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South West England

The sea is never far away in the south west of England. The estuaries and drowned valleys of the area carry the atmosphere of the sea far inland. It is fitting that great sailors such as Raleigh and Drake came from the south west. Amelius, a sailor with the Roman fleet on the Rhine is the first inhabitant of the south west that history can name.

Back beyond the Roman period the south west of England provides evidence of human habitation into the Ice Ages . In Kent's Cavern on the western side of the Ilsham Valley on the south coast, there are remains that reveal intermittent human habitation in warm periods between ice ages. Huge amounts of bear remains suggest that the hunters of those distant times crept into caves to find the lairs of bears who were hibernating their way through the coldest weather. Sediments found at Tornewton Cave, a few miles inland from Kent's Cavern tell the story of the later episodes of the Ice Age. A layer of stalagmites indicates a cool temperate climate. Then comes a layer of frost shattered stalactites indicating very cold conditions. With the return of slightly warmer temperatures the cave was taken over by hyenas, before bitterly cold conditions returned once again. This was the final Devensian glaciation, 18000 - 15000 years ago. Human activity then returned to the cave at the end of this cold period. Reindeer remains indicate that the cave's occupants were nomadic reindeer hunters.

Dartmoor

The ice melted rapidly. People lived on the large river estuaries, environments which combined sea and land food supplies. By 8000BC the ice sheets had disappeared, and by 5800BC when Britain was being separated from the continent, temperatures were two degrees higher in winter and one degree higher in summer than they are now. At this time the moors of the south west, Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor and Exmoor were open grassland, and good places to live. The moors and heaths of south west England contain some of the best preserved prehistoric landscapes in north west Europe. There are burial barrows, stone circles, mysterious lines of standing stones, outlines of ancient fields, individual standing stones, and the remains of houses and small villages. As is often the case in history it was the decline of these moorland areas which has helped their preservation. Methods of farming, the burning of forest cover and heavy grazing, encouraged the formation of peat bog. Then from the late Bronze Age, around 1000BC, the climate cooled, and farming became difficult. The ancient settlements were progressively abandoned, and today the moors are empty bleaky beautiful places, showing the remains of a civilisation lost to climate change.

The next period in the history of England's south west is often portrayed as the time when Britain reached out to a wider world. This is supposed to have happened through the trade in Cornish tin with adventurous Greek and Phoenician traders. You will often read in guide books that traders called Britain the Tin Islands, and thus brought the country suddenly into recorded history. In reality the country slowly emerged from the mists of myth, deception and half truth. The idea that Phoenician or Carthaginian traders reached the south west has to contend with the smokescreen that Phoenician captains threw up around their lucrative operations. Herodotus (484 - 425BC) mentions the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, but knew nothing of their location. Five hundred years later Strabo wrote that Phoenicians based at Cadiz in Spain traded with the Cassiterides, but he has no specific details about where they were. He noted that the Phoenicians carefully concealed their whereabouts from rivals. The Tin Islands might have been Britain, or a mythic place somewhere out in the Atlantic opposite Spain, created to keep people from finding the real British Isles. As Malcolm Todd says in his history of the south west: "as Roman knowledge of the coastlands of north-western Europe increased the Cassiterides melted away in the Atlantic mists whence they had been conjured." (South West to AD1000 P186)

Tintagel

Later on in history, the south west peninsula was the last part of England to hold out against the Saxon invaders following the Roman withdrawal. The struggles of this time remain in some of the legends of the region. King Arthur is a semi-mythical figure, who may or may not have been a warlord leading the defence against the Saxons. The Tamar Valley between Devon and Cornwall marks the ancient "front line," and Tingtagel a ruined castle on the Cornish coast is sometimes claimed as King Arthur's birth place. Whether or not any of these legends have basis in fact, they have become part of the identity of the area, and in that sense King Arthur really does wield a powerful sword.

Still further on in history Cornwall became an important centre during the Industrial Revolution. The rock here is rich in tin, and in the nineteenth century the mines of the south west produced a large proportion of the world's tin. This was the same tin that may or may not have been the basis for the myth of the Tin Islands.