Paul Taylor-McCartney, "Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall's Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity"

Congratulations to Paul Taylor-McCartney, UoL PhD Creative Writing graduate, on the publication of his debut non-fiction book, Cornwall Uncharted!

Dr Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer whose interests include queer studies, speculative fiction and teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a wide range of print and electronic media. Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall’s Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity, published by The History Press, is his first non-fiction title. You can read more about Cornwall Uncharted below and on the publisher's website here.

About Cornwall Uncharted: Writing Queer Lives Back into the Landscape

By Paul Taylor-McCartney

Cornwall Uncharted began with a walk. I was looking across the water towards Godrevy Lighthouse, thinking about Virginia Woolf and the childhood holidays in St Ives that would later help shape her seminal novel To the Lighthouse (1927). That small connection between a physical place, memory and writing prompted a much larger question: what other queer histories might be held in Cornwall’s landscapes, if we knew how – and where – to look? That question eventually became a journey across the county. The book moves through towns, artistic colonies and coastal retreats, lighthouses and castles, rural hinterlands, private houses, prisons and contemporary Pride routes. Along the way, it encounters writers and artists, performers and campaigners, soldiers and people whose lives survive only fleetingly in institutional records. At its heart are three interconnected themes – concealment, culture and creativity – and the ways in which they have been shaped by Cornwall itself.

One of the challenges of writing queer history is that the archive rarely gives you everything you want. For much of the period covered by Cornwall Uncharted, openness about same-sex desire or gender nonconformity could carry profound personal, social and legal consequences. Letters might be coded. Newspapers relied on euphemism. Court and prison records could reduce complicated human lives to an offence, a sentence and a date. Silence, therefore, becomes part of the evidence. While researching the book, I became interested not simply in what the archive said, but in what might exist around its edges: the gaps between official words, the routes people took, the houses they chose, the rooms in which they met and the landscapes that allowed them to appear or disappear. This is why place became so important to the project. Cornwall is not simply a picturesque backdrop to these histories. Its coves, moors, lanes, harbours, towns and buildings actively shape them. A secluded house can provide refuge. A winding lane can offer privacy. A coastal community can give someone enough distance from the expectations of elsewhere to experiment with how they live, work or love. But the same landscape can also be watched, mapped and policed. That tension runs throughout the book. In Chapter Five, for example, I place the Cornwall of Daphne du Maurier – its creeks, lanes, boathouses, hidden approaches and private houses – alongside the records of Bodmin Gaol. The comparison produced what I came to think of as a kind of double geography: in fiction, a lane or rented room might provide secrecy and refuge; in official records, those same kinds of spaces could become evidence, a "scene" or a "place of offence." Nowhere did the relationship between landscape, concealment and punishment feel sharper to me than at Bodmin Gaol. In this chapter I examine cases including those of Sergeant Ernest Oke and Private William Davey, whose lives entered the historical record through prosecution and punishment. Their story sits alongside du Maurier’s very different experience of secrecy, privacy and controlled visibility. The intention was not to suggest equivalence between those lives, but to ask what different kinds of concealment cost – and what happens when concealment succeeds or fails.

Throughout Cornwall Uncharted, I include short sections called "A Traveller’s Reflections." These were an opportunity to return to the places themselves. I wanted to acknowledge that researching history can also be a physical and emotional experience: walking the same streets, standing beside a harbour, climbing a castle staircase, entering a prison cell or simply feeling the weather change around a landscape you have spent months encountering through documents. At Bodmin Gaol, the historical material suddenly acquired weight. The names in court calendars were no longer simply entries on a page. The building made questions of confinement, visibility and memory difficult to hold at an academic distance. 

The extract below comes from the Traveller’s Reflection that closes that part of Chapter Five.

From Cornwall Uncharted
Here, I reflected on the case of Oke and Davey and tried to set it at a scale I could hold. Two kits packed in haste. Pay stopped. A letter home, delayed or never sent. A newspaper notice that reduced their actions to a phrase like "improper conduct," and two families left to read between the lines. The prison then fixed these lives in record and stone. It named the offence, measured the time, closed the door on both men.

Yet du Maurier’s life sits alongside this image, offering another kind of confinement: one in which she is not locked up, yet her letters and houses show a careful management of movement, disclosure and risk. Menabilly was then, and is to this day, kept closed to visitors and screened from prying eyes. Desire was routed through correspondence, via friendships that must be framed as safe, through journeys that began and ended elsewhere.

During our visit to the gaol, the site choreographed attention differently. Entry to "The Dark Walk" was timed, then we were released into the museum. The past was not softened so much as held at a distance that allowed looking without breaking. For du Maurier, distance likely worked in a similar way. It became a tool for survival, a way to live with what cannot be named openly.

On our way out, I glanced up at the hotel wing: new glass inside old stone, warm light behind a wall once built to contain and punish. Luxury suites where cells had once stood. Soft furnishings where bodies were counted and kept. The conversion was clever, even aesthetically pleasing, but it left a slightly bitter aftertaste. To be clear: I’m glad people come to visit and take the tour – school groups, couples, families and individuals – who wish to engage with local history, even where opulence blurs the edges between past and present. But if there was a promise worth keeping there, it was this: tell the hard parts in daylight, keep the iron in view and do all in my power not to let the triple-glazed frontages ever erase the voices of the past.