Blog

Click on one of the tags to find blogs on specific topics or areas of interest.

Tags: Archeology, Conservation, Books, Cornwall, Archives, History, Collections

Book Review

Apr 12, 2019

Book Review – Our Place: Can we save Britain’s wildlife before it is too late?

by Mark Cocker. London: Penguin Random House, 2018

Our library member Katharine Mair has recently enjoyed this new addition to our library, and her review follows.

This is a timely book with a grim theme. It is also an easy and engaging read. Mark Cocker is a working naturalist, who draws us into his own experience of delight in the living landscape that we share with other creatures.

In addition he gives us a lucid account of the work of many individuals and organisations who have, over several centuries, worked to preserve threatened species and landscapes.This combination of personal anecdote and historical perspective tells us why we should be concerned, and highlights the many conflicts of interest that can get in the way of change, modern farming methods being just one example.

The title of this beautifully written book asks a question. To me it suggests the answer that we must never give up hope and stop trying.

William Wordsworth

Apr 7, 2019

249 years ago today William Wordsworth, the great poet of English Romanticism, was born.

Our archives hold a precious letter from Wordsworth to Hugh Seymour Tremenheere. The pair were introduced by Harriet Martineau in the autumn of 1845. As well as belonging to a distinguished Cornish family, Tremenheere was an academic, barrister & school inspector.

It is in the latter capacity that Wordsworth writes to him to suggest that “Knowledge inculcated by the Teacher or derived under her management from books” may be “too exclusively dwelt upon, so as almost to put of sight that which comes without being sought for from intercourse with nature”. And he goes on to say that “too little attention is paid to books of imagination” for “we must not only have knowledge, but the means of wielding it” which is done “more through the imaginative faculty assisting both in the collection and application of facts than is generally believed”.

The importance of the imagination and experiencing the natural world, particularly for children, is ever present in Wordsworth’s oeuvre, and in his own poetic and personal growth as depicted in works like The Prelude.