Mevagissey sits in a valley that people have lived in since the Bronze Age. It built an inner harbour in 1778, wrote its own harbour laws in a pub four years before that, printed its own bank notes, and was the first village in the UK to have electric street lighting.
Every pin is a page. The map is the menu for people who would rather look than read a list.
Each one tells the village from where they stood. They have a story, a shelf of things to sell, and a door through to the store.
He walked the quay with a lantern before the village had lamps of its own — and was still walking it when the first electric lights came on.
The first village in the UK with electric street lighting.The catch did not only feed the village. It lit it. She knows what a barrel was worth by the hour, and what it cost to keep a light burning.
Pilchards were the trade, the diet and the fuel.A thousand years of dinners came out of this bay, most of them pilchard — so many that the village doctors started blaming the stomach aches on the fish.
The traditional diet here for a thousand years.By 1733 fishing alone would not put bread on a table. Roscoff was the run — French cognac, Dutch spirits — and everybody on this quay knew somebody who went.
In 1733 smuggling was rife. Roscoff was the primary stop.A department store never made what it sold — it chose it, set it out floor by floor, and put someone on the counter who knew the stock. IYUS does that part. Take a lift and the floor tells you a story before it sells you anything.
Each character keeps a shelf. What sits on it comes from the Qx commerce catalogue, so a shelf is never a picture of a shop — it is the shop.
The Mevagissey catalogue is not loaded yet. These are the four shelves it will fill, and the doors are already wired to the store.
Mevagissey has had an annual celebration going back a very long way. The modern Feast Week was devised in the 1960s: live music, the eating of fish, exhibitions, flora dances and choirs.
Settlers take the valley. Their burial mounds still stand on the cliffs south of the village, and the hill fort ruins on Camp Hill with them.
The age of the saints. Two settlements — Lammorick, and Porthhilly, a fishing community.
Fishing alone no longer puts bread on the table. Smuggling is rife, with Roscoff the primary stop.
The Harbour Trust rules are written in the Ship Inn, and bound not in cow leather but in the skin of a ling.
The inner harbour is built. The outer wall follows a century later and takes the worst of the storms off it.
The modern Feast Week is devised — music, fish, exhibitions, flora dances and choirs.
The village keeps two other kinds of story, and is honest about which is which.
Photographs live on the content mount rather than in git, so this band is drawn empty on purpose until the real pictures are in place. What is designed here is the shape: a wide strip that scrolls, captions on hover, and every image linked to the page it belongs to.
Mevagissey is unusual in that the fishermen own the seabed around the harbour, which is normally the Duchy's. The village is a place of work first and a view second, and the guide is written that way.
Around the harbour, where it would normally belong to the Duchy of Cornwall.
Mevagissey printed its own bank notes at one point.
The first village in the UK to have electric street lighting.
A directory of the businesses the guide sends people to. It is empty here because a partner list has to be real to be worth anything — the design is a four-column index that grows a column at a time, the same way the menu does.
No partners loaded in the preview.
Mevagissey Harbour — a guide to the village, the bay and the people who worked it.
PREVIEW. This is a design preview at /preview on the Qx devhost. The live guide is at mevagissey.co.uk and is untouched by it.