In search of a poet Frances Bellerby Frances Bellerby lived at Plash Mill, near Upton Cross, on the edge of Bodmin Moor. Although few now have heard of her, she deserves to be read by all who find Cornwall in general and the moor in particular a mysterious and special place. Charles Causley, the foremost Cornish poet, championed her work. In his introduction to his selection of her verse *, he wrote of how she settled ‘at Plash Mill, under the louring shadow of Caradon Hill’, and how for eleven years she lived and wrote ‘in a haunted and haunting Cornish landscape. Here, in this particular area of Cornwall, are neolithic stone circles, medieval holy wells, ivied engine-houses crumbling away in a memory of the great nineteenth-century copper mines and their appalling conditions of labour. Nearby, too, is Cornwall’s frontier river valley of the Tamar that flows to Plymouth, with all its associations of war and the sea. The whole district is as heavy with history as the