On holiday with the ghosts of my Cornish ancestors

Like thousands of us, this writer delved into her family ancestry in lockdown –and her discoveries led to a living history getaway

A tiny miner’s cottage with an ancient-sounding name loomed large during my suburban childhood. My father was born in Bojewyan Stennack (pronounced Bow-jeew-yurn Sten-arrrr-k), a granite one-up, one-down in Cornwall, at the close of the second world war. His mother, Virginia, grew up here, steps from the foaming Atlantic coast, with her seven brothers and sisters and a mother who spent her life in widows’ blacks. I knew, from family folklore, that Bojewyan’s sash windows wheezed in a sou’westerly and that the chimney of the blackened hearth sang a haunting, almost human note. I knew about the ocean fogs, which obscured feet and montbretia-dotted hedges and made the lighthouse’s lamp, visible from the upstairs back window, glow a spectral white.

It was with these inherited memories that I stepped across the threshold of Bojewyan, my family’s home for a century until 1946, and now a holiday let. Several of the cottages on this original terrace of 20 dwellings in Pendeen, just west of Penzance, are now holiday rentals, with woodburners in the old granite fireplaces and gardens, where pit boots once swung, turned into sun-trap terraces.