  A consortium of universities has recently been formed with the goal of using
the decommissioned telecommunications infrastructure at the Goonhilly Earth
Station in Cornwall, UK, for astronomical purposes. One particular goal is the
introduction of one or more of the ~30-metre parabolic antennas into the
existing e-MERLIN radio interferometer. This article introduces this scheme and
presents some simulations which quantify the improvements that would be brought
to the e-MERLIN system. These include an approximate doubling of the spatial
resolution of the array, an increase in its N-S extent with strong implications
for imaging the most well-studied equatorial fields, accessible to ESO
facilities including ALMA. It also increases the overlap between the e-MERLIN
array and the European VLBI Network. We also discuss briefly some niche science
areas in which an e-MERLIN array which included a receptor at Goonhilly would
be potentially world-leading, in addition to enhancing the existing potential
of e-MERLIN in its role as a Square Kilometer Array pathfinder instrument.

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics