I love visiting Cornwall and reading about it and have read several great non-fiction books about the place (see my blog on Reading Cornwall) as well as a lot of fiction set in Cornwall. So, when I was in Fowey at Easter I went to the fabulous independent bookshop as usual and Trelawny’s Cornwall by the extremely Cornish sounding Petroc Trelawny caught my eye. I finally got round to reading it on some long train journeys in mid-September and it was a delight.

I hadn’t heard of the author before, but loved the mixture of memoir, travelogue and history lesson that the book provided. It is mainly centred on the Lizard peninsula and its surrounds, where the author grew up, but also ventures further afield, finally to the edges of the border with Devon to the east. It looks at how the county has changed since the 1970s and 1980s, the fight to hold onto Cornish traditions, the authors’ love of train travel and the place Cornwall has had in the world, as a centre of communication in various forms over hundreds of years.

I learned a lot, was taken back to some of my favourite places walking the coastal path and it’s making me want to go west again as soon as possible.