‌Two

‘Walk, and Be Merry’

‘Never scramble your toes about, where toes have no business to be.’

Wilkie Collins, 1850

Wilkie Collins,
Plymouth to Lamorna Cove, July and August 1850

In July 1850 the twenty-six-year-old Wilkie Collins was travelling west from London to Plymouth, ensconced in one of the well-groomed carriages of the Great Western Railway (I’m guessing it was first class – Wilkie liked to live it large), on his way to Cornwall with a friend, the artist Henry Charles Brandling, to write a book about ‘a part of your own country which is too rarely visited and too little known’. Rambles Beyond Railways was the descriptive title, and the plan was to ‘wander hither and thither, in a zig-zag course’, out of reach of railways, highways, stagecoaches, timetables and guidebooks, taking note with sketchbook and pen of the local characters and scenery. In 1850 Plymouth was literally the end of the line; in fact, according to Wilkie, the only other place left on earth that wasn’t yet inundated with travel books was ‘Kamtschatka’ – and for practical reasons (he said ‘patriotic’), Wilkie had chosen to set his own travel book in Cornwall. ‘Even the railway stops short at Plymouth, and shrinks from penetrating to the savage regions beyond!’ he trumpeted, in a manner calculated to send shivers down the spine of any modern-day marketing department. There was nothing anyone could ever tell Wilkie about how to promote his own books.

Things were looking up for Wilkie in the summer of 1850. His first published novel had appeared in February – Antonina, a spicy Gothic tale of feuding brothers set in the last days of Rome – and he was basking in the afterglow of a slew of positive reviews. (Better, he wrote in the introduction to the 1861 edition, than anything he had experienced since.) Also in February, his first play, A Court Duel, had been staged at a small theatre in Dean Street, with Wilkie awarding himself the minor part of a courtier. He had by now definitively abandoned a half-hearted plan (more his anxious father’s than his own) to become a lawyer or indeed (his father’s earlier plan) a clerk in the tea trade, and the trip to Cornwall was Wilkie’s way of announcing, to himself and others, that he was determined to make his living as a writer. A travel book must have seemed like a canny next step: a modest way of sliding into the literary scene, in a genre that had predictably solid sales. With Henry Brandling providing the illustrations, they hoped to knock together a guide to a little-known part of Britain and, with luck, have it on the shelves in time for Christmas.

The railways were relatively new to Britain, but by 1850 about 6,000 miles of track had already been laid; that is, a staggering 5,900 more than had been there just twenty years earlier. Despite complaints about the noise and dirt, people were adapting fast to the presence of this transformative technology. Of course, progress was patchy and not all the track was actually connected to the network. Some of the railway companies were even using different gauges and, right up to the 1850s, different times (the GWR, where Wilkie rattled and lolled, used an ultra-wide gauge; and most cities ran to a local time that could be several minutes behind or ahead of London). But the railways had opened up Britain, connecting villages and valleys to the towns and cities with a timetabled ease that would have been inconceivable a generation earlier. People and goods were on the move and the country was shifting and shrinking in the minds of its inhabitants. In fact, the roll-out of the railways was so rapid in mid-nineteenth-century Britain that if you fast-forward 100 years, to a time when Enid, Gillian and Imogen were travelling home by train to Beaconsfield from their holiday in Swanage, the network they used was essentially the same one that Wilkie explored 100 years earlier. They could have intersected at Bath, Reading or even Didcot, all stations that were up and running in the year 1850.

Wilkie was never a fan of the discomfort of railways. Indeed, despite the persona he would adopt in Rambles Beyond Railways, he probably didn’t much care for the outdoors either. Here he is describing the countryside in a letter written to his friend Charles Ward just three months earlier:

cursed confused chirping of birds – an unnecessarily large supply of fresh air – and a d–d absence of cabs, omnibuses, circulating libraries, public houses, newspaper offices, pastry cooks shops, and other articles of civilisation.

Or maybe Wilkie is showing off, a young man feeding lines to a sophisticated older friend. But he was always a Londoner at heart, more so than any other Victorian novelist, even his friend Charles Dickens, who moved to London as a child and split his time between the capital and Kent in middle age. Wilkie had London baked into his bones. He was born in Cavendish Street, Marylebone and he died at home in Wimpole Street, aged sixty-five, just a short stroll (or anguished, morphine-clouded, gout-ridden hobble) from his place of birth. He always liked to travel, though (to Paris and the English coast, especially), and it was probably this trip to Cornwall that sparked his lifelong love of the sea.

Wilkie and Henry were heading to Plymouth, where the train line ended, because they planned to take a boat from there to St Germans, over the River Tamar (there was no useful bridge at that time – and even now you’ll find the ferry helpful), and then walk to Land’s End and back. Both men had brought knapsacks and walking sticks and we can also assume that Wilkie was dressed with bohemian eccentricity. He was a small man (short even by Victorian standards), with the tiniest little hands and feet. Once, when he was staying with friends in the country, his shoes fell apart and the only replacement pair that could be found in the house belonged to an even tinier great-aunt. Not that Wilkie cared: he knew he was odd-looking, but he had an eager, sweet temperament and he enjoyed the sparkle of attention and conversation that flowed from his unusual appearance and calculatedly contrary opinions.

There’s a picture of Wilkie hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, painted in 1850 by his friend the pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, the year of the trip to Cornwall. Wilkie is seated, gazing thoughtfully into the distance, his little ring-clad fingers pressed together at the tips (although thanks to Millais they’re not that little ), small round glasses (he was short-sighted), and wearing a sober dark jacket (but with a gold-seamed cravat, watch chain and shirt studs). There’s not much sign of the large bump that rose from his high forehead, the result, it was said, of his own difficult birth. He looks unusually neat – and serious. Young, of course. Maybe even rather depressed (although perhaps that’s how Millais rendered ‘thoughtful intellectual’). What the portrait gives no sign of is Wilkie’s extreme restlessness. By every other account, he was sharp, hungry and a notorious fidget, brimful of ideas and passions, interested in everything and everyone, courteous to others, certainly, but also sure enough of himself to fill the railway carriage with chatter and schemes and urgent talk. Perhaps Henry Brandling was pleased to find that the train was at last pulling into Plymouth, after its long, lurching journey from London.

The two friends headed for Devonport and there they found William Dawle, a boatman who could row them to St Germans, although he insisted they first stop at a tavern in Saltash, just across the Tamar, while they waited for the tide to turn. This suited Wilkie – he was eager to go with the flow – and for the next couple of hours they poured beer into Dawle, and themselves, and even Dawle’s friend (an immense but catatonically drunk ‘shrimper’ who was meant to be helping row the boat, or at the very least entertain them with a song, even though very early in the long evening he lost the ability to move or speak). The place, says Wilkie, was the only light in the surrounding darkness (just think, for a moment, how dark that Cornish night was) and, like all good taverns surely were in those days, it was in ‘festive uproar’, the entire population of Saltash squeezed into two small rooms, ‘shrimpers, sailors, fishermen and watermen, all “looming large” through a fog of tobacco’. The local women were there too, brushing Wilkie’s and Henry’s feet as they left, claiming it was an old Saltash tradition to guarantee their safe return, and all for just a few more coins. It sounds like they were royally ripped off – and happy with it.

When they got to St Germans, with everything closed and dark, Dawle denounced it as ‘a damned strap of a place’. The landlady of the only inn had to be called from her bed (Dawle bellowing from the street that his companions were ‘right-down gentlemen, and no mistake’), but at last the travellers were able to get to bed and sleep through their first night in Cornwall. The next day, once Henry had sketched St Germans church, they hoisted their knapsacks and set off to walk eight miles to the fishing village of Looe.

By ten o’clock that night Wilkie and Henry were collapsed on a hill outside Looe, with Wilkie going on (and on) about how wonderful it is to walk when you want to really see and understand a place. How blisters don’t matter (just sponge your feet with cold vinegar and pop on another pair of socks). How a knapsack becomes your friend, once your muscles have hardened. And who needs trains, or horses, or stagecoaches anyway? When you can be out and talking to the locals. Or chipping rocks and collecting leaves. This was probably so much hot air (Wilkie had to take to his bed when he went on a walking tour with the genuinely hyperactive Dickens seven years later), but I’m still feeling guilty as I roll my car down the narrow road, squeezed between high wooded banks, into Looe and the vast car park on its eastern bank.

Looe is divided into two – west and east – linked by a famous bridge that is no longer here. Well, there’s a bridge, of course, but it’s not the one that Wilkie made a beeline for as soon as he could. The original was built in 1411, had fourteen arches (‘no two on the same scale’, says Wilkie) and it even had a small chapel in the centre (gone by Wilkie’s day). Celia Fiennes trotted across the bridge in 1698, counting off the fourteen arches and noting that Looe had ‘a great many little houses all of stone’ (it still does), and Turner painted it in 1811, but in 1853, just three years after Wilkie’s visit, the bridge was dismantled to make way for something less inconveniently medieval. I’ll bet the town misses it, now that it’s no longer a busy port for the fishing and mining industries, and its main trade is tourism. But how were any of us to know that our future wealth would depend on hoarding our past? Any true Victorian would have laughed at the idea.

I’m here on an alarmingly hot day in April. I have been steeping myself in Rambles Beyond Railways for so long that it comes as a surprise to find that Looe is full of cars, buses, neon hairdressers and streets surging with people in branded T-shirts and sandals. What on earth was I expecting? Horse-drawn carts and a pilchard industry? When Wilkie was here, the population of Looe was ‘some fourteen hundred; and … as good-humoured and unsophisticated a set of people as you will meet with anywhere’. No doubt he was happy to be out of London, and fired with holiday enthusiasm. He was certainly excited about Looe’s shops:

Let no man rashly say he has seen all that British enterprise can do for the extension of British commerce, until he has carefully studied the shop-fronts of the tradesmen of Looe [selling] … such cosmopolitan miscellanies as wrinkled apples, dusty nuts, cracked slate pencils and fly-blown mock jewellery …

Oh … I see.

But honestly, I wouldn’t want you to think that Wilkie was just another sarcastic Londoner, chuckling at the rustic lives of the hay-headed locals. There’s so much more to him than that, even if he did find it hard to resist an easy joke. He’s still young – and the currents of the time flowed with brutish certainty. Later, Wilkie would do what he could to divert them.

These days the shops of Looe would give Wilkie genuine palpitations. There’s no sign of any ‘dusty nuts’, but there’s plenty of other seaside innuendo on offer, not to mention Cornish crafts, cream, pots, pixies and pasties. Since Wilkie trod these narrow streets we have come an inconceivably long way in our understanding of what it takes to extract money from a casual passer-by and although we all think we’re sophisticated enough to spot and resist the obvious temptations, it isn’t long before I find myself tucking into ‘Cornwall’s best Cornish pasty’ (it’s not), and browsing a shop enticingly decorated with luminous buckets, nets, beach balls and spades, before leaving with a baseball cap and a pair of shorts (well, who knew it would be so hot?). Anyway, when you’re visiting a place that is so reliant on tourism, isn’t it your duty to buy something? To keep feeding the beast.

Looe on a bright blue Saturday in April is all sunshine and seagulls. There’s an easy, aimless drift to the holiday crowds. Small boats sway and duck on the tidal river and people gather at the banks to watch – it’s low tide now – sitting at café and pub tables or shuffling up and down the western side, from the fishermen’s wharf to the nearby beach, gazing at the boats and imagining another life. The air is salty fresh. Some of the boats are offering deep sea fishing (mackerel! shark!) or a trip to nearby Looe Island, where once, long ago, there was a great and ineradicable infestation of rats. It was only ended, or so Wilkie tells us, when every person then living in Looe – men, women and children – got up early one morning and caught, cooked and ate the whole damn lot, with vindictive relish, ferociously smothered in onions.

Rats or no rats, I’m eating a huge white doorstep of a bacon sarnie, perched on the side of an overturned barrel at the front of a cheery quayside café, listening to my fellow customers get to know each other. Two of them had recognized each other’s Kentish accents – and so, I am pleased to say, had I. North Kent, probably, close to the south-east London border, although I’m no Henry Higgins; I just happen to have grown up in Kent. In fact, could Professor Higgins even pull off his party trick now, of placing the status and provenance of any British person he met, based only on the way they spoke? His (or Shaw’s) point was to expose English snobbery, although you would think, wouldn’t you, that with the amount of exposure it has received over the centuries English snobbery would have shrivelled and died a long time ago. Wilkie, though, lived in a time when the children of Looe could ‘congregate together in sober little groups, and hold mysterious conversations, in a dialect which we cannot understand’. No one here today seems to be speaking a Cornish dialect (and the last native speakers of the original Cornish language had all died off by the time Wilkie arrived), but now I come to look about me, there aren’t even any children. Perhaps they’re all at the beach.

The elderly Kentish couple are in Looe on a train trip from home, and their new, younger friend is a Man of Kent who ‘moved down here five years ago’. His daughter and her husband ‘live in Spain now and are always posting food on Instagram’. ‘Oh,’ say the elderly couple, ‘our two grandkids live in Oz and are on holiday all the time. Thank heavens for Skype.’ I have Wilkie on my shoulder, listening to this strangeness, but I actually think what would strike him most (once he’d got used to the idea that his ‘all-conquering Railway’ had set everything and everyone in motion, and that so much and so many had been smoothed and spread across the globe, and once he’d stopped marvelling over our smartphones and motor cars, our plastic straws, bare legs and miraculous teeth), I think what Wilkie would notice is just how subdued the town of Looe has become.

Looe is still, as Wilkie wrote, ‘one of the prettiest places in England’. It has a lovely (thank you, Enid) holiday air and a zip and sparkle to its streets. But it’s no longer unusual in the way that Wilkie once found it. Of course it’s not – but when Wilkie was here he found himself swept up into a boat race and bazaar when ‘all the women fluttered out in [the sun’s] beams, gay as butterflies. What dazzling gowns, what flaring parasols, what joyous cavalcades on cart-horses, did we see on the road that led to the town! What a mixture of excitement, confusion, anxiety, and importance, possessed everybody!’ Until, predictably, it rained with shattering force, and everyone raced for the tea rooms, except for three German musicians who continued to honk gloomily through their brass instruments, and the usual ‘inveterate loungers’, and ‘seafaring men who cared nothing for weather’. The party continued indoors, with everyone bawling and rushing around with ‘steaming teakettles and craggy lumps of plumcake’. I’m told this is now a fair description of Looe on New Year’s Eve, with added strong lager; but on the day I visit I’m just one of a low-decibel crowd of middle-aged tourists, drifting through the tourist shops, fretting and cooing over the silver charms and the lace.

Wilkie took the rain as a sign to leave Looe. He had stayed much longer than he’d intended, kept in thrall at the inn by ‘the smiles of our fair chambermaid and the cookery of our excellent hostess’. Even today there’s something more to Looe than its tourism; at the very least, you will find that the fishermen still gather at the wharf to sell dressed crabs and fresh mackerel. Many are heavily bearded in a muscular, salt-lashed way that’d put a Shoreditch flâneur to shame. Wilkie, at this stage in his life, was still clean-shaven – he was yet to grow the all-encompassing beard that would come to dominate and define his appearance. That came three years later, on a trip to Italy with his new friend Charles Dickens and an artist called Augustus Egg – all of them beardless at the time – and I think it was Wilkie, if I’m reading the letters right, who first grew a tentative moustache (mocked by Dickens) that over the next few months spread and enveloped his cheeks and chin and then tumbled in profusion to his chest and eventually flared and crackled like a hairy living counterpoint to his great domed forehead. Beards became immensely popular with Victorian men in the 1850s as a way of flaunting their imperial masculinity, and even, it is said, as a tribute to the soldiers of the Crimean War (who had no way of shaving), although I suspect that Wilkie’s era-defining whiskers probably had more to do with laziness than anything else. He always dressed with flamboyant disregard for convention, but he was a notorious sloven. Especially once the laudanum took hold.

Wilkie and Henry headed north for Liskeard and I speed after them. We pass under disused railway bridges and race by steep banks of young grasses and ferns and great floods of primroses, dizzying, oceanic outpourings of yellow that drag at my heart. We are leaving the narrow coombes and dense woods of Looe far behind. The sky widens and stretches – the colour seems to leach out of it – and then I know I’m on the right track because ‘a single turn in the road brought us suddenly to the limits of trees, meadows, and cottages; and displayed before us, with almost startling abruptness, the magnificent prospect of a Cornish Moor’.

Wilkie dismissed Liskeard as an ‘abomination of desolation’. After encountering ‘a nonagenarian old woman with a false nose, and an idiot shaking with the palsy’, he checked into the worst inn in Britain, where the landlady reluctantly handed him and Henry two sheets each and left them to make their beds in a room with nothing but six immense wooden tables (‘like dissecting tables waiting for “subjects”’). We’ve all been there. I remember staying with Anna in a B&B in Kingsteignton in south Devon in the late 1980s where the smell of rancid chip fat mingling with air freshener was so powerful that I actually wept pine-scented tears of oil. The landlady could not have been kinder. ‘Don’t worry about Norman,’ she chirruped, as she steered us towards the stairs and past a small dark room in which some large, dank animal seemed to shift and stir. ‘He’s normally the life and soul of the party. But he’s been a bit off colour of late.’ I spent the night sweating and tangled in the nylon sheets, waiting for Norman’s soft tread on the carpeted floor, his hand on the doorknob and a rattling, unhinged whisper: ‘It’s time to PARTY’. But when we got down the next morning, as early as was decent, there was Norman at the breakfast table, a dowdy man with sad eyes and a repertoire of heartbreaking jokes. We each had a fried egg slopping in oil – and were far too polite to turn it away. Wilkie should count himself lucky for Liskeard’s corned beef, about which he made such a dreadful fuss.

I stop for lunch in an empty pub in St Cleer (where is everyone?), and accompany Wilkie down the hill to the ruined remnants of St Cleer’s Well, a fifteenth-century shrine dedicated, so Wilkie tells us, to the honour of St Clare, the twelfth-century founder of an order of nuns (the ‘Poor Clares’) who gave up all their worldly goods to pursue a life of healing, charity and prayer. Wilkie mooched around the well, while Henry sketched, pondering how things had changed since the days of St Clare, nuzzling at the crumbling, ivy-clad walls (the Victorians loved a good ruin), musing on the power of the ancient church that once so innocently linked ‘the beauty of Nature and the beauty of Religion’, the loss of faith in his own day and the ‘melancholy language of desolation and decay’. And I find myself doing the same, except now the well (enfolding its holy spring) has lost even more of its old magic. There are new houses here, crowding right up to the surrounding low stone wall; several cars are parked a couple of yards from the well itself; and just across the road children are shouting at the school gates (it’s the end of the school day), although this is a cheering sound. Wilkie wrote about the ‘cottage-girls’ who greeted him shyly by this well, over 150 years ago.

Wilkie was offered a drink from the holy waters by an old woman (she brought him a glass for the water and a rose from her garden) and he wrote that the only thing that hadn’t changed in 400 years was the little pool itself, still ‘pure and tranquil as in the bygone days’, although I’m sorry to report that all you’ll see now is a sludgy puddle with a couple of plastic bottles rammed up underneath an iron grille. What’s more, according to John Betjeman’s Shell Guide to Cornwall, St Clare had nothing to do with St Cleer – the latter was a Celtic saint whose shrine was presumably placed on a much older site of worship. Something pagan. So Wilkie was all over the place, although he surely has a point when he says:

There has been something of sacrifice as well as of glory, in the effort by which we, in our time, have freed ourselves from what was superstitious and tyrannical in the faith of the times of old – it has cost us the loss of much of the better part of that faith which was not superstition, and of more which was not tyranny.

And here indeed stands Wilkie, at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, with the furnaces lit and the iron wheels churning, straying into the lost corners of ancient Cornwall with the railways howling at his back; and there’s Watt and Darwin and Marx just ahead or all around; and everything is aflame and unmoored and on the move; and Wilkie, even though he’s right in the middle of it, can see the revolutionary power of what they are doing. And it is! It’s dazzling. The planet-stripping energy and wealth that is being unleashed. And it is also heroic, the courage that is needed to create these things and to face down the ingrained tyranny of the old beliefs. Although, as Wilkie sips his water by the holy well, he understands that something else is also being left behind, unnoticed in the noise and excitement. And now, today, I’m not even sure we know what that was. It’s not faith or God. But there’s something. A continuum or a connection has been broken and here we are, 150 years later, surging forward, full steam ahead, all alone and seemingly out of choices. Or no longer in any position to choose.

I don’t know. Perhaps all I can say for certain is that I’m staring into the once holy waters of St Cleer and there are two discarded plastic bottles pressed up against an iron grille. So I pick them up. There’s got to be a recycling bin around here somewhere.

Wilkie’s father, William, was a moderately successful artist, painting in the traditional manner of the time. In 1822 he was commissioned to accompany King George IV on a trip to Scotland (where he arranged to meet and then married Wilkie’s exuberant mother, Harriet). As the years passed, William became a staid sort of man, obsessed with the finer points of religion, carving out a comfortable living, treading a conventional path: the kind of artist people turned to when they wanted a commemorative portrait or landscape, nothing to frighten the horses. Charles Dickens, flush with success from the publication of Nicholas Nickleby, became one of his clients in 1839, asking William to paint him ‘a seashore with figures’ for £100. Dickens met the father long before he knew the son.

As Wilkie drifted around St Cleer’s Well, he found himself lost in a reverie about his father. William had died three years earlier and Wilkie missed him, although he perhaps didn’t miss having to account for his time or choice of career. The money he’d been left was also useful (Harriet was holding William’s characteristically modest but solid estate, to share between Wilkie and his older brother, Charles). In 1836, when Wilkie was just twelve, William had taken his family to Italy and France for almost two years, interrupting Wilkie’s sporadic schooling and igniting a lifelong passion for travel, mystery, antique ruins and painting – and where, walking with his father, he ‘first learned to appreciate the beauties of Nature under guidance which, in this world, I can never resume’. When he returned to Rome seventeen years later, his travelling companions had to put up with a number of excitable tales that suggested it wasn’t only ancient ruins that Wilkie was exploring in his early teens. ‘Wilkie’, wrote Dickens in a letter to his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, ‘in a carriage one day, [gave us] a full account of his first love adventure. It was at Rome it seemed, and proceeded, if I may be allowed the expression, to the utmost extremities – he came out quite a pagan Jupiter in the business.’

The first thing to know about Wilkie, I am learning, is that he is a storyteller. In later years he would be acclaimed as a man who could weave a thrilling tale and puncture some of the most absurd hypocrisies of the age, especially when it came to the inequitable treatment of women; but it is also true that, even as he produced his sensational, campaigning novels from his solitary home in Marylebone, he was secretly installing one, and then two, mistresses (and their families) in separate houses around the corner. It’s like my mother said, a man with a beard always has something to hide. Just ask Enid. In 1838, when the Collins family returned at last from their foreign trip, and the fourteen-year-old Wilkie found himself enrolled in a grim little boarding school in Highbury, the only way he could keep the dormitory bully from beating him every night was by telling him ever more fantastical stories. Entertain me! Or feel the pain. Wilkie was a proper little Scheherazade all his life, but I imagine the habit started here.

You’ll understand, then, if we don’t take everything in Rambles Beyond Railways at face value. With the day getting older, Wilkie and Henry headed north, deeper into the Cornish moor. They passed Trethevy Quoit, a Neolithic dolmen that looks rather like one of the advent houses that my family attempts to make every year out of slabs of gingerbread and icing, the main difference being that ‘The Place of Graves’, as Wilkie called it, has been standing on this spot for many thousands of years and still hasn’t disintegrated into a slew of sticky pastry. It’s peaceful here in the late April sunshine. Fields and hedgerows have grown up around the stones – and Trethevy Quoit is so much part of the landscape that, despite its size, a dog walker strolls past and doesn’t even spare a glance. New housing has been built a few yards away, just beyond a wire fence and a ditch. I look over and there’s a woman in white sitting on the nearest balcony, sipping a mug of tea and reading a novel (there is! I mean, it’s cream-coloured leisurewear or something, but still: she’s a woman; in white). And she’s close enough to start a whispered conversation. ‘Is that the road to London?’ I want to ask ‘with nervous, uncertain lips’, but I’m worried she might start giving me directions (why indeed wouldn’t she?), when I don’t actually want to go to London.

When Wilkie was here the Quoit stood alone in ‘a barren country’, but then (and now) its ‘aboriginal simplicity … renders it an impressive, almost a startling object to look on’. Startling, yes. In many other countries there’d be a car park and a hullaballoo of kiosks and cafés; here you can jump up and take a restorative nap on the Quoit’s sloping roof, a great twenty-tonne hunk of immovable granite. And yet, well over 4,000 years ago, someone somehow lifted these immense stones and placed them here. No one knows why.

Wilkie loved mysteries. His stories are constructed out of intricate layers of conspiracy, confusion and dread. For most of the time, the truth is elusive, or teased at, or obfuscated by a multitude of voices. There is a sensational secret at the heart of his most famous novel, The Woman in White, but to get to it his characters have to unpick a tangle of subterfuge and lies, before they can approach the chilling truth. Along the way, Wilkie exposes and rails against some contemporary injustices, although he’s no Dickens. In fact, can you imagine Dickens walking past the now defunct Caradon Mine, as Wilkie did soon after leaving Trethevy Quoit, and having nothing more to say than: ‘far beneath the embankment on which we stood, men, women and children were breaking and washing ore in a perfect marsh of copper-coloured mud and copper-coloured water.’ Children? Who cares that the water is ‘copper-coloured’? There are children working in the mine. Dickens would have had a letter to The Times out by nightfall and a novel in the shops the following year.

No, what Wilkie cares about is the story. No one else but Dickens could write such nail-biting serial cliffhangers (Dickens knew this and used Wilkie as much as he could in his magazines, even hiring him as a staff writer on Household Words for a while). Wilkie was aware of criticisms in his lifetime that he sacrificed character for plot, that he was more concerned with a rattling good yarn than he was in exploring the complexities of human affairs, and he even self-consciously tried to do something about it with his later novels. But I don’t think the criticisms are remotely fair. Just look at the way he uses different narrators in The Woman in White to build an intricate picture of the characters’ thoughts and lives. He had passion and empathy. What other (bearded) Victorian writer could have created the heroic Marian, who drives the investigation into her cousin’s sinister husband, even if Wilkie almost ruins his proto-feminism by giving her ‘a masculine mouth and jaw’ and dark down on her upper lip that is ‘almost a moustache’? He does the same in his detective story, The Moonstone, mixing perspectives, giving women a voice, but this time thickening the fog of mystery with a blow-back of opiates.

By the time he was writing The Moonstone in 1867, Wilkie was irrevocably addicted to laudanum. (If you’re wondering about the recipe, it’s a tincture, and easy to prepare: simply dilute one part opium or morphine with ten parts brandy; flavour with a dash of cayenne pepper, ether, hashish or anything else that comes to hand; shake; dose yourself generously as pain or inclination dictate.) Key passages of this dreamily intricate work were dictated to Harriet, the daughter of his first mistress, Caroline Graves, when he was in great pain and desperately swigging on the drug. It was said that when Wilkie was on a trip to Switzerland, he had to send a friend to go and buy his supplies from numerous separate chemists, because individually they couldn’t provide him with the quantities he needed. By 1885 he had been taking so much for so long that his surgeon said he was consuming enough ‘to kill a dozen people’.

Wilkie, like any good addict, always said that he wasn’t affected, but from very early middle age he suffered from gout (cripplingly), headaches, rheumatic pains, agues and weeping eyes and couldn’t survive without regular infusions. He was living in a time when laudanum was freely available over the counter; and had grown up in a household where his mother, Harriet, could say to her anguished friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who, to be fair, had a much more tortured relationship with the drug than Wilkie ever did): ‘Mr Coleridge, do not cry; if the opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go and get it?’

Amen to that.

I wonder if there was any blister-soothing laudanum in Wilkie’s knapsack on this walking tour of Cornwall? He was certainly familiar with the drug two years later, when he wrote to his mother from a seaside holiday with Dickens and his family that ‘the sea air acts on me as if it was all distilled from laudanum’. Perhaps the sea air was enough this time. He was a young man and a vigorous one: and he covered the miles. I’m struggling in his wake as we make our way over the moor, with the rock formation known as the Cheesewring as our goal, although for now I take a breather (as did Wilkie) among the three ancient standing stone circles known as ‘the Hurlers’. The stones in one of the circles are remarkably well preserved, although it seems a curtailed attempt was made to re-erect some of them in the 1930s, so it’s hard to know how many of them were standing when Wilkie passed by.

Wilkie reckoned there were only two possible theories for their existence: they are either the remains of ‘a Druid Temple’; or they are the petrified bodies of local men who went out to play ball on the Sabbath Day (the ‘hurlers’) and were turned into pillars of stone for their wickedness. He preferred the latter explanation; and it’s possible, of course; although I also have to break it to him that the stones are almost certainly not the remains of a ‘Druid Temple’ either – or rather, they are not the creation of what we now think of as Druids. I have a killjoy booklet by Paul White to hand, Druids in the South-West?, and he is adamant that the Druids had nothing to do with the ‘building of the West Country’s megaliths’. ‘Druids’, with their golden scythes and mistletoe and white robes, that is; and their belief that all living beings’ souls are connected and intermingle at our births and deaths. They probably came much later than these stones – and were obliterated by the Roman armies at Anglesey. Although, really, what do we know? Only that we are treading a land where the Druids and their ideas are making yet another tentative comeback.

A stout middle-aged man in faded, high-crotched orange dungarees, with dark curly hair cascading out from underneath a Breton sailor’s cap, is striding purposefully around these stone circles, directing an elderly couple where to sit (his parents I guess), and all the while talking loudly about himself and his needs and desires and hopes and gripes. It has to be his parents. No one else would put up with it. His decrepit father totters off to go and sit by himself next to a stone at the opposite edge of the circle and I watch with an uprush of sympathy as he painfully and oh-so-slowly lowers himself to the ground. The babbling man’s mother remains with her son and she listens mutely to his endless, energetic complaints, many of them directed at his father: ‘What’s he doing?’ ‘Why’s he sitting there?’ ‘Why doesn’t he come back?’ ‘He’s too old.’ Wilkie also talked a great deal, in an easy, sweet-tempered flow, although he was interested in what other people had to say, and he found an outlet for his teeming brain in the books he created. Perhaps Babbling Man is one of our greatest living authors, or artists. Not that it matters, of course; we must all find our way out. But not to be able to fall silent in this wondrous place, when the wind drops and the late April sun caresses us with soft paws and strokes the lichen-coated granite and an intoxicating aroma of bog and spent sunshine is rising from the tussocky earth; and in fact when the souls of the Celts themselves might be here, in these stones and grasses, waiting to infuse us with some ancient, transformative magic … I mean, please; this is babbling agony.

To the Cheesewring, then – they’ll never follow us there. Wilkie described this tower of rocks, set on a pinnacle on the edge of the moor, as ‘the wildest and most wondrous of all the wild and wondrous structures in the rock architecture of the scene’. He went on: ‘If a man dreamt of a great pile of stones in a nightmare, he would dream of such a pile as the Cheesewring. All the heaviest and largest of the seven thick slabs of which it is composed are at the top; all the lightest and smallest at the bottom.’

As Wilkie and Henry approached the Cheesewring, they were waylaid by a roar of welcome from a gang of awesomely drunk Cornish sightseers. All men, it goes without saying. Henry (the nervous artist) bolted for cover, saying he had to go and sketch, so Wilkie was left alone to share the lads’ beer, and one of them ‘violently uncorked a bottle and directed half of its contents in a magnificent jet of light brown froth all over everybody’. A true Cornish welcome, they bellowed, although the beery bonhomie soon turned sour because Wilkie was so eager to get past them and up to the top. I only mention it because I’m not sure this sort of thing happens very often any more – at least not to me.

I scramble up the final hill as the sun sinks closer to the horizon and settle myself on some rocks, at the very top of the plateau, just back from the Cheesewring (or Wringcheese as it was called by the eighteenth-century antiquarian the Revd William Borlase). I think I’m alone and get quite a shock when a crow gives a half-strangled yelp and then grunts like a disaffected hog. What strange ghosts must lurk here? Almost immediately a Scottish couple emerges from behind a pile of granite. ‘Excuse me, but is this the Cheesewring?’ they ask, pointing to the rocks I’m sitting on. ‘Well, no,’ I say, gesturing down the hill at the seven large granite slabs, each one larger than the next, all precariously balanced on top of one another. ‘I think that is.’ We agree it is an extraordinary sight. And they wonder if I know how it got there, so I say: ‘I’m afraid everything I know is at least 150 years out of date, but according to Wilkie Collins (you know?), the Cheesewring was probably not built by Druids, as people once thought, but is a natural geological formation, although it’s possible the Druids may have cleared away a few stones and some detritus to give it its shape. Also, the Druids almost certainly used the top of the Cheesewring to make speeches to their tribes – and made secret sacrifices up there.’ They take this strange and archaic explanation in their stride. They nod wisely. And then they disappear rapidly down the hill, leaving me to wonder if Wilkie would be pleased to think his erratically researched holiday book was still being quoted all these years later, and its dubious opinions absorbed and spread and repeated as gospel. Or perhaps the Scottish couple just thought I was unhinged.

I’ve been enjoying pottering around the eastern fringes of Cornwall, but it still comes as a relief when Wilkie all of a sudden plunges deeper into the county, rattling through the sixty-odd miles from Liskeard to Helston at the head of the Lizard Peninsula, without saying a word about any of it. Despite his earlier maunderings about the joys of hiking, I have a strong suspicion he and Henry may have taken a coach. Wilkie quotes Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy approvingly: ‘I think it very much amiss that a man cannot go quietly through a town and let it alone, when it does not meddle with him.’

Bad weather kept them trapped in Helston – ‘the dullest of towns’ – thinking dark thoughts about its inhabitants – ‘a riotous and drunken set’ – and its ‘superlatively ugly’ church. With the rain slenching down on Wilkie, it’s worth mentioning the popular theory, resisted by many, that weather shapes character. Nirad Chaudhuri believed it. Here he is in his book A Passage to England: ‘the weather has very largely entered into the formation of the Englishman’s mind, and the training of his sensibilities. It has made him responsive to changes in the environment, capable of meeting surprises of all kinds, both pleasant and unpleasant’. Or, to put it another way: ‘After experiencing the English weather I had no difficulty in understanding why Englishmen became so offensive in India, losing their usual kindliness … Their sense of proportion broke down.’

The only thing going for Helston, said Wilkie, was its festival, ‘the Furry’, held every year on 8 May, when the whole town dances all day and capers through the streets, hand in hand, garlanded with flowers and leaves. Or so he’d heard, although he never saw the thing (and was relying on Richard Polwhele’s 1803–8 History of Cornwall for a full account of ‘these extraordinary absurdities’). Wilkie could be supercilious about folk traditions, but the Furry was still going 100 years later when the surrealist artist, and local writer, Ithell Colquhoun visited in 1954 and 1955, and she relates how the town gathered to dance (especially the school children, but in the end everyone, including the local ‘worthies’), and she describes the dance winding up and down the streets and in and out of the flower-clad houses, while ‘the figure is executed as a foursome by the first two couples and so on down the chain’. Ithell was alert to mystic undercurrents, and she says that some locals thought the dance had originated in honour of the sun god, and was brought to Cornwall many thousands of years earlier by settlers from Egypt. True or not, in the 1950s the streets were also alive with jugglers, boxers, palmists, magicians and acrobats and Ithell found herself buying a remedy made from ‘holy thistle’ from ‘a Gypsy Lee’. When she opened the package later it contained some sage-green tablets, a pixie charm and an address in Lincolnshire ‘where one could write for advice’. The pills, she said, ‘smelled like the unguent of the witch-coven’. The sad fact is, Wilkie didn’t get to experience any of this – and nor did I. The key, it seems, is to visit Helston on 8 May; or otherwise avoid the town.

Wilkie was equally scathing about the next place he visited, mainly because it called itself ‘Lizard Town’ and he thought this absurd when it was no more than a few muddy little streets and rickety cottages, seething with ‘ducks, geese, cocks, hens, pigs, cows, horses, dunghills, puddles, sheds, peat-stacks, timber, nets’. Maybe someone was listening, because it’s just plain ‘Lizard’ on the Ordnance Survey map now, even though the number of houses has multiplied and the livestock and everything else has been tidied away, replaced by tubs and window boxes heavy with flowers and (on this hot, still, dusty day) a lingering aroma of chip fat. I wonder, as I wander up and down the few spruce streets, if David Icke has ever visited Lizard Town. You would think he should, because he believes (in case you haven’t been keeping up) that humanity is being ruled by a master race of lizards, who have disguised themselves as our leaders – and surely Lizard Town would be a good place to explore his theory. Although it does then occur to me that this may be exactly what they’re expecting.

When Wilkie was here the local mothers were holding a ‘small-pox’ party. Anyone with a baby was waiting at the inn for the local doctor, who had brought ‘a lot of fine fresh matter’ down from London and was going to vaccinate every baby he could lay his hands on. If you tried to do the same thing today the town would be in an internet-fuelled uproar, but in those days all you needed was a doctor’s certificate, some impressive whiskers and your word would be God’s. I can’t make up my mind which of Lizard’s two pubs was the smallpox inn, so I have a drink at both – and although the Top House seems most likely (it has an open, early Victorian feel), the woman behind the bar insists it wasn’t built until 1860, and I’m not going to argue. I then crack my head on one of the offensively low (fifteenth-century) beams in the Witchball and, like Wilkie (although what drove him out was the thought of the ‘fine fresh matter’), I hurry back into the sunshine.

If you live in a city (as most of us do), you will know what it is like to inhabit an atmosphere laced with diesel fumes, human detritus and grit. Strangely, we don’t generally notice the air that we breathe, unless we’re standing at a junction and a bus is coughing grey toxic particulate smog straight into our lungs. But the truth is that the city air is killing us. We all know it, even if we try to put that inconvenient fact to one side, along with so much else. Perhaps we’re waiting for a time when we’re less busy? Or, as if by magic – just like that! – a day when our governments are not working to placate the fossil fuel lobbyists. I mention it because the air on the walk to Lizard Point is so dizzyingly fresh, so sparklingly clean, so ozone-rich as it blasts in over the point from the south-west seas, that I can feel my brain being pummelled and scoured and positively derailed by the unaccustomed giddying glory of it all. This is the air – better than laudanum! – that would have transported Wilkie and Henry as they strolled along the narrow path, fringed with tamarisk and myrtle, that took them to ‘the southernmost land in England’. Breathe it – and weep.

Wilkie was excited to find that many footpaths in Cornwall run along the tops of the thick stone walls that divide the fields – and I am excited to find that this is sometimes still true. It is early afternoon and there are no clouds in the clear April sky. The fields are green with fresh new grasses and blackthorn blossom is frosting the hedgerows. Down by the Point there are neat clumps of thrift edging the paths, their first pink buds getting ready for the summer months; and I am happy to find (and identify) delicate violets and forget-me-nots. I’m told there is sea asparagus here, and Cornish heath, but the main plants you’ll see, clinging to the cliffs and open ground, are the bright yellow flowers of the Hottentot fig and the rapidly spreading, fleshy, succulent jellybean plant. Neither of these would have been here in 1850. They arrived, somehow, by ship or garden, from South Africa and Mexico respectively. And now they dominate England’s southernmost tip, to the great delight of many thrill-seeking tourists (they look spectacular, especially in the late summer when the jellybean plants turn a lurid red), and to the despair of most conservationists, who agonize over the effect this is having on the fragile native clovers and fringed rupturewort.

It is a dilemma, how much to intervene – and whether, indeed, there’s any point, given the vigorous glee with which these interlopers have spread – although the National Trust volunteer I meet at the cliff edge seems sanguine: why not let them thrive here, he wonders, and make a stand for the more delicate native plants further along the coast? The language of invasion and resistance creeps into our conversation, almost every conversation, about non-native species. None of us can help it – it shouldn’t really mean anything – but it is good to remember that these are plants we are talking about. The National Trust man knows that, of course. And there are indeed very good reasons for resisting the spread of many non-native species: it’s not just so we can save the poetry and magic and diversity of what we have, but there are diseases to combat and ecosystems at risk. As climate change accelerates, things are going to become even more complicated: are our native species best placed to adapt to the coming storm (and droughts)? Or should we welcome African and Mexican plants to our shores? Is nature in fact going to find its own way – and should we therefore abandon the Cornish heath (a rare white heather now found only on the Lizard) to its doom? Be assured that the debate around what happens to Britain’s flora and fauna in a time of unprecedented globalized trade and massive climate upheaval is ongoing and lively – and possibly even fruitful – but it has nothing to do with the human cost of the same. Even so. The Mexican jellybean plant is coming! Retreat! And regroup at Kynance Cove.

The walk along the cliffs from Lizard Point westwards to Kynance Cove is empty and wild, even on a blazing hot Sunday afternoon in April, but the Cove itself (which Wilkie described as ‘the place at which the coast scenery of the Lizard district arrives at its climax of grandeur’) is thronged with happy people. There’s a car park here only a short scramble from the beach, and some three to four hundred cars, which may explain the crowds. Also, as Wilkie knew, low tide is the time to be here, when the beach expands and some thrilling caves emerge from the waves – and that’s 3.30p.m. today, so we are bang on schedule.

Wilkie headed down the steep path to the beach, leaving Henry to sketch from the clifftops. It was August and he felt quite alone, although perhaps the ‘deep mist’ kept people away. More likely, this gadding about on beaches would have been something strange to the Cornish people of the day, unless they were looking for food or wrecks. A guide materialized to show Wilkie the rocks and for the next few hours he was steered and pushed and cajoled up ‘Asparagus’ Island and past the ‘Devil’s Throat’ and the ‘Devil’s Bellows’, slipping on the wet rocks, almost plunging to his death more than once (he claimed), sometimes standing on the shoulders or even the face of his guide, who taught him one of life’s more valuable lessons: ‘never scramble your toes about, where toes have no business to be.’ They gathered wild asparagus from the summit of Asparagus Island and the guide told him tales of smugglers and wrecks and fishermen slipping under the waves in the winter storms. I look at the steep sides of Asparagus Island (down which a skinny young man is currently bounding with improbable grace, like a carefree Barbary ape) and decide that Wilkie was either lying or he really did find a guide who could, as he says, have taken a drunken man ‘up and down Asparagus Island without the slightest risk either to himself or his charge’.

I am happier following Wilkie into the caves, walking tall in the ‘great, irregular, Gothic halls’ before we ‘wriggle onward a few feet, serpent-like, flat on our bellies’. Enid would love it here, among the smugglers and the dark hidden caverns. Children run in and out, yelling. I follow a father as he leads his very solemn six-year-old son round one of the shorter routes. Outside, people are charging into the sea, hoofing up the waves, swimming and flapping their polystyrene bodyboards, kicking plastic footballs, and shouting with joy in the sunshine. The beach is alive with holiday delight. Picnics and windbreaks cluster between the rocks. A young woman has sculpted a mermaid from the wet sand and is now lying with her head on its lap. Just past her, closer to the foaming sea, I am amazed to find a single living starfish in a rock pool – amazed, that is, to find it has survived so much human freight.

The poet Tennyson was here, in Kynance Cove, two years before Wilkie, jotting in his notebook: ‘Glorious grass-green monsters of waves. Into the caves of Asparagus Island. Sat watching wave-rainbows.’ Wilkie is also enraptured by the sea, ‘as it rolls and rushes and dances in the wind’ and almost stays too late (‘the surf dashes nearer and nearer to our feet’) – but then he didn’t have the shrieks of children to warn him or the stampede of oiled bodies rushing to the lonely (but lovely) café that overlooks the bay. I find a spare corner of a trestle table and watch the wave-rainbows from on high. I’m sitting with a couple of lean Americans who have ordered at least two dozen cream teas – towering plates of fluffy scones, huge troughs of claggy yellow cream, buckets of jam – but this apparent surfeit suddenly makes sense when a straggling, exhausted party of their friends appears, sweating and heaving from the walk from Lizard Point, some of them close to tears, many too old, I would have thought, for this sweltering adventure – and I watch as they collapse with cries of astonished delight into the arms of this incomparable Cornish feast.

I hear they are on a cruise ship, making its way round the coast. What would Cornwall be without its tourists? Now that the mines and the pilchards (‘a Cornishman’s national pride’, says Wilkie) have almost gone, tourism is the apparent key to prosperity. In 1850, when in other parts of Britain there weren’t enough jobs to go around, Wilkie could write: ‘The number of inhabitants in the county is stated by the last census at 341,269 and … the supply of men for all purposes does not appear to be greater than the demand.’ Wilkie found the people happy and busy and fruitfully employed. There were ‘ten thousand persons – men, women, and children’ working in the fisheries. He thought the ‘inexhaustible mineral treasures in the earth, and the equally inexhaustible shoals of pilchards which annually visit the coast’ meant that the people of Cornwall would always prosper. Nowadays the population of Cornwall is about 550,000, although that number is almost irrelevant when you consider that there are over five million annual visitors and rising.

In the 1964 edition of the Shell Guide to Cornwall John Betjeman lamented his lost world: ‘Cornwall has changed so much in appearance since the first edition of this guide was published in 1933 that now, thirty years later, the text has had entirely to be rewritten.’ On he went: ‘Roads have been widened, blocks of houses have been taken down in picturesque ports to make way for car parks; petrol stations proliferate … In the holiday season lorries and cars trailing caravans and boats block lanes never intended for such heavy traffic.’ According to Betjeman, before the great upheavals of the mid-twentieth century the only people who visited Cornwall were ‘fishermen, golfers and artists’. He manages to make it sound like they were all wearing tweed. The changes, every one of them unutterably awful (he would swear to that), had happened in the years since he was a boy and ‘everyone in the village had oil lamps and candles’ and ‘a journey to the nearest town and back was a day’s expedition’.

Ithell Colquhoun, renting a shack further down the coast, wrote in 1957: ‘I have never spent a whole year at Vow Cave and am sorry now that I did not do so before Lamorna became, during the summer months, uninhabitable.’ And I remember my own first Cornish holiday, aged eight, in 1971, when the sun blazed and the surf rolled and we had miles of golden sandy beaches all to ourselves. Didn’t we? I certainly remember my first trip to the Mediterranean a couple of years later. We were spending ten days in the hills of Provence, not far from Mont Ventoux, and we had been promised a day at the seaside, even though my father (my kind, gentle, but – he’d be the first to admit – somewhat gloomy father) explained that there was almost no point in going, what with the insufferable crowds and the rank pollution (discarded picnics and plastics and French effluent) and the fact that the once pristine Mediterranean Sea (the wine-dark sea of Homer and Dumas and Matisse) had been poisoned and blighted with oil spills and emptied – dragged clean – of all its teeming fish and every last scrap of sea life. And I remember heading south in our white Triumph 2000 Estate, with the cicadas shrieking at the open windows from the hot, scented hills; and how we surged over the last rise and there, laid out in front of us, was a vision of such potent beauty – the light leaping from the radiant sea, the almost empty beach glittering with ochre and gold – that we were all briefly struck dumb. And then we were seized with laughter, hysterical from the car journey, my mother too, overcome with wonder and joy to see this heart-stopping, undeniable beauty; and the look on my father’s face – amusement? disappointment? – as he started to explain (and then quickly stopped) that what we think we can see is not the same as what there is.

I’m not saying my father was wrong. In fact, and alas, today the Mediterranean is sicker and emptier than ever before (and still undeniably blue and lovely). And Britain’s own seas and shoreline, that once seethed with whales, walruses, dolphins, pilchards and puffins, are silent and sodden with invisible plastics. We all understand this in theory. But we are also having to contend with something known to conservationists as shifting baseline syndrome, the bewildering and endless realignment of what constitutes ‘normal’ – from Wilkie to Betjeman, from Ithell to us – so that we can no longer remember, or have no first-hand knowledge of what it was like to see butterflies thick in the meadows and starfish in every rock pool. We are rightly suspicious of our golden childhood memories, but none of us ever lives long enough to notice that the tap of life is being screwed shut.

When Wilkie was here in Kynance Cove he was alone, in August, apart from his friend Henry (sketching on the cliffs) and his indefatigable guide; and now here we are in April, and there are 400 vehicles in the car park and cruise ships disgorging tourists into the bay. I’m not saying that’s wrong: who are we to say who should or should not be enjoying this extraordinary cove with its rainbow waves and shimmering rocks? Not John Betjeman, let’s hope, nor me. Back in Wilkie’s time most people had to work hard just to scrape by. But there’s no avoiding the fact that there are an awful lot of us these days, on the move and keeping busy, scurrying up and down the land, nosing along the coast, looking for a lost lane or a lonely beach, and all the while buying and using and accumulating and shedding an unfeasible amount of stuff.

Imagine what this beautiful cove was like 150 years ago. And be honest. Wouldn’t you rather have it all to yourself – maybe you and a few others – as Wilkie once did?

Then again, who wouldn’t? I mean, I know I would.