rock became a feather in his hands, and he hurled it with such precision that it capped number one as if it had grown there.

(The legend of the Cheesewring. J Henry Harris)

With Jackson there was quite solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking, for any kind of communication.

( Lee Krasner)

Cornwall

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travels sake. The great affair is to move.

(Robert Louis Stevenson)

The flavour of words is intensely anti-visual. Strictly speaking painting cannot be written about.

(Patrick Heron)

Cornwall

We passed an open door in Back Road West and through it saw some paintings of ships and houses on old pieces of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall...we knocked on the door and found Alfred Wallis.

(Ben Nicholson)

Anchor Chains coil around  the Gravestones in Barnoon cemetery. Mariners, master mariners, men lost at sea. At night the sea pounds Hellesover cliff and the noise is animal growling.

(Porthmeor Beach Helen Dunmore)

Cornwall

This is the landscape that has altered my life. The house in its setting is the source of all my painting.

(Patrick Heron)

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of Distance.

(Charles Lindburgh)

Cornwall

The inhabitants of Britain who dwell about the headland of Belerium are unusually hospitable and have adopted a civilized manner of life because of their intercourse with foreign traders. It is they who work the tin, extracting it by an ingenious method. 

(Pytheas c300-380BC)

Another Cornish tradition is to the effect that Joseph of Arimathea came in a boat to Cornwall and bought the boy Jesus with him: and the latter taught him how to extract tin and purge it of the wolfram. When the tin is flashed, then the tinner shouts, "Joseph was in the trade".

(Baring Gould. Cornwall)

Cornwall

Landscape by itself is meaningless, but it works on our feelings in profound ways, arousing in us a sense of ourselves in relation to the outside world.

(Christopher Neve.Unquiet Landscape)

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.

(Andrew Wyeth)

Porlock & Clovelly

On awakening he appeared to himself to have distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen and ink and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on buisness from Porlock, and detained him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas ! without the restoration of the latter.


(Samuel Taylor Coleridge on being disturbed whilst writing Kubla Khan. 1797)

My dear father had been killed by the Doones of Bagworthy, while riding home from Porlock market on the Saturday evening. With him were six brother-farmers all of them very sober; for father would have no company with any man who went beyond half-a-gallon of beer, or a single gallon of cider.

(R D Blackmore. Lorna Doone)

Avebury

Just before I visited this place, to endeavour at preserving the memory of it, the inhabitants were fallen into the custom of demolishing the stones, chiefly out of covetousness of the little area of ground each stood on.


(Arbury a Temple. William Stukely MD 1690)

I painted a few pictures of pumpkins. But after I saw all the pumpkins that other people did, I stopped painting them. That ruined it for me -The imitators quickly take the charisma out of it.

(Andrew Wyeth)