By Corey Sandler
We sailed out of sprawling, cosmopolitan, ultra-hip, skyscraping and monumental London and made our first port of call at little, stubbornly uncool, and decidedly old-style Fowey, Cornwall.
This is not a bad thing.
Agatha Christie was born not far from here in Torquay, and with her success lived in a fine Queen Anne estate on the River Dart in Devon. If you are a fan—like my wife—when you visit Fowey you keep expecting to find Miss Marple sitting in a window seat with her knitting and watching every passerby.
Cornwall forms the southwestern tip of the mainland of Great Britain. A bit further west, off Penzance, are the Isles of Scilly which catch just enough of a warm ocean current to be one of the most temperate climates in the U.K.
This part of Britain was inhabited as long ago as the Palaeolithic era of hundreds of thousands years ago.
I went today with guests for a ride on the Bodmin and Wenford Railroad, the oldest steam-powered standard gauge line in the UK. After checking out the coal-fired firebox, we chugged through the countryside with a proper Cornish Cream Tea on the table of the first class compartment.
The name Cornwall comes from combining two different terms from separate languages. The Romans called the Celtic tribe in the region the Cornovii.
It could come from a Celtic or Latin words meaning horn, a reference to the shape of the peninsula in one theory, or to their worship of a “horned god” in another.
In the 6th and 7th centuries, the name Cornubia was given a suffix by the Anglo-Saxons: Wealas, meaning “Romanized foreigners.”
Corn-wealas, or Cornwall.
And it is from the same word, Waelas, that we get the name for the region of England now known as Wales.
It was the place of the foreigners.
Today it is the place of the Cornish, although sometimes overwhelmed by the visitors who come by ship, car, and other conveyances.
All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com
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