Name: Homecoming Presents: Tim Hannigan
Start: 2025-10-29T17:00:00+00:00
Location: Heligan, PL26 6EN Pentewan, United Kingdom

29 Oct: 5:30pm - doors open from 5pm
We are excited to invite you to join us this Autumn as we launch an inspirational new programme at The Lost Gardens of Heligan. ‘Homecoming Presents’ will welcome authors, musicians, poets, horticulturalists, chefs, artists and thought leaders to Cornwall for intimate evenings and important conversations.
Rounding up our Autumn programme, we are delighted to welcome author Tim Hannigan who will be reading from his book ‘The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey’ during a conversation with host Matthew Shaw.
‘The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey’ is a fascinating, lyrical account of Tim’s east-west walk across Britain's westernmost and most mysterious region. A distant and exotic Celtic land, domain of tin-miners, pirates, smugglers and evocatively named saints, somehow separate from the rest of our island.
Few regions of Britain are as holidayed in, as well-loved or as mythologized as Cornwall. From the woodlands of the Tamar Valley to the remote peninsula of Penwith - via the wilderness of Bodmin Moor and coastal villages where tourism and fishing find an uneasy coexistence - Tim will talk us through his zigzagging journey on foot across Britain's westernmost region to discover how the real Cornwall, its landscapes, histories, communities and sense of identity, intersect with the many projections and tropes that writers, artists and others have placed upon it.
Tim will be signing copies of ‘The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey’ after this event.
Tim Hannigan was born in Penzance and grew up in Morvah. After leaving school he worked as a chef for several years in busy restaurant kitchens around West Cornwall. He escaped the catering industry via a degree in journalism and a move to Indonesia, where he taught English and worked as a journalist and guidebook writer. He is the author of several narrative history books, including A Brief History of Indonesia and the award-winning Raffles and the British Invasion of Java, as well as The Travel Writing Tribe and, most recently, The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey, which was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year Award and the Holyer An Gof Award. He also studies travel writing as an academic. He divides his time between Cornwall and the west of Ireland, where he teaches on the Writing & Literature programme at the Atlantic Technological University in Sligo. He is currently working on a travel book about a 500-mile walk from Dingle to Strangford Lough, exploring the fraught history of countryside access in Ireland.