British Military

Cornwall’s Minack Theatre looks as if it has been carved into the cliffs for centuries. In 1931, it was still a rough gully of gorse and granite above a 90-foot drop to the sea. The change began because Rowena Cade wanted somewhere for a local group to perform Shakespeare. She had moved to Cornwall after the First World War and bought the Minack headland for £100. In 1929 she helped with an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a nearby valley. When the group decided to stage The Tempest next, Rowena offered the cliff at the bottom of her garden. There was one problem. There was no theatre. So Rowena and her helpers started making one. Her gardener Billy Rawlings and another local man cut huge granite boulders by hand. They worked with bars, hand tools and, sometimes, dynamite on a slope where one bad step could have meant a fall into the sea. Rowena filled the gaps with earth and stone. She carried sacks of sand up from the beach to mix into concrete. The first audience arrived for The Tempest in 1932, with the young theatre lit by battery lamps and car headlights. That could have been the end of it. Instead, she kept building. Year after year, Rowena added terraces, steps, seats and strange little details that made the place hers. She pressed patterns into wet concrete with an old screwdriver. Many of the seats still carry the names and dates of productions performed there. She continued working on the Minack well into her eighties. I assembled these images because the finished theatre can hide the hardest part of its story. What looks like an ancient amphitheatre was shaped, altered and cared for across one woman’s lifetime, with a few helpers, simple tools and a cliff that never became any less steep. The Minack is still a working theatre. It welcomes more than 200,000 visitors a year and stages more than 200 live performances, from plays and opera to music and children’s shows. That is why this place is worth remembering. It was not inherited complete from some distant age. It was made because one woman looked at an awkward Cornish cliff and decided it could become a stage. The sea is still behind it. The granite is still under it. And every time an audience takes its seats, Rowena Cade’s unlikely theatre does exactly what she built it to do.

I had no idea Edinburgh’s famous Castle view from Princes Street survives because homeowners fought a building scheme there in the 1770s. I recovered this old photograph and the detail that changed it for me was the open side of the street. When land opposite their homes was being built on, New Town residents went to law. A 1776 ruling kept much of it as pleasure ground; an 1816 Act strengthened the protection against further building. That fight still shapes the simple walk west from Waverley. The street, shops and railway changed enormously, but the Castle and Old Town still rise across Princes Street Gardens instead of disappearing behind another wall of buildings. The old Act is not the only safeguard. Edinburgh’s current planning guidance protects key Castle views through viewing corridors and protected sky space. What began with householders defending their air and prospect left the city a public view generations still share.

Welsh tapestry blankets are still being made more than 250 years after a surviving pattern book recorded their reversible double-cloth weave. That makes Dinefwr’s upstairs studio in Llandeilo feel especially precious. These blankets became wedding gifts and part of a bride’s “bottom drawer”, then travelled with Welsh families seeking industrial work. (A piece of home had to earn its keep.) By the 1890s, west Wales had over 250 woollen factories. Most are silent now, but Dinefwr still designs in Wales and finishes its blankets in Llandeilo—old patterns made ready for another generation.