The Living Stones: Cornwall

In The Living Stones, the British surrealist painter and writer Ithell Colquhoun drifts through Cornwall in search of an artist’s studio and sanctuary from the modern world. Her finely wrought and learned observations of festivals, fairs and druidic rituals, quickly establish her as the reader’s gnostic guide to the county. She paints a land of ghosts, pedlars, borrowed saints and holy sites, charmed wells and crumbling megaliths, and finds in the city emigrants a prefiguring of hippie culture. Above all, Colquhoun connects us with the eerie, numinous beauty of the Cornish countryside, quietly insisting that we see the Cornwall she sees: an ancient land of myth and legend.