Reviews and News

Linda Holmes photo of the shore off Newlyn Green (above) shows what looks like a remnant of a petrified tree exposed by the storms of February 2014. James T Blight, writing in 1876, described a forest that may have extended along the coast to St Michael’s Mount, which was ‘a hoare rock in a wood’ and five or six miles from the sea; the bay was said to have been a plain, formed into parishes, each having its church, and laid out in meadows, corn-fields, and woods’; Blight also recorded that some people thought that the story was ‘monkish fable’. But the story remained embedded in local consciousness and in 1884, the Reverend Wladislaw Somerville Lach-Szyrma, also argued that there was evidence of a flood that had covered a forest and an ancient town.

The Last Open Day

There was a buzz of activity at the last Open Day, ‘Those that Got Away: Newlyn’s Migrants’, despite a much lower attendance than usual, only 69 people managed to get along. The problem was the horrendous weather and the storms of the previous few days. Despite this, visitors seem to have had an enjoyable experience and the archive had a very productive day with many people sharing new information. We aimed to raise money as part of matched funding towards a bid we are making to the Heritage Lottery for the new project we have called ‘When Newlyners walked to Lamorna’ which involves the integration of the Lamorna Archive with the Newlyn Archive. In raising money, Amanda Thompson’s cake stall and David Tredinnick’s book stall were very successful, the former raising £80 and the latter £37. If we are successful with the lottery bid, the project will start on May 1st.

New Project, 2014

The new project aims to enhance archive facilities and broaden the community that makes use of these facilities by integrating a new dimension into the existing Newlyn Archive. The new dimension is about the Lamorna Valley and its artists, many of the latter with strong associations with Newlyn. The project will start on May 1st and concludes with a two-day event to be held in October 2014 at Trinity Centre. The two–day event will focus on the links between Newlyn and Lamorna, particularly those involving the Newlyn and Lamorna Colonies of Artists that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first part of the twentieth century. We hope to involve many groups in the community including school children and we will be recording oral histories from those with good memories.