Talking Location with author Fenella Gentleman – Mevagissey and South Cornwall

19th June 2018

#TalkingLocationWith…... author Fenella Gentleman – MEVAGISSEY AND THE SOUTH CORNWALL COAST, the setting for her novel The Reading Party.

I’ve stayed in many parts of Cornwall over the years, but am especially fond of Mevagissey and its surroundings, on the south coast.  They provide the setting for a week of ‘hard work and hard play’ amongst a group of students and dons from Oxford, in my novel The Reading Party, which draws on my own experience of such a retreat, back in the 1970s.  We revised in silence in a rambling clifftop house, had boisterous meals planning our escapades, and went for long walks in magnificent landscape. I never forgot it.

Mevagissey is easy to miss: it’s some 20 miles off the main road beyond Bodmin Moor (austerely beautiful), and you might think it’s not worth the detour.  Think again! It is a pretty fishing village, spilling over the hillsides around a harbour full of colourful working boats, and it is full of character.  I describe the arrival there in my novel, where a sparky young woman is narrating:

“By now we were all looking out of the windows, taking in the sombre greys of the stone buildings lifted by white-washed houses with slate roofs. Mevagissey was not as I’d expected; too big for a village but small and tight-knit for a town. There were glimpses of boats at the ends of the side alleys as we drove through, but we didn’t get the measure of the setting until we were above the bay and could look down to the harbour and across to the surrounding hills. Mevagissey had the air of a place created by tossing boulders into a valley and seeing where they settled: dwellings jammed against each other, streets irregular and narrow – everything lined up in a jumble to face the water, focused on fishing.”

The oldest buildings in Mevagissey had to withstand the elements: those in the most exposed locations are really solid.  I was particularly struck by the massive house below, which overlooks the quayside and the activity of the little port.  There’s a nod to it in The Reading Party, where I imagine it belonging to an 18^thcentury harbourmaster, who would have been a proud figure in the community.

Other houses, located at a decorous distance from the harbour, are more elegant.  The facade of this one (below) seems to me especially beautiful: I love the textures, the greys, and the way the brilliant white paint and glossy green foliage set off what might otherwise look dour on a dull day (which this was!).

I took some of the delicate detailing here, together with the weightiness of the harbour-side mansion, as the inspiration for ‘Carreck Loose’, the house in The Reading Party, which I imagine as built by the harbourmaster at the end of his career.  I move it to a nearby clifftop, where it is:

“a thundering imposition on the landscape, whose scale, proportion and sheer nerve suggested a confidence we’d long lost.  It completely dominated the grouping and more than held its own in the craggy landscape despite the majesty of the rock face below.”

You can see other elements of this fictional composite not far from Mevagissey.  Ideally you travel on foot: there’s a wonderful walk to be had going west along the coast for about six miles until you reach Dodman Point, where you might sensibly turn back.  (The National Trust website details this as the ‘Dodman Loop’.)

The route begins easily, passing by Chapel Point (below), with its cluster of 1930s arts and crafts buildings (the main house reputedly the inspiration for Daphne Du Maurier’s novel ‘The House on the Strand’).

I loved the idea of this spit, soft when approached from inland, craggy from the sides, and no doubt vicious if encountered from the sea.  There’s something of its arrangement in the location of my fictional house too.

Further along, after a not insignificant tramp, you reach Gorran Haven (in the more distant bay below), where the brutal potential of the sea is shown again: you can often find shingle from the beach strewn yards up the main street, and the doors and windows of the waterfront cottages are set deep in their stone walls.  The participants in the fictional reading party visit the pub in a village like this.

Beyond Gorran Haven the path takes you past the languorous Vault Beach where I swam as a student and, pretending exhaustion, was given a piggy back up the hill to Lamledra – the ‘real’ reading party house (still available as a holiday let).  Below is the view looking back at both from the far side.  In the novel this beach is just in view from the house, a constant temptation to everyone, as in real life.

A final push and you get to Dodman Point itself, where a large granite cross signals to sailors that the headland should be avoided.  If you were to walk along the coast for another day (on the horizon below) you’d reach Falmouth, which has a deep natural harbour and now houses Cornwall’s National Maritime Museum.  It was here that I learned about the Falmouth Packet Service, which took mail to and from the Empire.  This too crops up in my novel, as the main source of the harbourmaster’s wealth.

Thank you so much to Fenella for such a wonderful tour to Cornwall. You can of course buy her book through TripFiction and follow her on Twitter

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