“Salt-licked winds” and life of Cornwall’s fishing community

Lamorna Ash’s evocative, lyrical and profound memoir of a Cornish fishing village community in Newlyn, the largest working fishing port in Britain and highlights the meditation on the soul of a place in the face of globalisation.

#Twenty-Two-year-old Londoner Ash,  found gutting fish is a messy business as she was onboard 79ft beam trawler dipping up and down the high seas off the coast of Cornwall, emerging covered in slushy intestines.

She was decapitating a Monkfish and slicing open leopard rays after only eight days onboard the Filadelfia and earned a nickname “Raymundo”.

What started as an anthropological study and thesis research transforms into a lyrical study of Cornwall’s fishing community.

 She graphically describes snippets and character-rich stories, about the habits of fish and the art of catching them, about bifurcating life of sea and shore, about “salt-licked winds” and Squawking seabirds.

Ash a product of Oxford University and St Paul’s Girls School, she is like a fish to water,  at Newlyn, a busy Cornish fishing village of  4, 400 residents and five pubs and went on to do a pub crawl.

Ash’s focus is only tangentially on the politics and the economics of modern-day fisheries but she definitely writes about the individual life of Cornwall’s fisherman in vivid details.

She argues “anger and insularity”  among Cronwall’s harbourside cottages and rugged cliffs, and warns to be distrustful of an emmet writing about them and their turf.

 Dark, Salt. Clear by Lamorna Ash, Bloomsbury Press £15, 336 pages.