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Cornwall, The Granite Kingdom

I read and reviewed Tim Hannigan's (2021) TheTravel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre, back in July 2021, please see full review on Amazon, so I became too impatient to wait until I could buy the hardback of Tim's 2023 book, and have started to read it on the iPad. It gives me the opportunity, though, to express my delight at my favourite early scene from Tim’s Cornish journey in The Granite Kingdom 



The exact spot where…

When I'm teaching, I encourage my student-writers to focus on embodied experiences at precise locations to enact the physicality of the layout of the land, the term that we borrow from geography in literary tourism studies is poetic geomorphology. My chosen scene from Tim's travel book on Cornwall has already found its way into my workshops. I will be careful not introduce spoilers as I share the moment below. I have taken the Mousetrap Oath.


‘The water was shallow here, glittering over stone, but what I was contemplating seemed horribly transgressive. I stood there for a long while, wondering whether I needed to take my boots off, then went for it without doing so: four or five mincing steps, a handhold on an exposed root, a brief and muddy scramble and I was over the border. There was no abrupt change of atmosphere. No one challenged my trespass. Crossing over was not as hard as I might have thought.’ (Hannigan 2023. Unpaginated ebook).

The narrator in this scene above, takes the readers through a kind of catacosmesis in his emotions from the 'horribly transgressive' to the resolved calmness of 'not as hard as I might have thought'. Framing this same scene of movement is a further complex reference to borders, and in another literary process Hannigan mixes hints of other border crossings from other writers and times with this simple scramble across a shallow stream.

This is one of those books that I'm going to read many times.





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