ABSTRACT
As the train draws out of Plymouth, and begins to edge across Brunel’s bridge over the Tamar, the passengers in my carriage, as one, look up from books and laptops and watch out of the window as we cross the river into Cornwall. After we pass through Saltash on the other side, the landscape seems to change rapidly, moving through verdant valleys and forests, across desolate and dramatic moorland, through the scarred industrial landscape of the mid-Cornwall clay country and, finally, into the softer landscape of South East Cornwall. Then, the long awaited glimpse: ‘Can you see the sea yet?’ I’ve made this journey ‘home’ so many times now, and in recent years it has become a routine dash down the M5. Making the journey by train rekindles the childhood excitement of looking for the sign on the little road bridge which marked the shift from Devon (England) into Cornwall (somewhere exciting, somewhere different), and I look backwards to see the Cornish coat of arms on Brunel’s Bridge. There is something about the crossing of this border; Cornwall is almost entirely cut off from mainland Britain by the Tamar, has its own flag, language and claim to independence. Making this crossing has always been a bit like leaving England and travelling abroad, into another land. Cornwall is, at once, both home and away. Of course, I am not the first to romanticize this journey. As the Great Wes-
tern Railway extended into Cornwall and Brunel’s bridge traversed the Tamar in 1859, the GWR’s publicity for the journey into the South West solidified constructions of Cornwall as somehow both familiar and foreign. Thomas (1997) examines this early construction of the county, citing GWR-produced publicity and travelogue writing. Mais tells us that the GWR takes us:
over the Tamar and into foreign territory: the simple truth is that Cornwall is far more different from any other part of the British Isles than most foreign places are. It is the only entirely foreign place you can reach without changing from train to boat after leaving London.
