Other Non-Fiction Collins, Wilkie: Rambles Beyond Railways, v.1, 30 Jan 2008.

[Patricia]

First published in 1851. This is the 1852 edition of Wilkie Collins’s account of a walking tour in Cornwall.


Here’s what http://www.wilkie-collins.info/books_rambles.htm says:
Collins found the locals hospitable, though inquisitive, and Rambles became an amiable mixture of travelogue, vivid descriptive writing, Cornish history and legend, and social observation. The route of 234 miles took them along the south coast to the Lizard and Penzance, returning through northern Cornwall to Tintagel and Launceston. An appendix gives precise details of the itinerary, the miles walked and the inns at which they stayed. Some of these, such as the Ship at Looe, still exist.
Collins's notebook was filled with stories about the wreckers; the plague of rats in Looe, solved by eating the rodents cooked with onions; royalist supporters of Charles I at St Michael's Mount; the destruction and re-assembly of the Loggan stone; and the graves of fishermen either drowned or frozen to death. The legend of a supernatural storm sinking a ship in an instant re-appears in 'Mad Monkton' (1855). At Kynance Cove, Collins was exhilarated by the Devil's Throat which inspired the description of Mannion's death in Basil (1852). Inland, he saw the prehistoric remains known as the Cheese-Wring and the Hurlers. A highlight of the book is a long description of a visit to the Botallack copper mine, where the workings extended beneath the sea and the ghostly sound of the surf could be heard as 'a long, low, mysterious moaning.'

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