About

Wheal Alice began when I moved from Shropshire, where I maintained the Sabrinuflu blog, to Cornwall. Over time this blog has expanded to range from information on Cornish events and resources to CD and concert reviews, to articles on music techniques, FAQs and history, as well as providing an outlet for my own folk-oriented music recordings, not to mention some of my eclectic verse and stories. During lockdown the blog has also started to generate and link to podcasts and videos.

Enquiries about CD and online event reviews as blog articles or podcasts are always welcome, as are questions and comments on the music or anything else, within reason. Here’s a link to the Contact form.

The Wheal Alice engine house pictured above is in the parish of Lelant (or, according to some sources, the parish of Ludgvan – I suspect that may be historical rather than contemporary usage, but I’m not a churchgoer), not far from St. Ives, and very close to where I’ve lived since 2016. The engine house is commonly referred to as Wheal Sisters, and according to a book I saw recently, is also known locally as Fox’s Whim, though I’ve never heard that name locally or elsewhere. (Sorry, I don’t seem to have made a note of the book’s title or author.)

Wheal in Cornish means a place of work, though it’s most often encountered as a name for a mine. Unsurprisingly. ‘Where there’s a mine or a hole in the ground…’ (Cousin Jack – a song about the Cornish diaspora – by Steve Knightley for Show of Hands. A great song, but probably not one I’d feel comfortable singing as one of ‘the English [who] live in our houses’.)

This blog site came about in part because for a while now I’ve been running a blog-y version of Fliss Burke’s Sabrinaflu web site, “promoting folk music, song and dance, especially but not exclusively along the course of the river Severn (hence Sabrinaflu – Sabrina Flumen).” When my wife and I started spending much of our time in Cornwall, I naturally started to look for musical events down here. And Cornwall isn’t that far from the Bristol Channel. I’m afraid I’ve mostly stepped back from the Sabrinaflu site now: partly because I spend very little time in Shropshire now, though I still help out a bit with the Facebook page.

Here’s more about me, in case anyone cares.

David Harley