Three Cornish Landscapes

By Richard Skinner:

i. Over Mevagissey Harbour

from pitch-black night
the first to encroach 
the horizon
a strip of milk-blue
seeping in minutes
into electric cobalt
then comes peach 
bleeding into pink-white, thus
re-enacting day
growing, glowing light 
develops the harbour
spots of red & orange buoys first
then boat names, shop fronts
no clouds yet manifest
the last to drift from  
darkness—
the gift of granite 
& gneiss

*

ii. At Chapel Point

Or sun rising
is a bath of 
golden acid, 
pure voltage, it 
baffles us with 
its infinite patience,
the great silence 
yellow turns to blue 
the day peals by 
autoharp of light 
later
curtain of winter
light, stopped
(hush/bloom)
into the simmerdim,
solvitur ambulando—stride side by side
into the west
Come 

*

iii. Polkerris Bay

coming down 
off the cliff 
through the trees
a bundle of stone buildings 
tantalise below
the setting sun 
scintillates 
through a tangle of 
miraculous leaves 
and the whole scene 
is an abstract painting 
of green on red
the wood spews us out 
onto the beach   
the small bay is a tight curl
with one harbour wall
tiny waves break like ripcords
on virgin sand
there is no depth, everything is on a flat surface 
the bright sky is a pulsing membrane
the kettle drum sun 
hums and all the world 
could plunge into it
at any moment

***

Richard Skinner has published six books of poems. His next collection, White Noise Machine, is out with Salt in June 2023. A great deal of his work has to do with his love of long distance walking and a sense of place. He and his wife spent December 2022 on retreat in Mevagissey, where these poems were written. 

Richard’s website

Photo Essay: Nancekuke, by Michael Crocker

By Michael Crocker:

Nancekuke is situated on an isolated cliff top between the villages of Portreath and Porthtowan on the north coast of Cornwall. With uninterrupted horizons and far-reaching coastal views, it is an alluring and beautiful space to visit.

In the 1950’s, Nancekuke was the home of a British government chemical defence establishment where 20 tonnes of Sarin nerve gas were secretly manufactured. By the 1970’s, the site was cleared, with the toxic manufacturing facility being levelled and then buried on site in disused mine shafts. Today, the site continues to be the operated by the Ministry of Defence and is now known as Remote Radar Head Portreath. With a disturbing history, Nancekuke remains shrouded in relative secrecy.

The project documents Nancekuke and its surrounding area as it is found today. The rugged natural beauty of the coast is juxtaposed with a secretive and sinister past, leaving the informed visitor to contest opposing identities of place. The images offer the viewer conflicting interpretations of place; those of beauty, serenity and nature are challenged by remnants of a sinister past, where a human desire to kill and to harness science for widespread destruction remain ever present within the landscape.

The Nancekuke project records the rugged vistas and the ever-changing seascape of the area, whilst acknowledging it as a place with a destructive and unsettling history when viewed through a contemporary lens.

About the photographer: Michael Crocker’s creative practice is centred around photography of the landscape and the agency that can be formed between place, artist and visual outcome. His work creates a visual response to the phenomenological link between spatial experience and consciousness and is often informed by literary sources recording experiences of place. The notion of what we consider place to be within space is an area of interest within his image making.