Cornwall

Photographs of the Bude/Widemouth Bay area from the BBC Cornwall Web Site- please click
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Visual art

Since the 19th century, Cornwall, with its unspoilt maritime scenery and strong light, has sustained a vibrant visual art scene of international renown. Artistic activity within Cornwall was initially centred on the art-colony of Newlyn, most active at the turn of the century, and associated with the names: Stanhope Forbes, Elizabeth Forbes, Norman Garstin and Lamorna Birch. Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf lived in Cornwall between the wars, and Ben Nicholson, the painter, having visited in the 1920s came to live in St Ives with his then wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, at the outbreak of the second world war.

Much of this modernist work can be seen in Tate St Ives. The Newlyn Society and Penwith Society of Arts continue to be active.

Music and Festivals

Cornwall has a rich and vibrant folk music tradition which has survived into the present. Cornwall is well known for its unusual folk survivals such as Mummers Plays, the Furry Dance in Helston, and Obby Oss in Padstow.
As with other former mining districts of Britain, Male voice choirs and Brass Bands are still very popular in Cornwall.
Cornish players are regular participants in inter-Celtic festivals, and Cornwall itself has several lively inter-Celtic festivals such as Perranporth's Lowender Peran folk festival
The American Singer/Songwriter Tori Amos now resides predominantly in North Cornwall not far from Bude with her family.

Sports in Cornwall

Due to its large coastline, various maritime sports are popular in Cornwall, notably sailing and surfing. International events in both are held in Cornwall. Cornwall hosted the Inter-Celtic Watersports Festival in 2006. Surfing in particular is very popular, as locations such as Bude and Newquay offer some of the best surf in the UK. Pilot gig rowing has been popular for many years and the World championships takes place annually on the Isles of Scilly.
Rock climbing on the sea cliffs and inland cliffs has been popular since the pioneering work of A. W. Andrews and others in the early 1900s, and is now highly developed.
Euchre is a popular card game in Cornwall, it is normally a game for four players consisting of two teams. Its origins are unclear but some claim it is a Cornish game. There are several leagues in Cornwall at present.

Food and drink

Cornwall has a strong gastronomic heritage. Surrounded on three sides by the sea amid fertile fishing grounds, Cornwall naturally has fresh seafood readily available; Newlyn is the largest fishing port in the UK by value of fish landed. Television chef Rick Stein has long operated a fish restaurant in Padstow for this reason, and Jamie Oliver recently chose to open his second restaurant, Fifteen, in Watergate Bay near Newquay. Masterchef host and founder of Smiths of Smithfield, John Torode, in 2007 purchased Seiners in Perranporth. In St Ives Porthminster Cafe is a renowned beach restaurant as is The Boardroom at The Blue Bar in Porthtowan. One famous local fish dish is Stargazy pie, a fish-based pie in which the heads and tails of the fish stick through the pasty crust, as though "star-gazing". The pie is cooked as part of traditional celebrations for Tom Bawcocks Eve.

Cornwall is perhaps best known though for its pasties, a savoury dish made from pastry containing suet. Today's pasties usually contain a filling of beef steak, onion, potato and swede with salt and white pepper, but historically pasties had a variety of different fillings. For instance, the licky pasty contained mostly leeks, and the herb pasty contained watercress, parsley, and shallots. Pasties are often locally referred to as oggies or Teddy Oggies. Historically, pasties were also often made with sweet fillings such as jam, apple and blackberry, plums or cherries. Recently the origin of the Cornish pasty has been challenged, with neighbouring county Devon claiming to have the oldest known recipe

All the above information is compiled with the help of Wikipedia the online encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.com