In Memoriam
Oliver Howes
Retired driver-guide & chronicler of Cornwall
“A visitor's guide to the very best of Cornwall — hundreds of honest reviews of homes, gardens, castles, churches, museums, antiquities, towns, villages, coast and country walks.”
For many years Oliver Howes drove visitors the length and breadth of Cornwall, and in his retirement he set down everything he had learned in a sprawling, generous website. He wrote about the Duchy the way a good guide talks: plainly, warmly, and without a trace of marketing gloss. If a garden was poor value he said so; if a house moved him, he told you exactly why.
His original site — composed, as he cheerfully admitted, in “old-fashioned Netscape Composer” — gathered 662 reviews and well over 1500 photographs across homes, gardens, castles, churches, museums, antiquities, towns and villages. In his later years he discovered walking, and added page after page on the coast path, the inland trails and the wild crossings of Bodmin Moor.
Oliver has since died, and the site that held his life's work is now at risk of vanishing. This archive preserves his writing and his photographs in full, exactly as he wrote them, with a modern design so that a new generation can travel Cornwall in his company. Nothing here is ours; every word and every picture is his.
A word about Meg
No account of Oliver's Cornwall would be complete without Meg, the Border collie who — by her own insistence — did most of the walking. “Well, they think they walk me,” she once observed of Oliver and Jane, “but really I walk them.” A self-described motoring enthusiast partial to a Honda Jazz, Meg led her humans along the Camel Trail and out to Lanhydrock, Polzeath and the Camel Estuary, clocking up three miles for every one of theirs.
All written content & photographs © Oliver Howes. Originally published at oliverscornwall.co.uk.