50 Fun Facts About Cornwall

What is the Cornish-language name for Cornwall?

Kernow. Like the Corn- of Cornwall, it goes back to a Celtic word for horn, presumably after the horn-like shape of the peninsula.

Which river forms most of the border between Cornwall and Devon?

Tamar. It rises less than four miles from the north coast and flows to the south, so it almost cuts Cornwall off from the rest of Britain; King Athelstan set the border along it in 936.

What is Cornwall's only city?

Truro. It was made a city in 1877, the year after Cornwall regained a diocese of its own following centuries under the bishops of Exeter.

Which Christmas service was first held in 1880 in a wooden building serving as Cornwall's temporary cathedral?

Nine Lessons and Carols. Bishop Edward Benson devised it for Christmas Eve 1880, and King's College, Cambridge took it up in 1918 for the service now broadcast around the world.

Land's End is mainland England's westernmost point, but which Cornish headland is mainland Britain's southernmost?

Lizard Point. England's first sight of the Spanish Armada came off this headland in July 1588, as the fleet entered the Channel.

Land's End sits on which peninsula at the western tip of Cornwall?

Penwith. Land's End is England's most westerly mainland point but not Britain's: that lies on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the Scottish Highlands.

Which summit on Bodmin Moor is the highest point in Cornwall?

Brown Willy. A 2012 campaign tried to swap the giggle-inducing name for its Cornish form, Bronn Wennili, but critics saw no need for a change and Brown Willy it remains.

Who is generally regarded as the patron saint of Cornwall?

Piran. The oratory linked to him at Perranporth was lost under drifting sand, dug out in 1835, buried again in 1980 to protect it and uncovered once more in 2014.

According to legend, how did Cornwall's patron saint arrive from Ireland?

Floating on a millstone. In the tale his enemies in Ireland bound him to it and threw him off a cliff to drown, but the stone floated and carried him across the sea to Cornwall's north coast.

What does Cornwall's flag, the banner of its patron saint, look like?

A white cross on black. The colours are said to show white tin flowing from black ore, though no record of the flag is known from before the 19th century.

Cornish belongs to which branch of the Celtic languages, alongside Welsh?

Brittonic. Cornish faded out as a community language by about 1800, but a 20th-century revival led UNESCO in 2010 to drop its 'extinct' label for 'critically endangered'.

Which living language is closer to Cornish than Welsh is?

Breton. Settlers, many of them from Cornwall, carried their speech across the Channel in the early Middle Ages, which is why Breton sits closer to Cornish than Welsh does.

In 2014 the UK government recognised the Cornish as what, under a European convention?

National minority. The decision gave the Cornish the same status under the Council of Europe convention as the UK's other Celtic peoples, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish.

By the rules of its protected status, where must a genuine Cornish pasty be crimped?

Along the side. The 2011 protected-status rules demand a D-shape crimped to one side and made in Cornwall; as the trade body puts it, if it's not crimped, it's not Cornish.

Besides beef, potato and onion, which vegetable belongs in a traditional Cornish pasty?

Swede. Confusingly, the Cornish call it turnip, and the protected recipe allows no other vegetable beyond the potato and onion, so a carrot disqualifies the pasty.

Stargazy pie, with fish heads poking through the crust, comes from which Cornish village?

Mousehole. The pie is baked each December for Tom Bawcock's Eve, in honour of a fisherman said to have sailed into a storm and landed enough fish to end a famine in the village.

Which Cornish product has protected status and cannot legally be made under that name outside Cornwall?

Clotted cream. Cornish custom spreads the jam on the scone first and crowns it with the cream, while Devon's puts the cream on first, an order the two counties still argue over.

The Eden Project near St Austell was built inside what?

A reclaimed china clay pit. The worked-out pit sat 15 metres below the water table, so it flooded during building, and it had no soil until the team made their own from waste.

Which James Bond film shot scenes in the Eden Project's biomes soon after they opened in 2001?

Die Another Day. The giant domes doubled as the inside of the villain's diamond mine in Pierce Brosnan's final outing as Bond, released in 2002.

Which 12th-century writer first named Tintagel as the place where King Arthur was conceived?

Geoffrey of Monmouth. His story came first: a century later Richard, Earl of Cornwall, built the castle whose ruins stand there today, on a site of no military value, seemingly because of the legend.

Which tidal island is reached from Marazion on foot by a causeway uncovered at low tide?

St Michael's Mount. When the tide covers the causeway, boats take over; the island once belonged to the monks of its Norman look-alike, Mont-Saint-Michel.

Who built the open-air Minack Theatre on the cliffs at Porthcurno?

Rowena Cade. She bought the headland for £100 and shaped the terraces herself with her gardeners, carrying sand up from the beach to make concrete that passes for carved stone.

Which Shakespeare play opened the Minack Theatre in 1932?

The Tempest. The local players had been performing A Midsummer Night's Dream in a meadow, and for a play that opens with a shipwreck they were offered a cliff garden above the sea instead.

The chimneyed ruins beside the shafts of Cornwall's World Heritage mines were built to house what?

Steam engines. Pumping engines drained the workings so that shafts could be sunk far deeper, and emigrating Cornishmen built the same engine houses as far away as Mexico.

Which Cornishman ran a locomotive on rails in 1804, two decades before Stephenson's Stockton and Darlington line?

Richard Trevithick. His locomotive hauled ten tons of iron and 70 men for more than eight miles in South Wales, but it proved too heavy for the rails and ended up driving a forge hammer at the ironworks.

Cornish chemist Humphry Davy is best remembered for inventing what?

The miners' safety lamp. Davy built it in 1815 for coal pits, where gas exploded on meeting a naked flame; his answer was to screen the flame behind fine wire gauze.

In 1901 Marconi's clifftop station at Poldhu in Cornwall sent the first radio signal across which body of water?

The Atlantic Ocean. Marconi reported hearing three Morse dots, the letter S, in Newfoundland, some 2,200 miles away, on an aerial held up by a kite.

Who automatically holds the title Duke of Cornwall?

The monarch's eldest son. Edward III wrote the rule into the 1337 charter that created the duchy for the Black Prince, so no daughter can hold the title and without a son it rests with the Crown.

In 1497 Cornish rebels angry at a war tax marched east until beaten outside which city?

London. A blacksmith, Michael An Gof, and a lawyer, Thomas Flamank, led them as far as Blackheath, where Henry VII's much larger army broke the rising in June 1497.

Who played Ross Poldark in the BBC's 2015 series, forty years after Robin Ellis?

Aidan Turner. He played Winston Graham's soldier home from the American war, and Robin Ellis, the Ross of 1975, came back to join the new cast in a supporting role.

Daphne du Maurier lived at Menabilly, near which Cornish town?

Fowey. She fell for the house while it stood empty and decaying, and the Rashleigh family later let her rent it, but she never owned the house that inspired Manderley in Rebecca.

Which director filmed three Daphne du Maurier stories, starting with Jamaica Inn in 1939?

Alfred Hitchcock. He followed it with Rebecca a year later and then The Birds, moving her tale of a Cornish farmhand under attack from the sky to the California coast.

Which Cornish town is the base of the title characters in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera?

Penzance. The opera opened in New York on the last day of 1879 so that Gilbert and Sullivan could secure American copyright, after real-life 'pirate' companies there had staged HMS Pinafore without paying them.

Which Cornish town stages the Furry Dance on Flora Day each May?

Helston. Dancers wear lily of the valley, the town's flower, and a visitor's 1911 song about the day, 'The Floral Dance', became a brass-band hit in the 1970s.

The Obby Oss May Day festival belongs to which Cornish port?

Padstow. Two rival hobby horses, the Old Oss and the Blue Ribbon Oss, each lead half the town on a day-long procession, goaded on by a dancer called the Teaser.

Which game is fought through the streets of St Columb Major each Shrove Tuesday for a small silver ball?

Hurling. The Cornish game shares only its name with the Irish sport: Townsmen and Countrymen wrestle an applewood ball cased in silver towards goals two miles apart.

In Cornish wrestling, what do competitors wear so opponents can grip them?

A loose jacket. Every hold must be taken on it, and before wrestling each competitor swears an oath in Cornish to fight without treachery or brutality, then offers the opponent a hand.

Which red-billed, red-legged bird returned to Cornwall's cliffs in 2001, decades after dying out there?

The chough. Legend says King Arthur's spirit passed into one after his last battle, its red bill and legs recalling the blood shed there, and the bird stands on Cornwall's coat of arms.

Goonhilly's first dish, nicknamed Arthur, was built in 1962 to link with which satellite?

Telstar. On 11 July 1962 Arthur picked up some of the first live television pictures ever beamed from America, and later dishes on the site were named Merlin, Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde.

Which north-coast town was Cornwall's most populous built-up area at the 2021 census?

Newquay. It edged out St Austell by fewer than 500 people, though Camborne and Redruth together form a larger urban area.

In which Cornish port did Ben Nicholson come across fisherman-painter Alfred Wallis in 1928?

St Ives. Wallis, a former fisherman with little money, painted his ships in boat paint on cardboard from old boxes; modern artists prized the pictures, yet he sold few of them in his lifetime.

Which artist's Cornish studio and sculpture garden became a museum that the Tate took over in 1980?

Barbara Hepworth. She called finding Trewyn Studio a sort of magic and worked there from 1949 until she died in a fire at the studio in 1975; her family opened it as a museum the following year.

Which is the largest of the five inhabited Isles of Scilly?

St Mary's, home to most Scillonians. The water between the islands is so shallow that on the lowest tides people walk across the seabed from Tresco to Bryher, where a pop-up festival is held on the sand.

With whom are the Isles of Scilly said to have been at war for 335 years, without a shot fired?

The Dutch. Admiral Tromp reputedly declared war in 1651 over Dutch cargoes seized by Royalist ships based in Scilly, and nobody thought to make peace until 1986, when the Dutch ambassador came out to end it.

Which mythical lost land is said to lie between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly?

Lyonesse. Legend has the sea swallow it suddenly, churches and all; its bells are said to ring beneath the waves on calm days, and one Trevelyan is supposed to have escaped on his horse.

Which Cornish port did the Killigrew family found in the 17th century beside Henry VIII's Pendennis Castle?

Falmouth. It grew in importance as the packet station for overseas mail, and in 1805 the schooner Pickle landed here with the first official news of Trafalgar and of Nelson's death.

Which 1549 law forced an English prayer book on Cornish people who spoke no English, sparking revolt?

Act of Uniformity. A Cornish army besieged Exeter for five weeks before government troops, hired Italian soldiers among them, crushed the rising, and the defeat hastened the retreat of the Cornish language.

From the early 19th to the mid-20th century, which form of Christianity was dominant in Cornwall?

Methodism. Mobs set upon the Wesley brothers' first Cornish meetings in the 1740s, yet working people flocked to hear them, and the chapels that followed gave Cornwall its male voice choirs.

Which American singer-songwriter and pianist settled near Bude in the late 1990s and built her own studio there?

Tori Amos. She wanted a studio far from record company executives, so she built one at her Cornish farm, and during the Covid lockdown the county's landscape and myths inspired a whole album.

The '-wall' of Cornwall and the word 'Welsh' share an Old English root that meant what?

Foreigner. The Anglo-Saxons applied wealh to the Celtic-speaking natives they found on arriving, so the newcomers were calling the locals foreigners, and the same word makes the walnut a 'foreign nut'.