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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The language is part of my life': Gwenno shares songs in Cornish to inspire new generation
The Mercury prize-nominated Cornish/Welsh singer Gwenno Saunders has said that Cornish should be more widely taught to children in the far south-west of Britain to protect the language and preserve local culture. Gwenno spoke after visiting a school in the fishing village of Mevagissey on the south coast of Cornwall before a performance at the nearby Lost Gardens of Heligan. Year 5 pupils at Mevagissey community primary school joined her in singing. She covered an eclectic range of subjects, from the importance and vitality of Kernewek (Cornish) to rebellions of the 15th and 16th centuries – and cheese. Gwenno, whose parents are a Cornish poet and Welsh language activist, sings in Cornish, Welsh and English. She said: 'The children in Mevagissey weren't that familiar with the language because they don't have access to it. I think it would be really useful for it to be on the curriculum. It's really nourishing for children to learn about local heritage and history in a language that is from the place where they live. 'It's so easy in a very globalised world to feel like everything's the same and there's only one way of doing things. Having local strains of history and language and accents gives you a sense of place and sense of community and creativity.' Gwenno was nominated for the Mercury prize in 2022 for her acclaimed third record, the Cornish-language Tresor. She is appearing at the Heligan Homecoming festival on Thursday 19 June as part of a lineup of artists, comedians and thinkers exploring the themes of home and belonging. She last performed a gig in Cornwall at the Minack theatre in 2023. Among the songs Gwenno performed for the children in Mevagissey was Den Heb Taves, meaning 'a tongueless man'. Gwenno said: 'It's about losing your language and how that contributes towards losing your grounding and your footing.' She also spoke to the children of the Cornish rebellion of 1497, partly a response to hardship caused by the raising of taxes by Henry VII to go to war, and the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549. 'Children love those sorts of really deep, dark, big ideas,' Gwenno said. 'I think that when you go into school and you're having a conversation it's really important to try and push it emotionally and intellectually. 'Often people think: 'Oh well, we've lost our language because it wasn't important or it was irrelevant' and actually, so often it's systematic and it's structural why a language dies or almost dies.' She said she wanted to convey to the children that Cornish was an integral part of her life. 'The language is something that's part of my life and part of my home life and I think if a language comes from that I think it has a real chance to thrive.' Cornwall council believes there are about 500 advanced Cornish speakers and 2,000 with basic levels of Cornish. It has designed a free initiative called Go Cornish for Primary Schools to promote the language and culture. It says Cornish culture is 'thriving' with more people getting involved with programmes and events celebrating Cornish food, heritage, sports and music. Gwenno also sang a rousing song with the Mevagissey children about cheese called Eus Keus? (Is There Cheese?). 'I thought we should probably lighten it. The thing about any language or culture is that you've got to find the absurd in it and the humour. It's really cathartic to shout about cheese. It was fun to do. I'll be singing that till I'm 90 if I'm still here.' The Heligan Homecoming festival takes place on selected dates between 13 and 22 June 13. For details go to
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Why I regret moving to Cornwall: My relationship was ruined, I was told 'go back to London' for trying to buy oat milk and it takes half a day to get anywhere because of tourists
With a glass of champagne in hand and the turquoise River Fal gleaming in front of me, I felt smug. It was October 2017, and my fiancé and I were celebrating the acceptance of our £450,000 offer on a cottage just outside the seaside village of St Mawes. We were finally escaping the exhausting daily commute of the south east, replacing it with peaceful beaches, quaint villages and an altogether slower pace of life in Cornwall. I was convinced that the county's untouched Roseland Peninsula was the ultimate upgrade. We'd be a stone's throw from our favourite spots including Portscatho's tiny harbour, the Lost Gardens of Heligan and endless quiet coves. But sadly the reality didn't live up to the much-hyped daydream. For a start, it wasn't until Christmas 2019 that we finally managed to make the move full-time, with a baby in tow. One of us was always needed back in London or Cambridge for work. When we eventually spent more than a few weeks together in our coastal bolthole, our 14-year relationship imploded from the stress of living in a half-renovated property in a remote village, with a newborn. I found myself a single mother in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the hectic pace of the capital and desperately missing its anonymity and my friendship network. Ironically, I was physically closer to my mum, grandmother and extended family than in decades. They were just an hour or so up the road on their farm, but even that felt a world away when I was caring for a little one and juggling work with property renovation. Life in Cornwall didn't magically get better when summer hit. Tourists descend in droves each year, gridlocking narrow, single-lane roads that inexplicably haven't been upgraded since the days of horses and carts. Bins constantly overflow and seagulls circle, dive-bombing for discarded pasties or fish and chips. And parking becomes a competitive sport. The only half-decent hotel gym in miles shuts its doors to locals so it can cater to visitors. I try to avoid even a trip to the supermarket, as traffic slows to a crawl and it ends up taking almost half a day. Locals call this 'overtourism.' I call it what it is and that's a woeful underinvestment in infrastructure. The Cornish are famously proud of their cultural heritage. And rightly so. But I was shocked by how real the hostility to 'incomers' and resistance to change can be. Soon after our arrival, I asked, perfectly politely, if the village shop stocked oat milk. An elderly man looked me up and down and commented: 'We don't sell that muck in here. F*** off back to London.' I think he was joking, but it definitely carried a sharp edge. Months later, I was shocked to hear the popular local electrician tipsily bragging in the village pub about charging some 'emmets' – a Cornish word for 'outsiders' – four times the usual rate. Even the weekly girls' ballet classes at the village hall is a battleground. It costs £10 a session, but parents aren't allowed to wait indoors during the lesson — not even in the empty room next door — unless we pay extra to hire the space. When I queried this rule, I got a cold response. Days later, I was quietly removed from the village Facebook group. I later learned that there had been a thread filled with complaints about the fact I'd spoken out. It is funny, I suppose, but at the same time the message is crystal clear. Toe the line or you're out. I'm constantly puzzled by how often locals lament the so-called 'housing crisis,' while fiercely opposing the construction of any affordable homes that might actually help solve it. Of course, there are fewer sirens in sleepy Cornwall. You don't worry about getting mugged by a teenager on an e-scooter. But crime doesn't disappear, instead it takes a different form. I can't recall any drug raids or stabbings in this neck of the woods, yet my neighbour's dog defecates in my front garden every single day without fail. It's not a crime that will get anyone locked up, but it's the kind of thing that slowly chips away at your sanity in a place where everyone swears they're just doing their best. Some people thrive in this tight-knit environment. They love that nothing goes unnoticed and that gossip travels faster than the local broadband signal. Personally, I've struggled to adapt to the village-wide interest in my every move. When the police turned up at my door, as I called a retired officer a raging misogynist, it felt like front page news for weeks. People still comment on it over a year later. These days, I second guess almost everything I say. I desperately miss the privacy and excitement of the city, being able to get on with life without mistakenly stepping on local toes. And I miss grabbing oat milk at the nearest shop without triggering a minor culture war, and not having to tiptoe through what feels like a political minefield every time I challenge how something's done. But even if I wanted to disappear back to London, I can't. My ex-fiancé has already remarried and had another child. Our daughter, who adores her dad, wouldn't want to live far away from him, and I wouldn't want that for her either. So, I've decided I'm staying put. I'm going to learn to love this place. Fortunately, the school run and my child's extracurricular classes have opened up new friendships. I'd become uncharacteristically shy after the oat milk moment and ballet hall debacle, but slowly my confidence has returned. I tentatively turned back to Facebook, not for the cliquey village group, but to connect with newcomers and locals looking to build new friendships. Things have gone surprisingly well and I've met some brilliant friends, some with their own faintly traumatising tales of adapting to rural life. Gradually, I'm beginning to appreciate the seaside peace I once craved. I spend time outside gardening or sitting with a cup of tea, enjoying the stillness. It's far from the seaside life I imagined, but it's becoming one I can live with. Maybe even love.
The Guardian
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Simon Armitage: ‘Our pace of life is unhelpful to nature, it's burning it up'
His new poems celebrate the extraordinary homes of the creatures tucked away, usually out of sight, within the verdant nooks and crannies of the Lost Gardens of Heligan. But during a stroll with the Guardian around the sub-tropical garden on the south coast of Cornwall, the poet laureate, Simon Armitage, explained how the pieces could also be taken as a plea for humans to slow down, think about the damage we are causing to the natural world and, hopefully, do something about it. 'When I was first shown around, my first impulse was that I needed to write something about gardens and flowers,' he said. 'But I was looking for another dimension, something a bit more secretive. It occurred to me that this location provides habitat for a lot of species of British wildlife and I think the unspoken theme is the fact that the animals I'm talking about are under stress.' In Dwell, Armitage uses elements of riddle and folklore to focus on a series of dwellings: the 'twig-and-leaf crow's-nest squat' of a squirrel's drey, a beaver lodge's 'spillikin stave church' and a hive's 'reactor core'. Newts, swallows, bats and hares make an appearance and there is a poem about Heligan's large 'bug hotel' – said to be the biggest in the UK – written as if its inhabitants had left Tripadvisor-style reviews about it: 'Would deffo recommend. Dreamland!' Armitage said he was pleased with the title of the book. 'There's definitely an invitation in the title. As well as it being about habitat and dwellings, I'm asking people to dwell on ideas and to be contemplative and to think more deeply. 'You often hear that word in relation to being told not to dwell on something. 'Don't dwell on it – move on'. I wanted to invert that because I am asking people to dwell on ideas. Maybe that's a response to this very fast-paced, short concentration span world that we're living in, the age of social media where everything is just a quick glimpse of something and then you're on to the next thing. 'I may be asking people to slow down because that pace of life is not helpful to nature, it's burning it up. I think there's, even within that word and its implications for a change of pace, there's an environmental plea.' The gardens date back to the mid-18th century but became swallowed by unchecked growth when many of its workers failed to return from the first world war. Over the last 30 years they have been carefully restored and Armitage was invited to visit and write a suite of poems about them. Armitage said: 'I thought there was something very naturally poetic about this place, not just the kind of environment, but the backstory and the idea of lostness. 'It's exotic here, it's otherworldly, and when you enter its space, you fall under its spell. I think you feel as if you're in a very contained and discreet environment. It provides tunnels, there's a jungle area down there; there are places where it's quite manicured and cared for and there are other places which seem wild and a bit out of control.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Three installations – a slate boulder, a 'jungle' pond and an oak wood tunnel – have appeared within the 80-hectare (200-acre) garden bearing lines from Dwell, the idea being that visitors will come across poetry stashed in the gardens. 'It's a space outside of normal time and the busy working world. You can park all that at the door and become lost here, in a good way.' Armitage said he hoped that just as the animals had their dwellings, the poems would be 'little dens and treehouses' for readers to inhabit. 'Somebody once said about me as a writer that I had a child's eye and I think they meant it as a criticism but I just took it as an enormous compliment,' he said. 'I've always felt with the writers that I like that they continue to ask questions, they continue to be spellbound, to engage in wonder rather than becoming wise and knowledgable.' Dwell is published by Faber and Armitage will appear at the inaugural Heligan Homecoming festival, from 13 to 22 June.
