This is the stone-built work hut of the writer and man of letters, Ronald Duncan (1914-1982). It's been beautifully restored by some members of his family, and stands directly by the South West Coast Path on the border of Devon and Cornwall. The door was open, so I went inside. Under the window was Duncan's desk and chair, and a box of his books, with a hand-written sign saying 'Help Yourself!' I took a couple of paperbacks and stuffed them into my rucksack. On one wall hung an information board, which contained some interesting facts about this most prolific yet little known of writers...
Duncan read English at Cambridge with FR Leavis, and was much taken with Gandhi, whom he met in India in 1936. (He remained a life-long pacifist.) Back in England, he moved to Devon, where he established a community farm in the small village of Welcombe - a project he describes in his book Journal Of A Husbandman (1944). He wrote plays, poems, fiction, fables, film scripts, opera librettos, autobiographical essays, journalistic pieces, literary criticism, and topographical books about the landscape of his beloved Devon and Cornwall. He was one of those figures destined to stay on the margins of belles-lettres, forever in the shadow of his more famous literary and artistic friends, who included Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Benjamin Britten, Jean Cocteau, and the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
This is the view of Marsland Mouth from Duncan's writing desk. I'm not sure I'd be able to write anything at all with a view as amazing as that. I'd be perpetually distracted. Where I'm standing is in Devon, but I'm looking down on Cornwall...
And here's the border sign ('Kernow' means 'Cornwall' in Cornish). There was no passport control, no officious guards, no body searches. I just slipped right through, over the long, green grass, past the gliding fulmars and cronking ravens, into a new county, almost a new country...
