Talking Location With … author Jane Johnson: West Penwith, CORNWALL

21st June 2022

#TalkingLocationWith …. Jane Johnson, author of The White Hare set in West Penwith, CORNWALL

THE WHITE HARE was a novel written in lockdown, here in my native Cornwall. Usually, my husband and I spend part of our year in Morocco. In February 2020, Abdel headed back to our mountain village ahead of me to sort out our little apartment – get the services up and running, air the rugs, and remove months of desert dust. I was packed and ready to join him. But news coming from China and then Italy was increasingly alarming and at last we both agreed it better that he come back to the UK and we would see what happened. Well, we never made it back to Morocco! And so I started thinking about writing another Cornish book, one for which I did not need to travel, except in my mind.

THE WHITE HARE is set in the far southwest of Cornwall (as my mother would say, ‘proper Cornwall’), in the area known as West Penwith. Abdel and I know the coast here well. One part of the walk from Mousehole to Lands End passes through a particularly lovely wooded valley. The stream that runs down to the sea there has cut a deep path for itself through rocky channels. You can sense the passage of thousands of years of life there, and despite its beauty, it has a melancholy air, as if it has witnessed tragedies.

One day, Abdel had an odd experience there: crossing a stile, he suddenly felt chilled and his skin horripilated – arms, back, legs rising in gooseflesh. Then there came a sudden whoosh of white light that raced past him through the canopy of leaves and headed at speed down through the valley towards the sea. It had no discernible form, but it was definitely ‘there’ – not a sudden breeze, or a bird. He was left feeling unnerved. I, too, had felt a presence in the same place, a sense of being observed, and not necessarily in a totally benign way. I guess it’s worth saying at this point that neither of us is particularly woo-woo or fervently believe in the supernatural; but when he told me this, the hairs rose on the back of my neck in recognition of the sensation.

Cornwall is a land replete with legends, folklore, and tall tales. It wears its ancient history close to the surface – stone circles, quoits, burial chambers, fogous, menhirs, saints’ wells, Celtic crosses. I was raised with that history, and my Cornish mother and grandmother instilled me with stories, and an awe for the landscape and everything it had seen across the millennia. I remembered snippets and images, but I needed more. So, I started to research the area.

I’m not going to name the valley or the nearest village, because this is a novel, and people live in these places. I don’t want them thinking, Oh lord, my house is haunted; or Oh no, that’s why my garden will not thrive; or I’m living in a cursed valley. But I can tell you that in the area I researched I found all sorts of fascinating facts: ancient hoards containing coins and objects from the ancient world; a massacre of the Cornish that took place in the tenth century; miraculous wells dedicated to pre-Christian goddesses, chambers that offer a doorway into other worlds. So many tales of spurned lovers, vengeful spirits, and tragic widows. And the legend of a white hare that runs through the woods and along the cliffs, portending doom…

Sense of place is key to this novel; and I hope (believe) I’ve done my local area justice. I know it intimately, and when you’re raised in such a strange and magical place, you feel it in your marrow. When you walk it frequently, you know every turn in the path, every outcrop of granite, every tangle of exposed roots, every little ancient clapper bridge; you watch the seasons change the scenery and are powerfully aware of the cycle of life – when the first leafbuds appear, when the woods are clothed in bluebells, when the baby ravens fledge, when the seal pups leave the beaches, when the summer flowers go over, when the seasonal storms blow in.

West Penwith is a magical place when the sun shines upon it; but when the shadows fall, it can be eerie, as my characters – interlopers into this landscape – Magdalena, her grown daughter Mila, and Mila’s daughter Janey are about to find out…

Jane Johnson

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