LEGEND LAND

Book excerpt: This is a reissue in book form of the first series of leaflets The Line to Legend Land. A modern title could very well be LEGENDS FROM POLDARK COUNTRY. Originally published by the G.W.R. in 1922, this small volume was an early form of Great Western’s modern day “Top 10 Things To Do” and gave the rail traveller a list of English, West Country legends to look up and places to see. This edition has twelve tales plus a poem and a song from the West Country of Devon & Cornwall – the area in which POLDARK is filmed. Each legend has an updated “How to Get There” section with train, bus and distance information. There are also two supplements, "The Furry Day Song" and the iconic “Trelawny”, also known as “The Song of the Western Men.” In older, simpler days, when reading was a rare accomplishment, our many times great-grandparents would gather round the blazing hearth or hall on the long, dark winter nights and pass away the hours before bedtime in conversation and story-telling. The old stories were told again and again and children learned them by heart in their earliest years and passed them on to their children and grandchildren in turn. In origin, most of these old legends date from the very dawn of our history, possibly even in a time before Stonehenge has been erected. They may have even been told around the camp-fires of that first British army that went out to face Cæsar’s invasion, now almost two millennia ago, and in the marshes of Southern England by the army of Alfred the Great before they finally defeated the Viking invaders. Later, much later, with the spread of education and the introduction of formal curricula, in which folklore seems to have no place, they began to die. Then, when many more folk could read and books grew cheap there was no longer the need to call upon memory for the old-fashioned romances, and so they began to fade from the modern consciousness. Yet there have always been those who loved the old tales best, and wrote them down before it was too late, so that they might be preserved forever. A few of them are retold briefly here with instructions of how to get to the very places in Devon & Cornwall that these legends originated from. Be sure to check out the Poldark filming locations map on the Abela webpage.