At Work and at Play 43
of communication, travel and access to goods via the internet mean that distance
is really no longer a factor in rural locations ‘keeping up’ with progress in cul-
tural terms (economic terms is another matter), constructions of Cornwall in our
media continues to inscribe age-old stereotypes. Th e portrayal of the inhabitants
of Port Wenn in the television show Doc Martin is one such example where an
in-comer from London lives amongst a tribe of locals who are little more than
strange, stupid and completely cut off from or ignorant of a world outside of their
odd Cornish idiom. Such constructions also draw upon delineations of Celtic
peoples as uncivilized and in need of control and instruction from their Anglo-
Saxon betters. Once again this is a well-worn stereotype but it continues to inform
how Celtic regions of Great Britain and Ireland are understood and portrayed.
As Bernard Deacon has established, from the late eighteenth century a prev-
alent representation of Cornwall as West Barbary – a land foreign to England, its
inhabitants dangerous and barbaric – was being readily consumed by ‘a voyeur-
istic metropolitan market, fascinated by news from the peripheries’.^12 However,
both Deacon and Philip Payton argue that this identity, over which the Cornish
themselves had no control, was by the 1820s supplanted by an insider-derived
identity of ‘industrial prowess’, or what Deacon refers to as ‘industrial civiliza-
tion’.^13 Cornwall was the site of immense industrial activity in mineral mining
and earned a world reputation as an industrial leader in technolog y and exper-
tise. Th is reputation survived the collapse of mining in Cornwall in the 1860s
as Cornishmen travelled to places such as South Africa, Australia and America
to impart their industrial knowledge and provide manpower. Th e reality of the
state of mining within Cornwall by the second half of the nineteenth century,
the privations experienced at home and by those forced to travel abroad for
employment is another story, which there is not time to discuss here, but this
does not distract from the power of Cornwall’s industrial prowess moniker. Th is
was a reputation earned through what happened and what was produced within
Cornwall in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century which was promoted by the
Cornish themselves and accepted beyond its borders. Such an identity compli-
cates the idea of the rural location as antithetical to the progression of the city.
Cornwall, then, is a site where multiple narratives of place and identity exist
and intersect, which are both constituted from within and imposed from with-
out.^14 As Rachel Moseley has recently suggested, it is a contested space.^15 Th is is
despite the irresistible desire by some, in the nineteenth century and still today,
to try to fi x Cornwall with an overly simplistic historical and cultural narrative.
Payton, in his comprehensive history of Cornwall, identifi es an example of what
he calls a ‘gross oversimplifi cation’ of Cornwall’s history in Maxine Berg’s Th e
Age of Manufactures where she simply states that ‘in the middle of the nineteenth
century mining suddenly declined and the region was rapidly transformed into
a holiday resort’.^16 Th is kind of analysis is perhaps partly due to Cornwall’s geo-