Cornwall in Verse - Tide to Tor in Poetry

 

Cornwall is a county with the sea on three sides and granite underneath. Tide to Tor in Poetry holds those two forces together — the Atlantic that shapes the coast and the ancient rock that shapes everything else. It moves from harbour town to high moor, from the tin-country of the west to the wooded valleys of the south, mapping Cornwall not as a holiday postcard but as a real, worked, weathered place.

 

The poems here start from the ground, as the whole British Counties in Verse series does: from the granite, the tide, the old mine-workings, the weather coming in off the sea. A ruined engine house is read as labour turned to stone. A moorland village like Altarnun is read as centuries of endurance carved into rock. What emerges is Cornwall held to close attention — precise, unsentimental, and all the more moving for it.

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What's inside the collection

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Tide to Tor travels Cornwall the way a walker meets it — by coast path and moor track, by weather and tide. The granite heart of Bodmin Moor. The mist and myth of Boscastle. The stone village of Altarnun. The harbours, the cliffs, the tin-mine stacks standing against the sky. Each poem stands in a named, specific place and listens: to its geology, its history, its ordinary present-day life. Together they form a map of Cornwall drawn in verse rather than ink.

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​Who it's for

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This is a book for anyone who loves Cornwall — whether you walk the coast path each summer, grew up in the county and moved away, or carry Cornwall in your family's memory from further afield. Readers in the UK, the United States and Canada have found their way to the series, and Cornwall speaks to that far-flung Cornish and West-Country diaspora in particular. If you value landscape writing, regional history, or poetry that connects deeply with place, Tide to Tor was written with you in mind. It makes a considered gift for the walker, the traveller, or the reader with Cornish roots.

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A sample from the collection

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By the cliff’s edge where gulls cry free,

Granite shoulders lean on the sea;

Tides beat time on a weathered shore,

Whispering tales of those before

 

Through lanes that twist like an old man’s hand,

Past hedgerows stitched to a patchwork land,

The scent of gorse in the summer rain

Hums of a home you’d find again