My haven, Robin Hanbury-Tenison: The explorer and author, 82, in his new house on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall

  • Robin Hanbury-Tenison, 80, has lived in Cornwall since 1960 
  • The explorer and author shared the items of significance inside his new home 
  • He values a photograph of his mother as a reminder of his childhood in Ireland
  • He also treasures a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society 

By Andrew Preston For Weekend Magazine

Published: | Updated:

Robin Hanbury-Tenison, 80, (pictured) has lived in Cornwall since 1960. Here, he reveals the items of personal significance in his new Bodmin Moor home 

Robin Hanbury-Tenison, 80, (pictured) has lived in Cornwall since 1960. Here, he reveals the items of personal significance in his new Bodmin Moor home 

1 WHAT A WILD RIDE 

Cornwall’s been my home since 1960, and I’ve just moved here to the site of what was an old deer house in the grounds of our farm, which we now call the old dear house. 

In honour of it I bought this model deer as a joke from a garden centre. My first wife Marika died in 1982, and a year later I married Louella.

On our honeymoon we went to the South of France to buy two Camargue horses, and then rode them the 1,200 miles home.

2 MY BARKING CHILDHOOD 

I grew up in Ireland where my mother Ruth was a leading Labrador trainer.

I was the youngest of five – nannies looked after the others but my mother said she kept me as a pet.

She educated me until I was eight, and from the age of six or seven I’d camp on my own on an island in the middle of a lake by our house, then row back for breakfast. It taught me to be alone, an important thing for an explorer.

3 A HEAD FOR ADVENTURE 

This 100-year-old parang – like a machete – on the table came from my biggest expedition, spending 15 months researching Borneo’s Mulu rainforest with 120 scientists in 1977/8. 

Sadly greed and corruption has since led to much of the forest being cut down. 

Robin treasures a collection of medals he achieved after turning 80 including one for the London Marathon (pictured top)

Robin treasures a collection of medals he achieved after turning 80 including one for the London Marathon (pictured top)

At the end of our stay the local tribespeople thanked me with this parang, which they said had cut off 100 heads. 

They’d been legendary headhunters, but hadn’t done it for a while – in fact, they couldn’t have been nicer people.

4 POLE POSITION

This narwhal tusk was given to me by Arctic explorer Wally Herbert as rent for living here on the farm in his caravan for a year. 

He was a great explorer but was always broke. He was in the first expedition to reach the North Pole by foot, taking 16 months to travel from Alaska to Spitzbergen in Norway. 

Wally would have been much more famous if, just after his return in 1969, Neil Armstrong hadn’t stolen his thunder by landing on the moon. 

5 WALKING ON EGGSHELLS 

I persuaded a local tribesman to walk across a chunk of the Kalahari Desert with me in 1980. 

There’s no surface water there so he’d dig a little hole, put a straw down, suck water up and then dribble it into this ostrich egg. 

I survived on an eggful a day. I’ve donated the ostrich egg and my other artefacts to the natural history museum at my old school, Eton College, which is open to the public on Sundays.

6 MEDAL FATIGUE

Turning 80 annoyed me, so I thought I’d spit in the face of fate and do eight silly things. I ended up raising £80,000 for Survival International, which campaigns for the rights of tribal people, and of which I’m president. 

The medal on the right is for finishing the London Marathon, which was very unpleasant. Then I did a skydive – easy, you just fall out of a plane. 

The hard one was a 761ft abseil, then a four-hour crawl through a cave. 

The gold medal is the one I’m most proud of – it’s from the Royal Geographical Society for my 1977/8 Borneo expedition. 

Robin’s latest book, Finding Eden (I.B. Tauris, £17.99), is about Borneo and the Penan people. Visit survivalinternational.org.

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