Time trundles remorselessly onwards. I was shocked to realise it’s been over a year now since I began adding two or three blogs a week to this website. Maybe it’s because people had nothing better to do during the covid lockdown but the number of visitors in 2020 is already almost double that of 2019, which was itself double that of 2018.
Readers may be interested to know that what the most popular pages and posts have been …
The page on ‘18th century surnames by parish’ continues to be by far the most frequent consulted, with more than twice as many hits as the next most popular pages, most of which concern surnames and their history. I will add a similar page for the seventeenth century at some point, based on the 1641/42 Protestation Returns.
Generally, information on surnames in Cornwall remains the most popular content, although the page on ‘Cornish mining: a short history’ gets a lot of views, as does an old review of the first TV series of ‘The Last Kingdom’. This appears regularly in the top ten pages, which shows the importance of having a vague title.
Meanwhile, the most visited blog posts in the past year have been
- ‘Challenging negative stereotypes of Cornwall and its people’, a short summary of an academic article.
- ‘Cholera in Cornwall – the Victorians’ coronavirus’
- ‘The Black Death in Cornwall’
- ‘The myth of Dumnonia’, based on the argument in my book Cornwall’s First Golden Age
- ‘From rarer Cornish surnames to surnames on demand’
Those were the days! But less of this cloying nostalgia. Thank you for reading these blogs and others, adding your comments and helping to make the website the most reliable, informative and entertaining source of information on Cornwall and Cornish studies available online. Do get in touch if you have any suggestions, although I can’t guarantee a quick reply.
Cornish studies resources 
Congratulations on your anniversary and thank you for sharing your knowledge
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A Bernard ger,
Merastahwi. I really appreciate getting my regular dose of bite-size Cornish Studies. I think that you have got the format just right (longer and more detailed tomes do tend to get earmarked ‘read drekly’ and then I never get around to it)
I do have one specific, further query about the ‘Dumnonia myth’. It seems that the entire construct is traceable back to a very small number of original references or pieces of evidence. Is it possible to enumerate exactly what these primary source scraps are and then to trace the development of assumptions and extrapolations through the various ‘authorities’?
oll an gwella
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