Rucksacks, soggy socks and rain-drenched beaches – Wilkie Collins’s guide to Cornwall

The sight of two young male friends walking across Cornwall in the summer of 1850 with knapsacks on their backs caused consternation among the locals.

‘Trodger’ Wilkie Collins 

‘Poor fellows!’ they said. ‘Obliged to carry all your baggage on your own backs!’ In villages, little children ran indoors to bring out their siblings. Everyone gawped. The young men were accused of being ‘mappers’ or ‘trodgers’ (a ruder version of ‘trudgers’). Why would two gentlemen choose to carry their own luggage rather than giving it to a servant?

But don’t deride the knapsack, pleads Wilkie Collins (one of those two walkers) in his sparkling travelogue reissued in a charming hardback edition with an enthusiastic foreword by Rick Stein. Collins and his friend, the artist Henry Brandling (whose evocative sketches illustrate the book), positively wanted to carry their own luggage. ‘Walk to be merry! Walk and be healthy! Walk and be your own master!’ 

And, in a tip to walkers: ‘Sponge your feet with cold vinegar and water, change your socks every ten miles, and show me blisters after that, if you can!’

This holiday took place very early in Collins’s career, nine years before he would produce his fiction masterpiece The Woman In White. Here we see the budding writer in a light, curious, frivolous mood, taking delight in observation. 

Describing a washed-out day in Looe, he describes the ladies ‘running hither and thither for shelter, in lank wet muslin and under dripping parasols, displaying, in the lamentable urgency of the moment, all sorts of interior contrivances for expanding around them the exterior magnificence of their gowns.’

Any of us who have been on a rain-drenched beach holiday in Cornwall will identify with the sodden ladies.

Wilkie Collins on Cornwall is available now 

Collins is relieved to report that ‘in the Government Tables of Mortality for Cornwall there are no returns of death from starvation’. 

That glimpse gives a sense of the low bar for public health in 1850. Other counties were reporting deaths from starvation, but thanks to the mining and pilchard industries, plus low rents, the Cornish seemed to be doing all right.

He watches the pilchard industry in full flow: a man stands on a cliff waving a bush to point out a vast shoal to the fishermen below. Women and girls work in the salting house for threepence an hour and are given a glass of brandy and a piece of bread and cheese every sixth hour.

He goes down a copper mine at Botallack near Land’s End, with a candle stuck on to the front of his hat with clay. He’s wearing borrowed miner’s trousers far too large for him. 

I won’t forget the image of his swarthy guide picking him up by the loose material to carry him across a tricky gap at the bottom of a 450ft perpendicular ladder. He doesn’t go as far down or as far under the sea as the miners do, breaking ore all day with their pickaxes.

That same afternoon, he and Henry walk on another 15 miles. The energy of those Victorians! Celebrating freedom, nature, ancient standing stones and the charm of the Cornish, this is a book to take with you on your next weather-dependent holiday in Cornwall.