Thanks again Cornishman, but it seems like Ilow Kernow is out of print and not on Mike O'Connor's website. The only copy I can find on the Net is in USA and would cost about £45 including shipping...ouch! There are probably copies gathering dust in bookshops with little web frontage.
Comment elsewhere suggests that the 'country house' styles of dancing done in Cornwall in 18th/19th Century may have been very similar to those in the rest of UK, using many tunes that were almost universal within UK at the time. I suppose the reason would be that the owners of the big houses and estates often travelled within UK and may have also had had property in London, Bath, or Edinburgh. Whether you were dancing to Petronella played by Nathaniel Gow in a Scottish castle, or the Banqueting Hall in London, or a Dorset country house by the then equivalent of The Mellstock Band, it was the same tune and a similar sort of dancing.
What I'm looking for is uniquely Cornish forms of simple dances adaptable to riotous assemblies like end of evening at a local festival. It doesn't have to be authentic and it doesn't want to be complicated, just fun - the sort of gig you'd do with someone like The St Piran Pirates also taking part YouTube vids of dances annotated by John Old of Par in the early 19thC suggest that a number were a bit too 'polite' or else rather too complicated for what I have in mind, which is the Cornish equivalent of a modern West Highland village hall ceilidh. I'll email a friend who used to be in a troyle band and see what ideas he has.
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