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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
OF THE
Ann S. Farnam Fund

THE CORNISH COAST
(NORTH)

WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER
The Portsmouth Eoad, and its Tributaries : To-day and in Days
of Old.
The Dover Eoad : Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
The Bath Eoad: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old
Highway.
The Exeter Eoad : The Story of the West of England Highway.
The Great North Eoad : The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two
Vols.
The Norwich Eoad: An East Anglian Highway.
The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two
Vols.
The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Eoad: The Great
Fenland Highway.
The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road : Sport
and History on an Last Anglian Turnpike.
The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Eoad : The
Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols.
The Brighton Road : Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic
Highway.
The Hastings Eoad and the " Happy Springs of Tunbridge."
Cycle Rides Round London.
A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of
Reproduction.
Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Tore. Two Vols.
The Ingoldsby Country : Literary Landmarks of " The Ingoldsby
Legends."
The Hardy Country : Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
The DorBet Coast.
The South Devon Coast.
The Old Inns of Old England. Two Vols.
Love in the Harbour : a Longshore Comedy.
Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey).
Haunted Houses; Tales ofthe Supernatural.
The Manchester and Glasgow Road. This way to Gretna
Green. 1 wo Vols.
The North Devon Coast.
Half-Hours with the Highwaymen. Two Vols.
The Autocar Road Book. Four Vols.
The Tower Of London : Fortress, Palace, and Prison.
The Somerset Coast.
The Smugglers : Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient
The Cornish Coast. South.
Thames VaUey Villages. r/„ ,;,„ Press

Gibson & Sons, Penzance]

WkhCK Oh THli ALEXANDER YEATS, GURNARD'S UliAI),

THE
CORNISH COAST

(NORTH)

CHARLES G. HARPER

" Cornwall is the compleate and repleate Horn
qf Abundance for high churlish hills, and
affable, courteous people. . . The country
hath its share of huge stones, mighty rocks,
noble free gentlemen, bountiful housekeepers,
strong and stout men, handsome and beautiful
ivomen."- — Taylor (tbe "Water Poet") 1649

London : CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.
1910

PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL WATSON AND VINEY, L
LONDON AND AYLESBURY

CONTENTS

PAGE
INTRODUCTION  I

CHAPTER I
MARSLAND MOUTH — MORWENSTOW — HAWKER, THE
ECCENTRIC VICAR OF MORWENSTOW . . II

CHAPTER II
TONACOMBE — COMBE VALLEY — -STOWE AND THE
GRENVILLES — OLD HARVEST CUSTOMS . . 35
CHAPTER III
THE CORNISH ARMY, AND THE BATTLE OF STAMFORD
HILL — SIR BEVIL GRENVILLE AT LANSDOWN . 50

CHAPTER IV
BUDE — POUGHILL — MARHAMCHURCH — WIDEMOUTH
BAY — MILLHOOK — CRACKINGTON HAVEN . . 62
v

PAGE

vi CONTENTS CHAPTER V
PENTARGAN BAY, AND THE " CLIFF WITHOUT A
NAME "— " A PAIR OF BLUE EYES "— BOSCASTLE
—MINSTER — FORRABURY AND ITS " SILENT
TOWER " — WILLAPARK AND BLACKAPIT — CAMEL-
FORD 

CHAPTER VI
THE ROCKY VALLEY — ST. NIGHTON'S KIEVE — BOS-
SINEY — TREVENA, OR TINTAGEL  KING ARTHUR
— THE OLD POST-OFFICE — TREVENA CHURCH . IOI

CHAPTER VII
TREBARWITH STRAND — PORT GA VERNE — PORT
ISAAC — DELABOLE — PENTIRE — ST. ENODOC AXD
THE SANDHILLS — ROCK  WADEBRIDGE — ST.
BREOCK — LITTLE PETHERICK — PADSTOW —
HARLYN BAY — TREVOSE HEAD — ST. CONSTAN
TINE' S CHURCH  126

CHAPTER VIII
QUEEN BESS ROCK, BEDRUTHAN STEPS — MAWGAN
PORTH— MAWGAN AND THE VALE OF LANHERNE
—PORTH— NEWQUAY— ST. COLUMB MINOR— ST.
COLUMB MAJOR . ,..

CONTENTS vii

CHAPTER IX
PAGE
CRANTOCK — WEST PENTIRE — CUBERT — THE LEGEND
OF LANGARROW — ELLENGLAZE — ST. PIRAN'S
SANDS — PERRANPORTH — ST. PIRAN'S ORATORY 165

CHAPTER X
ST. AGNES — TREVAUNANCE PORTH — -PORTREATH —
DOLCOATH : DOWN A TIN MINE — ARSENIC . 184

CHAPTER XI
TEHIDY — CARN BREA — GWITHIAN — GODREVY
LIGHTHOUSE — PHILLACK — HAYLE — LELANT
— JOHN KNILL AND HIS MONUMENT . 202

CHAPTER , XII
ST. IVES  222
CHAPTER XIII
THE ST. IVES CONSOLS — RADIUM — ZENNOR QUOIT —
ZENNOR — GURNARD'S HEAD — PREHISTORIC
CORNWALL  234

viii CONTENTS

CHAPTER XIV PAGE
BOSIGRAN — MORVAH — PENDEEN — CARN KENIDZHEK
AND THE GUMP — THE LEVANT MINE — BOTAL-
LACK — WHEAL OWLES  253

CHAPTER XV
ST. JUST-IN-PENWITH — CAPE CORNWALL — WHITE-
SAND BAY — SENNEN COVE — LAND'S END . . 262

INDEX

277

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Wreck of the Alexander Yeats, Gurnard's Head
The Cornish Coast (North)
Morwenstow ....
Morwenstow Vicarage
Figurehead of the Caledonia
Tonacombe ....
Hawker's Cottage, Combe Valley
The "Neck" ....
Tablet at the " Tree " Inn, Stratton
Stamford Hill Monument .
Bude 
John Trebarfoot
MillhookCrackington Haven
Boscastle .....
Boscastle .....
The Harbour, Boscastle
Queen Victoria Rock, Boscastle
Cottages at Boscastle
Boscastle, from the Camelford Road
Camelford ....
Creswick's Mill in the Rocky Valley
The Elephant Rock, Bossiney .
Tintagel 

Frontispiece PAGE i
17
22 25
36
40
47 Si59
63 74778085
86 89
9i 939699
103106
Facing 112

Facing
Facing

Facing

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing
Facing

Cross, Trevena ....
Cross, Trevena ....
The "Old Post Office," Trevena
Trebarwith Strand
Port Isaac
St. Enodoc, Padstow, and the Estuary of the Camel Facing
Queen Elizabeth Rock . . ...
Mawgan Porth
The Vale of Lanherne
Mawgan Church . ...
Monument at St. Columb Minor
The Coast of Cornwall (North-west and South-west)
Crantock Church .....
Font, Crantock .
Cubert Church ......
Rocks at Perranporth
Wreck of the Seine, Perranporth
St. Agnes ....
The Harbour, Trevaunance Porth
Trevaunance Porth : Wheal Friendly Mine
Cam Brea, from Tehidy
Gwithian . ...
Godrevy Lighthouse
Phillack 
Approach to Lelant .
Knill's Monument
Arms of Knill
St. Ives
Cross, St. Ives Church
Hicks's Court, St. Ives
The " Sloop " Inn, St. Ives
Barnoor Hill, St. Ives . . . Facing

Facing
Facing Facing

Facing

PAGE 118119
120 126 128
130 149
151
153
157160 164
16616817317817S
185188190
203205
208210213217
219 222
224 225
227 230

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

xi

A Street in St. Ives .

PAGE 232

Zennor Quoit ...

.

241

Zennor ......

244
The Mermaid of Zennor
246
Gurnard's Head
247
The Road to Pendeen
Facing
254
Botallack to-day
258
Botallack, as it was .
Facing
260
St. Just Church .
263
Interior, St. Just Church .
265
Label-stop, St. Just .
266
Label-stop, St. Just .
267
The Senilus Stone, St. Just
268
Cape Cornwall
271
Land's End
Facing
274
J4ars/an<*

cJ{c)Tt^^<rc^

MARSLftKD to KeW^UAY

K.lkK*?^"

, Pound fctock

3%jl (ORNISH (qast

norjh

INTRODUCTION
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
comprises England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales,
to which a patriotic Cornishman might feel in
clined to add Cornwall. And, if he did so, he
would be in large measure justified, for Cornwall
is not merely a county, although generally placed
in that middle position between a mere shire and
a distinct national entity. It is a Duchy, and,
more than that, has something approaching a
distinct nationality. Still the Cornishman may be
heard talking of " going into England," when he
intends crossing the Tamar and entering Devon ;
and to this day all who come westward across
that stream are " foreigners." It is from no
fantastic notion that he holds these views, but
merely as a curious survival of ancient conditions,
when Cornwall was still an independent country,
the land of the Cornu- Welsh ; the ultimate west,

2 THE CORNISH COAST
where the Saxon had not yet prevailed. Who,
then, are the Cornish ? They are, even as the
Welsh of Wales, the surviving Britons, the last
of the race, divided into many tribes, that peopled
Britain when Caesar and later Romans came and
conquered the isle. The Britons were originally
an invading race. They came from the Continent,
and are the first we know of among the several
peoples, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans,
who have overrun what is now England and sub
merged, or partly submerged, its earlier inhabit
ants. Historians prefer to style them " Bry-
thons." We shall probably not be far wrong in
supposing that the Britons, when finally con
quered by the Romans and when the land had
definitely become a colony of the Empire, were a
happy people : as happy, that is to say, as any
Celtic race is capable of being. They partook
of the Roman civilisation, and became not merely
an inferior conquered race, but intermarried with
their conquerors. Thus arose a newer nation co
partners with the Romans of the Continent in the
arts and in the Christian religion. The Romano-
Britons, in the long-drawn agony of the Empire's
decay, very nearly won permanent independence ;
but when the Roman legionaries were withdrawn,
in a.d. 410, their culture, unsupported by military
strength, fell into ruin with the centuries of desper
ate struggles against invading ruthless hordes of
barbarians. When barbarians attack, it is a
war of extermination that follows, and as the
Britons were by degrees for a space of five hundred

INTRODUCTION 3
years, from about a.d. 410 until 936, driven west
ward by the Saxon hosts, the slaughter was long-
continued and prodigious. In that period the
light of culture went out, and was only lit anew in
the last sixty-five years of it, under the rule of
Alfred the Great.
The final disaster for the Britons was the con
quest of Cornwall by Athelstan, grandson of
Alfred, in 936. The Britons of Wales and those
of Cornwall had already been divided from one
another by Saxon victories in the neighbourhood
of Gloucester and Bath, and the Saxons knew
them henceforward as the " Welsh " and the
" West Welsh " or Cornu- Welsh, i.e. the Welsh
who occupied the horn-shaped land (Cornwall).
The only communication that then was left be
tween the Britons of Wales and Cornwall was that
arm of the sea we now call the Bristol Channel.
Meanwhile, already in the initial troubles of the
fifth and sixth centuries, there had been a con
siderable exodus from Britain into the land then
called Armorica, across the ninety miles or more
of the English Channel ; the land that came
afterwards to be called Brittany. The Bretons
of Brittany are, in fact, descendants of those fifth-
and sixth-century emigrants, and of those others
who followed when Athelstan conquered Cornwall
in the tenth century, and to this day we not only
find part of Brittany known as CornouaiUe, and
discover the essential sameness of the Welsh and
the Brezonec languages, but happen upon many
place-names identical in Brittany and Cornwall,

4 THE CORNISH COAST
with the mere exception of an insignificant letter
or so. Thus we find in Cornwall a Lanyon, and
in Brittany a Lannion ; a Landewednack, and a
Landevenec ; a St. Michael Caerhayes, and a
St. Michel Carhaix ; a St. Breock, and a St.
Brieuc ; with a parallel to the Lizard in " Lezard-
rieux." Mr. Henry Jenner, author of a work on the
Cornish language, tells us that the old language
of Cornwall even more nearly resembles that of
Brittany than Welsh, and describes how, making
a speech in the Cornish tongue at a meeting in
Brittany, he was fairly well understood by the
Bretons. Brittany, which has often been called " Little
England," is far larger than our Cornwall, as this
table will at once show :

Square miles

Population 1891

Brittany .

13,130

3,162,272

Cornwall .

1,356

322,589

Cornwall, therefore, both in respect of area and
population, is only about one-tenth the size of
Brittany. The population of Cornwall, moreover, is de
creasing. It reached its maximum in 1861, when
it was 369,390, and has since then exhibited a
steady decline, falling by 1891 to 322,589 ; a
decrease of over 1,500 a year, spread over a period
of thirty years. The cause of this consistent
shrinkage is found in the progressive decay in that
period of the tin and copper mining, which used

INTRODUCTION 5
to be the staple industries of Cornwall. But better
times are coming, and at any rate there has been
no development of Cornwall in which the foreigner
has come and thrust his alien name upon those
Cornish names, whose characteristic beginnings
Camden noted over three centuries ago, in the
rhyme, By Tre, Ros, Pol, Caer, and Pen,
You may know the most Cornish men.
The chief products of Cornwall are so well
known to be "copper, tin, and fish," that long
ago the phrase thus enumerating them won to a
celebrity almost as widespread as the county
motto, "One and All"; and, indeed, itself was
thought by some actually to be the motto. The
Cornish seas, needless to say, remain as teeming
as ever, and there is probably more copper and
tin remaining within the stubborn granite rocks of
the county, than has ever been extracted from it
in all the two thousand years in which we know
mining for those metals to have been carried on.
But for many years Cornish mining has been
under a cloud. In the old days, when tin and
copper were found chiefly in Cornwall, Cornishmen
shared among themselves the advantages that
come naturally to those who possess almost a
monopoly in anything ; but when great finds of
copper were made in Spain and North America,
they began to feel the effects of competition, and
their ruin was almost wholly compassed by the
extraordinarily rich deposits of tin discovered in

6 THE CORNISH COAST
the Straits Settlements in 1870, and in Australia
in 1875. These finds very seriously brought down
the price per ton of copper and tin ore, and thus
rendered it in the majority of cases commercially
impossible to continue mining in Cornwall, where
deep levels and the highly costly equipment neces
sary in old workings could not compete with the
rich lodes and cheap labour abroad. Thus the
busy mining-fields in Cornwall gradually grew
silent, and the mine-shafts and engine-houses
deserted. The Cornish, fortunately for them
selves, are a frugal and an adaptive people, and the
busy miners faced the altered conditions and,
very generally, resigning themselves with a sigh
to expatriation, turned to Australia or to Asia,
and went to seek a fortune or a wage at their old,
hereditary trade under alien skies. Later, when
the goldfields of the Rand were discovered,
Cornishmen flocked also to South Africa. There
are probably forty thousand Cornishmen now in
Australia and the Straits Settlements alone. The
conditions abroad are very different from those
that have survived in Cornwall from ancient
times, and have done much to hamper enterprise.
Here the old "tribute " system, at last dying out,
obtained : a method by which the working miner
shared the risks and profits of the " adventurer,"
or speculator in the work of a mine, instead of
receiving a fixed wage. The Duchy of Cornwall
and the ground-landlords alone benefit without
working for it, or without risking anything;
taking their mining royalties whether the miners

INTRODUCTION 7
lose or gain. Under foreign skies the Cornish
miner usually remains a stranger in a strange
land, hoping always to return to Cornwall when
he has made a competency. That is why there
are so many married women and children in
Cornwall whose husbands and fathers are away.
The Cornish love their wild country as passionately
as any other branch of the Celtic family their
home, as the Scottish highlanders their lochs and
glens, the Irish their bogs and mountains, or the
Welsh their own beautiful land. But, unlike
those nations, their love is dumb, and has never
found expression in song and story. A Cornish
man is never eloquent about Cornwall, but he
always returns, if it be possible ; and meanwhile
he leaves his people at home, sending home with
the punctuality of an automaton a goodly pro
portion of his earnings for the support of those
left behind. And, since travel is so cheap and
has brought the ends of the earth into such ready
communication, he not seldom comes home on
a flying visit, until such time as he can return for
good, and settle for the rest of his days in his own
grey-green land of granite, in some comfortable
cottage, handy to one of those uncompromisingly
ugly Bible Christian chapels that are a feature
of Cornwall, wherein he will on Sundays uplift
a voice, earnest indeed, but unmelodious, in
psalmody. Although the true Cornishman is so patriotic
where his own Cornwall is concerned, he is no
Imperialist ; hence the great rush home of miners

8 THE CORNISH COAST
from the Transvaal when the troubles arose
there, leading up to the great Boer War of 1899-
1902. Others might fight for the Empire. It
was not a pleasing thing to contemplate.
Another and more welcome change has within
the last few years come upon the mining fortunes
of Cornwall. The world's demands for tin and
copper have grown enormously, the market price
of those metals has in consequence risen, until
it has become once more possible to get tin and
copper out of the granite and slate rock at a
profit. It is largely that matter of market-price,
just as the annual acreage under wheat in other
parts of England is influenced by the rise or fall
of the price per quarter. Not, however, wholly
an affair of markets, for in these latter days im
proved and cheapened methods of mining have
been introduced, among which electrical installa
tions for the costly purpose of pumping, com
pressed air, and the diamond-drill have effected
much saving.
Mining had never wholly ceased in Cornwall,
and Dolcoath and the extreme westerly mining-
field of Pendeen were active in the worst times,
with Levant and Botallack hard by; and the
weekly ticketings of ore at Redruth, where the
tin and copper are sold, had not ever ceased ; but
those mines in work were the exception, and a
railway journey through West Cornwall from
Truro, where the Great Western runs through the
midst of a once busy scene, had become for the
most part a weird experience, like that of passing

INTRODUCTION 9
through a dead and deserted land. There
stretched away the desolate region of Scorrier and
Chacewater, with hundreds of derelict engine-
houses, all of one pattern, looking, with their
chimneys, in the twilight like so many monstrous
animals of the giraffe kind. Heaps of poisonous
mine refuse, on which nothing will grow, strewed
the scene, and nowhere was there the slightest
sign of activity. Not a wisp of smoke, telling of
a mine at work, floated from any of the chimneys.
To-day signs of a renewed life become more
and more increasingly manifest. Pits long idle
are being reopened and engine-houses and plant
of an entirely new type are being erected. The
renascence of mining is, however, on its trial
here, and it is as yet too early to form a judgment
as to whether it is merely a passing wave, or
whether a new era has really dawned. The
old-time mine-managers — the " captains," as they
are always called in Cornwall — are a little scorn
ful of electrical pumping plant, and of the scientific
ways of up-to-date mining engineers. They
cherish a very great respect for the old Cornish
pumping engines (or " inyins " as your true
Cornishman would say), which for generations
effectually drained the most profound pits, and
consider the electrical contrivances to be too
delicate. But those old " captains," although
for the most part, in common with the Cornish
in general, Liberal if not Radical in politics, are
the veriest Conservatives in mining practice, and
consider their old rule-of-thumb the best method,

io THE CORNISH COAST
and consequently any change a change for the
worse. It is instructive to briefly glance at the fortunes
of tin and copper, which mean so much to this
western land, and to note the wild rises and falls
in value of these metals. The metallic tin —
that is to say, tin after being smelted — produced in
Cornwall rose in 1870 to 10,200 tons, and the
price per ton, which in 1866 had fallen to £88,
rose to £127 8s. 6d. In 1872 the price of tin
reached its high-water mark of £152 15s. a ton,
and thence declined to £65 12s. 3^. in 1878. It
has since then gradually risen, and the market
at this time of writing is strong at £151 12s. 6d.,
with a prospect of the record price in 1872 being
reached. Cornwall's immediate future in respect
of tin is therefore particularly hopeful, and the
output, which in 1899 fell to 4,013 tons, will
doubtless soon rapidly increase.
Copper has experienced equal fluctuations.
Pure copper was worth £104 per ton in 1872. By
1877 it had fallen to £58 5s. In 1893 it was
down to £49 15s. and in 1904 to a trifle over £33.
It is now quoted at £59 ys.

CHAPTER I
MARSLAND MOUTH — MORWENSTOW — HAWKER, THE
ECCENTRIC VICAR OF MORWENSTOW
We have already seen the historical warranty the
Cornishman has when he talks, in crossing from
Cornwall eastward, of " going into England,"
and now let it be duly set forth how far we have
to go from the border-line at Marsland Mouth
until the extremity of his country is reached,
along the north coast, at Land's End. Measured
in a straight line on the map, it is eighty-one
miles, but nothing in the nature of such direct
progression is possible, unless we elect to go by
road, and that is only approximately straight,
and rarely touches the coast. To explore the
north Cornish coast afoot, following the cliff-tops
and the coastguard-paths, and tracking along
the shores of estuaries will bring the itinerary
up to quite 120 miles. It is a rugged line of
country, whether by cliff or by road, and the
motor-car and the bicycle can only here and
there approach the sea (the bicycle more frequently
of the two) at seaside towns and villages ; thus
sampling, as it were, the delights of these coast
wise miles. Yet there is no reason why the
Cornish coasts should not be explored in that

12 THE CORNISH COAST
way. What is lacking in either of those two
last methods can easily be made up by filling
in with walking the stretches of coast impossible
to them. Cornwall is certainly not impossible
for a cyclist, but in the byways, he must be
prepared for prodigious gradients and for scatters
of loose stones.
The north coast of Cornwall begins, according
to the modern county boundary, on the south
side of the romantic tangled combe called Marsland
Mouth, nine miles south of Hartland Point.
It should, however, if there be aught in the ety
mology of place-names, begin rather at Welcombe
Mouth, the matter of a mile back, for Welcombe
is shown in ancient records as " Walcombe,"
and " Wala-combe " ; that is to say, the Welsh,
or Strangers' valley. The name, given by the
invading Saxons, indicated the frontier of that
country into which the Cornu- Welsh, or Cornish,
had been driven.
Trending almost due south from Hartland,
the coast-line continues to follow that course
for another eleven or twelve miles, past Bude,
and then gradually assumes a south-westerly
direction. The beginning of this coast is an obscure
and difficult point for the explorer to reach,
and he who would follow the cliffs to Morwenstow
will find that, although it measures but a mile
and a half on the map, it is really about four
miles of, for the most part, toilsome scrambling.
Two years before this walk from Marsland

MARSLAND MOUTH 13
Mouth to Morwenstow was undertaken, I came
on a bicycle down to the Mouth, just where a
plank-bridge spans the stream which divides
Devon and Cornwall, and there, having set foot
in Cornwall and completed that which I had
set myself to do, turned back " home-along,"
as we say in the West. Even so, I thought,
Caesar, before the dawn of the Christian era,
came to Britain and, looking upon it, left, in
tending to return when opportunity served. Yes,
you may smile at the simile, you who know only
such coasts as those where the scenery is tame,
and where level roads skirt the shore ! Here,
where savage cliffs, deep valleys, and steep
hillsides give upon the Atlantic, where coastguard
paths may exist, but are impossible to be found,
and where only by the merest chance a solitary
farm or an occasional human being is to be
happened upon, the explorer finds himself com
mitted to something of an enterprise.
I said I came down to Marsland Mouth on a
bicycle, but it should rather be said with a bicycle,
for no one, having come to the hilltop road that
passes two atrociously ugly plaster villas, and
then spills sharply down the hillside in circum
stances of dust, loose stones, and abrupt corners,
would be mad enough to ride down. So I walked
it down, and returned likewise, meeting down
below an old man with a donkey laden with sand,
who was of opinion that no machine could be
taken through that way to Morwenstow. He
was wrong there, for a road of sorts exists, but

14 THE CORNISH COAST
it does not touch the coast, and whoever wants
to come upon the cliffs must do so on foot, and
not easily either.
The footpath down to the Mouth itself winds
through ferny brakes and dense, woody under-
growths with so many twists and turns that
nothing can be seen beyond a few yards. A
mile or more of this, and then a black-avised
opening is disclosed, where the little stream
plunges out from the thorns, blackberry-brambles,
and scrub-oaks of the valley on to a little beach,
and then, like some maniac rushing upon de
struction, loses itself in the roaring sea. The
sea, indeed, roars here, the long ground-swell
of the Atlantic dashing in great curving rollers,
crested with foam, like the manes of white horses,
upon the lonely strand, and filling the air with
salt particles : aerated sea-water, than which few
things are more refreshing. Grinning black cliffs
enclose the little bay, and a dark, ugly-snouted
crag, " Gull Rock," stands out to sea.
A scramble up the cliffside leads to a devious
way amid the gorse and bracken, where the
sullen rocks go sheer to the water, with gigantic
fallen fragments below, all ringed about with
foam. Looking backward, the eye ranges over
the valley, up to where a farmhouse is seen :
that small farmstead built in 1656 by one William
Atkyns as a residence, and now figuring in Mr
Baring Gould's story, " The Gaverocks." Fiction
indeed, has been busily employed upon this
coast-line. Kingsley annexed Marsland Mouth

.V

MORWENSTOW 15
in his " Westward Ho ! " and Hawker, a more
subtle and insidious worker in the art, has peopled
these cliffs and the Morwenstow countryside in
general with the wild creatures of his imagination,
or with highly elaborated versions of the wreckers,
pirates, and smugglers, who flourished on these
coasts in a small way of business. The country
folk here were always, of course, being Celts,
marvel-mongers, but their imaginations were
limited. The Reverend R. S. Hawker, on the
other hand, the famous Vicar of Morwenstow,
possessed a fecund and inventive mind. Your
humble, pettifogging pirate (not your blood-
boltered majestic pirate of the Spanish Main,
but the comparatively harmless fellow of the
West Country) became in his hands a creature
of superhuman attributes and super-diabolical
passions ; and your striving, hand-to-mouth
smuggler was metamorphosed into a far-seeing
syndicate of " free-traders," who did business
on a wholesale scale, even engineering hollow
lanes leading up from the Mouths with earthwork
banks on either side, constructed so that the
Revenue officers should not observe the trains of
pack-horses, laden with spirit-tubs, winding inland
from the shore. Such a creature, an impossible
combination of pirate, smuggler, and devil, was
his " Cruel Coppinger." The real " Cruel Cop-
pinger " was far less terrible ; and in actual life
a far milder man than the untutored local legends
made him. He is represented to have come, by
some almost satanic agency, in storm and ship-

16 THE CORNISH COAST
wreck, to this coast, and after a long career of
murder, piracy, smuggling, and local intimidation
to have vanished in like manner ; but we find
him, in real life, a bankrupt in 1802, and a prisoner
in the King's Bench, and later subsisting on an
allowance from his wife, paid him on condition
of his living apart from her. I have analysed
this preposterous, ogreish figure at length else
where,* and find his proportions to consist of
something like six parts Hawker and three parts
local marvel-mongering, with the small residuum
of one-part truth.
The tragedy of the pedestrian who would see
this coast is that he is no sooner up out of one
Mouth and on the breezy hillside, than he sees
before him the sharp descent into another, at
whose foot he stews and gasps, if it be summer,
in a close, still atmosphere. Thus there comes
the descent into Yeol, or Yuol, Mouth, with its
little stream, and thence a further rise to Henna-
cliff, 450 feet high, the crowning height. No
attempt at heroics shall here be made in respect
of Hennacliff : imagine it to be a culmination
of the scenery already passed, and that shall
suffice. He who would write upon the Cornish
coast must early learn to husband his ad
jectives. From this point Morwenstow is well disclosed,
the church standing half-way up a valley, and
on a spur of one of the great semi-circular hills
that here are bare of trees, or wooded merely
* "The Smugglers," pp. 129-136.

MORWENSTOW

17

in occasional patches. Such an isolated wood
is that which shelters Morwenstow church.
There is nothing at all resembling a village at
Morwenstow. The homely " Bush " inn, more
nearly in the likeness of a farm than an inn, stands
with some bartons and a cottage or two, on a
common-like scrap of land just off the south-east
side of the churchyard, and the vicarage lies just
down below, on the north. In summer time a

MORWENSTOW.

carriage or a waggonette, a bicycle, perhaps, and
a few strangers peering curiously about will be
seen, for Morwenstow has during these latter days
become a place of pilgrimage on account of the
eccentric Robert Stephen Hawker, vicar here
forty-one years. Hawker died in 1875, and
successive biographies and quaint stories of him
in guide-books have ever since then gradually
established a kind of Hawker legend, that is very
valuable to any contemplative philosopher who
3

18 THE CORNISH COAST
may be travelling in Cornwall intent on its
mythology and legends ; for we have here an
example of an interesting and singular personality,
around which legends are surely accruing, just as
they did, ages ago, around the personahties of
those dim figures who are now Cornish saints;
those among them, that is to say, who ever really
existed at all. The art of printing and the con
sequent more or less exact recording of facts
have for some centuries past nipped the growth
of such legends, and have fixed the shifting sands
of hearsay, just as grasses give stability to the
blown sandhills by the seashore, so it is scarce
likely that Hawker will ever be canonised ; but
he is lionised instead, so greatly indeed, that
no book on the Cornish coast could be considered
complete without some account of him.
Robert Stephen Hawker was born December
3rd, 1803, at Plymouth ; son of a doctor, and
grandson of the Rev. Robert Hawker, vicar of
Charles church. In after-years his father abandoned
the medical profession and entered the Church,
becoming eventually (1833) vicar of Stratton,
where he died in 1845. Hence his early asso
ciation with this neighbourhood, confirmed by
the offer and acceptance of the living of Mor
wenstow in 1834. Whether at Plymouth with
his grandfather, or at Stratton, where his father
had become curate as early as 1808, he early
distinguished himself by boyish escapades and
reckless high spirits. They knew him well, even
down as far as Bude, where, on one occasion,

A PROPOSAL 19
" dressin' up in seaweed an' not much else, an'
zettin' on a rock in the munelight, an' combin'
his hair, all the town went out to zee 'en. They
thoft et wer a merry-maid, sure 'nuff. An' ther
'a zet an' zinged every night, till a varmer tuk a
gun an' tried to shut en."
He was sent to Oxford in 1823, and entered at
Pembroke College, but his prospects of remaining
there until he had taken his degree were suddenly
dashed by the news that his father could no
longer afford the expense. He seems to have
been suddenly confronted with this disastrous
news when at home at Stratton, during vacation.
Hearing it, " without waiting to put on his hat,"
says Mr. Baring-Gould in his biography of
Hawker, " he ran from Stratton to Bude, arrived
hot and blown at Efford, and proposed to Miss
Charlotte I'Ans to become his wife."
The story of that two-miles run has been con
tradicted, but it is quite characteristic of Hawker ;
nor was it done without a reason. At that time
there resided partly at Bude, and partly at
Whitstone, six miles from Stratton, the four
middle-aged daughters of one Colonel I'Ans, who
had died in 1816. Their house at Bude, known
as Efford Manor, still stands, and is now the
vicarage. The I'Ans family had been long on
terms of friendship with the Hawkers. Miss
Charlotte I'Ans, one of the four sisters, was then
forty-one years of age, while Hawker himself
was not quite twenty. Mr. Baring-Gould tells
us that she was his godmother, anc[ had taught

20 THE CORNISH COAST
him his letters; and certainly when she was a
young woman of some twenty years old, she had
nursed and petted the boy. The strangely
assorted couple were married at Stratton, and the
bridegroom's father performed the ceremony. The
lady's fortune enabled him to return to Oxford
and complete his career there, at Magdalen Hall.
Mr. C. E. Byles, writing a definite life of
Hawker, from the point of view of a relative,
objects to this story, and declares it to be untrue
that the marriage was the mercenary one it is thus
made to appear ; but whatever the motive, the
fact remains that at the moment when Hawker's
prospects were likely to have been spoiled for
lack of money, he did suddenly propose to, and
marry, a woman old enough to be his mother,
and possessed of the means by which he was
enabled to complete his University course. To
blink or to attempt to obscure that fact is merely
to tacitly acknowledge the mercenary nature of
the affair.
It was in 1828 that Hawker took his B.A.
degree. The following year he became curate at
North Tamerton. When he was appointed to
Morwenstow in 1834, by Phillpotts, Bishop of
Exeter, the parish was still inhabited by quaint
characters, sufficiently shrewd in worldly affairs,
even though few of them could write or read.
The Church of England had no hold whatever
upon them. ' They were," says Hawker him
self, " a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers,
and dissenters of various hue." This association

HAWKER, THE ECCENTRIC VICAR 21
sufficiently shows Hawker's attitude towards Non
conformists ; but he should perhaps have ex
plained that John Wesley, the great preacher
of whom he speaks of " persuading the people to
alter their sins," would never have obtained his
chance here and elsewhere, if the clergy of the
Church of England had only done their duty.
The bitter expression of " altering " their sins,
instead of leaving them, cannot be forgiven him.
It simply discloses the unending antagonism be
tween the State Church and the free Churches.
For myself, I recently heard a Very Reverend
Dean, speaking in public, rather taking credit for
the goodwill in our own times displayed by the
Establishment towards Nonconformists. " We
have found a neutral term," he said, " and speak
of them as ' the denominations — the names.' "
How generous !
The position of affairs when Hawker came to
Morwenstow was indeed characteristic. The
vicarage was in ruins, for there was no resident
clergyman, nor had been for upwards of a hun
dred years. The Reverend Oliver Rouse had
been the last occupant, and he was no shining
light wherewith to illumine the darkness of the
wreckers, the smugglers — and the dissenters. He
was related by marriage to Thomas Waddon, of
Tonacombe, who had a brother resident at Stan-
bury, and the three of them took turn and turn
about to visit one another's houses, there card-
playing and drinking far into the night. Often,
in these drunken sessions, they would break their

22

THE CORNISH COAST

glasses, and at last the humorous idea occurred
to them that it would be a waggish and an appro
priate thing to construct a lantern set with the
feet of those demolished drinking-vessels, to keep
them in mind of the liquor that was gone and of
the jolly evenings it had produced. And the
guest, or guests, whose turn it was to walk home
took the lantern, to light him on his way. After

MORWENSTOW VICARAGE.']
having come into Hawker's possession, this curious
lantern at last found its way to Tonacombe, where
it still remains, a large oriental-looking wooden
affair, set with about twenty feet of wine-glasses,
and with other fragments of glass cut into dia
mond and heart shapes.
The vicarage had stood near the church
tower, on the south-west side of the churchyard.
Hawker in the course of five years built a new
one, on a new site : a spot he had observed the

HAWKER, THE ECCENTRIC VICAR 23
sheep select when sheltering from storms. With
his mystical mind, he compared his vicarage with
the sheep-shelter, and called it a refuge for his
flock ; but no doubt his first intention was to
make himself as comfortable as he could. He
was largely his own architect, which accounts
for the eccentricities of the building ; its chimneys
representing, rather roughly, the church-towers
of the various places with which he had been
associated : Stratton, Whitstone, Magdalen, North
Tamerton, and others not so readily to be identi
fied. The kitchen chimney was a model of his
mother's tomb.
The living of Morwenstow was the very ex
cellent one of £365 a year. In allusion to this,
he placed over his porch a slab of slate, with
the verse :
A House, A Glebe, A Pound a Day,
A pleasant Place to Watch and pray :
Be true to Church, Be kind to Poor,
O Minister, for ever more.
Hawker's dedicatory verse was exquisitely
satirised in the neighbourhood : —
With all these benefits supplied,
A pound a day, and more beside,
How very good this man should prove,
How full of zeal, how full of love !
But different the times we see
Since Jesus walked on Galilee,
And did poor fishermen prepare
His holy Gospel to declare.

24 THE CORNISH COAST
Nor purse, nor scrip He bade them take,
But preach the Gospel for His sake,
And not a single word did say
Of house, or glebe, or pound a day.
By 1850, when the value of Morwenstow had
for a time decreased, he had also obtained the
curacy of Welcombe, worth £93 a year.
Hawker's life at Morwenstow was eccentric,
but through it all ran a vein of poetry. Con
sidered simply from the literary point of view
leaving out of sight his sacerdotal pretensions,
his is a considerable and admirable figure, touched
with genius. His " Silent Tower of Bottreaux,"
and the Trelawny ballad are deservedly famous.
In the churchyard still stands in an ungainly
fashion the white-painted figurehead of the
wrecked Caledonia, lost in 1842, marking where nine
of her crew lie. It is not " stately," as Hawker
would have it, and it is indecent, not in the
vulgar sense of the word, but in the feeling that
its unsupported legs make a ludicrous figure of
what was intended to be a noble, national per
sonification ; but his verse is touching : —
Stand, silent image ! Stately stand
Where sighs shall breathe and tears be shed,
And many a heart of Cornish land
Will soften for the strangers' dead.
They came on paths of storm : they found
This quiet home on Christian ground."
At the same time, it must have been a gruesome
thought to any mariner sailing past Morwenstow,

HAWKER, THE ECCENTRIC VICAR 25
who knew the place and its vicar, that should he
come to shipwreck on its shore, there lived a
parson-poet up the valley, to whom his end on
the cold, grey stones might be a poetic inspiration !
It is strange, in a person of Hawker's views,
to find that he tolerated animals in the church,
and to read that ten or more of the many cats

figurehead of the Caledonia.
he kept would be found there during service ;
while his dog sat on the chancel steps. He had
the oddest impulses. Near by the vicarage is
a little wood of oaks and sycamores, formerly
inhabited by jackdaws. Hawker proposed to
establish a rookery there, and, procuring a ladder,
removed the jackdaws' nests, placing them beside
one of the chimneys of the vicarage. Then he
4

26 ' THE CORNISH COAST
offered up the following petition : " O Jackdaws,
Lwill make you a promise. If you will give
up these trees to rooks, you shall have the chimney
of my blue room for ever and ever, Amen."
And the jackdaws removed accordingly.
Mrs. Hawker died early in 1863, over eighty
years of age. Her grave-stone is in the pavement
of the church, near the pulpit. By the close of
1864 Hawker had married again. His first venture
had been to marry a woman old enough to be
his mother : his second eccentricity was to marry
a girl of twenty, young enough to be his grand
daughter. He was rejuvenated, and lived an
active life almost to the last. Visiting Plymouth
in August 1875, he was taken ill there and died
on the 14th, not in possession of his mental
faculties at the last. As he lay in that condition,
his wife sent for a Roman Catholic priest, who
" received " him, unconscious of the reception,
into that Church. And so, as a pervert, Robert
Stephen Hawker died and was buried, not at
Morwenstow, but in Plymouth cemetery. He
had been for many years half on the way to
Rome ; but the scandal of that death-bed scene
created much bitter controversy, and the gain of
that insensible unit probably in the end lost
the Roman Catholics much.
The present vicar of Morwenstow appears to
suffer sorely under the infliction of living in a
house of such peculiar design, made famous by
so eccentric a character, for in the porch of the
church will be found a written notice reproving

HAWKER, THE ECCENTRIC VICAR 27
one class of tourist : " Tourists are reminded
that before standing immediately in front of a
gentleman's house, and photographing it, it is
at least courteous to ask permission." This
acid rebuke, judging from the disparaging remarks
scribbled across it, and by the elision of the
word " gentleman," appears to be resented ;
and, to an unbiassed observer, who does not
take photographs, the notice certainly appears
to be the wrong way of correcting people who
do wrong things.
Lesser men always suffer in this way for
residing in houses made famous by greater.
Some have even been so infuriated that they
have actually demolished the place of pilgrimage ;
just as Shakespeare's house, " New Place," at
Stratford-on-Avon, was destroyed in the eigh
teenth century. Up to the present, no vicar of
Morwenstow who has followed Hawker has in
the least, by his own personality, dimmed the
fame of that remarkable man ; even though the
present view of the countryside is that he was
"a bit of a crank." That was the exact ex
pression used in a conversation the present writer
held with a Cornishman near by. " I knew old
Hawker well," said he, " he baptized me. Queer
old fellow he was. He used to pinch the babies
at the font, to make 'em squeal, and let the devil
out of 'em, as he said."
Morwenstow church is not dedicated to St.
Morwenna, grand-daughter of Brychan, a Welsh
prince, who died a.d. 450, but to St. John the

28 THE CORNISH COAST
Baptist, from whose holy well issues the little
stream flowing through the churchyard. The
well and the land on which it stands formed the
subject of a two-years' lawsuit in 1843, when
Sir John Yarde Buller, the landowner, claimed it,
and Hawker successfully resisted. The litigation
cost Buller £1,370. Morwenna's shrine has never
been found.
Hawker found much symbolism in the stream
flowing through the churchyard. It was, he
said, typical of Jordan, the river that ran close
by the scene of St. John the Baptist's ministra
tions. He found another allusion in the three
steps by which you descend into the church.
" Every church dedicated to John the Baptizer,"
he said, " is thus arranged. We go down into
them, as those who were about to be baptized of
John went down into the water."
In a land like Cornwall, where few Norman
churches remain, this of Morwenstow commands
attention. Very little of the exterior, however,
is other than Perpendicular, and the arch of the
south porch, built at some late period, although
Norman, is formed of the outer order of the fine
semi-circular Norman south door, hidden within.
It would seem that the quite un-architectural
masons who constructed that porch and wanted
a decorative arch without the trouble of working
the stones, looked upon the Norman arch of
three orders, and, considering that it could well
spare one, removed it for their purpose, and
thus sinned more flagrantly than they knew.

HAWKER, THE ECCENTRIC VICAR 29
It is an unexpectedly beautiful interior, and
of very diversified appearance : the north nave-
arcade exhibiting heavy Norman and Early English
arches, and the south displaying the strong
contrast of a slim and graceful Late Perpendicular
style, remarkably pure for its date, which is
actually post-Reformation, an additional proof
of what we know very well, that Cornwall, strongly
Nonconformist though it now is, was bitterly
opposed to the Reformation, and rebelled and
fought and bled for the old faith. Fortunately,
lest the late date of this arcade might be doubted,
one of its capitals is plainly, and oddly, inscribed :
THIS WAS MADE ANNO MVCLX4,
i.e. 1564. The inscription on another capital,
THIS IS THE HOUSE OF THE LORD,
has been built in upside down.
The font is hewn out of a large, mis-shapen
block of granite, with a cable-moulding about
its middle. Hawker's imagination ran riot upon
the details of his church, and when the fine
chevron, or zig-zag, mouldings of two of the
Norman arches were mentioned in his hearing,
he would exclaim indignantly, " Zig-zag ! Do
you not see that it is near the font this ornament
occurs ? It is the ripple of the Lake of Genesareth ;
the Spirit breathing upon the waters of baptism."
I don't know how he symbolised the ram's head
sculpture between two of the arches, nor the

30 THE CORNISH COAST
grinning human head, between two others, with
protruding tongue, nor the mingled birds' heads
and horrid faces in the middle order of one arch ;
but it can doubtless easily be done if one has
a mind to it.
He out-symbolised the symbolists, and saw
parables everywhere ; in the woodwork represent
ing a vine, and in every decorative detail. The
original artists who wrought here would have
been astonished to know how profound they
had unwittingly been.
But Hawker also dressed symbolically, affecting
an odd costume that typified a " fisher of men."
He wore long sea-boots and a fisherman's blue
jersey, with a red cross worked into the side,
marking where the centurion's spear had wounded
Our Lord. The seals he used for sealing letters
bore the mystical Pentacle of Solomon, con
taining the Hebrew letters forming the name
" Jehovah," and the equally mystic Fish. His
walking-stick, now preserved at Tonacombe, had
a cross-handle. Since Hawker's day, a new east window has
been inserted, abundantly allusive to him. It
includes representations of St. Morwenna ; St.
John the Baptist ; the Well of St. John, with
Hawker and his dog beside it ; the figurehead of
the Caledonia, the font, churchyard cross, Man
ning tomb, and many other things ; and is thus
very much of a curiosity among windows.
The object of inserting all these things, es
pecially a picture of the Manning tomb, is not

HAWKER, THE ECCENTRIC VICAR 31
very clear, unless the designer and the subscribers
wished to " live up to " the eccentricity of Hawker
himself. They have certainly succeeded. The
tomb itself is a striking object in the church
yard, and no one can fail to notice it ; a tall,
rugged, and very substantial altar-tomb of
granite, that looks very white and new for its
age of over three centuries. An inscription is
carved round it, in enormous letters, but they
are only with difficulty traced, because of the
ruggedness and whiteness of the material, flecked
with felspar. It appears to run :
" Here Lieth John Maning of . . . Who Died
Without Issue ... I am Beried in the VI Daie
of August 1601."
This John Manning was a yeoman of Stanbury,
who was killed six weeks after his marriage with
Christina Kempthorne, by being gored by a bull.
Shortly afterwards his wife died of grief, and
both lie within this granite casket. Hawker
discovered the great wooden four-poster bed
that had not only belonged to that ill-fated
couple, but had evidently been made especially
for them, with their names carved on it ; and
he coveted this curious article of furniture. The
farmer to whom it belonged would not part, not
at any price, so then Hawker was reduced to the
dirty trick of frightening him out of it. He drew
a dreadful picture of how many persons must
of necessity have died during the two hundred
and fifty years on that bed in which he slept,
and grew so eloquent about it, that the farmer

32 THE CORNISH COAST
was horrified at the thought of ever using it
again. So Hawker not merely became pos
sessor of it, but even got it at a gift ! And I
suppose that edifying story can be the only
possible reason for the Manning tomb figuring
in the east window.
Where the cliffs break away in preliminary
grassy tumbles, down at the seaward end of
Morwenstow valley, Hawker in 1843 built a hut
from some of the timbers of the Alonzo, wrecked
here with all her crew lost. He partly excav
ated a room, which he covered with earth and
turf, closing the entrance with a timber con
struction closely resembling a sentry-box, with
the addition of a door in two compartments.
Here he would often sit, writing and meditating.
The hut still remains. In it Tennyson is said to
have written the pathetic verses beginning with
the well-known line, " Break, break, break, on
thy cold grey stones, O sea ! "
Out of these cliffs, half way down to the sea,
there trickles a little spring, ceaselessly wearing
away the earth by small and imperceptible
degrees. It is called St. Morwenna's Well, and
here, traditionally, she had landed and estab
lished her oratory, in this lonely spot, looking
over the sea towards South Wales, the land
from which she had come. I suppose she pre
ferred the solitary life, after that of the family,
which was of greater size than common ; for
she had twenty-four brothers and sisters. Some
accounts say forty-nine. Fourteen others, besides

HAWKER, THE ECCENTRIC VICAR 33
herself, according to legend, left the family fire
side and sought peace and quiet on these shores.
They all became saints : among them St. Neot,
or Nectan, Endelient, Yse, Cleder, Helie, Adwen,
Wenna, Menfre, Teth, and Merewenna, all of
whom founded oratories, on the sites of which
churches and villages bearing their names, dis
torted after the Cornish way, afterwards sprang
up. They may be sought on the map as St.
Neot's, St. Endellion, St. Issey, St. Clether,
Egloshayle, Advent, St. Wenn, St. Minver, St.
Teath, and Marhamchurch.
Hawker was accustomed to narrate a legend,
which he had probably himself invented, of the
death of St. Morwenna, here on the cliffs. " Raise
me in thy arms, brother," she said to Nectan,
who had come from his oratory at Hartland,
" that my eyes may rest on my native Wales,"
and when her gaze rested upon the faint shadowy
outline of the Welsh coast, that may sometimes
be traced from this point, she died.
As I have remarked, Hawker probably in
vented this affecting exit ; it would seem to
him an effective rounding off, and was a mere
nothing to him who could set up as an authority
on angels and other mystical subjects. " Angels,"
he said, " have no wings ; not a single feather."
He held them to be like young men in white
garments, and with deacon's albs, i.e. some
thing after the style of curates and licentiates.
But the fates forfend that Heaven should be
populated by curates ! 5

34 THE CORNISH COAST
The many dreadful wrecks that have hap
pened on this part of the coast, between Mor
wenstow and Bude, lend a fearful interest to the
scene ; to the point of Sharpnose that projects
to the southward, to Stanbury Mouth, Duck
Pool, and the long ranges of cliffs to Bude Haven.

CHAPTER II
TONACOMBE — COMBE VALLEY — STOWE AND THE
GRENVILLES — OLD HARVEST CUSTOMS
Up along the combe next to Morwenstow, with
another little stream running down it, is the old
manor-house of Tonacombe. A charge of a
shilling is now made for being shown over Tona
combe, so the pilgrim may have not the least
hesitancy in turning aside from the high road,
walking down the long approach, and ringing
the bell. He is placed on a business footing, and
the cash nexus saves his self-respect, even though
it nrght conceivably make the owner of Tona
combe in moments of reflection feel like an
ordinary commercial showman.
It is a low-pitched, grey stone building, of few
or no architectural features, that you see on
approach, and it might pass for an ordinary
farm, except for the singular fowls sculptured in
stone and intended to represent eagles, that
surmount the pillars on either side of the entrance-
gate. They are signs of armigerous, and there
fore gentle, owners in the past, probably the
work of the Whaddons, who owned Tonacombe
in the eighteenth century, in succession to the
families known to have called it theirs from late
35

36

THE CORNISH COAST

in the thirteenth century — Jourdains, Leighs,
and Kempthornes. The house as it now stands
is a work chiefly of the sixteenth century. You
enter it by a porter's lodge, beneath a granite
arch that conducts to a courtyard, from which
in turn opens the principal feature of the man
sion : the hall, still as of old, floored with stone,

TONACOMBE.

and with its ancient open fireplace. A minstrels'
gallery occupies one end, the roof soaring up
dimly in the restricted light as though it at
tained a considerable altitude ; whereas in reality
all the proportions of the hall are of the smallest :
thirty feet in length by about thirty-five in
height. At the same time, when Hawker first
came as vicar to Morwenstow this hall wore a
very different appearance. An earlier generation
had divided it about midway of its height with

TONACOMBE 37
stout joists and a flooring, thus altering the
appearance of the lower part to that of an or
dinary room, and converting the upper into a
kind of loft or attic. Mr. Martyn, the then
owner, had been long resident at Tonacombe
without knowing that the room below and the
attic above were properly a hall, and it was left
for Hawker to point it out to him. The restora
tion to its original form was then undertaken.
There are other interesting rooms here, and
delightful gardens, where old-fashioned flowers
grow and wall-fruit ripens against sunny old
masonry. Kingsley took Tonacombe for a model
in describing the mansion called "Chapel" in
"Westward Ho ! " Hawker thought the descrip
tions of localities in that story poor, and the
story itself a failure.
Crossing Stanbury Mouth and the hillside of
Lower Sharpnose Point, the charming ravine of
" Combe Valley " is reached, at its seaward end
known as Duck Pool, a little rock-strewn fore
shore as unlike a duck-pool as may well be ima
gined. The usual little stream flows down the
valley, and loses itself on the boulder-strewn
beach, but the valley itself is innocent of trees,
the very opposite of those of Welcombe and
Marsland, where the woods grow so densely as
to be almost impenetrable. " Combe," as we
should properly call it (for " valley " is simply
"combe" over again, in another language), is
frank and open, without a vestige of secretive-
ness about it. Whether you stand at its land-

38 THE CORNISH COAST
ward or its seaward end, it freely discloses itself.
I like it, and stayed there all the hot summer
afternoon, sitting bare-legged on boulders, with
the cool incoming tide washing about my feet.
Other people also like this delightful valley, it
appears, for there was a large camping-party up
along, beside the stream. Campers pay a fee,
it would seem, to the Duchy of Cornwall, for
the privilege of pitching their tents here.
Further up the valley, the road crosses the
trout stream on the way to Bude. Here is a
little bridge, built in 1836 through Hawker's
exertions, where a ford and stepping-stones only
existed before. It is not a great work, but it
bears an inscription :
Toward the erection of this bridge, built by sub
scription, in the year of human redemption 1836, his
most gracious Majesty, King William the Fourth,
gave the sum of Twenty Pounds.
Fear God ! Honour the King !
A hundred yards or less above the bridge, where
the hills begin to close in and narrow the valley,
there stands adjoining an old farm and mill,
Combe (or Coombe, for although the pronunciation
is invariably that of two "o's," latitude appears
to be allowed in the spelling of the word) Cottage.
It is just as often known as Hawker's Cottage,
and it is a whitewashed building, with thatched
roof, unaltered since the days long before he
became vicar of Morwenstow, when he stayed
here reading for his University career after his

COMBE VALLEY 39
marriage in 1823. Even the window he altered
to the shape of a cross remains unchanged. Here
he wrote that best-known of all his works, the
famous Trelawny Ballad, which deceived even
Sir Walter Scott, who, when he saw it published
anonymously, thought it a genuine seventeenth-
century song. It first appeared in the Plymouth
paper which owned the astonishing title of the
Royal Devonport Telegraph and Plymouth Chron
icle, on September 2nd, 1826, and was there de
scribed as a " Ballad written at the time when
one of the Trelawny family was committed to
the Tower in the reign of James II. The cir
cumstances described in it are historically true."
These circumstances were the imprisonment
and trial of the Seven Bishops in 1688. Among
them was Sir Jonathan Trelawny, of Trelawne,
near Looe, then Bishop of Bristol, whose peril
aroused the Cornishmen of that time. They
had proposed to march upon London, and sang
a ballad of which only the chorus was remem
bered. This ran :
And shall Trelawny die ?
Here's twenty thousand Cornishmen
Will know the reason why !
To this refrain Hawker had written a set of
stirring verses, and sent them, obviously with
the object of imposing upon the public, to the
newspaper. He did not definitely claim the
ballad until 1832 ; but that claim never actually
set at rest the controversy arising over the sub-

40

THE CORNISH COAST

ject. So late as 1862 he was writing bitterly
to declare that it had been written by him " under
a stag-horned oak in Sir Beville's Walk, in Stowe
Wood," and that while the song was known
everywhere and universally applauded, he, the
author of it, remained " unprofited, unpraised,
and unknown." He had, in fact, so thoroughly

HAWKER S COTTAGE, COMBE VALLEY.

succeeded in his deception that he suffered all
the rest of his life from it.
Combe Mill is a favourite walk from Bude,
and I know of no place where is it more delightful
to get a rustic tea than the mill-house. No need
to ask diffidently if one can obtain tea here :
the fact is obvious in the number of those gener-

STOWE AND THE GRENVILLES 41
ally to be seen doing so. And if Cornish cream,
bread that is a revelation, saffron cake that is a
delight, and various other desirables for which
my stock of adjectives does not for the moment
suffice, do not satisfy the hot and thirsty pilgrim,
especially when taken beside the huge mill-
wheel that goes round so slowly, spattering
myriads of drops on ferns and moss, then surely
he is hard to please.
Away above the mill-house, on the lofty
lands at the crest of the long hill that rises so
steeply, the roadway overhung by noble elms,
is Stowe. Simply, if you please, Stowe, innocent
of any proprietary name : " stowe," the station,
the place where some person, or some race of
old, settled, or bestowed, himself, or themselves.
Morwenstow is a " stow " with a personal affix,
but here is none at all. And yet, if famous men
and ancient families have given their names
to places elsewhere, does there not seem some
thing lacking in Stowe not having taken on the
name of the long-descended and loyal family of
Grenville, who were of Norman origin, and,
tracing their origin from Granville, came thence
so many centuries ago ? To trace the history of
the Grenvilles were to write a considerable volume,
and bulky volumes have indeed been written
about them. There are still Grenvilles in the
land, but you will no longer find them resident
on their north Devon and Cornish lands, and
although the property at Stowe belongs to the
Thynne family, collateral descendants. The
6

42 THE CORNISH COAST
Grenvilles have, in fact, so branched out that
they spell their name in a large variety of ways.
Earl Granville is at the head of them, and there
are Grenfells, and even Greenfields of the same
race ; who, to be sure, were never quite certain
how they liked best to spell the name. The
great Sir Richard Grenville, who fell in that sea-
fight off " Flores, in the Azores," celebrated in
Tennyson's "Ballad of the Revenge," wrote him
self " Greynvile," and others who handled the
sword with certainty, when they took up their
pens wrote their honoured names in such a variety
of ways, not often twice alike, that we feel
inclined to wonder what would have happened
had banking-accounts and cheque-books then been
in vogue. There are no Grenvilles here now,
and their great house of Stowe is represented
only by a farmhouse, but many dead Grenvilles
lie in Kilkhampton church, something over two
miles away — that church whose tall tower on
these uplands is so wide a landmark here-
including one whose fame rivals that of Sir
Richard himself ; none other than his grandson
Sir Bevil, who fought for the King and gained
the neighbouring battle of Stamford Hill, and
was killed in the victory of Lansdown in 1643.
Not a fragment remains of the old house in
which Sir Bevil and his ancestors lived, for his
third son, John, created Earl of Bath in 1661,
demolished it, and built in its stead New Stowe
House, in 1680. This was a large and stately
mansion of princely appearance, of whose beauties

STOWE AND THE GRENVILLES 43
and costly appointments a great deal was written
in the course of its brief existence. The builder
of this mansion died in 1701, and his son Charles,
the second earl, shot himself dead by accident
when travelling from London to attend his
father's funeral. It was remarked, as a curious
thing, that with his son, then seven years of
age, there were three Earls of Bath above ground
at the same time.
With the death of the third Earl, grandson
of the magnificent John, in 1711, the title became
extinct, and in 1739 New Stowe House was
demolished and its materials sold by auction and
dispersed far and wide. Thus, within the space
of fifty-nine years it had been built, and the
ground became again vacant, and there were
many who had seen both the building and the
pulling down of it. There is thus a curiously
close parallel between New Stowe House and
the famous example of Canons, in Middlesex,
begun by James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, in
1815. It was one of the finest mansions, if not
the finest, in England, and cost half a million
sterling, yet by 1747 it had been entirely de
molished, having existed only thirty-two years.
The stables of New Stowe House remain
beside the road to Bude, and on part of the site
stands a large granite house, Stowe Farm, still
displaying over its pillared doorway a cartouche
bearing the Grenville arms, three sufflues or pan
pipes, often thought, from their shape, to stand
for graining-combs, and thus to represent a

44 THE CORNISH COAST
pun upon " Grayn ville." All around, in the
pastures of Stowe Farm, may be traced the grassy
mounds and hollows that mark the foundations
and the terraces of the vanished house, and the
meadow immediately in front of the farmhouse
is very largely pitched with a pavement of cobble
stones, a little beneath the surface. The grum
bling farmer, on an evening tour of inspection of
his gates, left open as a rule by trespassing Bude
visitors, showed fragments of pillars and archi
tectural carving often dug up. " Look here," he
said, crossing the road and pointing to a sunken
space in a field, " that is where they brought up
their early vegetables."
Kilkhampton village no one would care to
see. It is mean intrinsically and meaner by
comparison with its large church, whose lofty
Perpendicular tower soars high above the tall
churchyard trees. A calvary cross of great size,
with a painfully realistic figure of the Saviour,
has recently been erected at the approach to the
church, greatly to the distress of many. The
great attraction of the church is, of course, the
monument in the chancel to Sir Bevil Grenville,
with its long inscription. Here follows merely
the beginning of it, just to give a taste of its
quality, and of the family pride of the Grenvilles :
' Here lies all that was mortal of the
most noble and truly valiant Sir Beville Gran
ville, of Stowe, in the county of Cornwall, Earl
of Corbill and Lord of Thorigny and Granville
in Normandy, descended in a direct line from

OLD HARVEST CUSTOMS 45
Robert, second son of the warlike Rollo, first
Duke of Normandy, who, having obtained divers
signal victories over the rebels in the West, was
at length slain, with many wounds, at the battle
of Landsdown, July 5th, 1643."
Eulogistic verses follow, ending with this
question :
Where shall ye next fam'd Granville's ashes stand ?
Thy Grandsyre fills the Seas and thou yc land.
The question remains unanswered, for with Sir
Bevil the knightly years were done, and succeed
ing Grenvilles were splendid in wealth and in
ostentation, rather than famous, before their
natural force was abated and their direct line
ceased out of the land.
As we penetrate back into the country, from
the more or less modernised fringe of the seashore,
and come into places that have no "sights" to
attract strangers, so do we happen upon surviving
old customs. Here, on this high land, stretching
to the Devon border behind Kilkhampton, the
patriarchal custom still often survives in farm
houses, of the master and mistress and servants
sitting down together to meals in the big kitchen,
at one table. It is rapidly falling into disuse,
chiefly on account of the farmers' wives, rather
than from any innovating ideas on the part of
the farmers themselves, who are not so easily
bitten with new ideas, and dislike the introduction
of class distinctions applied to their level in the
social scale. Such a typical farmer will touch

46 THE CORNISH COAST
his hat to a " gentleman " and recognise the
different place he occupies, but he does not set
up to be in a class above his own men. I have
often sat at table in such old-fashioned farm
houses in the West, and thought nothing of it,
and the farmers have not given the matter a
moment's consideration, but their wives and
daughters have been, almost always, honestly
apologetic, not from sheer politeness, but from
a genuine dislike of, and discontent with, the
old custom ; and, sooner or later, they contrive
to abolish it.
Some of the more ancient of the farm-hands in
remote situations recollect the last celebrations
of harvest-home, when the customs that had
existed for centuries before the coming of
machinery were yet lingering in the ill-assorted
company of threshing-machines and steam-
ploughs. But the final decay and disappearance
of these remaining observances, that had come
down from early Saxon, and even from ancient
British times, was due rather to the School Board
and its short way with sentiment, than to ma
chinery. " Education " taught the youthful mind
to look upon the harvest merrymaking as " silly,"
and the parson did his destructive share in tracing
this custom, that, and t'other to old-time pagan
influence, and urging the abolition of time-
honoured mummeries in favour of the smug
correctitudes of the harvest festival, when the
village church is changed for the time into the
likenesses of a corn-chandler's and a greengrocer's

OLD HARVEST CUSTOMS

47

and fruiterer's shop, and clerical commonplaces
issue from the pulpit to the hackneyed accom
paniment of We plough the fields and scatter
The good seed on the land.
The irony of it all is that Hodge does not commonly
go to church at all, and
that the " harvest thanks
giving " resolves itself,
in the decoration of the
church, into the occasion
of an unlimited amount
of flirting between the
decorators and an equally
unlimited amount of
damage wrought by en
thusiastic young ladies,
ignorant and careless of
archaeology, upon rood-
screens, fonts, and ancient
sculpture in general, in
efforts to nail up monster
marrows and other mar
vellous agricultural pro
duce in effective situa
tions. This is not the kind
r ,, ¦ , , THE "NECK."
of thing to compensate
for the old " harvest-homes " of a simpler genera
tion. But precisely because the present is a
much less simple age, and because it is more

48 THE CORNISH COAST
difficult, if not impossible, now to amuse people
with the things that sufficed our grandfathers,
it is hopeless to wish those manners and customs
back again. No resuscitated " harvest-home "
nowadays would be considered complete without
last season's topical music-hall songs, or the
songs of some season before that. It would be
hopeless to expect the current season's min
strelsy, for these things travel slowly into the
villages. A favourite form of harvest jollity in the
West of England in general circled round the
preparation of a kind of fetish known as " the
neck," or the " nack," as some would have it.
" Neck " is, however, the proper form, " nack "
being the provincial phonetic way of rendering
the word. This was the making of a miniature
sheaf from some thirty or forty ears of corn,
bound round and neatly finished off with plaited
straw, sometimes very ingeniously patterned,
according to the taste, fancy, and patience of
those who made it. The celebration of " the
neck " was of great antiquity, and finds mention
in the Bailiff's rolls for Porlock so early as the
fifteenth century, in which it is referred to
as " the custom called le necke." In Brand's
" Popular Antiquities," a work with a vast amount
of miscellaneous information, badly arranged and
not always accurate, we read : " When they have
cut the corn, the reapers assemble together, a
knack is made, which one placed in the middle
of the company holds up, crying ' a knack,'

OLD HARVEST CUSTOMS 49
which all the rest repeat. The person in the
middle then says :
Well cut ! well bound !
Well shocked ! well saved from the ground,
concluding with ' Whoop ! ' They then all holloa
as loud as they can." Brand ascribes this to
Devon, but it was common to all the West of
England ; and the affair did not end here. The
reapers then marched in a body to the farmhouse,
the neck being borne by one of them. Arrived
there, the problem was to carry it in with a rush
through the open door of the house, without it
being drenched with water by the womenfolk
waiting at the open windows above, whose part
it was to prevent, if possible, the neck being
brought in dry. Such were the simple, boisterous
sports of old. The successful bearer of the
trophy, dry, into the house was rewarded, and
the whole company entertained in the farmhouse
kitchen, where the neck was suspended from
the old rafters until the next harvest.

CHAPTER III
THE CORNISH ARMY, AND THE BATTLE OF STAMFORD
HILL — SIR BEVIL GRENVILLE AT LANSDOWN
I shall proceed direct from Kilkhampton to
Bude by the upper of the two inland roads, for
Norcot Mouth and the cliffs between Duck Pool
and Bude form something of an anticlimax to
the crowning heights and deeper glens by Mor
wenstow. And I shall the more readily do this
because Stratton is not only an interesting old
town of narrow streets and steep, crowned by
an ancient church, but because also of Stamford
Hill that overlooks it : the hill where Sir Bevil
won his victory of May 16th, 1643, by the valour
of himself and of the Cornish army, as a tablet
fixed in the wall of the " Tree " inn at Stratton,
narrates. But, first of all, we must learn something of
the " Cornish army." The inscription reproduced
here was read by a boy just fresh from a public
school, and he knew nothing of the Cornish army
that fought so valiantly for King Charles. Yet
the establishment of that force, and perhaps
also the eventual dwindling of it away, is one
of the strongest proofs of the survival of law and
5°

THE CORNISH ARMY

5i

order even during the civil war. It originated
in the passage westward, from Devonshire into
Cornwall, at the close of the summer of 1642, of
the Royalist Sir Ralph (afterwards Lord) Hopton,
in command of a body of one hundred and fifty
horsemen. Devonshire was almost solid for the
Parliament, and was strongly held for it, and
Cornwall, thoroughly Royalist, was thus entirely

in tnii tlace y Army of y?
Rebclli under y command
of y Ear) ol bamford
receuioj A sign all ooertdi-
\) y:"Udlorof5rBe»Tll
Cramhlle. ^^.CornifF,
Army oixToefdaV y .
iQ of Hay iC/\^

TABLET AT THE " TREE " INN, STRATTON.
isolated and helpless. But the coming of Hopton
and his men across the Tamar roused the generous
hearts there, and the gentlemen of Cornwall
were soon in arms, chief among them Sir Bevil
Grenville of Stowe, where the ancient practice
of receiving the sons of squires and gentlemen for
training in arms and chivalry, once common
in all great and knightly families throughout
England, still survived. To Stowe, therefore,
that academy of arms and discipline now become

52 THE CORNISH COAST
a Royalist centre in the West, came some of the
most prominent men of Cornwall in arms for the
King. Others assembled at Truro and elsewhere :
old Sir John Arundel of Trerice, young Sidney
Godolphin of Godolphin, and the equally youthful
Sir John Trevanion of St. Michael Caerhayes,
and Sir Nicholas Slanning, from Bickleigh in
Devonshire. Grenville and the three last-named
were accounted the four chief supporters of the
King in the West : "the four wheels of Charles's
wain," as the mournful verse, narrating their
deaths in battle, has it :
The four wheels of Charles's wain,
Grenville, Godolphin, Trevanion, Slanning, slain.
But there were many more.
The survival of civil law, or the form of it,
at this juncture, when an armed conflict was
raging and physical force and the power of the
sword might seem the only law to which respect
would be paid, is remarkable ; and not long
after Hopton and his men had crossed into
Cornwall, which had until then been undisturbed,
the principal men on the Parliament side, including
Sir Richard Buller and Sir Alexander Carew,
met their coming in arms by a legal attack at
quarter-sessions. Quarter-staff would have been
a better weapon of offence. An indictment was
drawn up against the invaders and presented
at Launceston, showing that certain unknown
persons had come, armed, contrary to the peace,

THE CORNISH ARMY 53
into the county, and that they were dangerous
to the public welfare and ought to be suppressed ;
their actions being likely to cause tumults and
discontents, and loss of life, and damage to
property. The object of those who presented
this document to the justices is, of course, obvious.
Cornwall, so far, had not been drawn into the
bloodshed and destruction of the newly-opened
civil war, and it was sought to keep the strife
on the other side of the Tamar, and to make
this a neutral land, a Laodicea, where peaceful
folk might keep their convictions to themselves,
while other people elsewhere fought the one
cause or the other to a finish. Several English
counties did the like, and most successfully bade
Royalists and Roundheads go somewhere else
and settle their differences ; but Cornwall was
not so fortunate.
The indictment at quarter-sessions at Laun
ceston had curious and unlooked-for results.
The bold Sir Ralph, not in the least afraid of
legal process, appeared in person at Launceston,
and there, producing his commission from the
King, declared he was sent to assist the people
of Cornwall " in the defence of their liberties
against all illegal taxes and impositions." After
which a jury not only acquitted Hopton and his
officers and men, but added that " it was a great
favour and justice of His Majesty to send down
aid to them who were already marked out for
destruction ; and they thought it the duty of
every good subject, as well in loyalty to the

54 THE CORNISH COAST
King as in gratitude to those gentlemen, to join
with them at any hazard of life and fortune."
In their turn, the magistrates forthwith drew
up an indictment against the Parliamentary
leaders, and bade the High Sheriff call out the
" posse comitatus."
And thus, as a strictly logical and legally
constituted body, the Cornish army was formed,
to fight against the King's enemies in Cornwall,
and this was further added to by a large number
of recruits, whose loyalty went beyond such
territorial limits and sent them joyously following
their leaders into England when the time
arrived. It was not until the beginning of January
1643 that the Parliamentary forces began to
move out of Devonshire, to deal with the situation
that had arisen across the Tamar ; but they
had by that time accumulated a considerable
and well-equipped force, calculated to crush the
Cornish out of hand. They came across the
Tamar at New Bridge, a bridge that was old
even then ; Ruthven, the governor of Plymouth,
in advance, and the Earl of Stamford two days
in the rear. The first encounter was the battle
of Braddoc Down, near Bodmin, on January 19th,
on the windy heights where, amid the grassy
sepulchres of the prehistoric dead men in some
unknown ancient fight, Hopton's men, with Sir
Bevil in the thick of the fray, smote them to the
ground, and captured 1,250 prisoners and nearly
all the equipment of the enemy,

SIR BEVIL GRENVILLE 55
To his wife, " The Lady Grace Grenville, at
Stowe," Sir Bevil wrote :
" My Dear Love,—
" It hath pleased God to give us a happy
victory on this present Thursday, being the
19th of January, for which pray join me in giving
God thanks. I had the van and so, after solemn
prayers at the head of every division, I led my
part away, who followed me with so great courage,
both down the one hill and up the other, that
it struck a terror into them, while the seconds
came up gallantly after me, and the wings of horse
charged on both sides. But their courage so
failed as they stood not the first charge of foot,
but fled in great disorder, and we chased them
divers miles. " So I rest, yours ever,
" Bevill Grenvile."
The covering of the letter was inscribed,
" The messenger is paid, yet give him a shilling
more." Into and out of Liskeard the victorious Cornish
drove the enemy, and Ruthven fled on until
he reached the banks of the Tamar again at
Saltash, where he fortified himself on the hill-top,
confident that there he could make a stand :
but in another three days Hopton had come up
and driven him down through the steep streets
of Saltash, to the waterside, where many in the
headlong flight were drowned. All the warlike

56 THE CORNISH COAST
stores that had not been captured before were
taken now, and the remainder of Ruthven' s
army had hurried into Plymouth.
The spring came on amidst ineffectual skir
mishes, for Plymouth lay menacingly in the
path of any advance in force. Sometimes flying
troops of Cornish horse penetrated to Dartmoor,
but these were only the futile exploits of ad
venturous spirits, and in one of them Sidney
Godolphin was slain, in the porch of the " Three
Crowns " inn, at Chagford.
At last Parliament prepared to deal the
Cornish a decisive blow. The Earl of Stamford
had gathered an army of seven thousand men,
horse, foot, and artillery, and in May 1643 he
invaded Cornwall, sent on a containing force of
1,200 horse to keep the Royalists of Bodmin
from advancing, and posted himself, with his
main body, on what was then called Stratton
Hill, overlooking the little town of that name :
the "Stamford Hill" of to-day. The Earl of
Stamford deserved to win the day, for his general
ship was perfect ; but the fight that ensued
proved to be a soldiers', rather than a com
mander's, battle. The Royalists had the dis
advantage of attacking a position that had
been selected with every care, and was held
strongly and equipped with cannon. They
marched out of Launceston on the 15th, full
of fight, and confident, after the earlier successes,
that they could thoroughly beat any force the
Parliament could array against them. But they

SIR BEVIL GRENVILLE 57
had much to contend against : a twenty miles
march and a poor commissariat department
that brought officers and men hungry at night
to the foot of the enemy's position. They were
2,400 against 5,800. To storm that hill, with
an enemy well-found in every way, and fresh
for fighting, might well seem a forlorn hope ;
but from five in the morning until three o'clock
in the afternoon they charged again and again
up the unsheltered slopes, gaining no advantage,
yet resolute for further efforts. And then at
last the day seemed indeed lost, for their am
munition was almost gone. At that time, if
Stamford's men had come from their breastworks
on the hilltop and charged down the hillside,
they might, even if only by sheer weight and
impetus, have overwhelmed the Cornish, whom
they outnumbered by more than two to one.
But that is exactly where prestige comes in.
The rout of Braddoc Down had taught the Earl
of Stamford and his officers and rank-and-file to
beware of meeting the Cornish in the open ;
and they lay sheltered behind their emplacements,
from which thirteen brass guns and one mortar
had all day been volleying.
Hopton, commanding on that day, now saw
that to expend the last of their ammunition,
firing up the hill at foes scarcely showing from
behind their earthworks, would be fatal ; and
it was then decided to make a simultaneous
attack from all sides, in four columns, the soldiers
to hold their fire until on the hill-top. Every
8

58 THE CORNISH COAST
soldier who has seen active service knows what
a strain that is : to be shot at and make no
reply until an advance is completed. It takes
the coolest nerves, the utmost self-control, and
generally a very considerable deal of military
training to do so much. But it was done perfectly
on this day, and those who held the fort up yonder
were so astonished at tactics they had never
before known that, when the Cornish were among
them, they failed to respond to the occasion, and
were driven out, in spite of a charge led by Chud-
leigh, a general to whom the Parliament owed
much in the West. Chudleigh himself was made
prisoner by Sir Bevil's men, who, with their
chief, were foremost in the advance : the guns
were put out of action in the confusion of friends
and foes, and soon the enemy were in full flight,
their own cannon, left behind, now thundering
after them. They left Cornwall in haste, and
following upon their heels went the containing
force from Bodmin. Three hundred of the enemy
lay dead, and 1,700 were taken prisoners.
Pastures to-day cover the surface of the hill,
but the formidable earthworks thrown up on
its crest by Stamford's men are still remarkable,
forming a lunette on the north and west sides,
where the approach is easiest. Storm-stricken
pine-trees grow upon the banks, and in the
archway of the remains of a monument built
to commemorate the battle rests a dismantled
cannon. A makeshift, apparently a discarded
pinnacle from Stratton church, does duty on the

SIR BEVIL GRENVILLE 59
archway, in place of the original monument,
destroyed long ago by a farmer, who objected to
sightseers walking to it across his fields. But
if he thought by such means to obscure the site
of the battle, he was much mistaken, for the
spot is one of the first places to which visitors
to Bude inevitably come. The original inscription
on the monument, now in a wall of the " Tree "

STAMFORD HILL MONUMENT

inn, Stratton, somewhat obscures history, stating
as it does that in " this place " the battle was
fought ; leading strangers to suppose that the
fight took place in the streets of the town.
If this were all there remained to say of Sir
Bevil it had been well ; but, flushed with their
success, the Cornish army marched away up-
country, and when July was come, had reached
that exceeding great height above Bath, Lans-
down. There was fought the battle of Lansdown,
another victory, but one dearly purchased, for

60 THE CORNISH COAST
there Sir Bevil was slain, knocked off his horse
by a pole-axe, in the thick of the fight. In the
battle was his son, John, a boy of sixteen, and
him Sir Bevil' s giant retainer, Anthony Payne,
who was seven feet four inches in height, and
broad in proportion, set upon his father's horse.
Following him, the Cornish carried the hilltop
and gained the day. In one of Hawker's books,
" Footprints of Former Men in Cornwall," there
appears a letter purporting to have been written
by Anthony Payne to Lady Grace Grenville, after
the battle of Lansdown, but it is almost certainly
a forgery by Hawker himself, for the original
has never been seen by any one. At any rate,
here it is :
Honoured Madam, 
111 news flieth apace : the heavy tidings
no doubt hath already travelled to Stowe, that
we have lost our blessed master by the enemies'
advantage. You must not, dear Lady, grieve
too much for your noble spouse. You know, as
we all believe, that his soul was in heaven before
his bones were cold. He fell, as he did often
tell us he wished to die, for the good Stuart
cause, for his country, and his king. He de
livered to me his last commands, and with such
tender words for you and for his children as are
not to be set down with my poor pen, but must
come to your ears upon my best heart's breath.
Master John, when I mounted him on his father's
horse, rode him into the war like a young prince,

SIR BEVIL GRENVILLE 61
as he is, and our men followed him with their
swords drawn and with tears in their eyes. They
did say they would kill a rebel for every hair of
Sir Beville's beard. But I bade them remember
their good master's word when he wiped his
sword after Stamford fight ; how he said, when
their cry was ' stab and slay,' ' halt, men, God
will avenge.' I am coming down with the mourn-
fullest burden that ever a poor servant did bear,
to bring the great heart that is cold to Kilk
hampton vault. Oh, my lady, how shall I ever
brook your weeping face ? But I will be trothful
to the living and to the dead. These, honoured
madam, from thy saddest, truest servant,
" Anthony PaYne."
Putting aside the probability that Anthony
Payne could not write at all, and certainly not
in the literary English of this letter, we may
detect a wrong note in the phrase " Stamford
Hill," the battle on Stratton Hill not having so
early acquired the name of the defeated Par
liamentary general. And it was yet too early
for a " Stuart cause " to have existed. That
came only later, after the final defeats of the
Royalists and the establishment of the Com
monwealth, when the Stuarts were in exile.

CHAPTER IV
BUDE — POUGHILL — MARHAMCHURCH — WIDE-
MOUTH BAY — MILLHOOK — CRACKINGTON
HAVEN
And so we come to Bude. No one knows the
origin of the place-name, and although St. Budoc,
who has given his name to several places, in
cluding Budock and St. Budeaux, has been
suggested, it is merely a guess.
I grieve to find that there are many who do
not like Bude. There are things I do not like
at Bude : the golf-links, for example, where
golfers have jumped the sandhills. Also there
are certain villas and shops that are not like
able, but so much may be said of a deplorably
large number of places. A terminal station of
the London and South-Western Railway stands
at some distance from the shore, but I have
not the least idea by what route you do even
tually arrive at it, for I have never entered or
left Bude otherwise than afoot or on a bicycle ;
and when one by such means just comes to it
in one of the opaque white sea-mists that in
summer do occasionally shut down upon earth
and sea and sky, throwing a cold and wet mantle
62

BUDE 65
over everything, and here and there lifting a
little, so that odd, disconnected bits of scenery
float like islands in the fog, a strange and startling
place Bude does indeed appear to be, and its
situation is not readily understood.
Bude stands a little distance off the seashore,
on the banks of a little stream and the Bude and
Holsworthy Canal, which run side by side, and
a little lower down fall into the inlet called Bude
Haven. Trees are scarce, and they have bowed so
long and consistently before the furious winds
that they have stiffened into that attitude ; so
that an observer looking out upon them from
within doors might even imagine from their
pose a gale still blowing. They have grown so,
and so they will remain, like human beings
brought up in habits of subjection, until their
nature is warped irredeemably.
Bude will some day be a town, for, although
its " haven " is one of the most difficult and
dangerous that ever poor mariner put into, and
as difficult to get out of as it is to get in, and
therefore the port is never likely to grow, the
natural advantages of the place as a holiday
resort are at once evident to any one who sets
foot there. It cannot ever become a seaside
resort of the conventional kind, there is some
comfort in thinking, for the little sand-choked
haven is bordered by low cliffs that render such
vanities as parades and sea-walls alike undesirable
and impossible. Some fifty years or more ago,
9

66 THE CORNISH COAST
when Sir Thomas Acland, the local landowner,
first thought of developing Bude, it was merely
a hamlet in the parish of Stratton. But its air
and the surrounding scenery were even then
capable of supporting the " Falcon " hotel, it
appears, for it was in 1848 that Tennyson, roam
ing the north coast of Cornwall in search of local
colour for his " Idylls of the King," stayed there,
and fell off the terrace in front, at that time un
guarded by a railing, and nearly broke his leg.
The few old-fashioned cottages of the Regency
period also tell us that, even in the early years of
the nineteenth century, a select few found Bude a
desirable place. The colour, for one thing, ob
servable here on a bright summer's day is wonder
ful : the black and grey of the rocks and cliffs,
and the subdued green of the scant vegetation,
is thrown into the background by the light yellow
of the sands, composed almost wholly of broken
sea-shells, by the foam of the always turbulent
waves, and by the extraordinarily pure and
brilliant greens and blues of the sea. A natural
pier or breakwater is formed on the south side of
the haven by a long jutting reef of rocks running
straight out to sea. Here is safe bathing, afforded
by a large cutting made in the rocks, known as
"Sir Thomas's Pit." Efford Lodge, an ideal
"cottage by the sea," stands at the landward
end of this long rocky arm, sheltered beside a
craggy knoll, and screened by outcrops of rock
crested with tamarisk, overlooking the haven
at the point where it may be forded at low

BUDE 67
water, hence " Efford," a contraction of " ebb-
ford." There is now little use for Bude as a port,
for the railway has taken away the need of bring
ing in coals in this fashion ; and in any case the
world nowadays moves too rapidly for it to be often
commercially possible to use a haven, in which a
vessel may be perhaps imprisoned by various cir
cumstances of weather and tide for weeks, without
the least chance of getting out. Still, one perceives
the Clara Mary and the Jessie, vessels of from
80 to 100 tons, risking much, discharging coal,
"cullum" — which is the provincial way of pro
nouncing "culin" — and suchlike cargoes here.
"I am going to Bude," wrote Tennyson;
" they say the waves are larger there than any
where else." They are.
Among the fifty wrecks of the last half century
here was that of the Bencoolen, from Liverpool
for Bombay, with machinery and telegraph-wire,
October 21st, 1862. Sixteen were lost of a crew
of thirty-six. The vessel went ashore below
Efford, and the lifeboat, brought down to the
sands, could not be launched, partly because of
the fury of the waves, driven to enormous heights
by a hurricane that had lasted seven days and
nights, and partly because the skilled sailors
of Bude were nearly all away at the time, in
seventeen of the nineteen small vessels that then
belonged to the place. There was not a crew
present, and for the unskilled to have gone out
would have been for the lifeboat and all in it

68 THE CORNISH COAST
to have been lost, in addition to the ill-fated
crew of the Bencoolen.
The golfers are rampant at the back of Bude
on the sandhills, where the local club exhibits
the impudent notice : " Dangerous ; no right of
way across the links," which is, of course, to put
it mildly, not the truth. There has been, from
time immemorial, an unquestioned right of way.
That way lies the pretty inland village of Pough-
ill, anciently written " Pogeswelle," i.e. " Puck's
Well." We find several places in this country
named after that impish sprite, Puck ; among
them Pokesdown, near Bournemouth, and Pox-
well, near Weymouth.
Until quite recent years Poughill was locally
" Puffle," but any stranger in the neighbourhood
of Bude, cognisant of the fact, and asking the
way to it in that old pronunciation will almost
certainly be met with " Oh, you mean Poughill,"
adopting the literary, rather than the rustic
method. One feels reproved, for it is like being
convicted of a misdemeanour ; that of the false
pretence of being a native. Alternatively, one
is made to feel that it is a confession of ignorance.
Which is worse I will leave the reader to judge.
There is a fine and interesting church at
Poughill. It is Perpendicular, of course, for
that style is almost the only one throughout
Cornwall ; but it is rich in fifteenth-century
bench-ends, and has two remarkable frescoes
in colour, representing a gigantic St. Christopher
carrying the infant Saviour across a stream,

POUGHILL 69
with fishes in the waves and a mermaid with
her looking-glass, while a hermit displays a
lantern from the bank, to guide the saint. An
inscription over the south door narrates that
the clock in the tower was given in memory of
Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, by his daughter, in
1889, and proceeds to say that he was of the
Castle, Bude ; of London, and of Westminster,
and that he died at Reeds, Poughill, February 18th,
1875, aged 82. " His Inventions and Discov
eries," the inscription goes on to say, " in Steam
and Electricity made Communication by Land
and by Sea so Rapid that it became necessary
for all England to keep Uniform Clock- time."
But this inscription does not do the fullest
justice to Gurney. He was originally a medical
practitioner at Wadebridge, but left the pro
fession for science and engineering, and was one
of the original inventors of the motor-car, about
1827. Omy tnat. half-pedantic, half-American
name for what are perhaps even more pedantically
named " automobiles " was not then thought
of, and Gurney simply called his invention a
" steam carriage." He contrived to run at a
speed of fifteen miles an hour on the Bath road
in 1829, and had actually entered into extensive
contracts for public services, when discriminating
rates introduced against them by turnpike trustees
killed the new method of locomotion. Gurney
was ruined, and he derived little benefit from
his other inventions, including the steam-jet
(wrongly claimed for Stephenson), the flash-light

70 THE CORNISH COAST
for lighthouses, heating of houses by hot-water
pipes, and many more. In 1863 he was rewarded
with the barren honour of a knighthood.
The road out of Bude for Tintagel goes easily
for ten miles, to Wainhouse Corner, where two
miles and a half of bye-road lead on the right,
mostly downhill, to Crackington Haven. It is
an excellent road, but it leaves the sea entirely
out of sight. At the same time, however, it
gives ready access to a number of more or less
interesting little inland villages, among them
Marhamchurch, which obtains its name from the
church being dedicated to St. Merewenna.
Marhamchurch village stands on high ground,
to the left of the road. It is a place of one very
broad, empty street, with the church facing
down it, at the north end. It is a pleasant,
but not remarkable old church, with a Jacobean
pulpit and an old-world, unrestored waggon-roof
that it is a pleasure to look upon. The floor
has been repaved with slate squares, cut into a
reeded pattern very often seen in this neighbour
hood. Several churches are paved with it. The
only living things I saw in all Marhamchurch
this summer afternoon were a dog rolling de
lightedly in the dust, a cat asleep on a sunny
wall, and a starling that whistled on a tree.
To trace the coastline from Bude, the way
lies over the humble little " Nanny Moore's
Bridge " — crossing the canal, and then past the
church and up over the down to Efford Beacon.
The cliffs at Compass Point, recognised by the

WIDEMOUTH BAY 71
octagonal tower on its crest, are wasting away,
and the view from the still higher vantage-point
of Efford Beacon, ranging over Widemouth Bay,
discloses a gradual dip of the land to the sea
and groups of half-sunken reefs scattered off
the sands : remains of the softer strata that
run for some ten miles along the shore, until
the dark slate rocks are again met with at Pen-
targan Bay. The reefs seen at low water in
Widemouth Bay, and the solitary stack of rock
starting up from the sands, half-way across,
known as Black Rock, are just the remaining
bases on which the softer strata stood.
Widemouth Bay—" Widmouth," as the fashion
locally is to call it — is believed to have a future.
Looking down upon it, and walking, either by
the sands or by road across its empty three
miles, that future, which is, of course, something
in the seaside town way, appears to be far beyond
the vision of any person now living, and the
expected Eastbourne — for it is nothing less that
sanguine persons have predicted for Widemouth
Bay — is likely to remain a great idea, a dream
city, rather than a real place. That some sanguine
persons have had the courage to back the idea
with money is sufficiently evident, for a broad
road has been driven across, and a few melancholy
houses built, which have an air of surprise at
finding themselves set down in such a lonely
situation. But the road is already derelict.
Winter's waves taking more recent mouthfuls
from the earthy cliffs, have even made away

72 THE CORNISH COAST
with some of the " eligible sites," and great
lumps of the road have gone too. And, to put
the seal of failure finally upon it, the road is
now closed with heavy locked gates bearing the
notice : " This road, particularly that part of it
between Salthouse and Widemouth Villa, having
been undermined in places by the sea, is dangerous
to traffic. Pedestrians are cautioned to keep to
the end of the road on the sea side."
Some other authority has made a newer road
parallel with the wrecked one, a little distance
further inland : a road upon which the wise
man looks but does not travel, for where it is
not deep in shingle, it is furrowed fathom deep,
and where there are neither furrows nor shingle,
there are boulders. Also, in due season, there
is mud ; and in some places you get all these
disabilities to travelling at once.
Passing Black Rock, where, according to
Hawker, " Featherstone the Wrecker " is doomed
for ever to the futile task of weaving ropes from
the sand, Wanston Mouth is reached, and with
it the end of the Widemouth Bay stickit develop
ments. A little stream comes cutting deeply
through the ochreous earth of a valley, and has
excavated a sinuous and precipitous gully giving
upon a pebbly beach. It is, as it were, a natural
model of Boscastle Harbour, on a very small
scale ; so small that its every detail can be seen
at a glance, and so close a resemblance that the
likeness to its original is at once perceived. It
is an object-lesson in the immemorial ways of

WIDEMOUTH BAY 73
nature in forming the larger features of this
coast. A new and commonplace villa overlooks
Wanston Mouth, but in the hinterland, through
a farmyard and the distance of a mile and a half
along narrow lanes, there lies the secluded village
of Poundstock, hidden in a combe and sheltered
by elms. Strictly speaking, there is no village :
only the church, the small schools, the vicarage,
and a farm or two. In spite of restoration it
is an interesting little church ; but the photographs
displayed on the door, showing the old state,
before everything was brought back to a presumed
original condition, are sufficient to show that,
however painful to the clergy the appearance of
Poundstock church may have been, it was really
part of the history of the seventeenth and eight
eenth centuries, and ought not to have been
altered. It would appear, from the evidence of
the old photographs, that in those centuries,
when portions of the church became decayed,
local workmen were called in to effect repairs.
They were, naturally, quite ignorant of Gothic,
or of any kind of church architecture, and they
did not pretend to anything of the kind ; so
built and repaired exactly as they would have
done to a house or a cottage. The result was
one of the most whimsical " secularisings " of
churches it is possible to conceive ; delightfully
naive and truly picturesque. But all those works
have been ruthlessly swept away, and great
pride is taken in the doing so. 10

74

THE CORNISH COAST

There are curious— but mostly faded and
dilapidated— frescoes at Poundstock, including
an odd representation of
the seven deadly sins.
These are shown as a
flourishing, seven-branched
tree, with Pride as the top
most branch.
A slate slab against the
west wall of the church is
engraved with a quaint
little effigy, kneeling at a
desk, represented with an
utter disregard of perspec
tive. Beneath is an epitaph
on John Trebarfoot, with heraldic shield bearing
the punning arms of three bears' feet : —

JOHN TREBARFOOT.

Aetatis suae 24 afio dni 1629
Soe soonest are the best flowers cropt, yet hee
Sawe soe much virtue as old age would see,
But too fewe yeares, God wott, and was approvd
Aged in good, soe loving, and belovd
That of Trebarfoote may be truly said
The love of mankinde here lyes buried

Returning to the shore, and mounting steeply
up the path past the commonplace villa with its
petty domestic details of ash-bin, dirty plates,
and bathing-dresses drying on a wall, a lofty,
rugged common occupies the summit of the
down, giving place to a winding, steep, and
stony lane, at whose feet is the little bay of

MILLHOOK 75
Millhook. Hawker and some others style it
" Melhuach," but it is Millhook — or, as we mouth
it in the West, " Millhuke," or, further, with the
" h " slurred, " Millook," and " Millok " ; and
at the bottom, to prove it, a few yards from
the shore is the mill, with its big mill-wheel and
a stream to turn it ; and the projecting cliffs
on either side of the mouth form the "hook,"
or the hooks. The little stream, like many
another hereabouts, carves a deep cleft in the
earth, and thus finds its way to the sea ; and the
sea flings up great stones into the cleft, and
endeavours to push the stream back into the
valley ; and the contention goes on and on, and
neither side gains any appreciable advantage,
while man changes visibly and presently goes
to his long home.
There are a hut or two and a lodging-house
or two, even in a place so remote as Millhook
Haven. And people who really know how to
make holiday come in two or three little parties
and lie about in the sun, or bathe, or fish, or go
boating, barelegged, in the oldest of old clothes,
and not unfrequently in the scantiest of bathing-
dresses. " And when you are tired of that, what
else ? " I asked.
" Nothing else, except, perhaps, we go hunting
Plymouth Blues."
A " Plymouth Blue," it presently appeared,
was a rare species of butterffy that especially
affects Millhook. I had been confusing them

76 THE CORNISH COAST
with " Plymouth Rocks," which are pigeons,
but fortunately was shown one before I had
exposed my ignorance.
Out of Millhook the way lies steeply up, and
thence along the comb of the ridge to Dizard
Point. For two miles the grassy fields slide
gradually towards the sea, and end in no very
dramatic fashion ; but then the cliffs begin to
rise again and, with Castle Point showing boldly.
St. Gennys is marked on the map, apparently
an easy distance, but there is a more or less
great gulf set between it and a farmhouse marked
" Cleave " on the map. The traveller who carries
maps and not only studies them, but contem
plates the meaning of names, will understand
something of what he may expect in a place
called " Cleave." He will deduce a cleft or at
the least of it, a deep valley to be crossed ; and,
sure enough, here is a deep-wooded valley, and
the inevitable stream, and then the equally
inevitable steep rise. St. Gennys village stands
on the summit of a lofty down that runs seawards
and ends in the great cliffs of Penkenner Point,
which form the eastern side of Crackington
Haven. " What do you call it, Gennys, or Jennys ? "
I asked a villager. "Sometimes one, sometimes
t'other," said he. " It's just as you please." But
it is really the first of the two in local speech.
St. Gennys, or Genesius, was one of those
" saints " who are unconsciously represented in
legend a great deal too clever. He was, with

if s

CRACKINGTON HAVEN 79
his brothers, beheaded, but he bowed to the
executioner, picked up his head, and walked away.
The church was being restored when I came
to it, but the building is so poor that no one
need grudge any alterations. Tablets to a family
of Braddons of Treworgy, in the tower, and a
slab in the chancel to one William Braddon, are
of only a minor interest ; although William
certainly appears to have been a rumbustious
person. His epitaph, couched in the first person,
tells us that he had doubled the parts of officer
in the Parhamentary army, and minister of
religion : In war and peace I bore command,
Both gown and sword I wore.
Crackington Haven is a really noble place.
There is that spaciousness in the downs look
ing into the long green vaUey which is the
fellow in nature to broad handling in art. Let
the illustration here of the haven serve to show
exactly what is meant. There you see the
long, majestic sweep of the hillside, going forward
to the verge of the cliffs, with no distracting
little details to belittle it. St. Gennys lies away
on the other side of that even skyline : fortunately,
for anything that should intervene to break it,
were it merely the smallest of houses, would
destroy the effect. Let there be, in reason,
what houses you will below : the hillside, gorgeous
in its livery of subdued green, and the gold and
purple of gorse and heather, will only glorify

80 THE CORNISH COAST
them ; but Crackington Haven will be irre
trievably ruined whenever the hills that enclose
it are touched by the builder.
Who gave this bay, which does not really
form a haven or safe anchorage for vessels, its
name, or what the name means, I do not know,
and it is properly, or was originally, Tremoutha.
The usual little settlement has been established
along the road to the shore, and immediately
facing the beach ; but it is a thought superior
to some we shall see, further west.

Jpiil-
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HillBsl&iaigs ^^llllll

HBKi

CRACKINGTON HAVEN.

CHAPTER V
PENTARGAN BAY, AND THE " CLIFF WITHOUT A
NAME" — "A PAIR OF BLUE EYES" — BOS
CASTLE — MINSTER — FORRABURY AND ITS
" SILENT TOWER " — WILLAPARK AND BLACKA-
PIT — CAMELFORD
He who goes otherwise than afoot from Crack
ington to Boscastle misses much, for the road
leads inland, out of sight of the sea, up across
Resparvel Down, and runs between the mono
tonous high hedges that are a feature of nearly
all the roads in North Cornwall. Cambeak, the
headland enclosing Crackington Haven on the
west, looms darkly ahead, and seems to forbid
progress. Its name means " crooked nose." Little
is gained by proceeding to the extremity of that
ness, except a very tiring addition of nearly two
miles to the coast walk. A rugged track, like a
farm occupation road, leading out of the western
side of Crackington Haven, and over the shoulder
of the down, leads direct, in something like two
miles, to the range of mouldering precipices called
" High Cliff," over seven hundred feet. They
line a shallow bay, and are of mingled buff and
purplish blue in colour ; blue-clay running through
81 n

82 THE CORNISH COAST
them in streaks. A little unnamed bay succeeds
this. Off-shore are two jagged rocks, called the
" Beeny Sisters," and a little inland lies the hamlet
of Lower Beeny, just a " farm-place " or two,
whence a rough road leads to Pentargan Bay, a
romantic inlet, where savage-looking black cliffs
descend to a beach strewn with wave-worn flat
stones, heaped up in ridges by furious winter
seas. " Pentargan " is said to mean " Arthur's
Head." A cave gapes blackly on the east, and
a rivulet splashes down from the considerable
height of the cliff-top ; losing itself amid the
stones. Very rarely will the explorer find his
solitude shared here. Pentargan Bay shares with
Willapark, the great black precipice on the
western side of Boscastle, and with High Cliff,
the honour of the almost tragical " Cliff without
a Name " which figures in Mr. Thomas Hardy's
novel, "A Pair of Blue Eyes." On mature con
sideration, I believe the cliffs of Pentargan Bay
to be the nearest approach to the description
given in those pages, for although the altitude of
High Cliff is much greater, and although Willa
park is both higher and more savage, Pentargan
Bay is the only one of the three possessing a cas
cade, described thus : " The small stream here
found its death. Running over the precipice,
it was dispersed in spray before it was half-way
down, and falling like rain upon projecting
ledges, made minute grassy meadows of them.
At the bottom the water-drops soaked away amid
the debris of the cliff. This was the inglorious

"A PAIR OF BLUE EYES" 83
end of the river." The stream is described
as running from Endelstow, which must be St.
Juliot, although the name resembles that of
Endellion, nearly twelve miles further west.
Boscastle figures in the story as "Castle Boterel."
The incidents of that sad and beautiful story
lend an especial interest to the cliffs of Pentargan
Bay. Elfride Swancourt, the owner of that pair
of blue eyes, walks with her lover, Henry Knight,
to the spot, described in the book as a " terrible
natural fagade." The author continues : " The
sea, rolling direct from the shores of North
America, has, in fact, eaten a chasm into the
middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and
unobtrusive, stands in the rear of pigmy sup
porters. Not least singularly, neither hill, chasm,
nor precipice has a name, or the merest tradi
tion of a name. On this account I will call the
precipice the Cliff without a Name.
" What gave an added terror to its height was
its blackness. And upon this dark face the beat
ing of ten thousand west winds had formed a
kind of bloom, which had a visual effect not unlike
that of a Hambro' grape. Moreover, it seemed
to float off into the atmosphere, and inspire terror
through the lungs."
The priggish Knight — how we hate him ! —
demonstrating, after his dominie manner, with a
stone, the action of atmospheric currents against
cliff-faces, loses his hat in one of the backward
eddies, and in regaining it slips on the verge of
the precipice. There he hangs almost in air ;

84 THE CORNISH COAST
in his agonised minutes of suspense confronted in
ghastly fashion by a fossil in the projecting rock.
" It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead
and turned to stone, were even now regarding him.
It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilo-
bites. Separated by millions of years in their
lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have
met in their death. It was the single instance
within reach of his vision of anything that had
ever been alive and had had a body to save, as
he himself had now.
" The creature represented but a low type of
animal existence, for never in their vernal years
had the plains indicated by those numberless
slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence
worthy of the name. Zoophytes, mollusca, shell
fish, were the highest developments of those
ancient dates. The immense lapses of time each
formation represented had known nothing of the
dignity of man. They were grand times, but
they were mean times too, and mean were their
relics. He was to be with the small in his
death." We who read how Elfride rescued him from
this imminent peril by the expedient of stripping
herself on the cliff-top and tearing off her under
clothing and forming a rope of it, wherewith to
drag him back to safety, ardently wish she had
been less resourceful, and had let him drop.
From these tense heights we may conveniently
descend by the road into Boscastle, lengthily and
steeply ; which almost goes without saying in

BOSCASTLE

85

these parts, where the way, when not steeply
down, is almost always steeply up.
There is nothing now left of the ancient castle
of the knightly family of De Bottreux, whose
name originated the place-name of Boscastle ;
but the battlemented round tower of the Wel
lington Hotel gives the stranger a momentary
thrill, for it looks at first sight feudal. About

BOSCASTLE.

four hundred years ago, when the antiquary,
Leland, came to Boscastle, he described it as
" a very filthy Town and il kept." He then
proceeded to tell of the little brook running down
from the immense heights at the back " into the
Severn Se betwixt 2 Hylles to a pore Havenet,
of no certaine Salvegarde." The little brook is
the Valency, issuant from a lovely wooded and
ferny valley, and it still goes tumbling and splash
ing down to the little haven ; there meeting the

86 THE CORNISH COAST
sea, which comes roaring in through a constricted
and intricate passage, shaped like a double S,
and hemmed in on either side by the shoulders of
mighty headlands. You will perceive that Leland
says nothing about the picturesqueness or beauty
of Boscastle. He could not, indeed, for in his
era such qualities were unknown. No one, when
Leland wrote, travelled for the purpose of ad
miring scenery. Tourists were not yet thought
of, and scenery was not recognised when seen,
except as difficult country, offering obstacles to
those who were, unfortunately, obliged to travel.
Leland himself was a wide traveller, but we may
search in vain through the pages of his itineraries
for admiration of the beautiful in rugged nature.
He was our first antiquary, and travelled solely to
see antiquities and to note such things as heraldic
cognizances and family pedigrees. That he should
have even done so much as that in those times is
sufficiently remarkable.
Boscastle, from a tourist's point of view,
appears to be a place that may conveniently be
visited from such a centre as Tintagel, three and
a-half miles away to the west, where there is
plenty of hotel and boarding-house accommoda
tion, and whence public excursion vehicles set out
plentifully every day. For my own part, Bos
castle suffices me better than Tintagel, and I can
be happy there, so long as the commissariat needs
of the Wellington Hotel (which make great de
mands upon butter, clotted cream, and eggs), do
not absolutely starve me out. The alternative

BOSCASTLE.

After J. M. W. Turner, R.A.

BOSCASTLE 87
is to abandon one's cottage lodgings, and in self-
defence repair to the " Wellington " itself.
There is a great deal more of Boscastle than the
pedestrian, who walks into the place from the
direction of Bude, would at first suppose. The
village, as it discloses itself to his wondering
gaze, is just the group of cottages by the hotel,
and a scattering of village shops and sheds
where photographs and like articles are for sale.
Between them runs that stream of the musical
name, the Valency, to the haven half-a-mile down
the valley. This he conceives to be the whole of
Boscastle, but there is very much more of it up the
hill, back of beyond. Of that, however, he knows
nothing until he has been down to the little
harbour and returned, on his way either to Camel
ford or Tintagel.
Oh ! that 'twere possible to say something of the
doings of the De Bottreaux. But it is not. I
am told that the site of their castle may be traced
in . a green mound ; but I confess to not having
traced it, largely because green mounds of no
remarkable scale, unsanctified by knightly deeds,
are plenteous. Even in Leland's time there was
only a building " far onworthie the name of a
Castel. The People ther caulk it the Courte."
Many years before Leland wrote, the De Bot
treaux had ended in an only daughter, who married
a Lord Hungerford. By a succession of marriages
the title of Baron Bottreaux at last became one
of the minor titles of the fourth and last Marquis
of Hastings, and when he died in 1868, the title

88 THE CORNISH COAST
lapsed, being revived in 1871 in favour of the
Countess of Loudoun. It is now one of the sub
sidiary titles of the Earl of Loudoun, and appears
to be spelled with only one " t."
The harbour of Boscastle, which Leland con
sidered to be of such questionable safety, is the
most remarkable harbour in Cornwall — and that,
in this country of strange havens, is saying much.
As you walk down to it, along a rocky path beside
the Valency, you come gradually to a place where
the great hills rise gradually, steeper and more
steep, enfolded one within the other, and where
they grow near together, so that the approach to
the harbour mouth becomes dim, and at certain
seasons of the day long shadows from the lofty
flanks of the hills are cast across the narrowed
valley, and the Valency foams and ripples out in
flashes of silver, in midst of a velvety blackness.
When you have come to the sturdy little stone
quays of the harbour, the rocky headlands tower
loftily on either side, and the projecting profile
of Pelly Point, on the right hand, which has been
gradually assuming a weird resemblance to a
human figure on a gigantic scale, is suddenly
seen to be a remarkable likeness to the reclining
matronly figure of Queen Victoria. It is so close
a similarity, with, of course, that clinching feature
of slight caricature which always emphasises a
portrait, that the revelation of it is nothing less
than startling.
The harbour of Boscastle has been likened to
that of Balaclava, in miniature. The similarity

BOSCASTLE

89

was discovered by Walter White, who wrote his
" Walk to the Land's End " in 1854 ; and if the
modern writer fails to draw attention to it he may
be held to have fallen something short of his duty.
There is an Arabian Nights kind of weirdness

THE HARBOUR, BOSCASTLE.

in the scenery of Boscastle harbour. I think,
looking up at those jagged black headlands, and
that impassive rock-figure brooding upon the
scene, of the magnetic mountain in that collection
of wonderful stories ; the mountain which at
tracted passing ships to it, and, extracting the

12

90 THE CORNISH COAST
rivets and nails that held them together, resolved
those vessels into a mass of disjointed timbers.
The enormously thick hawsers that lie upon the
quays tell a tale of the strenuous work often
necessary to warp a vessel through the narrow
passage ; and the hollow rumblings of the waves
in the honeycombed rocks, to the sound of a
half-tide blowhole in them, that sucks in air and
water with a noise as of some giant swilling
gargantuan drinks, and expressing a gulping
satisfaction, bespeak the force of the waves. It
is a disgusting giant, for ever taking more than
he can hold, and spewing it out again, with much
noise and circumstance, until the next state of the
tide drowns him altogether. A somewhat similar
blowhole exists in the island-rock called Meachard,
off the headland.
I have already hinted that there is apt to
be a scarcity of food at Boscastle, where pur
veyors take care to serve the hotel first. But
there is fish ? Nay, not always, for fish is not
a common article of food here. Catches are
chiefly for strangers. The gulls are the only
other creatures at Boscastle that eat fish ; but
then, say the Boscastle people, " Gulls will eat
anything." And thus those visitors who pro
pose fish for table find themselves reproved and
in the cold shadow of contempt. To be classed
with a gull in miscellaneous and unchoice appe
tite—it is not well ! But if a visitor will eat fish,
I doubt if he will have courage to sample a Cornish
pasty. I have known Cornwall for many years,

BOSCASTLE

9i

and have explored most of what is explorable,
but the interior of a Cornish pasty remains to me
personally uninvestigated. It is quite sufficient
to know that its interior, hidden within a pallid
dough, is wonderfully varied ; pork and potatoes,
onions and eggs, minced, forming its contents ;

QUEEN VICTORIA ROCK, BOSCASTLE.
sometimes, I am told, with additional features,
including chopped conger, according to individual
fancy. Miss Braddon, who in her novel, "Mount
Royal," written many years ago, sets many of
her incidents on this coast, sends her Christabel
and Mr. Hamleigh walking to Minster, up the
valley from Boscastle, and truly describes how the

92 THE CORNISH COAST
church " lies in the hollow of the hill, so shut in
by the wooded ridge which shelters its grey walls,
that the stranger comes upon it as an archi
tectural surprise." It is a small building, partly
of Early English date, dedicated to St. Materiana,
and obtains its name of "Minster" from being
the fragment of a former monastery church be
longing to the alien Priory of St. Sergius at
Angers. The squat tower, repaired after long
decay, was wrecked in olden times, according to
local legend, by a number of sailors, furious at
a light said to have been shown from its belfry,
by which mariners, mistaking it for a beacon,
were lured to destruction on the rocks. It
does not in the least signify in legendary
lore that no light displayed in the tower of
Minster church could possibly be observed out
at sea. Boscastle stands partly in the parish of Minster,
and partly in that of Forrabury, whose church,
with the famous " silent tower," stands not far
from the cliffs' edge, high up above the harbour.
There is little to attract in this church of St.
Symphorian, Forrabury, and were it not for its
legends — one of them a very common one, b}^ the
way — that the devil would not allow the builder
of it to build in any more accessible situation,
expecting that if they did, every one would attend
public worship, few would pay any attention to
it. The more famous story, however, is that
which explains its " silent tower." I know it will
be said that every one is perfect!)- familiar with

FORRABURY

93

the legend of the missing bells of Forrabury and
with Hawker's fine poem thereon, but for the
sake of every one else who has not, they shall
be told and quoted again. Hawker, some time
after writing the ballad, explained, or confessed,
that the legend of the peal of bells cast for the

COTTAGES AT BOSCASTLE.

church-tower, having been lost at sea owing to
a Divine judgment upon the impious language
of the captain of the ship that was bearing them
to port, was originally, when heard by him, but
a very slight suggestion of the story he told.
The " Silent Tower of Bottreaux " he styleci his
poem. The pilot, steering the incoming vessel

94 THE CORNISH COAST
towards the port, was thankful for the safe passage
they had made :
The pilot heard his native bells
Hang on the breeze in fitful swells ;
" Thank God ! " with reverent brow he cried,
" We make the shore with evening's tide ! "
" Come to thy God in time ! "
It was his marriage chime :
Youth, manhood, old age past,
His bell must ring at last.
" Thank God, thou whining knave, on land,
But thank, at sea, the steersman's hand,"
The captain's voice above the gale :
" Thank the good ship and ready sail."
" Come to thy God in time ! "
Sad grew the boding chime ;
" Come to thy God at last ! "
Boomed heavy on the blast.
Uprose that sea, as if it heard
The mighty Master's signal- word.
What thrills the captain's whitening lip ?
The death-groans of his sinking ship.
" Come to thy God in time ! "
Swung deep the funeral chime :
Grace, mercy, kindness past,
" Come to thy God at last ! "
Long did the rescued pilot tell —
When gray hairs o'er his forehead fell,
While those around would hear and weep —
That fearful judgment of the deep.
" Come to thy God in time ! "
He read his native chime :
Youth, manhood, old age past,
His bell rung out at last.

FORRABURY 95
Still, when the storm of Bottreau's waves
Is wakening in his weedy caves,
Those bells, that sullen surges hide,
Peal their deep notes beneath the tide.
" Come to thy God in time ! "
Thus saith the ocean chime :
Storm, billow, whirlwind past,
" Come to thy God at last ! "
There are those, and I count myself among them,
who could wish that the tower really were silent.
It has one bell, of an aggravatingly cacophonous,
deleterious, and necessarily monotonous clang.
A doleful ballad could be written about it, but I
refrain. Willapark, the lofty headland that rises on the
western, or Forrabury, side of the harbour, is
not in the least park-like. A wilder or more
storm-persecuted place, when the winds arise, it
would not be easy to imagine. It is well-named,
for " Willapark " means the " look-out place,"
and it commands many leagues of troubled sea.
The topmost spot has a little tower of its own ; a
mark for those making the harbour.
Willapark in ordinary weather is scarcely
dangerous, except to born fools ; but the ghastly
chasm in the black cliffs immediately to west
ward of it, with a sheer drop of some hundreds of
feet into the sea, that you can hear thudding in
caves invisible, is a horrible place. A railing
rightly guards this place, well called " Blackapit,"
for it is one of the best definitions of a pit that
one's travels can produce, and the blackness of

96 THE CORNISH COAST
the rocks is that of coal, with an additional sullen
dullness all its own. The very curious fashion in
which the sea has taken a great mouthful out of
the cliffs at this point can perhaps be better
noticed at a distance than near at hand. For
example, if the road leading up out of Boscastle
to Camelford be ascended— a long, long pull-up
indeed it is, very steep and winding, but very
beautiful, being for a considerable distance shaded
by avenues of a long and luxuriant growth — and a
glance backward be taken when at the summit,
the greater part of the situation of Boscastle and
Forrabury will be disclosed. You will see nothing
of the harbour, nor of Boscastle village, for they
are so closely and lovingly enfolded between the
hills that they are entirely hidden from sight,
deep down there, below the oddly formal row
of four-square houses seen in the accompanying
illustration. But you will see the avenue going
down, and the sea, filling up the cleft made by
the swooping down of the hills, and on the left-
hand is the lofty look-out of Willapark, with its
little beacon-tower, and on the left of that again,
Forrabury church. Behind it, you will perceive
how the extremity of that mighty headland, that
would seem, ages ago, to have risen much higher
seaward, has been eaten away, shorn off sheer.
It is one of the most extraordinary views, this,
down to Boscastle from the Camelford road, that
could well be found, and it wears an appearance
almost of unreality. Twelve years before the
accompanying illustration of it was made, I drew

Q <
Oa
a «c
Hs<o
WsHs
o«

CAMELFORD 97
a pencil sketch of the scene, and came during the
interval to look upon it as an exaggeration, so
impossible did it seem. But, comparing it again
with the actual place, I found it absolutely
truthful. Camelford town, inland from Boscastle, is five
miles distant. Strangers who do not come to
Boscastle from Tintagel come alternatively from
Camelford station, which is a good half-mile
from Camelford town. All guide-books rightly
agree that Camelford is uninteresting, in spite of
its antiquity. Murray even styles it " dreary,"
and it certainly is commonplace. But there is
one thing, at any rate, not commonplace about
Camelford, and that is the fact of its parish church
being nearly two miles away, at Lanteglos. It
is perhaps worth while to see a town with such
a distinction. Since the happy, happy days of the old " rotten
boroughs," when Camelford sent two members
to Parliament, and Bossiney by Tintagel two
others, times have been out of joint. The Reform
Bill eventually, woe the day, the Reform Act,
of 1832 abolished the representation, and votes
no longer command guineas, nor have Camelford
and Bossiney electors, these eighty years and
more, experienced the intimate joys they once
knew, when honourable members would come
down and do the honourable and gentlemanly
and convivial thing, namely, invite their con
stituents to feasts at which all would get gloriously
drunk together. 13

98 THE CORNISH COAST
There has been so much reform of one kind
and another since 1832 that it has become some
thing of a vice. The wrong things are reformed,
the things that don't matter, and yet whose
disappearance leaves the world a httle more
grey. Reform the essential things : reform away
private ownership in minerals, decimate the
parasites called " officials," the real tax-eaters,
for whom each new government, no matter the
party, creates new and fat posts : but leave us
still something as picturesque and laughable
as the old " rotten boroughs." Camelford was
not so rotten as some ; not so bad as, for example,
Old Sarum, which possessed no inhabited house,
and yet enjoyed Parliamentary representation.
Camelford always had a select few electors, and
they did pretty well out of the rival candidates'
necessities. Camelford, it should be said, is one of the
places claiming to be the " Camelot " of the
Arthurian story, and Slaughter Bridge, one mile
distant, is said to be the site of that last battle
in which Arthur received his death-wound, but
Malory, in his " Morte d' Arthur," distinctly says
" Camelot " is Winchester, a place certainly
more nearly corresponding to the Tennysonian
description of a " dim, rich city " than this.
Cadbury Camp, overlooking the Severn Sea,
near Portishead, is one of the supposed Camelots,
but if one may have a personal preference for
the site of that perhaps mythical, and certainly
elusive, spot, I should place it twelve miles

CAMELFORD

99

south-east of Glastonbury, near North and South
Cadbury, and overlooking the Camel river of
those parts, where Queen's Camel and other
similarly named villages lie. These would not,
of course, fit in with many other Arthurian
localities, but no one place does that. Glaston-

e j ha^ph^.

CAMELFORD.

bury, however, the traditional " Vale of Avalon,"
whither Arthur voyaged to heal him of his wounds,
and where he is said to have been buried, fits
in exceedingly well with this tentative Somerset
Camelot. Camelford derives its name from the river
Camel or Camlan, the " Camallan," or " Cam-
hayle " = " crooked river," and has, therefore,

ioo THE CORNISH COAST
nothing to do with camels or dromedaries ; but
this has not prevented the town from adopting
the camel for coat-of-arms, and the weather-
vane of the market-house may accordingly be
seen in the likeness of one of those ungainly
animals.

CHAPTER VI
THE ROCKY VALLEY — ST. NIGHTON'S KIEVE — BOSSI
NEY — TREVENA, OR TINTAGEL — KING ARTHUR
— THE OLD POST-OFFICE — TREVENA CHURCH.
The cliffs beyond Blackapit, on the coast-path
to the Rocky Valley and Tintagel, hide in their
embrace the beautiful tiny inlet of Trevethet
Gut, where landsprings pour down the rocks,
heavily draped with ferns. Beyond it, the cliffs
are seamed with the old " Grower " slate-quarries,
with a hill on the left known as " Cadon Barrow."
It is best to turn inland here, to the village of
Trevalga. The name is said to mean the " place
of nobles." The church is dedicated to St.
Petroc, and is an example of gradual growth,
being partly Norman and Early English, with
later additions. In the churchyard is the tomb
stone of a young woman, Elizabeth Richard,
who is stated to have died aged xxii years and
Y5-, i.e. twenty-two years and eleven months.
An epitaph on John Mitchell, 1764, has the follow
ing moral reflections : —
Happy is he, the only Happy Man
Who out of choice does all ye good he can
first to our Wives, Parents, children, fit respect
and to our friends and kindred we direct :

102 THE CORNISH COAST
who business loves and others better makes
by prudent industry and pains he takes,
God's blessing here will have and man's esteem
And when he dies his work will follow him.
not only this but those who will rely
on what I teach shall never, never die.
There is no lack of company in summer
along the road between Boscastle and Tintagel,
and now that motor-cars have discovered the
West, the traffic is sometimes even congested.
Presently a policeman will be required, say at
Longbridge, after Trevalga, where the road swoops
down, under the trees to the bridge crossing the
stream running down from St. Nighton's Kieve
to the Rocky Valley. If it be rainy weather,
the touring cars and the waggonettes churn up
a fearful mud, and if a long spell of dry weather
has set in, the dust hangs thickly on everything.
" You caan't see no then, this summer, for the
pillum. Us do want a passel o' rain to make
the place look clane an' vitty agen." So said a
cottager, whose wayside garden looked as though
a carpet-beating company had been conducting
extensive operations there. The " pillum " — that
is to say the dust — was being stirred up continually
and hung in the air like a miasma. Tennyson
is responsible for this, for King Arthur and
Tintagel had not become a cult before he wrote
the " Idylls of the King."
I believe in King Arthur, not necessarily by
that name, but that there was a historical, or,
if you like it better, a prehistoric personage on

THE ROCKY VALLEY

103

whom the great figure of Arthur is based, appears
beyond doubt. But I decline to believe he in
any way resembled the person Tennyson pictures,
with the manners of a Sunday School teacher,
and language to match. The school-marms, uni-
versity-extensionists, and spectacled bat-like pro-

CRESWICK'S MILL IN THE ROCKY VALLEY.
fessorial persons, whom we see walking Tintagel
and the country round about, with the Tenny-
sonian Arthur in their minds, would not, one
shrewdly suspects, have liked the real Arthur, who
was probably a man of wrath and blood, full
of patriotic sentiments, but giving expression to

104 THE CORNISH COAST
them rather with the sword than by word of
mouth. I am quite sure the affectionate maiden
aunts who present good nephews with the " Idylls
of the King," hoping the recipients will take the
Tennysonian hero for model, would be quite
horrified could they know the real Arthur.
It is a relief to escape the dusty throng and
turn aside into the Rocky Valley. It is a vale
of moss-grown boulders, of a bright and sparkling
stream, a place where the foxgloves grow and
blackberry brakes take you by the elbow and
implore you to wait awhile : a place, too, of
fairylike glades, with a newer and a better view
at every turn, and down at the end of it the
sea. Trevillet Mill, the subject of Creswick's
painting of the "Mill in the Rocky Valley,"
stands picturesquely here.
In the upper part of the valley, on the other
side of Longbridge, is the forty-foot waterfall
of St. Nighton's Kieve, nearly a mile off the
road. The romance of this lovely waterfall is
perhaps a little obscured by the necessity for
applying at Trethevy Farm for the key, but if
the thought of it is resolutely banished, the
meadow and woodland path has beauties sufficient
to soothe any irritation. The little door to the
waterfall, once unlocked, discloses the water
pouring down from the summit of a kind of
cliff, and received into a large natural rock-basin —
the " Kieve," a Cornish word for " tub." Thence
it pours out again, to the stream, hurrying through
a natural archway and thence into a veritable

ST. NIGHTON'S KIEVE 105
tunnel of foliage. Ferns and moss plentifully
cover every available inch of rock. The St.
" Nighton " of this place is Nectan, brother of
St. Morwenna. The legend of it is that the
saint established a hermitage and chapel above
the waterfall and lived here many years. Coming
at last to his end, he removed a silver bell that
had hung in the chapel, and dropped it far out
of sight through a rift in the rock. Then he
died and was buried on the spot, and the fall
was diverted so that it splashed over his grave.
It seems a stupid legend, and stupid were those
miners who are said to have believed it, and to
have again diverted the fall, with the object of
finding the supposititious silver bell. While en
gaged upon their treasure-hunt they heard the
sound of the bell, and a voice saying : " The
child is not born who shall recover this treasure,"
which so greatly alarmed them that they aban
doned the quest. But St. Nighton's Kieve needs
no such bald and unconvincing narratives, nor
any fine writing to recommend it.
Bossiney comes next after Longbridge, but
before the village is Bossiney Hawn, a little cove
at the foot of tall cliffs, with a strip of sands
and tolerably safe bathing. A natural arch in
one of the cliffs forms a close resemblance to
the head and trunk of an elephant. Offshore
is the spiny islanded Lye Rock, with " the Sisters "
westward of it.
Bossiney might readily be taken by a stranger
for Tintagel, and it forms, indeed, a continuation 14

io6

THE CORNISH COAST

of it. A grey, subdued village it is, of scattered,
humble cottages, but it was until 1832 a Par
liamentary borough, returning two members, of
whom perhaps the most distinguished in all its
history was Sir Francis Drake. Bossiney was
also a municipal borough ; and a grassy mound,

THE ELEPHANT ROCK, BOSSINEY.

crested by a flagstaff, stands by the cliff, marking
where, from . very early times, the mayor was
proclaimed, the writs for elections read, and the
members afterwards declared elected. Heaven
only knows what earlier rites were celebrated on
that spot, for the mound is a prehistoric barrow.
The description given by Leland of Bossiney is

BOSSINEY 107
one of the most curious even of his efforts : " This
Bossenny hath beene a bygge thing for a Fischar
Town, and hath great Priveleges grauntid onto
it. A Man may se there the Ruines of a gret
numbre of Houses. Here also cummith down a
Broke, and this Broke and Tredewy Water
resort to the Se at one Mouth bytwixt ij Hilles ;
whereof that that is on the Est side lyith out
lyk an Arme or Cape, and makith the Fascion of
an Havenet, or Pere, whither Shippelettes sum-
time resorte for socour.
" A Frere of late dayes toke upon hym to make
an Haven at this Place, but he litle prevailed
theryn." And now let the hopeful pilgrim to the chief
shrine of the Arthurian legend reconcile himself
to a bitter disenchantment.
No latter-day traveller coming to Tintagel can
fail to be disappointed with it. Tennyson's pic
ture of the place and of King Arthur, in his " Idylls
of the King," has wrought this sorry change.
The enterprising builder perceived quite clearly,
almost a generation ago, that there was money in
Tintagel and King Arthur, and I grieve to find
that the ground-landlord, or landlords, did not
say him nay. When the village still remained
Trevena, rather than Tintagel, it was a place of a
few scattered cottages, smaller than Bossiney,
and they were of the Cornish kind. Here the
earlier readers of Tennyson could find little
abiding-place, but yet, year by year, they came
every summer, in greater numbers. That demand

io8 THE CORNISH COAST
infallibly creates supply is one of the uncon
trovertible axioms of the dreary science of social
and political economy ; and hence in the fulness
of time Trevena became the " Tintagel " of to
day. Here is a " King Arthur " villa. I think,
but am not sure, that you may buy " King
Arthur " cigarettes at one of the little shops near
Eagle Villa, where the figure-head of a ship, in the
likeness of an eagle under rebuke, looks upon the
dusty road.
Tintagel, strictly and properly speaking, is
quite distinct from the village of Trevena that has
now usurped its name. It is, indeed, no inhabited
or habitable place at all, being just the bold,
almost insulated craggy headland which projects
into the sea beyond the last long-drawn houses
of the village street : the headland of Dun-dagel,
i.e. the "safe fortress," its natural features having
singled it out from the earliest times for refuge
and defence. All around the coasts of Cornwall
there are projecting headlands, larger or smaller,
more or less rocky and difficult of access, and in
varying degrees almost isolated from the main
land by narrower or wider, lofty or low-lying,
necks of land. On all these points of rock the
primitive peoples who inhabited Cornwall long
before the dawning of history, created what are
known as " cliff-castles." Nature in every case
was the chief builder of those " castles," and man
had but to cut one or more trenches and to heap
up lofty or less lofty embankments across the
neck of each isthmus, for the defences to be com-

TINTAGEL 109
plete. So completely obvious are the defensive
advantages of these several places, and so essen
tially unaltered, even in these days of ordnance,
that some fulfil military uses now. Pendennis
Castle, on the headland of Pen-dinas, by Falmouth,
is a case in point. But none of these headlands
was so completely defensible as this of Tintagel.
Proceeding through the village, the road to this
once impregnable fortress sharply descends to a
narrow, rocky gorge, down whose midst flows
a stream. At the end of it, in half a mile, the sea
is glimpsed in the V-shaped cleft formed by the
rocks on either side ; rocks that begin to give
place to ruined outworks of the ancient fortresses
that have succeeded one another here. They are
dark grey and black, slaty laminated rocks, and
the ruined barbicans, watch-towers, or what-not,
were constructed of the same material, so that
the difficulty is not inconsiderable in distinguishing
which is really a ruined wall, and which natural
rock. If the path be continued down to the sea, a
sandy cove is found, deeply recessed between
two massive headlands of dark rock, which is
seen on closer examination to be veined with white
and green and red streaks. The very approach
to the cove is extremely rugged. You do not step
gradually on to the sands at low water, but
scramble down rocks ; and if the tide be high, it
almost entirely fills up the cove.
The headlands, then, to left and right, are those
of Tintagel, and Barras Nose. Both are deeply

110 THE CORNISH COAST
hollowed into huge caverns by the sea ; but those
in the Tintagel cliffs, on the left, are the larger.
One of them is called " Merlin's Cave." A pic
turesque wooden staging, overhanging the cove,
is used for loading and discharging such small
vessels whose captains have the temerity to enter
here. Rough rock-paths, with here and there a
hand-rail for the timorous, lead down and then
up and across to " the Island," as the larger part
of Tintagel is called. The chasm that intervenes
does not obviously permit the passage of the sea,
but it does actually wash through by means of
the caverns. Here, then, with this rift in the
jagged precipices, you perceive the natural ad
vantages of the place, in the military sense ; but
the castle ruins are distinctly visible on either side
of this pierced isthmus. Whether the intervening
space was once narrower and bridged by some
contrivance of the drawbridge type, joining the
sundered portions of the castle, and has been
widened by time, or whether it was always, in the
history of the castle, as broad as now, is frequently
a matter of dispute, but there is no real occasion
for doubt upon the point, for the testimony of old
writers, sometimes at first hand, occasionally by
hearsay, is quite clear.
Among the unreliables is Geoffrey of Mon
mouth. Writing in the twelfth century, he
tells how the one and only entrance to the
castle is " through a strait rock, which three
men shall be able to defend against the whole
power of the kingdom ; " but he does not appear

TINTAGEL in
himself to have seen Tintagel. Leland, however,
writing in 1538, actually speaks from his own
knowledge of the " great and terrible cragge
environed with the se, but having a drawbridge
from the Residew of the castelle onto it ; " and
further, speaking of the castle, " ij Wardes be
woren away with gulfing of the se, in so much that
yt hath made ther almost an isle, and no way
ys to enter ynto hyt now but by long elme trees
layde for a brygge." Camden adds his testimony
to the castle being "part upon an island formerly
joined to the mainland by a bridge." Carew re
marks : " Halfe the buildings were raised on the
continent, and the other halfe on an island, con
tinued together (within men's remembrance), by
a drawbridge, but now divorced by the downfalne
steepe cliff es on the further side."
John Norden, writing a survey of Cornwall,
in the early years of the seventeenth century,
and dedicating his work to the " most High and
mightie Prince, Jeames," by whom James the
First is indicated, is not, perhaps, the easiest
or the most instructive reading, but at any rate
he gives us the best descriptive account, whether
old or new, of the castle and headland of Tintagel.
He and modern writers alike enlarge mightily
upon the dangers of the place, but I think old
Norden decidedly the most convincing.
"The principall buylding," he says " seemeth
to be on the maynelande, from whence a Draw
bridge was lett downe to pass to the Ilande to the
other buyldinges ; but of late yeares, within man's

112 THE CORNISH COAST
memorie, it is depryved of that benefite of a bridge,
and the passage to the Ilande is nowe farr more
irksome and troublesome by a little Isthmos or
neck of lande, which lyeth at the foote of the rock
or Ilande, the descente unto it is verie steepe and
craggie, from whence the ascente againe is farr
more tedious and dangerous, by a verie rockye
and wyndinge waye, up the steep sea-clyffe, under
which the sea waves wallow, and so assayle the
foundation of the He as may astonish an unstable
brayne to consider the perill, for the least slipp
of the foote sendes the whole bodye into the
devouringe sea."
He has much else to say of this terrible place,
but this may be well condensed into the one
fine and illuminating phrase, summing up the
situation : "He must have eyes that will scale
Tintagel." The early history of Tintagel is unknown, and
it seems probable that it was in ruins even so far
back as the time of the Norman conquest ; but
it is found shortly afterwards occupied by the
Earls of Cornwall. In 1245, the then Earl of
Cornwall entertained treasonable relationship here
with his kinsman, David, Prince of Wales, but
it does not appear that he suffered for so doing.
The intervals in which even mediaeval history has
something to say of Tintagel are scanty, and the
next item bears date 1385, when, the castle being
used rather as an out-of-the-way prison belonging
to the Duchy of Cornwall than a fortress, we find
John de Northampton, Lord Mayor of London,

TINTAGEL.

TINTAGEL 113
" for his unruly mayoralty, condemned hither as
a perpetual penitentiary." One would like to hear
more of this ; details of that mayoralty, and
particulars of his imprisonment, but these are
only fleeting glances we are vouchsafed. Sir
Richard Grenville in 1583 (the hero, eight years
later, of the Revenge) considered that Tintagel
ought to be kept in repair, and wrote a report
upon it, but the Queen's advisers thought other
wise, and it was thereafter left to ruin. The office
of Constable of the castle was absurdly revived
in 1852, at the suggestion of the Prince Consort,
and given to the vicar of Trevena.
The existing roofless, and indeed, almost form
less, walls, skirting the circuit of the cliffs, are
without architectural features that would
definitely determine their age, but it appears un
likely that any portion can be so old as that period
in which King Arthur or his prototype lived.
Arthur has been the sport of literary men from
the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth, about 1140, to
Tennyson, and they have made of him what they
will. Sir Thomas Malory's " Morte d' Arthur,"
written in 1470, is more poetic in its majestic
prose than any poet's work, and Arthur is not
thoroughly emasculated by him ; but that
Romano-British chieftain whose exploits origin
ated the marvellous legends of the Table Round
and its twelve knights, of Joyous Gard, and the
other picturesque features, cannot have been any
thing like the person represented in any of them.
He was probably born late in the fifth century, 15

114 THE CORNISH COAST
in that terrible period when the civilisation
introduced by the Romans into Britain, and ad
vanced to a high state in the passing of over four
hundred years, was stricken down in the with
drawal of the Roman garrisons and the landing
of barbarian hordes. Everywhere the Romanised
British were fighting desperately against swarms
of these strangers from the north of Europe, and
gradually they were beaten back. The discoveries
of Romano-British remains, such as the ruins of
Uriconium, at Wroxeter, and those of Calleva
Attrebatum, at Silchester, with traces of burning,
and the skeletons of those who perished miserably
in hiding from those pitiless invaders, tell us
eloquently of those times. Any chieftain among
the terrified British who could, for a while, at any
rate, keep those ruthless hosts in check, and could
even occasionally beat them back, was sure of
honour in his time, and of a posthumous fame that
would gather legends, taking ever more marvel
lous shape as time went on.
Cerdic, founder of the West Saxon kingdom of
Wessex, felt the weight of Arthur's might in
many battles, and was flung back in the great
battle of Mount Baden,, identified by some with
Badbury Rings, near Wimborne ; with Lans-
down, near Bath ; and even with a place in
Linlithgowshire. It was probably the first of these
and was perhaps fought in a.d. 516. There Arthur,
performing prodigies of personal valour, smote
the pagans to earth. Cerdic died in 535, without
being able to prevail against the British, and

KING ARTHUR 115
Arthur remained overlord of all that part of
Britain stretching from Strathclyde, about where
Glasgow is now, southward to Cornwall, and
roughly half-way across it, from west to east.
The abundant traditions and places associated
with his name in all that territory, and across
sea into Brittany, make it very evident that his
military power had welded for a time the petty
divisions which the Saxons could otherwise have
taken in detail and destroyed. The legend of
Arthur's treacherous nephew, Mordred, and the
desperate final battle of Camlan, in which Mordred
was killed, and Arthur received his death-wound,
would seem to enshrine some original lost fact ;
and perhaps points to the peace he had gained
for the British being wrecked by internal dissen
sions ; mutual rivalries abundantly to be found
in the story of all Celtic peoples. Those troubles
resulted in a renewed Saxon advance, and the
eventual conquest of Cornwall.
Arthur, we are told, sailed to the valley of
Avalon, to recover, it might be, of his grievous
wound. Some think to find Avalon in the neigh
bourhood of Glastonbury, and others point to
an island off the Breton coast. To declare it an
absurdity that any one could voyage to Glaston
bury, would be to speak without knowledge of
what Somerset was like in those times. Glaston
bury, or the Isle of Avalon, was then one of many
islands rising from the calm, lagoon-like waters,
which stretched where Sedgemoor is now. It
was, for instance, considerably over three hundred

116 THE CORNISH COAST
years later that Alfred the Great hid there from his
foes, in the Isle of Athelney.
It would be a natural thing for the British to
bitterly mourn the desperate wound that Arthur
had received, to wish him back, and to invent
legends of his return when his country should
again be in need of him. All those legends are
part of the Arthurian romance ; but although his
people soon had a bitter call for a protector, he
never returned. Yet, some day, the stories tell,
when his country has direst need of a champion,
he will come again. It is the outcome of the
fervid Celtic imagination, which, so late as the
time of Sir Francis Drake, evolved the mystic story
that when England has need of him, he wiU be
with us again.
Cornish legends variously tell us that at present
the spirit of Arthur inhabits the body of a Cornish
chough, or of a wailing gull, that haunts the crags
of Tintagel. Twice a year, also, they say, Tintagel
becomes magically invisible ; but the genesis of
that story may not be difficult to discover, for the
sea-mists that occasionally arise, even on a glorious
summer day, wrap the rude ribs of that ancient
castle round in so thorough a fashion, that its
very existence, and that of the headland itself,
would not be suspected by a stranger. But it
is oftener than twice a year this magical thing
happens ; and when it does, and you proceed
with the necessary key that admits to those
precincts, nothing but the clammy wisps of fog
greet you. No ghostly court is held there, and

KING ARTHUR n7
no spectral janitor asks what you would in the
halls of Table Round.
The legends that enshrine the birth of Arthur
and the twelve great battles he fought, origin
ate with Nennius, who wrote his " Historia
Britonum " in the ninth century. Arthur, re
duced as nearly as may be done to fact, was
the son of Uther the Terrible, Pendragon, or
chief military champion, of the British kinglets.
Opinions clash, however, as to the actual exist
ence of Uther, but there is sufficient evidence of
the reality of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the Romano-
British chieftain, said to have been brother of
Uther, and therefore uncle of Arthur. The mother
of Arthur was Igerna.
Uther would not please those who like their
legends to be of a high moral standard ; for he
appears to have been a personage who occupied
the leisure left to him, after fighting the common
foe, to making illicit love to lesser chieftains'
wives. It is an ancient and more romantic ver
sion of Parnell and Mrs. O'Shea.
Igerna, or Igraine, was wife of the Duke of
Cornwall, whose chief strongholds were Tintagel,
and Damelioc, a hilltop earthwork fortress be
tween St. Teath and St. Kew, about six miles
from Tintagel. To Igerna the terrible Uther
made such love that her husband (" Gorlois " he
is named by the romantic Malory) hurried her to
Tintagel and fortified himself in Damelioc, the
" Castle Terrabil" of the romances, against Uther,
who besieged him there and slew him. Uther

n8

THE CORNISH COAST

then married Igerna, who bore him two children,
Arthur and Ann, whose son, Mordred, in after-
years ended Arthur's career.
It was not long before Uther, who was at that
time an old man, died. He was succeeded as
Pendragon by Geraint, who
was killed in a.d. 522, fighting
with the Saxons at Lang-
port. Arthur was chosen
Pendragon after him, and met
his own end in 537 or 542.
Almost the oldest thing in
Tintagel stands in front of
one of the newest. This is
the rudely inscribed Romano-
British cross in front of the
" Wharncliffe Arms." It
came from a farm at Trevil-
let, two miles distant, where
it had seemed good to the
farmers of generations back,
to convert it into practical
use as a gate-post. It stands
nearly four feet high, and
bears inscriptions on two
sides, running thus: — "Aelnat + fecit ha(n)c
crucem p(ro) a(n)ima su(a) ; " and the names of
the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John. The whole is difficult to be read, because
not only of the roughness of the granite, but also
on account of its crabbed and contracted nature.
In midst of the many stuccoed abominations

CKOSS, TREVENA.

THE OLD POST-OFFICE

119

that in these latter days disfigure Tintagel, the
fourteenth-century building known as the " Old
Post Office " is a welcome relief. The " Old Post
Office " takes that name only from the building
having for some years served post-office purposes,
before the modern plasti-
ferous horror immediately
opposite was erected, and is
really an ancient private resi
dence of the smaller kind, of
rather larger proportions than
a cottage. The interest of it
lies rather in its construction
than in its history, for the
house has really no story. It
is one of the now unfortu
nately few examples left of
the Cornish rustic manner of
building in olden times, in
which the design and the
substantial character of the
house were conditioned by
the nature of the local
materials, granite and slate.
The walls are of great blocks
of granite, the roofs of large and thick slate slabs.
Time has so weathered the " Old Post Office " that,
although almost powerless to affect in the slightest
degree its structural stability, the centuries have
given it a certain venerable air, more easily
understood than explained. It has long been the
delight of artists, and not a photographer, amateur

CROSS, TREVENA.

120

THE CORNISH COAST

or other, who comes this way but expends a plate
or two upon it ; although, to be sure, it appears
to make a better drawing than a photograph.
There was, some years ago, a danger that the
" Old Post Office " might be demolished, in order
to clear the ground for villas and boarding-houses
of the horrific type that now sears the soul of the

THE OLD POST OFFICE, TREVENA.

sentimental traveller in these parts. It was put
up to auction in 1895, but was fortunately bought
by Miss Johns, solely with the object of preserving
it from that fate. The National Trust for Places
of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty afterwards
became the owner, on the terms of paying Miss
Johns £200, and granting her a lease of the house
for her lifetime, at a nominal rent. There is, now,
therefore, a certainty that, although Tintagel

THE OLD POST-OFFICE 121
becomes another Notting Hill, in the architectural
way, the " Old Post Office " will remain for cen
turies yet, to point out the falling from grace that
has come about. The interior is now a show-
place, and is more imposing than a glance at the
.low, rambling exterior would lead a stranger to
expect, for the height of the principal living-room
is identical with that of the roof-ridge ; the
apartment thus forming a hall covered with the
great original roof-timbers, themselves neces
sarily of very substantial character, bearing as
they do the weight of heavy slate slabs. A gallery
is a feature of one side, and smaller rooms open
out below.
As I have already said, the " Old Post Office "
is now a show-place, and a caretaker acts the
showman's part. Not by any means an in
terested caretaker when the pilgrim of this pil
grimage came and knocked, and was admitted.
" I'm just about fed up with it," said he.
" The deuce you are," said I, " and you a
Cornishman ? "
" No, sir, not a Cornishman ; I came from
Brighton, I did."
" And you're going back, I suppose ? '
" I'm sure ! "
The grey old church, dedicated to SS.
Materiana and Marcelliana, stands apart from
the village, its bleak churchyard always sad,
in winter storm or summer sun. Often, in the
height of summer, when there is a calm, and
moisture arising from the sea is condensed into
16

122 THE CORNISH COAST
an impenetrable, cold, clammy white fog, the
place, and the village and Tintagel, and the coast
line for many miles, are apt to be enshrouded in
a ghastly winding-sheet of vapour, through which
anything that is at all dimly visible looks un-
sanctified and forbidding. It is then as though
that era promised by scientific men was really
come : that time when the sun shall have lost
his power, and the earth be surely returning
once more to the Ice Age. It is true that the
recent hideous bulk of the " King Arthur's
Castle Hotel " does at such times begin to look
rather romantic than vulgar, and that the plaster-
fronted lodging-houses succeed, for once in a
way, in giving the impression that they are
substantial ; but it is then but a ghost-world,
grey and sad, here, and the wailing of fog-horns
out of the emptiness emphasises a horrible feeling,
that you and every one else are dead and damned
in a cold inferno. The churchyard is then es
pecially grim. Cold, shivery airs float past and
salute your cheek, as though you had been kissed
by the invisible ghost of one of the many drowned
who lie here ; some with their slaty tombstones,
propped up with other slabs against the violence
of the elements, telling their story, others un
recorded. Among the sad memorials here is a
rotting lifebelt over the grave of an Italian sailor,
one Domenico Catanesi, drowned in the wreck of
the Iota of Naples. The lettering will soon be
decayed entirely away. Almost solitary, at the
western extremity of the churchyard stands

TREVENA CHURCH 123
the elaborate tomb of Douglas Cook, 1868. He
was a founder of the Saturday Review. Although
so comparatively recent, it is already bearded
with thick tufts of grey-green moss, much longer
than that growing on any of the leally ancient
stones around.
An altar-tomb by the south door bears an
epitaph to Thomas Hemmge, who was killed by
lightning :
The body that here buried lyes
By Lightning fell, death's sacrifice ;
To him Elijah's fate was given,
He rode on flames of fire to Heaven ;
Then mourn no more, Hee's taken hence
By the just hand of Providence
0 God ! the judgements of thy seat
Are wonderous good and wonderous great ;
Thy ways in all thy works appear
As Thunder loud, as lightning clear !
In the vestry one may find this singular
epitaph, on Christopher, son of Christopher
Chilcot, 1696 :
This Was Too Sweet : a Babe for : earth : Thus fate
In paradife did Him : in : Oculate :
What Heavenly : ioys At God's right hand there be
This : Bleffed Innocent : is Gon to See
We : have loft in : him : oh pity o'r complaint
A hopefull Child : But he's gon : to be : A Saint
Noe more Therfore of tears : but, Ceafe, to : weep
He lies : in : Abraham's Bosome : Let him Sleep
Hoer : Flevit : pater :
In the south transept is the oldest thing in

124 THE CORNISH COAST
Tintagel, a stone that had long been a portion of
the lych-gate, but was found in 1890 to be a Roman
milestone. It is inscribed imp. c. g. val. lic.
licin., which has been extended to mean :
" Imperatore Caesare Galerio Valerio Liciniano
Licinio," and is considered to refer to Licinius,
who rose from being a peasant to become Emperor
in A.D. 307. Licinius came to a bad end. He
married Constantia, sister of Constantine the
Great, and ruled the Empire jointly with him.
He was executed in a.d. 324, after injudiciously
quarrelling with his brother-in-law.
Here is, for the rest, a passably good stained-
glass window in memory of the first Earl of
Wharncliffe, erected in 1899 by his tenantry ;
but the pitch-pine fittings of the church, and
the showy modern encaustic tiles are sadly out
of place. The dangers of Tintagel are by no means to
be lightly dismissed. They are not always those
of falling from dizzy heights, or being claimed a
victim by the sea. Sometimes the rocks fall.
This coast, by some odd chance, seems fatal to
visitors from Derby. A tablet will be found at
Bedruthan Steps, to the memory of one from
that town who was drowned there ; and on August
9th, 1909, a visitor to Tintagel from Derby lost
his life in a peculiarly sad manner.
He went to a high cliff overlooking the sea
and sat there reading, possibly one of those
modern exemplars and repositories of all know
ledge and wisdom, the halfpenny newspapers,

CLIFF-DANGERS 125
which love to tell how man has conquered nature.
And then, suddenly and without warning, the
apparently solid cliff gave way, and the un
fortunate man descended in thunder, amid tons
of what journalists love to call " debris," to the
shore, far below. People near by heard a noise,
described at the inquest as " like the report of
a gun," and descending to the beach, found the
victim of the accident dying.
A local doctor stated " he had known the
cliff well for years, and had never known the
like happening before." So we may know our
friends a lifetime, and even then at the last they
shall betray us.

CHAPTER VII
TREBARWITH STRAND  PORT GA VERNE  PORT
ISAAC — DELABOLE — PENTIRE — ST. ENODOC
AND THE SANDHILLS — ROCK — WADEBRIDGE —
ST. BREOCK — LITTLE PETHERICK — PADSTOW
— HARLYN BAY — TREVOSE HEAD — ST. CON
STANTINE' S CHURCH.
It is about two miles from Tintagel to Trebarwith
Strand, and the best way to get there is by road,
taking the intermediate Dunderhole Point on
trust. The way into the place, after going for
some distance in a featureless fashion, suddenly
turns to the right and goes in a long, swift descent
through a deep valley to the shore.
Miss Braddon, in " Mount Royal," is enrap
tured with Trebarwith Strand. ' That noble
stretch of level sand, with the long rollers of
the Atlantic tumbling in across the low rocks,
and the bold headlands behind — spot beloved of
marine painters — spot where the guUs and the
shags hold their revels, and where man feels
himself but a poor creature, face to face with
the lonely grandeur of sea, and cliff, and sky."
Speaking personally, I find myself, confronted
with the exquisite scenery of Trebarwith Strand,
126

TREBARWITH STRAND.

TREBARWITH STRAND 127
an invigorated and delighted creature, uplifted
and rejoicing at sight of those bold contours :
the blackened jutting ledges of slate rock and
the swelling lines of the bulging cliffs ; and
moved almost to some hymn of praise by the
colour of those golden sands and the translucent
green of the plunging waves.
" So rarely," says the author of " Mount
Royal," " is that long stretch of yellow sand
vulgarised by the feet of earth's multitudes
that one half expects to see a procession of frolic
some sea-nymphs come dancing out of yonder
cave, and wind in circling measures towards
the crested wavelets, gliding in so softly under
the calm, clear day."
That may have been correct enough some
thirty years ago, but it does not now hold good.
There are frolicsome nymphs, it is true, but
they generally come over by brake or other
vehicles of the waggonette type from Tintagel,
and they are accompanied by attendant swains
and by middle-aged persons no longer nymph
like. They buy picture postcards, which succeed
in showing the scatter of cottages and refreshment-
rooms near the sands, but utterly fail to disclose
the beauties of the spot ; they fortify the body
with meat and drink, and they paddle in the
water. They are by no means vulgar people —
the vulgar do not commonly come so far west —
and they genuinely admire Trebarwith Strand,
but they do so in the debased language of the
age, and say, struck with surprise on first ob-

128 THE CORNISH COAST
serving it : " This is a bit of all-right " ; " Not
half " ; " I'm sure."
The Wilhelmina, German barque, was wrecked
at Trebarwith Strand, November 14th, 1875.
The sea was so violent and the rocks of that
ripping character that no fragment remained,
except one piece of board with the vessel's name
on it. Mr. Baring-Gould has added a horrid
clincher to tales of this savage coast.
" After a wreck," he says, " those lost are
literally cut to pieces on the sharp, slaty rocks,
and a man is employed to descend into the coves
with a sack and collect the bits of human flesh
which the sea casts up."
The coast between Trebarwith Strand and
Port Gaverne, a stretch of five miles, is varied
by the sands of Tregarget Beach, but otherwise
is a length of not very remarkable cliffs. The
walking is difficult, and no road serves between
those two places except that which runs far
inland, steeply uphill to the slate-quarries and
village of Delabole. If it be hot weather, it is
hot indeed at Delabole, where the sun, striking
full upon the slate rocks, radiates a heat that
makes every movement an exhausting experience.
Delabole is slaty in every respect. Even the
fences are slate. It is a very ugly and depressing
place. Port Gaverne, where the road again
touches the coast, is just a dark chasm in the
cliffs with a village down below, and bathing, not
so embarrassingly mixed with fish-offal and dustbin
refuse as that obtainable at Port Isaac, where

PORT ISAAC.

PORT ISAAC 129
the perpendicular cliffs form ail-too tempting
dust-shoots for easy-going housewives. " Ga
verne " is probably a variant of " Keverne,"
and that in its turn stands for St. Piran.
Port Isaac, which immediately follows, is, as
may perhaps have already been gathered, a
true Cornish fishing-village, little leavened by
modern conventions and prejudices. It is a hamlet
in the parish of Endellion, nearly two miles
inland, and is far larger than its original, being
indeed a quite populous little place. Conceive
a narrow inlet, or wedge cut out of tall, steep cliffs,
and roads almost the steepest to be found in
Cornwall running lengthily down into it and up
out on the other side ; pack the cliff-tops and
those roads as tightly as possible with cottages
and houses, and furnish every one of them with
prolific families ; and there, plus more than a
little dirt and an ancient and fishlike smell,
you have Port Isaac. But the illustration will
show it better than words can convey, and proves
it to be truly picturesque. The name has nothing
to do with the patriarch, but no one really knows
what it means. There is a choice of two ex
planations, one declaring for Port Issyk, the
" lower port," the other for Port Izic, the " corn
port." Porthquin, two miles from Port Isaac, round
the intervening capes and promontories of Varley
Head and Kellan Head, is another Port Isaac,
but in a state of abject decay. Thence the
long coastline of Porthquin Bay leads round to
17

130 THE CORNISH COAST
the remote headland of what is known generally
as Pentire Point. There are really two points,
with a good mile between them, and of these
the easterly one is " The Rumps," while that
to the west is Pentire. It is a wildly beautiful
region, the cliffs honeycombed with caverns. A
cliff-castle, whose ancient builders seem to have
paid especial attention to the depth of their
ditches and the height of their scarps, is situated
on the Rumps, and huge island rocks, " The Mouls "
and " Newland," frown darkly out to sea. The
busy world seems, and is, very far away from
Pentire, and you do not return easily to it, for
the way round to the usual tracks of mankind is
long and rough, past the little hamlet of Polzeath,
where there is a sheltered verge of sand, and
so across the hillside to Trebetherick and St.
Enodoc. Here one has come well into the estuary
of the Camel river, at this point half a mile wide.
Obliquely across the water lies the ancient port
of Padstow, and sand, sand stretches everywhere.
The lazy current of the Camel and the
masterful winds have between them brought
about the sandy desolation of these shores, but
legends have something to say on the subject.
According to these, it would appear that a sports
man, wandering along the estuary, observed a
mermaid in the water, occupied in characteristi
cally feminine fashion in combing her luxuriant
tresses and admiring herself in a mirror. The
pestilent fellow levelled his cross-bow at the
mermaid and mortally wounded her, whereupon

ST. ENODOC, PADSTOW, AND THE ESTUARY OF THE CAMEL.

ST. ENODOC 131
she cursed him and Padstow, prophesying the
destruction of the port. It is not known what
happened to that ill-advised marksman, but
from that time the sand appeared that has since
choked the harbour and created the fatal ridge
that has ended many a ship — the dreaded " Doom
Bar." There can certainly have been no sand in
the estuary when Padstow, over yonder, was
built, or it would not have been built in that
situation. Nor were there such mighty drifts
and hills of sand as we see at St. Enodoc, for
in that case it is quite certain that neither St.
Enodoc' s sixth-century oratory that lies buried
somewhere under Brea Hill, nor the closely
neighbouring early fifteenth- century church would
have been established here. The devastating
sand is, in fact, said to have first appeared about
1485. St. Enodoc's is a really satisfying sand-
buried church. Very few are. We come, en
thusiastic, to most of them to find merely the
ruins of an architectural something, that might
to all appearance have been an inferior cowshed,
and find that enthusiasm difficult to sustain ;
but here is a real Perpendicular building, complete,
with a roof on it and a crooked stone spire ;
with plentiful evidences of having once been
buried up to the roof in blown sand and having
been dug out again. This exhumation and sub
sequent restoration took place about the middle
of the nineteenth century, when the sand was
trenched immediately away from the walls, and

132 THE CORNISH COAST
the rough stone churchyard wall banked up and
planted with tamarisk, to protect it in future
from the sand. It is said that, before these
doings, the incumbent used to make his way
through the roof. Zeal, you say ? Ah ! no,
my friends, he was anxious for his tithes, which,
in the event of no services being held, would
have been endangered.
The living is held With that of St. Minver,
and services take place only on alternate Sundays.
They might very well be discontinued altogether,
for the place is a wilderness ; but perhaps now
that golf-links have been established adjoining,
a mission for the conversion of golfers who play
on Sunday would not be without its spiritual
advantages in recovering souls in process of
being lost.
The direct way to Padstow is by ferry from
Rock, one mile along the sandhills. A hotel
has been established by the waterside at Rock,
chiefly for golfers. Near at hand are the hamlets
of Porthilly and Stoptide, with the church of
St. Michael, discovered buried in the sands about
1867, and then restored. Maps show a hamlet
called Pity Me, a little way inland, and the odd
name leads many there, to see what manner of
place it may be, but it offers no rewards in beauty
or interest for the exertion.
It is a good six miles from Porthilly up by
the Camel estuary to Wadebridge, and the roads
lead for long distances away from the waterside,
touching the oozy head of a creek here and there,

WADEBRIDGE 133
and finally going uphill and swerving sharply
round to the right for YYadebridge town. Here
a fine bridge of seventeen arches spans the Camel,
or the sands and mud that most often display
themselves and are not covered until high water
is reached. The first half of the place-name
comes from the " wath," or ford, that existed
here before the bridge was built in 1485. Thomas
Loveybound, vicar of Egloshayle, it was who
brought the bridge into existence, but it was
only after many failures that firm foundations
were made for the piers. Legends of the kind
common to the building of many other bridges
tell us that the foundations were at last laid
upon woolsacks. It is a highly imaginative and
perhaps somewhat poetic way of putting the real
facts, that the funds for building the bridge came
from taxes levied chiefly upon wool.
Not quite a mile above Wadebridge stands
Egloshayle — i.e. the "church by the river," the
parish of that busy worker, Loveybound. He
rebuilt the tower, whose doorway still bears his
device, three hearts joined by a ribbon, inscribed
" Loveybound." The scenery along the Camel is of that sweet
and tender beauty we associate rather with the
Thames than Cornwall. It does not seem a land
of legends ; yet for all this, and although the road
to Egloshayle is lined with the most matter-of-
fact villas, it is a haunted road ; haunted by a
spectral white rabbit. No one wants to see that
rabbit, for the sight of it, brings ill-luck, and I do

134 THE CORNISH COAST
not know any one who has seen it ; but a tale of
dread is told of one sceptical youth, who expressed
a very great desire to do so, declaring he would
shoot it on sight. He waited for this purpose
with a gun one night, under the churchyard wall,
and was found there next morning dead, shot
through the brain.
From Wadebridge to Padstow the railway runs
by the water, but the road goes far inland through
St. Breock. The village is small, the church,
dedicated to St. Breaca, after whom the church
of Breage, near Penzance, is named, lying in a
deep moist valley. Among the old slate slabs in
the church is one inscribed, " Here lieth buried
John Tregeagle, of Trevorder, Esq., 1679." This
is the famous Tregeagle of the legends that repre
sent him to have been a dishonest steward of
Lord Robartes, and to be doomed to impossible
tasks, such as the emptying of Dozmare Pool
with a limpet-shell with a hole in it, and making
ropes of sand. In his despair, and chased by the
Devil's hell-hounds, he is represented in those wild
stories to howl at night over the moors and waste
places of the Duchy.
The road rises beyond St. Breock, and, passing
St. Issey, comes down to Little Petherick — i.e.
" Little St. Petroc."
There has been a great deal of High-Churchism
at Little Petherick of late years, since the advent
here of Mr. Athelstan Riley, insulting contro
versialist, fugleman of the extremists in that sort,
one who can find no better phrase to describe a

LITTLE PETHERICK 135
person of a different way of thinking than " no
torious Protestant agitator," and reprover and
instructor of those bishops who are not of a
sufficiently High school to please the ways of him
self and his friends. The ultra High Church ways
in vogue at Little Petherick find no support in
the village. One Sunday morning, beside a spring
on the quay which the High Church party pretend
to be a holy well, I talked a full hour by the
clock with an intelligent village carpenter, who
spoke at length on these things. He pointed out
the house built just above by Athelstan Riley for
some precious Brotherhood or Sisterhood, bearing
"A. R." on one of its gables, and told how the
village sardonically interpreted those letters to
mean " At Rome." He spoke of the mummeries
that generally accompany a visit of the Bishop of
Truro to the place, with banners and vestments
and the sprinkling of holy water in the road ;
of the re-restoration of the church, and of the fate
that nearly befel an old and valued edition of
Foxe's " Book of Martyrs," dated 1684, pre
sented to the church by a late vicar, the Rev.
Sir Hugh Molesworth, Bart. It seems that those
volumes were discovered thrust aside, under a
heap of builder's refuse, and were retrieved only
to be placed in an obscure position in a dark
corner, instead of in the prominent place they
formerly occupied.
The " quay " of Little Petherick is rather more
of a rustic river-bank than a qua}. The "holy
well" is a very excellent spring, that sprouts from

136 THE CORNISH COAST
the hillside and falls into a stone tank from the
mouth of a grotesque head, sculptured some few
years ago in an archaic style, which almost
deceives the stranger that he has happened
upon something really of Norman antiquity. It
has just that appearance of mingled devilishness
and idiotcy which is characteristic of most
attempts of the period at representing the human
countenance. From Little Petherick, a hilly, hard-featured
high road leads steeply up, and then as steeply
down, in two miles, into Padstow.
Padstow owes its name to St. Petroc, styled
by Fuller, "captain of the Cornish saints."
Petroc, Pedrog, Petrock, or Petrox, flourished about
the middle of the sixth century, and was of royal
Welsh birth. Renouncing such pomps and vani
ties as may have existed at that time, he retired
to an Irish monastery and studied for twenty
years ; and is then said to have decided on a
pilgrimage to Rome. His first stage was to this
spot, then known as Lodenic, or Lassenac. He
voyaged to Rome, and thence to Jerusalem and
India, in a silver bowl, which called for him at
intervals. On some unnamed island he existed
for seven years on a miraculous fish, which,
although eaten daily, came to life again. The
silver bowl finally brought him back here to the
estuary of the Camel, where he found the robe he
had left behind him still waiting on the shore,
guarded by a wolf. It does not increase respect
for the clergy to see these emblems of such pic-

PADSTOW 137
turesque lies adopted and worked into a banner
displayed in the church.
Petroc finally retired inland, for fear of pirates.
It does not seem a saintly act. St. Decuman did
better. He allowed the heathen to decapitate
him, and then washed his head and put it on again,
in a matter-of-fact way, as though it had been
a hat. Petroc went as far inland as he could,
and founded a monastery at what is now Bodmin,
i.e. " Bod-mynach," the " town of the monks."
There he died a.d. 564.
Padstow is a small place, but, insignificant
though it be, the difficulty of finding one's way
about its crooked alleys is extraordinary. There
are quays and courts and thoroughfares of various
kinds, but nowhere any that can reasonably be
called a street. The place has a past, not a great
past, but one sufficient to have entitled it to the
dignity of municipal incorporation in 1583 ; but
it has long declined from that condition. Curious
visitors come to Padstow, potter about its fishy
purlieus, and wonder at the antiquity of its
shops and the goods they stock, and say : " How
delightfully old-world ! " and then they go and
stay somewhere else, just outside it.
The church of St. Petroc is approached either
by alleys or from the road that leads up out of
the town. Its tower is plain to severity, and
although there are brasses and monuments of the
Prideaux family within, the most interesting
object it contains is the very fine font, typically
Cornish, with its four pillars supporting the angles
18

138 THE CORNISH COAST
of the bowl, of Catacleuse stone, sculptured with
effigies of the apostles. The mansion of Place,
with its deer park, anciently the seat of the
Prideaux family, now of the Prideaux -Brunes,
adjoins the church, on the west. It contains a
long series of paintings by Opie, who was com
missioned by the Prideaux of that day to picture
the family, the servants, and even the domestic
cats and dogs. A prominent feature is a fine
staircase brought from Stowe.
For the rest, there is little to say of Padstow,
except that the bathing-cove bears the mysterious
and totally unexplained name of " Ship my
Pumps," and that a rough May Day carnival is
annually celebrated in which Hobby Horses figure,
to the barbaric notes of accordion and drum.
Padstow is not an end in itself, lying as it
does two miles within the winding estuary of the
Camel, choked at low water with sand. Even
the people of Padstow, when they want to make
holiday by the sea, have to take a journey of two
miles. They generally go to Trevone, a delightful
sandy bay almost due west. If we imagine a
triangle, with Padstow and Trevone at its base, and
Stepper Point as its apex, it will be seen at once
that the apex is likely to be a little-visited place,
being on the road to nowhere. It is, perhaps, by
so much the better. The way to it lies up from
the North Quay and thence across fields and
down to the intermediate point of Harbour Cove,
where there are cottages and boats. Unques
tionably the best way to view the grand cliff-

PADSTOW 139
scenery of four miles from hence to Trevone,
past Stepper Point, is to take a boat.
At Hawker's Cove, opening out of Harbour
Cove, is the Lifeboat House, with two boats,
one under steam. The first steam lifeboat here
was wrecked on the Doom Bar, and all lives lost,
when going out to save a vessel in distress.
Passing close under Stepper Point, crowned
with a day-mark for the entrance to the channel,
the cliffs grow grandly rugged, with great lowering
rocky eaves and yawning caverns ; the long,
rolling ground-swell, even on those calm days of
boating-excursions, swashing with a terrible in
evitable and irresistible might into them. Streaks
and bands of colour here and there variegate the
rocks. Here is " Pepper Hole," there " Butter
Hole," and, further on, Seal Hole. Seals are fairly
numerous here and at other points down the
coast, and at Scilly. The mingled wistful and
trusting expression of a seal's face, something
between that of a Newfoundland dog and a
human being, almost makes my heart ache, I
know not why. Sportsmen of sorts seek them at
low water in the caves, with lighted torches,
and slay them. They are confounded by the
light, and fall an easy prey.
Gunver Head, the highest point, is identified
by its flag-staff. Out to sea is the rocky islet of
GuUand. Inshore is a pillar of rock called " Queen
Elizabeth," not the Queen Elizabeth of Bedruthan.
The reefs, where the seas foam and surge, are the
Meropes, followed by " Permizen Bridge," a rock

140 THE CORNISH COAST
promontory almost islanded. Behind it is Per
mizen Hole, or Tregudda Gorge, where splintered
and shivered rocks stand like the remnants of
some blown-up castle. Here and there the slate
rocks give place to white and tinted limestone.
Landing at Trevone Bay, the coast walk may
readily be continued through Harlvn Bay. The
name of Harlyn Bay derives from " Ar-lyn,"
i.e. " By the lake," the lake in question being the
almost lake-like bay. The local pronunciation
still, while adding an H, keeps the ancient two-
syllabic form, with an emphasis on " lyn." The
bay is of the pretty, rather than the romantic,
order ; but extremely pretty, with fine yellow
sands — one of those places which a builder with
a speculative eye would declare to have a future.
That future, I think, is nearly with us, for certain
villas, an advance-guard, are sporadically evident.
Picnic parties like Harlyn Bay. The}" drop the
H of it all over the place, quite unconsciously
giving it its proper name, and leave halfpenny
daily papers and desolating penny weeklies about.
In fact, Harlyn has always been a popular place,
and once populous too ; for as well as that Future
it has had a Past. A Place with a Past : that
describes Harlyn ; and to see that past vou have
only to turn aside on coming down the road, into
the grounds of a new restaurant building, over
whose stucco and red tiles is so unmistakably
written Present.
Long years ago, in 1886, some one opened a
prehistoric mound near here, and found two

HARLYN 141
lunettes of gold. They were claimed as treasure-
trove by the Prince of Wales, as Duke of
Cornwall, and are now in the museum at Truro.
And then in 1900 came the discovery of a
prehistoric graveyard. It was found quite by
accident, in digging the foundations for this
house, being heralded by the spade striking
against what archaeologists delight, in their archaeo
logical way, in calling a " kist " — that is, you
know, a chest, of slate, sunk in the sand. It con
tained the skeleton of a man of the neolithic
period, with his neolithic implements beside him.
He lay fifteen feet deep. Further excavations,
in which some two thousand tons of sand were
removed, revealed over one hundred interments,
in places four deep, and ranging apparently down
to the bronze age. It is supposed that centuries
intervened between the first and last of these,
and that the blowing sands gradually accumulated.
Here is a museum of relics, and some skeletons of
those prehistoric dwellers in Harlyn Bay, brought
to an unexpected secular resurrection, but I have
not seen them, holding it equally indecent to dis
turb the dead of prehistoric times or of yesterday.
It is two miles from hence to Trevose Head,
the most prominent headland on the north coast
of Cornwall : a long featureless tramp, enlivened
now and again by glimpses of blue sea. The
headland, when you do at last reach it, through
gates and past a farm and another gate, is worth
the trouble, commanding from its great pro
jection into the channel, and its height of 243 feet,

142 THE CORNISH COAST
some fine views. It is remarkable for having
two lighthouses, one above the other, and for the
magnificent seas that foam round it. A mile
out at sea the waters boil like a pot around the
reef marked on Ordnance maps " Quies," a reef that
has doubtless given many a stout ship its quietus.
The long, empty sweep of Constantine Bay,
blown almost featureless by sand, is well dis
played from Trevose ; and maps mark "St.
Constantine's Church " in a solitude, over half
a mile from the shore. As in the case of other
ruined ancient oratories, this is extremely difficult
to find. Entirely by good fortune, I found my
way to a lonely old farmhouse, which appears to
have been Harlyn manor-house, and there got a
glass of milk and boy for guide. The guide, it
was astonishing to discover, had the unmis
takable London accent, " Yuss," and " Nah,"
and all the rest of it. He was, it appeared, a Jew
boy, planted out in the country from Bethnal
Green, to learn farming.
The name of Constantine conjures up visions
of Imperial Rome, but the saint has no connection
with the Emperor. Emperors and saints, indeed,
commonly travel different roads to fame. The
especial mingled shame and final glory of Con
stantine the Saint is that he travelled both.
No titular emperor he, but at any rate he was
a king of autocratic, cruel, and bloodthirsty ways.
He seems to have been a Cornishman, who had
acquired some veneer of Roman tastes and some
deeper-lying Roman vices ; and he ruled part

CONSTANTINE 143
of Cornwall and murdered his relatives, and lived
a riotous and besotted life — a kind of duodecimo
Nero — -until Petroc converted him. All this was
about a.d. 550.
A changed man, Constantine resigned his king
dom — no one invited him to stay — and sailed for
Ireland, where he became a monk. He thence
went to Scotland and suffered martyrdom on the
Isle of Cantyre.
There is very little left of the church dedicated
to him, but information is wanting as to the
period of its destruction. The site is in a scrubby
heath, sandy here and there, and grown with
rough grass and brambles. A small portion only
of the west end remains, and traces of founda
tions, by which it seems that the building was
sixty-four feet in length and thirty broad. The
fine font of St. Merryn's church, a mile inland,
of the same type as that in Padstow church, but
a better-proportioned example, is said to have
come from this demolished building.
Constantine Bay ends at Treyarnon Beach, a
pleasant sandy cove. Thence the cliffs lead to
Pepper Cove and Fox Cove, and to Porthcothan,
where there are a few recent houses, and a fine
sandy bay, overlooked by a large old " carpenter-
gothic " dark stone house, which looks like a
mansion built by some misanthrope. It is a
remote district, and grows even more solitary
on to Porthmear Cove and Park Head. The
cliffs here fall for the most part sheer to the water,
and come to their grandest at Bedruthan Steps.

CHAPTER VIII
QUEEN BESS ROCK, BEDRUTHAN STEPS — MAWGAN
PORTH — MAWGAN AND THE VALE OF LAN-
HERNE — PORTH — NEWQUAY — • ST. COLUMB
MINOR — ST. COLUMB MAJOR.
Many years ago, in those times when the Great
Western Railway, in common with others, did
not illustrate the scenery within its territory
so lavishly as now, it exhibited in its waiting-
rooms a few wood-engravings showing the finest
scenes on the Cornish coast. I forget the most
of them, but that of the " Queen Bess Rock,
near Padstow," remains vivid enough. One al
ways longed for the opportunit}' to come of seeing
that monstrous pile, whose scale was so artfully
exaggerated, with the surf and flying spume
wildly blown through the sky, and the seagulls
beaten back from an ineffectual battle with the
gale. One did not at first know or suspect any
thing of that exaggeration, but as time rolled on
and experience gathered, one expected something
of the sort, deducing it from an almost universal
practice. Imagine, then, when at last, after half
a lifetime, the writer, having long known almost all
the Cornish coast except Newquay and Bedruthan,
144

QUEEN BESS ROCK 145
found himself approaching the place, how eagerly
he looked forward to finding the famous rock.
It was a little discomposing at first to find that
a good many people within ten miles of it did not
know of the " Queen Bess Rock," and it was more
than a little exasperating to find again that common
experience in Cornwall, the utter lack of sign
posts in a lonely district, sending one off in wrong
directions, quite off the coast. At last, how
ever, the road came to a place where a field-gate
stretched across. Here a weather-beaten signpost
spelled out the words " Bedruthan Steps," in
broken-backed fashion.
To the right, through this gate, over a rough
pasture, lies the way to the spot ; which, of
course, does not in the least resemble any pre
conceived idea formed of it. Instead of coming
gradually down to the sea by the shores of some
little combe, the explorer finds himself ad
vancing to an abrupt cliff's edge, where the rocks
fall away suddenly and precipitously some four
hundred feet, their base descending at high tide
sheer into the water. It is a savagely grand
scene of a comprehensive panoramic kind. One
looks down upon gloomy chasms, and, along back
to the east, upon a series of headlands, large and
small, terminated by Park Head. It is difficult
at first to get the real huge scale of the place,
owing to the plunging, fore-shortened view, and
there is no recognisable " Queen Bess Rock "
anywhere to be seen, unless indeed an appa
rently insignificant pyramidal pile on the right,
r9

146 THE CORNISH COAST
standing in the water, surrounded by immensely
larger rocks, be she. And it is. The disappoint
ment, if it be high tide, is keen, but the case is
magically altered at the ebb, for then, greatly
to the astonishment of the inexpert, the appa
rently profound sea at the base of the cliffs has
receded a considerable distance, and revealed
the loveliest stretches of gleaming sands on which
the many stupendous masses of slaty rock, that in
bygone ages have fallen from the cliffs, are set,
like currants in a bun.
Rude flights of steps, cut in the profile of the
cliffs, and fortified here and there by a crazy iron
or timber hand-rail, lead down to the shore ;
a deeper descent than one would expect. The
steps, some 123 in number, are ancient beyond
knowledge, and have given a name to the place.
An uncertain tradition says they were cut by
miners, but no trace of mining operations is to
be found here. They were doubtless made origin
ally by the country-folk, for convenience in
reaching wrecks of the sea, always plentiful here.
Horrid tales are told of the fearful old days,
when the Cornish were not merely content with
the wrecks that winds and waves brought them,
but deliberately and cruelly brought about wrecks,
by the expedient of luring vessels ashore by false
lights representing other ships riding at sea.
There is not the least need to disbelieve those
stories, and to point out the kindly nature of the
Cornish. They were not always so : we know
that. Wesley and effluxion of time have done

BEDRUTHAN STEPS 147
much ; and there is not the least possible doubt
but that, if a Cornishman of to-day could be
confronted with an ancestor of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, when wrecking flourished,
he would be eager to disown him.
The method of bringing a vessel upon the rocks
at night was simplicity itself. You just pro
cured a cow, a donkey, or a horse, and hobbled it,
and then hung a lighted lantern round its neck.
No further trouble was necessary. You left the
animal to wander about the cliff-tops, producing
an effect, when viewed from sea, of a vessel
wallowing in the waves, and that same night,
if you had any luck at all, there was your wreck,
on the rocks below. If by chance any survived,
you just knocked them on the head, and then
all the wrecked ship and its cargo were your very
own. No interfering coastguards in those days.
Of course, as time progressed, wrecks were
merely sent by Providence, and not manufactured.
Those were the times when the parson (I wish
I knew his parish) simply prayed that, if there
was to be a wreck, it might be on his parishioners'
shore. " Lord ! " he implored, "we do not pray
for wrecks, but since there must be some, grant,
we beseech thee, that they may be on our beach ! "
The Cornish very slowly, and with the utmost
reluctance, relinquished their ideas that the con
tents of wrecked ships were their legitimate spoil ;
and they eventually did so, not from the conviction
that is sometimes called persuasion, but from the
criminal convictions, that overtook some of them

148 THE CORNISH COAST
found engaged in this kind of plunder. Thus,
when the Samaritan brigantine, from Liverpool
for Constantinople, went ashore in a gale on the
night of October 29th, 1846, at Bedruthan Steps,
and when five of the crew of seven were drowned,
the whole countryside turned out to carry off the
cargo, which, with the vessel, was valued at
£10,000. The sequel to this was enacted at
Bodmin, on Nov. 20th, when over twenty per
sons were committed to Bodmin Gaol, three of
them being sentenced to five months' hard labour
each. Bedruthan Steps is a favourite spot for ex
cursions from Newquay, and a cottage or two
may be seen standing a field or so distant from
the edge of the cliffs, where refreshment and
accommodation of a primitive kind may be ob
tained for man and beast. Excursionists and the
drivers of public vehicles generally time them
selves to arrive at low water, and for some hours
the caves and the sands down below are enlivened
with sightseers. Then, indeed, " Queen Bess "
does not disappoint. A walk along the sands
brings one to her, and it is seen what a vast
difference there is between the view from away
above and that at the very foot of this singularly
imitative rock. We are all familiar with the many
more or less (generally less than more) recognis
able rock-faces discovered and eloquently written
about, and we wonder at the little resemblance
they usually bear to anything human ; but here
in Cornwall we have already seen the very

BEDRUTHAN STEPS

149

remarkable resemblance to Queen Victoria at
Boscastle, and singularly enough, the coast at
Bedruthan Steps has an even closer likeness to
Queen Elizabeth. This is undoubtedly the finest
imitative rock in England, and needs no artful
aid of illustrator or photographer in emphasising
the portrait. It stands at low water quite easily
accessible on the sands, and may be from ninety

QUEEN ELIZABETH ROCK.
to one hundred feet in height. It is only when
viewed from the shore, looking out to sea, that it
resembles the great Queen ; from other points
it is merely a shapeless mass. But the stranger
coming to the rock has not to seek the likeness ;
he comes naturally to it, and finds it at once.
He sees her, crowned, quite in character with
her portraits, and with a generous ruff and spread
ing skirts ; a very noble and majestic presentment.
Her skirts are lavishly trimmed with mussels,

150 THE CORNISH COAST
and kittiwakes settle, screaming, on her crown,
looking inquisitively at those who pace the sands.
In the fact that only from one point of view is
she queenly and majestic, antagonistic Roman
Catholics may find a parable to suit their views
of Gloriana. There are dangers at Bedruthan : dangers in
bathing, and others in lingering too long when
the tide has begun to flow. These are sadly illus
trated by a tablet near the cliff's top,
" In Memory of Alex. C. Laurie, of Derby, who
was drowned in this bay, Aug. 12, 1903. This
tablet is placed here by his friends (whose hves
were mercifully spared), as a warning to visitors
of the danger of bathing from these sands."
The road from Bedruthan to Mawgan Porth
leaves much to be desired, alike in the matter of
gradients, of surface, and of gates. Also it winds
freely, and there are gates — seven of them, I think,
on the way to the bare hamlet of Trenance, which
looks from the windy shoulder of a down upon
Mawgan Porth. And as if these were not suffi
cient, there are three more between Mawgan
Porth and Mawgan, and two others between
Mawgan and Newquay.
From the little sandy inlet of Mawgan Porth,
lonely except for its coastguard station, a road
leads straight inland to Mawgan, in the Vale of
Lanherne, otherwise Mawgan-in-Pydar.
There are two Mawgans in Cornwall. The
other is Mawgan-in-Meneage, i.e. Mawgan in the
Stony District, near the Lizard. The meaning of

VALE OF LANHERNE

151

Mawgan-in-Pydar is explained by Carew, writing
in the seventeenth century, as follows : — " Pider
in Cornish is four in English, and this is the fourth
hundred of Cornwall, if you begin your reckoning
from the western point at Penwith."
It is close upon two miles to Mawgan. The
Vale of Lanherne is justly famed for its soft
woodland beauty, a complete contrast with that
of the rugged coast, where few trees can exist ;
and amid the tall elms stands one of the finest

MAWGAN PORTH.

churches in Cornwall, possessing an extremely
graceful tower. All is stately and quiet here, as
well as beautiful. A brook runs past the church,
the comfortable " Falcon " inn stands opposite,
with the motto of the Willyams family of Car
nanton, " Meor ras tha Dew " — in the Cornish,
language, "Many thanks to God" — on it, and
Carnanton woods, with the Carnanton mansion
hidden away in them, extend up the hill. Let
us for once in a way thank Providence for a
landlord ; for the family of Carnanton who have

152 THE CORNISH COAST
kept this lovely seclusion unspoiled, and have not
permitted the flaunting bungalow, the keepers
of refreshment booths, or livers of the simple life
under corrugated galvanised iron, to settle here
in the Vale of of Lanherne, or at Mawgan Porth.
The only blot in the place is the Roman Catholic
convent of Lanherne, of whose " misanthropic
shade " some one aptlv writes. The nuns of that
Carmelite establishment occupy the ancient man
sion of the Arundells of Trerice and of Wardour,
given to them in the opening years of the nine
teenth century, when their Order was driven out
of Antwerp by the French.
A fifteenth-century sculptured lantern cross
stands in the churchyard, but although fine,
is distinctly inferior in interest to the ninth-
century cross inscribed " Runol," and sculptured
with interlaced patterns and a crucified effigy,
standing in the nuns' cemetery. It does- not
properly belong here, and was brought from
Rosworthy Farm, Gwinear.
Many brasses of the Arundell family remain
in Mawgan church, with life-belts and life-buoy
from the schooner Hodbarrow Miner, wrecked at
Mawgan Porth, March Sth, 190S, when four
among the crew of five were drowned. In the
churchyard still remains the stern of a boat,
that drifted ashore at Beacon Cove in the winter
of 1846, with ten men in it, frozen to death.
Their names are painted on the wood : it elo
quently forms their memorial.
The inland road to Newquay is a dreary

C

THE VALE OF LANHERNE.

NEWQUAY 155
business : the better way is to return to Mawgan
Porth, and climbing the steep road past the
coastguard station, follow the cliffs past Watergate
Bay, past the Watergate Hotel, and so down
into Porth.
Porth — its old name was St. Columb Porth —
is magnificent. If I were a scene-painter, and
wanted a model for a romantic seashore, I would
take Porth for inspiration. The rocks are of
shapes that exude romance, and the sea comes
creeping in or goes sliding out across the shallow
sands with a singular air of secretiveness that
is very impressive. Relics sometimes disclosed
of a submarine forest, and barrows that stud
the cliffs on the way to Newquay, add definitely
to the eerie quality of the place, and there is a
blowhole in the islanded rock of Porth Island
or Trevelgue Head that spouts and sprays and
bellows. And yet modern and quite up-to-date
Newquay is only a mile away, and quite visibly
growing, growing, eating up the country and
spreading an atmosphere of hotels, motor-cars
(rather pungent, the motor-car atmosphere), and
boarding-houses over old immemorial things and
ways. Newquay really is new, new that is to say
according to British ideas. To an American it
would be of a respectable antiquity. The " new
quay," whence the place-name derives, was built
some time later than 1615, when a certain Thomas
Stuer sought to construct a pier at what was
then known as Towan Blistra, for the protection

156 THE CORNISH COAST
of shipping. The site was then an almost solitary
headland, with numerous caverns, which in the
great days of smuggling — a hundred to two
hundred years later — were found very useful to
the " free-traders." The nearest place was St.
Columb Minor, two miles away, nearer Porth.
It is still the mother-church of the present town
of Newquay. The growth of Newquay was slow. A fisher
village was in existence early in the nineteenth
century, and there were in 1840 a few primitive -
villas, but the discovery of the bracing air and
the fine sands of Newquay dates from about
1850. Those were the times of a small and select
Newquay, select because the difficulties of reaching
it were considerable ; and therefore the real
beginnings of what we see to-day are found in the
opening of the railway in 1875. Newquay is,
in short, a creation of the Great Western Railway,
which has a monopoly of the traffic. Since that
momentous time, the town has increased by
leaps and bounds, and now fringes the shores of
Newquay Bay for upwards of a mile : a straggling,
loose-jointed street of shops, residences, cottages,
boarding-houses, and huge modern hotels. That
is just the trouble with Newquay ; that it fringes
the shores and hides the sea, and that enormous
barrack-hotels have been built upon all the
view-points and the wild, breezy promontory of
Towan Head.
Thefirst impression of Newquay isone of dismay,
but acquaintance modifies the disappointment,

NEWQUAY 159
although one never really becomes reconciled to
reaching the delightful sands through narrow
alleys of printing-offices and other domestic
arrangements of local trade. The peculiar feature
of the shore at Newquay is its division into a
succession of sandy coves, compartmented and
shut off from one another by perpendicular
cliffs of between fifty and eighty feet high. They
run regularly from Porth to Newquay harbour,
and are named Lusty Glaze Beach, Crigga Rocks,
Tolcarne Beach, Great Western Beach, and Town
Beach. Newquay, it may be guessed from the fore
going remarks, is essentially a place for those
who like to take their holidays and their scenery
well qualified by hotels and luxuries. Could
Dr. Johnson return, one pictures him delighted
with it, and he would probably revise his opinion
that nothing was so delightful as a drive in a
post-chaise with a pretty woman by declaring
for a motor-car.
For those who care little for such modified
scenery, Newquay is merely a convenient place
whence to explore the surrounding country.
There is, for example, St. Columb Minor to be
visited : a village with an ancient church and
until quite recently an ancient parish clerk,
James Carne, who died in his 104th year on
October 7th, 1909. The monuments in the church
include singular examples to " Elizabeth, daughter
of Richard Pollamounter," 1640, like a jump-to-
Glory-Jane, and to a weird-looking personage

i6o

THE CORNISH COAST

whose initials the resourceful sculptor has placed
on his baggy breeches.
Three miles further inland lies the greater
St. Columb — the little town of St. Columb Major,

MONUMENT AT ST. COLUMB MINOR.
with a grand church and a moated rectory. The
living is, like the fabric of the church, magnificent,
and is said to be the richest in Cornwall. A
former rector, who appears also to have been
the patron, and who had presented himself to
the living, probably on the proverbial principle

ST. COLUMB MAJOR 161
that " charity begins at home," offered, it is
said, to give the income of the rectorate, if his
church were made the cathedral of the revived
Cornish bishopric, proposed a good many years
before Truro was selected in 1877. He incidentally
proposed to become the first Bishop of that
see ; so the offer was not altogether made from
the point of view of local patriotism ; and it
was accordingly refused. The living of St. Columb
Major appears to be worth £703 per annum.
There are brasses of the Arundell family in
St. Columb Major church, and memorials of the
Bonythons of Bonython, the ancestral seat of
their race, near Mullion, in the Lizard district.
Here may be found the baptismal register of
Richard, second son of John Bonython, baptized
April 3rd, 1580 : that notable Captain Richard
Bonython who settled in America, and in 1630
established himself in New Somersetshire (now
the State of Maine) upon an extensive grant of
land. Thus early did the Cornish begin to
distribute themselves into the remote corners
of the earth. I am, moreover, reminded from
far-off Adelaide, South Australia, by Sir Langdon
Bonython, who beneath the Southern Cross still
cherishes the old lore and history of Cornwall,
that a still more extended fame belongs to Captain
Richard Bonython, who, through the marriage
of his third daughter, became an ancestor of the
poet Longfellow.
The St. Columb of the place-name and the
church dedication is uncertain. The better-known 21

162 THE CORNISH COAST
Columba, Abbot of lona, is probably the patron-
saint of the place. Camden considered the
dedication to be to a woman martyr-saint ;
and it might possibly be to the St. Columban
after whom Culbone, on the Somerset coast, is
named. The windy heights of St. Columb, neighboured
by the hills of Castell-an-Dinas and Belouda
Beacon (nowadays corrupted into " Belovely "),
give upon the wild and lonely expanse of Tregoss
Moors, through whose midst runs the exposed
old Bodmin, Truro, and Falmouth coach-road.
St. Columb Major is thus, as it were, an outpost
of cultivation and civilisation in a district where
prehistoric man lived a draughty existence. On
the lofty hill of Castell-an-Dinas, 729 feet high,
tradition says King Arthur had his hunting-seat.
To have hunted here, and inhabited there, and
fought in so many other places traditionally
associated with him, King Arthur must have
been endowed with capacities for superhuman
exertions : a Super-man indeed !
Even in the little town of St. Columb Major
itself you perceive grey antiquity, not at all
affected by the activities of five or six miles away,
at Newquay, which have produced already at
St. Columb Minor an unlovely suburban street
or so.

CHAPTER IX
CRANTOCK — WEST PENTIRE — CUBERT — THE
LEGEND OF LANGARROW — ELLENGLAZE — ST.
PIRAN'S SANDS — PERRANPORTH — ST. PIRAN'S
ORATORY.
Newquay, spreading on all sides, has at last
sent some offshoot streets exploring across the
inland end of the ridge that ends the forked
headlands of Towan Head and East Pentire
Point ; and now begins even to contemplate
the lonely Gannel. The Gannel is a saltwater
estuary (gan-hael, " mouth of the creek or river ")
which runs nearly two miles inland between
East and West Pentire Points, and looks at
high tide a very profound and formidable place,
becoming at low water a mere waste of sand,
through whose midst runs the thin thread of a
small stream. The direct way to Crantock and
the coast across this channel is from Trethellan
to Penpoll, a plank bridge spanning the stream
at low water and allowing foot passage across the
sands. At any state of the tide above low water,
the plank is submerged and the crossing can be
made only by boat. Such are the primitive ways
still remaining even outside Newquay. Vehicular
165

i66

THE CORNISH COAST

traffic generally goes a circuitous inland route
to Crantock. The crossing of the Gannel and the arriving
at Crantock by way of Penpoll is an easy enough
matter for those who know, but the stranger
almost invariably is misled by the far outward
trend of the coastline, and trudges wearily through
yielding sands until it is at last quite evident
that he has come far out of his way. And then,

CRANTOCK CHURCH.

because no one who can help himself ever goes
back, he scales cliffs clothed with blackberry
brambles and at last, trudging over ragged
fields, comes weary into Crantock, which is really,
when approached the right way, well within reach
of the least energetic visitor to Newquay, and
thus, with the growth of that amazing place
becomes more and more a frequented spot.
Two or three fantastic houses have sprung
up here, looking across to the church, which

CRANTOCK 167
stands on a rough, scrubby knoll like a common,
laagered behind a rude masonry wall fringed with
grasses and tamarisk. Anciently the place was
known as Tregunnel, from the channel we have
just crossed, and is said to have been formerly
a considerable port, and the Gannel its harbour.
St. Crantock, the patron of its church, was an
Irish fifth-century missionary, who floated across
the sea on a raft, with his altar leading the way.
The Irish call him Saint Cairnech, and there is a
church dedicated to him at Llangrannog, in
Cardigan Bay. A great deal of obscure early
church history belongs to this now insignificant
place, and the church was the centre of a collegiate
establishment, from Saxon times to those of
Henry the Eighth. It was until 1899 in a
neglected condition, the roofs rotting away and
the walls almost ruinous. In that year an
elaborate restoration was begun under the direction
of Edmund Sedding, and the church re-opened
in 1902. The average net income of the vicar
is £30, gross £63 ; and the spiritual needs of so
small a place neither warrant a large income nor
the extraordinary efforts that have been made
for a costly restoration. A heavy, carved rood-
screen has been installed, elaborate stained-glass
windows inserted, telling the story of St. Crantock,
and many evidences of advanced ritualistic ten
dencies are to be seen. I have never in any
other church seen so many and such piteous
appeals for help, couched in such terms of abase
ment, although it is quite evident, from a mere

168 THE CORNISH COAST
glance, that much more has already been expended
than would have sufficed most other churches.
It is a dim interior, sufficiently typifying the
Ritualistic mind ; and women are found kneeling
and genuflecting in corners, passing the afternoons

FONT, CRANTOCK.

in that way, out of the reach of God's sunshine,
and examining their own paltry twopenny-half
penny souls and imagining that to be religion.
That kind of soul is not worth the saving. Believe
me, work, and a care rather for the souls and
bodies of others, is a better way to salvation

WEST PENTIRE 169
than bowing before images in a church, day by
day. There are fragments of Norman architecture
here, but for the most part the building is Early
English and Decorated. The font is something
of a puzzle. It is obviously Norman, or of
Norman design, but the bowl is inscribed with
the date 1474, which may mark repairs effected
at that time, after the fall of the tower. There
is much of the local sandstone in the building.
There are remotenesses beyond Crantock, out
West Pentire way, beyond the silly squalor of form,
rather than of social circumstances, of the hamlet
of that name. West Pentire Head is so finely
remote, the air of it so bracing, the scenery
that God made so beautiful that the hamlet's
misused opportunities and flouts and affronts
upon all that beauty are deplorable.
In between West Pentire Point and Kelsey
Head is Porth Joke, whose name piques curiosity
without imparting information. Doubtless some
Cornish descriptive name is hidden somewhere
in it, for "Joke" must be only a corruption.
Porth Joke is, I read in guide-books, " a good
place for a picnic," and so it is : a charming
little sandy bay, but it is not so much of a picnic
for the pedestrian who has undertaken the business
of foUowing the coast line, and is not content
with just sampling successive coves and proceeding
along the easy roads between them, rather than
following the coastguard paths. He must climb
and scramble who seeks to trace the shore here.
22

170 THE CORNISH COAST
Kelsey Head the weary traveller is apt to take
on trust, and to make as straight as may be
across a furzy, heathery line of country, for
Holywell beach. The spot is in the middle of
Holywell Bay, a wide, lonely, sandy bay enclosed
between the rocky arms of Kelsey Head and
Penhale Point, and the attraction of it is a
certain " Holy Well," formerly of great repute,
and still of astonishing beauty. Just about that
place where the cliffs of Kelsey Head begin to
die away into wastes of sand, the Holy Well
will be found. Its position is marked from the
shore by a cave and some rough steps cut in the
cliffs, leading to where it is situated, half-way
between shore and cliff -top. A spring charged
with mineral qualities pours from the rock into
a natural basin, which in its turn empties into a
rock-channel leading into another basin : the
rocks stained in many tints and overhung with
moss and ferns. The mildly curative qualities
of the water rendered the well " holy " in those
times when superstition still lingered.
It is a very long mile from this place to Treguth
farm, where the road is reached once more ; and
from that point it is another mile on inland to
Cubert. Cubert church is said to be dedicated to St.
Cuthbert, an error by which St. Cuby, Kebi, or
Kea is deprived of his just fame. He flourished
in the sixth century, and was the son of a petty
king in Cornwall, and a Welsh mother. Re
linquishing the succession to his father, he jour-

CUBERT 171
neyed into his mother's country, on a visit to
his cousin, St. David, and thence proceeded to
Arran, in Galway. This interchange of mission
aries and saints between Cornwall, Wales, and
Ireland is amusing, and seems to show that those
various peoples must have had the most con
flicting ideas of the spiritual darkness of each
other's native lands. He met with much annoy
ance and discouragement in Ireland, where at
that time they considered themselves to know
everything necessary to salvation, and looked
upon the Cornish as only fit to be preached at
and made to see the error of their ways. Cuby
therefore departed for North Wales, and sailed
the ocean blue in the uncompleted wicker frame
work of a boat, which was the only vessel his
persecutors would allow him, thinking he would
certainly be drowned. But he landed safely on
what is now Holy Island, Anglesey. The great
headland there is called after him, " Pen Caer
Cybi," or " the Head of Cybi's town " ; for he
founded down below it what is now the seaport
of Holyhead, which still retains in its midst the
old church of St. Cybi.
The church of Cubert shares with that of
St. Hilary, near Marazion and Lostwithiel church,
the rare distinction in Cornwall, of a church
with a spire. Spires are very unusual in the
West, and this of Cubert is, like those others,
of stone. Standing high as the building does,
on Cubert Common, and overlooking the wastes
of shifting sands it forms for long distances, and

172 THE CORNISH COAST
from many points of view, a striking feature,
and it is not difficult to suppose the spire to
have been provided in this instance for the
purpose of serving as a landmark. The church
is Early English and Perpendicular, and is largely
built of a local sandstone, compacted from the
omnipresent sands and the filtration into them
of ferruginous springs. The interior suffers from
a combination of the old-time stupid activities
that covered up the ancient waggon-roofs with
flat ceilings and the modern neglect that has
allowed walls and pillars to grow green with
damp. Placed against the exterior of the tower
is an inscribed stone discovered during some
repairs a few years since. It reads : — ¦
CONECTOCI FILIO TEIERNO. MALI.
or " Conectocus, son of Tejerno. Alas ! '
The outlook from Cubert churchyard towards
the distant sea ranges across the wide desolate
expanse of St. Piran's Sands, rendered a thought
more desolate still by the abandoned mines,
whose engine-houses look down upon the shifting
wilderness. Dark legends tell of remote times,
when these sands that now occupy all the coast
between Ligger Point and Perranporth, and
extend at their broadest point nearly two miles
inland, formed the site of the lost city of Lan-
garrow. They were collected and set forth by
Robert Hunt some forty years ago, in his " Popular
Romances of the West of England " as follows : —
" We cannot say how many years since, but

LANGARROW

173

once there stood on the northern shores of Corn
wall, extending over all that country between
the Gannel and Perranporth, a large city called
Langarrow or Langona. The sand hills, which
now extend over this part of the coast, cover
that great city, and the memory of a sudden
catastrophe still lingers among the peasantry.

<-{ ftARPM^

CUBERT CHURCH.

This city in its prime is said to have been the
largest in England, and to have had seven
churches, remarkable alike for their beauty and
their size. The inhabitants, who were wealthy,
drew their wealth from a large tract of level
land, thickly wooded in some parts and highly
cultivated in others, from the sea which was
overflowing with fish of all kinds, and from

174 THE CORNISH COAST
mines which yielded them abundance of tin and
lead. " To this remote city in those days criminals
were transported from other parts of Britain.
They were made to work in mines on the coast,
in constructing a new harbour in the Gannel
and clearing it of sand, so that ships of large
burden could in those days sail far inland. This
portion of the population of Langarrow were
not allowed to dwell in the city. The convicts
and their families had to construct huts or dig
caves, and to this day evidences of their existence
are to be found under the sand in heaps of wood
ashes, amidst which are discovered considerable
quantities of mussel and cockle shells. Those
fish we may suppose were their principal food.
For long this city flourished in its prime, and
its inhabitants were in the enjoyment of every
luxury which industry could obtain or wealth
purchase. The convicts sent to Langarrow were
of the vilest. They were long kept widely separ
ated ; but use breeds familiarity, and gradually
the more designing of the convicts persuaded
their masters to employ them within the city.
The result of this was after a few years an amal
gamation of the two classes of the population.
The daughters of Langarrow were married to the
criminals, and thus crime became the familiar
spirit of the place, and eventually when vice was
dominant, and the whole population sunk in
sensual pleasures, the anger of the Lord fell
upon them. A storm of unusual violence arose,

ELLENGLAZE 175
and continued blowing, without intermitting its
violence for one moment, for three days and
nights. In that period the hills of blown sand
extending, with few intervals, from Crantock to
Perran were formed, burying the city, its churches,
and its inhabitants in a common grave. To the
present time those sandhills stand a monument
of God's wrath."
Such was anciently the site of St. Piran's
Sands, and whatever the proportion of imaginative
romance in the story, certain it is that the neigh
bourhood of St. Piran's oratory, in the midst
of them, is strewn with the bleached bones of
many thousands of people, who cannot all have
been burried there with the object of resting
in the holy company of the saint. Even a casual,
unobservant visitor will notice some of these
poor relics of humanity, which the shifting sands
are continually covering and uncovering.
The way to St. Piran's oratory is obscure.
One is prepared for considerable difficulty in
finding it, but not for the almost hopeless quest
it really proves to be, amid those labyrinthine
sandy hills and valleys.
The first steps are easy, in spite of the French
proverb, C'est le premier pas qui coute. They are
the after-steps that cost, in these exploratory
matters, anyhow. The beautiful simplicity of
getting by road from Cubert, and thence by a
left-hand fork marked " To Ellenglaze," is a
shocking contrast to that which follows. Idly
considering how pretty that name of Ellenglaze —

176 THE CORNISH COAST
perhaps thinking of Scott's romantic ballads and
" Ellen's Isle," and wondering what sort of
place this will be — you come down a sharp dip
in the road — a road that hitherto has had every
appearance of going on for miles — and behold,
an end ! It slams downhill, past a farm, and there,
in a bottom, charges directly into a stream crossed
by a crazy plank-bridge, and butts up against
inconceivable, horribly steep, and impending hills
of sand. Not, you know, fixed sand, sparingly
overgrown with grass ; but deeply yielding, loose,
very imponderable sand, that flies off in clouds
in the high winds which blow across, and, decapi
tating the lofty peaks they raised yesterday,
fill up the hollows and proceed to make new hills
elsewhere. Rarely ever is it possible to see so
striking a demonstration of the Biblical remark
on the subject of the valleys being exalted and
the hills laid low. Fortunately, it is rarely in
summer that such manifestations are to be seen.
There is a singular appearance — a rather awesome
aspect it is — in these great bulging sandhills
overlooking Ellenglaze, as if all this had happened
recently, instead of many centuries ago. The
appearance of the suddenly shorn-off road creates
that impression, together with the extraordinarily
sharp transition from cultivation to wildness.
There are no intermediate stages of struggling
with the sandy enemy : the change is clear-cut
and dramatic in the extreme. A farmer, looking
contemplatively from his farm-yard, a figure of
peace and of as much contentment as can humanly

ST. PIRAN'S SANDS 177
be expected in a farmer ; said the way to St.
Piran's oratory was " out yonder," and pointed
a finger vaguely into a distant maze of sand
hills. "I'd come and show ye, only I'm busy
gettin' in my corn," he said. " You cross up
yonder where the old tramway is, only there
isn't any tramway now, since they pulled up
the rails, and then " — and so forth : directions
equally intelligible.
I crossed the stream, and thinking of the
difficulties of the British expeditionary force in
the Soudan, advancing from its base into the
desert, plunged into the wilds, ankle-deep in
sand from the beginning. And always, while
toiling up hillsides, sometimes on all-fours, and
descending slopes, the farmer directed operations
from the rear, so long as he was in sight, with
shouts and gesticulations.
I will not dwell upon those wanderings in
the desert ; on the hot and stuffy hollows in
between the hills, sometimes dry, sometimes
marshy, with reconnoitring rabbits silhouetted
against the skyline, rushing to cover as one
advanced ; or on the cool, invigorating air on
the hill-tops. Early I passed the half-obliterated
track where a tramway had run from one of
the distant abandoned mines, and caught a glimpse
of a sea-horizon in a notch between the hills ;
and when at last all sense of direction had been
hopelessly lost, I tracked my way back by my
own footsteps to the place, and thence made
for the sea, emerging at length upon sandy towans
23

178 THE CORNISH COAST
fronting Perran Bay, with a two miles' walk
along that solitary seashore into Perranporth.
At Perranporth, a broad, shallow valley comes
down to the sea, opening upon beautiful sands
and a shallow bay, where bathing and paddling
are safe and pleasant. The cliffs are curiously
honeycombed with caverns and " natural arches,"

ROCKS AT PERRANPORTH.

which look unnatural and impossible in drawings,
however carefully made, and a rocky island lies
off the bay with, at one end, an odd profile rock
bearing a likeness to the Sphinx. That times of
storm and wreck come to Perranporth let the
view of the Seine, wrecked here in 1898, tell,
with some emphasis.
A kindly autocrat at Perranporth would have
made of it a better place than it is. Its real
beauty and attractions have been frittered away

Gibson & Sons, Penzance.]

WRECK OF THE SEINE, PERRANPORTH

PERRANPORTH 179
by squatters who have established cheap and
vulgar shops and refreshment-houses, and wheeled
wooden shanties that supply simple things for
excursionists. There is no order, no beauty in
the things that have been done and the houses
that have been built at Perranporth, which will
remain a lost opportunity until the happy day
shall arrive and it be abolished and begun anew.
Failing miserably in the first attempt to
find St. Piran-in-the-Sands, I approached it by
a new line of advance from the direction of
Perranporth, passing through the hamlet of Rose.
The tumbled wastes of sands stretch desolately
away, ahead, and the very questionable-looking
farm-road or sandy track that branches off the
road beyond the hamlet is lonely, but that is
the way to the famous spot. Following this
dubious way, turning neither to the rifle-range
on the left, nor to the cross up among the sand-
dunes on the right, marking the site of a second
church which stood there until 1803, the road
at length dies away and is lost amid faint patches
of grass and drifted sand. The ruined oratory
is at this point less than a quarter of a mile
westward, and it would now seem a simple matter
to find it, but the hummocks and hollows that
have to be skirted alter the apparent direction
so much that it is a difficult business, particularly
as the sought-for building is a mere fragment,
and obscured by a protective railing.
And now, in the present explorer's experience,
" a strange, thing happened " : thus to quote.

180 THE CORNISH COAST
an all too-favourite expression whch runs like
a recurrent pattern through the pages of William
Black's novels. A distinct trail of scraps of
torn newspaper began where the track ended.
It was a hint that, followed up, led to the place
of pilgrimage. Heaven's blessings light upon
that benefactor of his kind, who, perhaps to
guide some friend, directed also the footsteps of
the stranger into what I would call the right
path, only that there is no path at all.
There stood the ruin, on the edge of a sandy
plain thinly grown with an innutritious grass,
rising here and there into small tufts and tumps,
where the innumerable rabbits of the place have
made their burrows. A gate in the railing leads
into the building, whose length is about 30 feet,
and breadth 13 feet. Only a small portion of the
west gable, about six feet high, remains, with the
rest of the walls hardly visible above ground.
You step down into it, as into a shallow tank,
which it closely resembles in wet weather, when
the rain accumulates on the concrete floor. That
is the present condition of St. Piran's oratory.
Let us now consider the reason of its being here,
and the saint after whom it is named.
St. Piran has been approached in widely
different ways by speculative writers. Some have
stripped the story of him clear of fantasies, and
displayed him as the early sixth-century Irishman,
Kieran, Bishop of Ossory and friend of St. Patrick,
who sent him with eleven others on a mission to
Cornwall; while others have gone so far as to

ST. PIRAN 181
declare him a myth, and that Piran was merely
a sublimation of the ancient tin-miners, a com
paction of all their virtues. Such a sceptical
view of Piran and his sanctity arises from the
absurd legend which tells us that it was Piran
who discovered tin, and long ago set him up as
the patron saint of tinners.
Kieran, for that was his real name, landed
at St. Ives. As he is easily the most popular
saint in Cornwall, more popular even than St.
Petroc, with three places — Perranzabuloe, Perran-
arworthal, and Perranuthnoe — named after him,
so also his voyage from Ireland was the most
miraculous ; the legends declaring him to have
been flung into the sea, tied to a millstone. Con
trary to the reasonable expectations of those
who thus unceremoniously embarked him, the
millstone floated, and gave him a safe passage
into what is now St. Ives Bay. He roamed from
that landing-place as far up along the coast as
this spot, and here he established his oratory
and baptistery, and at last died about a.d. 550.
His disciples, or converts, buried him here, or,
according to a more wonderful version, feeling
his end near, he dug his own grave and laid
himself down in it and died ; whereupon his
community built a church over him. This early
church, which was afterwards a place of pilgrimage,
and had the right of sanctuary, was suddenly
overwhelmed in the course of another four
centuries by a sandstorm, and was replaced by a
new church on another site, a quarter of a mile

182 THE CORNISH COAST
to the east, and protected from the constantly
drifting stand by a little stream. Rebuilt on
the same site in 1420, it remained safe until
about 1780, when mining operations caused the
stream to be diverted. Then it was gradually
threatened with the fate that had overtaken
St. Piran's oratory, and was in 1803 dismantled
and rebuilt nearly two miles away. A stone
cross marks the site of that removed church of
Perranzabuloe, i.e. " Piran-in-the-sands," but in
the century that has passed since then, the sand
has drifted nineteen feet deep where it stood.
The extreme sanctity of the surroundings, both
of the oratory and of the church that succeeded
it, seems to be indicated by the numerous human
bones found on the sands, exposed by the burrow
ing rabbits and by the wind.
St. Piran's oratory was lost, except to tradition,
for many centuries, until 1835, when the sands
were blown away by long-continued gales. The
scouring of the winds disclosed a building whose
walls were still quite perfect. Only the roof had
disappeared. The walls were covered internally
with plaster, but were constructed of rough stones
of all sizes, picked apparently at haphazard from
the beach, and stacked in like manner upon one
another. There had not been any windows in
the building, except one in the east gable, which
had been blocked up, and one in the south chancel
wall, and that was a small aperture for air, rather
than light. There were two doorways, one in
the north wall, and another in the south, A

ST. PIRAN'S ORATORY 183
stone seat ran round the greater part of the
interior, and the altar remained in its place.
Beneath it were discovered three skeletons, one
of a man of gigantic stature, measuring about
7 ft. 6 in. The heads, or skulls rather, had been
detached, and that belonging to the gigantic
skeleton was missing, leading to the supposition
that this was the framework of St. Piran himself,
whose head, it was known, had been removed at
the building of the second church, and had some
time after the rebuilding of 1420 been provided
with a suitable receptacle, as directed by the
will of Sir John Arundell, of Trerice, dated 1433,
in which occurs the passage : "To provide
honourable protection for St. Pieran's head, the
sum of 40s."
Within a few weeks of its discovery the lost
oratory of St. Piran, so strangely found, had
been almost wholly destroyed by relic-hunters
and mere wanton mischief-makers. To-day, a
notice threatening with prosecution those who
disturb the remains of the dead will be seen.
It seems rather belated, and the rabbits and the
winds between them perform a good deal of
exhumation in these sands, the traditional site
of the overwhelmed city of Langarrow.

CHAPTER X
ST. AGNES— TREVAUNANCE PORTH — PORTREATH —
DOLCOATH : DOWN A TIN MINE — ARSENIC
The cliffs out of Perranporth towards St. Agnes
are not, so far as Cligga Head, at any rate, for
the tourist. Dynamite factories have taken up
all that cantle of the headlands, and really the
road into St. Agnes is better than the coast,
although it proceeds by lands seamed with old
mining-works. There is a starkness about the
scenery, with heaps of rubbish showing where
the miners have turned the earth inside out and
extracted everything worth having, that goes
beyond mere petty ugliness and becomes monu
mental. And, passing Harmony Cot, where the
painter Opie, whose real name was Hoppie,
was born in 1761, and swinging round to the right
for the long hills into the town, there are inte
resting glimpses into deep wooded combes, or up
to other heights, where mines are still actively
in work. St. Agnes town, a very decayed town, de
pendent wholly upon the mining industry, is
some distance from the sea, and sheltered from it
by the kindly hill of St. Agnes Beacon. The
original name of St. Agnes was Breanick. Locally
184

II)z o<

24

ST. AGNES 187
it is pronounced with the " g " omitted ; and
sounds something between " Anne's " and " An
nie's." The church, which has been rebuilt,
except its tower, possesses one of the few spires in
Cornwall, which appear, excluding Truro Cathedral,
to number only nine, including Cubert, Lost-
withiel, Rame, St. Hilary, Sheviock, St. Enodoc,
St. Anthony-in-Roseland, and St. Keverne.
All around are mines, and the mile-walk on
to the harbour of St. Agnes, known as Trevaunance
Porth, is through a mining-field that was until
(mite recently of exceptional desolation. But
now, with the general revival of the industry,
these deserted scenes are showing life again.
" Trevaunance " is said to mean " the home
in the dingle," and it is in fact situated in a
hollow between lofty hills. The little harbour
is one of the greatest curiosities in Cornwall — a
miniature haven constructed in a most hazardous
situation at the foot of the cliffs, and overhung
by the crazy old wooden staging and gear of
apparatus for loading vessels from the heights.
Off-shore are two great rocks curiously known
as the " Man and his Man."
The history of the construction of this harbour
at Trevaunance Porth is that of a long and heroic
struggle against difficulties, rewarded only by
commercial failure. The idea of building a har
bour here dates from 1632, and attempts were
made in 1684, 1699, 1710, and 1794. That last
year saw it completed, but it has long been in a
more or less derelict condition. The scene, look-

188 THE CORNISH COAST
ing back inland from the beach, is in its way pic
turesque. There are the mines come again into
work, and giving a certain grandeur to the place ;
the nobility of human endeavour. Wheal Friendly
is now teeming with activity, and others are
re-opening ; and tanks and chutes, water-wheels,
and other mysterious machinery connected with
the getting of tin are seen to be doing inexplicable
things with the aid of the discoloured stream that
at last, exhausted with the hard work it has been
made to do, escapes to the sands and finds oblivion
in the sea.
I asked a sardonic person, who was loitering
hereby, the names of the mines. He gave them,
together with some pessimistic remarks on mining
investments. " There's Wheal This, and Wheal
That," said he, " but too many Wheal Do' ems."
St. Agnes Beacon rises to a height of 617 feet.
Mines and ugly works sit and straddle and squatter
about on its wild sides, and at a lower level St.
Agnes Head pushes out seaward, a long mile's
walk. Chapel Porth is the next inlet along the
coast, and then Porth Towan, where a stream
comes down from the hamlet of Blackwater, and
where there are sands and holiday-makers, and
by consequence, the usual mean, squalid little
parasitic shanties that minister to their require
ments, and fritter away in dirty domestic details
the clean, wholesome breadth of sands, hillsides,
and sea. Tobban Horse, a col of rock, which the
adventurous may bestride if they will, comes
next, and then Tobban Cove, Cayack Cove, and

THE HARBOUR, TREVAUNANCE PORTH.

PORTREATH 189
Gooderne Hawne : to describe them individually
would be like setting out to notxe the minor
peculiarities that distinguish a numerous family
of brothers and sisters from one another.
There is also a very excellent road from St.
Agnes, touching the heads of all the little valleys
leading to these porths and coves. As it ap
proaches Portreath, it runs through the delightful
valley of Nanceluke, " the sheltered valley,"
with charming views towards Illogan and away
to Cam Brea and Redruth. As I sat here ad
miring the view, a pretty girl of eighteen or so,
with a complexion of June roses and cream, and
an apron half full of potatoes, came through the
field gate towards a farm on the opposite side
of the road, and stopped talking, and I trans
ferred my admiration to her ; not too obviously,
I hope. She talked with all that beautiful west-
country absence of self-consciousness, which is
one of the charms of the rural places in Devon
and Cornwall ; a perfectly natural manner that
would, when exhibited in society, be remarked
as the result of " good breeding " ; whatever
precisely may be meant by that. I am afraid
I contributed little of note to that conversation ;
beauty makes me dumb.
An exceedingly steep road brings you down
into Portreath, with unexpected hairpin corners,
so that at one moment you are looking out to the
clean sea, and then upon the smudgy sands, and
then further inland upon the coaly centre of the
place.

190 THE CORNISH COAST
Portreath is an example of a naturally pretty
place spoiled by commercial activities. A little
bay, with good sands hemmed in by cliffs, lofty,
darkling, and of striking features, has been con
verted into a harbour and made the port of
Camborne and Redruth — those busy, twin mining
towns, four miles inland. A railway, chiefly of
the rough mineral-railway type, spills steeply
into the place, on to the quays, and on the quays
are great stacks of coal. Hence the copper-ore
mined in Cornwall is chiefly shipped across
Channel to the smelting furnaces of Swansea ;
and in return Portreath imports coal. A rivulet
runs into the harbour, rust-red and turbid with
the washings from the mines of the Cam Brea
district ; and, in one way and another, Portreath
is busy and prosperous, and quite indifferent as
to whether a mere ineffectual amateur of scenery
approves or not.
Portreath still vividly remembers a wreck here
in 1895, when the Glasgow steamship Escurial
came ashore in a storm and was dashed to
pieces on the sands, with the loss of eleven
lives. The best, and indeed only practicable way out
of Portreath is by crossing the harbour and then
proceeding for a while directly inland, up a long
steep hill. (The way round up to the headland
on the west side of the bay presently ends in a
tangle on a lofty height, where a wilderness of
furze and heather dauntingly confronts the hardy
stranger, whose hardihood vanishes when he

TREVAUNANCE PORTH : WHEAL FRIENDLY MINE.

DOLCOATH 191
contemplates pushing through the uncharted,
solitary waste.)
At the crest of the hill, amid seamed and
scarred lands, heaped and hollowed with the
workings of mines long abandoned, and command
ing extensive views towards Redruth, where other
mines, both at work and idle, crowd on the hills
and in the valleys, the road to the coast leads to
the right, and that to the left inland to Redruth
and Camborne. Those closely linked towns are
remarkable for being the centre of the Cornish
mining industries which, although distributed
over the whole of the Duchy, have their markets
here, and have always exhibited activity, even
in the worst periods of depression that have
entirely silenced some other districts. Near Cam
borne is the best-known mine of all.
Dolcoath, " the old pit," is the oldest mine
now in work in Cornwall — the origin of it lost
in obscurity. It is one of the chief sources of
wealth of the Basset family, of Tehidy, who have
received from it, in mining royalties in the last
hundred years, about £350,000, in addition to
payments from other mines. Dolcoath was ori
ginally worked only for copper, and after an
immemorial antiquity, was almost abandoned in
or about 1840, owing to the copper being ex
hausted. Other counsels, however, prevailed, and
the adventurers, or directors and shareholders,
as we should now call them, courageously taking
the advice of Captain Thomas, their then chief
mining expert, determined that the tin he ex-

192 THE CORNISH COAST
pected to find should be sought for. After an
anxious time, the tin was found, and Dolcoath
enjoyed another period of prosperity, only damped
by the great fall in the price of tin some twenty-
eight years later. It was at a time when the
metal market was still depressed, that the lease
of Dolcoath expired, and with the renewal of the
lease for sixty years, from June 1895, entailing
new business responsibilities and expenditure, it
was decided to form Dolcoath into a new limited
liability Company, with a capital of £350,000.
Since that time about £736,000 worth of tin has
been produced, but the half-yearly dividends,
ranging from nothing to ten per cent., do not,
upon the whole, come up to this brilliant mining
result ; the concern being possibly over-capital
ised. The total value of copper and tin pro
duced from Dolcoath during the last 116 years,
is placed at about seven and a half miUions
sterling. Dolcoath is situated on a hill near Camborne
railway station, and its works cover a large
acreage. It is not a place in which to spend a
quiet day, for the stamps crushing the ore make
a deafening noise, and in every way the scene
is a busy one, Dolcoath employing about 800
persons above ground, in addition to the 600 at
work below, in the levels and galleries that reach
a total depth of 3,000 feet. Among those em
ployed " at grass " — i.e. above ground — are a
number of women and girls, whose work consists
in raking and sorting the broken ore, and tending

DOLCOATH

193

the revolving miUs, that further crush it and
grind it up in running water.
Tin seen in these processes of extraction
appears as a very undesirable-looking, slimy, grey
semi-liquid ; and not until it has passed through
a series of refining tanks, which by degrees wash
the impurities away, does it wear a more inviting
appearance. This process of washing, or " hud
dling " tin is essentially an ancient rule-of-thumb
method, which originated probably before the
times of the Phoenicians, in the observation that
the metal particles were the heaviest among
the fragments of earth and rock, sinking to the
bottom in the process of washing, while the lighter
constituents were carried off. More exact methods
have been grafted upon the ancient ways, and
mining is now more or less scientific, with a
" Camborne School of Mines " to bring things
up to date ; but all these manifestations are
only developments of the wisdom of the ancients.
The tin resulting from all these processes, and
of the subsequent roasting, or smelting, is but a
very small percentage of the rock sent up from
the pits. Of all the heavy stuff drilled and
blasted, the proportion of ore may be five per
cent, or under, and the metal finally resulting
ranges from three to two per cent. It is not, at
that rate, remarkable that tin sells at present for
£146 a ton.
The exploration of a tin or copper mine requires
some preparation. It is not usually a difficult
matter to obtain access to Dolcoath, but one must
25

194 THE CORNISH COAST
dress for the part of explorer. Armed with a
letter of introduction to the Captain, imagine,
then, the present writer coming to the office and
interviewing the burly giant in charge of the
Dolcoath destinies, a typical mine-captain, broad-
shouldered, bushy-bearded, the hair of it seemingly
the quality of wire, upper lip shaven.
" So you want to go down ? " he asked, per
haps a thought patronisingly — or so it appeared.
"Yes; do strangers often go down?" you
ask, feeling a little bold and venturesome, and
forgetting for the moment that the thing you are
about to do is done here every working-day of
their lives, by six hundred men, who find nothing
remarkable in it.
" Many go down ? Yes, I should think so, and
many ladies among them ! " It sounded like a
reproof. " Come this way." " This way " led to a house
with hot baths and odd oilskin garments hanging
on the walls.
"Now," said the Captain, "this is the chang-
ing-room, and you've got to strip."
"Strip?"" Yes — everything. Look ! " and, suiting the
action to the word, he flung off his clothes,
drew on a thick pair of flannel drawers, put on
a thick vest of the like, over his head, got into
a pair of lined oilskin trousers, and put on a
kind of canvas wool-lined coat ; all with the
rapidity that comes of constant practice. I
followed suit, meekly and clumsily, and began to

DOLCOATH

195

regret the curiosity that had brought me to the
deed. "'Bliged to do it," said the Captain, "else
you'd perhaps catch your death of cold, coming
up to grass again ; and your clothes would
certainly be spoiled."
I thought, the way he put it, that undue value
was being placed upon clothes, in the balance ;
but that is a detail.
" Now, your hat." He handed me a thing like
a basin, of thick padded felt, and stuck a lump
of wet clay in front of it. It weighed several
pounds, and seemed to bear me to the earth.
Then, assuming similar headgear, he led the way,
first pausing to point to some photographs on the
walls. " Some of the ladies who've been down."
And there, sure enough, some slight, boyish-look
ing figures clad in these uncouth garments, were
seen to be standing beside miners, who appeared
gigantic is proportion. Their hands and a stray
curl or two escaping from the heavy mushroom
helmet-hats, betrayed them.
The Captain then led the way to the pit. Ex
pectations are hardly realised here. By " pit,"
the uninitiate would presume a chasm ; but all
that meets the eye is a narrow mouth of blackness,
into which disappears a wire cable, descending
from the hoisting gear overhead.
" She's coming up now," says the Captain ;
" here's your candles," and he hands over a couple
of green wax affairs, sticking one into the clay
on his hat.

196 THE CORNISH COAST
" She " then appears — a coffin-like box, rumb
ling quickly up out of the depths. Packed tightly
into it are four miners, beaded with perspiration,
their oilskins daubed with ochreous mud.
" That's what it's like down below," remarks
the Captain.
The box suddenly comes to a standstill, and
the men, swiftly unpacking themselves, and ex
changing some unintelligible technical language
with the Captain, go off. We then enter, and
the box descends into the depths. Slimy walls of
rock shoot by, and then darkness, as a reporter
might say, " supervenes." The motion is easy,
and you congraulate yourself on the simple ex
perience it really is ; but then comes a sudden
change. The box tips backwards, and begins to
travel with bumps and jolts. A horrible thought
occurs that something has given way, and that
you are being whirled to a horrible death.
" It's the underlie," shouts your companion.
It is a little difficult at first to comprehend this,
so all you can say is " Oh ! " not being quite sure
what an underlie is, or whether it is or is not a
desirable thing. An " underlie," it appears, is
a new sloping direction taken by the shaft.
Here and there the " gig " — the name of the
box in which one is travelling — passes weird
figures standing in hollowed-out spaces. They are
miners, with lighted candles, coming and fleeting
past like the unsubstantial figures of a dream.
At last the "gig" stops; we are in one of
the levels. The atmosphere has grown close and

DOLCOATH 197
moist. Narrow-gauge tramway-lines run along
the uneven floor, which is full of puddles, into
which you splash in the dim light cast by the
candles ; and now and again trolleys laden with
ore are run past by perspiring men. The Captain
has removed the candle from his hat, and you
do likewise, on instruction, for the roof of the
level is low, and however you stoop, a moment or
two of forgetfulness brings your headgear into
collision with it.
One or two violent concussions of this kind
bring one of the reasons for the hard hat well
forward. Another is that falls of rock from the
roofs are not unknown. Holding the candle
properly in your hand is one of the acquired arts,
it would appear, of the miner, who by some
magical means prevents the hot wax from dropping
abundantly over his hands.
Presently we come to a kind of clearing, or
large excavated space in the level. The roof of
it soars up in blackness, amid which the candles
in the hats of groups of miners twinkle at intervals
like stars. The scene here is like some opening
set in pantomime, with goblins at work in caves
of mystery. A buzzing, tearing sound fills the
space. " Drilling with compressed air," explains the
Captain. Other groups are working upon the
rock in the old-fashioned way, with hand-drills.
Presently the groups retire, and we with them,
to a safe distance. A fuse has been fired. That
is to say, a stick of dynamite, very closely re-

198 THE CORNISH COAST
sembling a candle, has been placed in a drilled
hole and plugged in, and a light applied. In
another minute the roar of an explosion comes,
like the slamming of some great door, round the
corner, and the level is filled with the acrid smell
of exploded dynamite. Approaching the scene,
a mass of rock about the size of a large room, is
found lying in fragments.
" Let you see what the place is like," says the
Captain, taking what appears to be another
candle, and lighting it. The thing blazes up in
a weird glare and irradiates every corner of the
cavern. Then it goes out, and a darkness that
seems almost tangible results.
" D'you know what that was ? ' asks the
Captain. " What ? That candle ? "
" That candle," he rejoins, " was dynamite.
Quite harmless when you burn it like that — or I
wouldn't do it," he adds. " Like to go to another
level ? No ? Very well, then, we'll go up-
along." As a matter of fact, it has become extremely
hot ; a moist, enervating heat, that almost pros
trates a strangei to these latitudes. Presently
we come to a sloping ladder-like construction that
is seen to rise up by stages, with a continuous beam
running up the middle of it ; this beam moving
up and down by regular twelve-foot strokes at
intervals of about three or four seconds.
" The man-inyin," explains the Captain.
" Would you like to go up by it ? "

'DOLCOATH 199
A hasty inspection of the " man-engine," for
that is the name of it — the Cornish, finding some
difficulty in pronouncing the " j "-sounding " g,"
generaUy say " inyin " — makes it quite evident
that ascent by " gig " is certainly preferable. To
climb up, or to descend, by aid of the " engine "
is hazardous, as well as toilsome. The method of
ascending is to take position on a little iron step
attached to the moving beam, which is worked
from the engine-house up at grass. With the
upward stroke, one is carried twelve feet, through
a square hole in a platform, called a " sollar."
It is here necessary to step off smartly and with
precision, for in the short, unvarying interval
the beam plunges again irrevocably down, bring
ing down with it the next iron step, upon which
the climber has to immediately take his place,
so that he is carried up another twelve-foot stage
by the succeeding up-stroke. The labour of thus
stepping on or off considerably over two hundred
times is heavy, and there is always the danger of
missing a foothold, or of absent-mindedly pro
jecting an arm, or even one's head just a little
beyond the very small opening in the sollar
through which one is shot. A certain death is
the result of such carelessness. But many men,
nervous of the wire-cable by which the " gig "
or the "kip," is drawn up or let down, use the
man-engine. Cables rarely break, but when they
do, it is only by a miracle that those in the " gig "
escape from being dashed to eternity. Thus a
cable failed at Botallack in 1876, when nine men

200 THE CORNISH COAST
met their deaths, and at Wheal Agar in 1883,
when thirteen were killed.
Returning to grass is a welcome relief. The
grey filterings of light that herald the approach
to the surface are hailed with joy, and the sun
shine of the upper world is precious indeed. It
is very interesting down below, but exhausting ;
and a hot bath and the resumption of one's own
clothes are fully needed before the effects of a
little mild, personally conducted exploration down
there are removed.
Not only tin and copper are found at Dolcoath,
but the production of arsenic is also one of its
paying branches. Arsenic, indeed, is found pretty
freely in the mundic stone, a mineral long thought
worthless, which generally accompanies tin and
copper lodes. At most mines, therefore, arsenic
could be commercially produced. Until some
fifty years ago, this terrible mineral poison
was in comparatively small demand, and the
price of it was only in the neighbourhood of 25s.
or 30s. a ton. In those times the quartz-like
rock, the arsenical pyrites, mineral mispickel, or
mundic — by whichever name you like to call it —
from which, by a very simple treatment of crush
ing and roasting, arsenic is produced, was thrown
away with the other " deads," or rock-rubbish,
from the pits. Visitors often took specimens away,
simply because of its pretty crystalline formation,
but it was so common that it was regarded in
Cornwall as rubbish, useful perhaps for mending
roads, but useless for other purposes. It was the

ARSENIC 201
" Colorado Beetle," not a world embarking upon
murder by arsenical poisoning, that brought
about a suddenly increased demand for arsenic,
and the extensive manufacture of a sheep-dip
has maintained it. " Paris Green " is made from
arsenic, and it was that preparation that slew the
dreaded Colorado Beetle. There are, nowadays,
many other uses for arsenic, and the price has thus
gone up to about £24 a ton ; a figure at which
it not only pays the mines to save and sort their
rubbish, and to look over their old heaps, but
also to prepare and separate the product, as an
important branch of their business. The Devon
Great Consols and other mines on the Devon and
Cornwall border, near Calstock, were the first to
devote attention to this industry. The first-named
at one time had an output of 250 tons a month.
Now Tincroft, Dolcoath, and East Pool, near
Redruth, are large producers.
The arsenic is prepared by breaking up the
rock into small fragments and then selecting the
mundic, which is ground up in revolving mills and
then burnt in " calciners," which may be old-
fashioned brick ovens, or in mines where the
latest machinery is employed are revolving cylin
ders. This process of burning results, in the first
instance, in the emission of dense clouds of sulphuric
acid gas, and secondly, in the deposit of a white
powder ; arsenic, which is scraped out of the
calciners by men who are protected from the
insidious arsenical dust by face-protectors. 26

CHAPTER XI
TEHIDY — CARN BREA — GWITHIAN — GODREVY LIGHT
HOUSE — PHILLACK — HAYLE — LELANT — JOHN
KNILL AND HIS MONUMENT
Returning to the fork of roads on the lofty hill
side out of Portreath, and resuming the coastwise
road, we come now to as fine and as invigorating,
without being actually rugged, a stretch of country
as may well be found in Western Cornwall. It is
a fairly lofty seaboard tableland, with an ex
cellent road leading for a long way close to the
cliffs, and running unfenced and without hedges
through a lovely expanse of purple heather and
golden gorse. Here and there the road almost
touches the cliffs' edge. Scattered rocks lie at
their feet, with the sea surging round them ;
the largest of them known as Samphire Island.
Except for the cheerful singing of larks aloft, and
the plaintive screaming of the sea-gulls, changed
into a loud chattering when they pounce upon an
unfortunate company of fish, the scene is quietude
itself. Rarely is any one in sight, and yet, looking
off to the left, from where the woods of Tehidy
impinge upon the way, you see distinctly the
clustered houses and the many mines of Cam-

CARN BREA 203
borne and Cam Brea, about two and a half miles
distant. Puffs of smoke and steam from the
railway and from the chimneys of the mines alone
disclose the seething activities of those places.
Cam Brea itself looms majestically over the scene
— that great boulder-strewn hill plentifully fur
nished with remains of prehistoric British beehive
huts, stone pounds, and other traces of a vanished
race, and with a mediaeval castle tower curiously
built upon enormous disconnected granite rocks,

> **»VmV '

CARN BREA, FROM TEHIDY.

or perched, rather than built, upon them. On
the very apex of the hill, 740 feet above sea level,
the lofty De Dunstanville column was built in
1836, in memory of a member of the Basset family
of Tehidy, ennobled under that title; Francis
Basset, born 1757, died 1835. He was Member of
Parliament for Penryn, and an actively useful
and patriotic man ; creating coast-defences for
Portreath, and a mineral tramway between that
port and Devoran on the south coast. He was
created a Baron in 1796, and assumed the full-
flavoured title of de Dunstanville, which sounds

204 THE CORNISH COAST
like an impossible peerage out of a penny novelette.
It is not a territorial title — or at least, not an
English one — but was chosen by him to seal the
cousinship of the Bassets to the extinct Norman
Lords de Dunstanville, of Castle Combe in Wilt
shire, whose honours had died out four centuries
earlier. The woods and the cornfields of Tehidy, in
the foreground of this scene, form a very striking
and beautiful pastoral foil to the grimy industries
yonder. There are, among many other evidences
of the advanced civilisation over the valley at
Camborne, electric tramways, which are scarcely
curiosities in these times.
I know no more gorgeous cycle run in Cornwall
than that to be obtained from this point to
Gwithian, a distance of four miles across the
heathery moors, with a fine switchback road
winding around the humps and into the hollows
of the hills, leaping over hunch-backed little
bridges, and finally bringing up over the ridge
of land that runs out on the right to Navax
Point. Down across that transverse ridge the
road drops to a little bridge and a stream that
runs a rusty tomato-red. Bridge and stream,
and road too in windy weather are just at this
place often nearly smothered in blown sand.
Here, by the parapet of the bridge, one must
stop, not indeed by reason of the sand but because
out yonder, about two hundred paces to the
left, along the further bank of the stream, the
ground is holy. There are many holy spots in

GWITHIAN 205
Cornwall, and I am free to confess that it is not
so much the sanctity of their connection with
the early Irish, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, or other
Celtic saints that impresses me, as the practical
immortality of tradition belonging to them. Where
fact and fiction meet in the lives of those saintly
persons, and which is fiction and which fact,
no man may tell ; but that some original founda
tion existed for these gradually accumulated

<>rfy —

GWITHIAN.

stories must be conceded. Hence the peculiar
interest surrounding St. Piran's oratory, and
hence too that belonging to this similar spot,
where the sands blow in every gale, and long
ages since overwhelmed the little oratory of St.
Gwithian. This saint was Gothian, and the dedication of
the parish church of Gwithian keeps that original
form, although the place-name has become cor
rupted. Gothian was one of the early Irish saints,

206 THE CORNISH COAST
brother of St. Breaca, who founded Breage. His
period was the closing years of the fifth century,
when colonising Irish, some of them saints in the
making, others sinners in being, landed in Hayle
Estuary in large numbers and established them-
in West Cornwall, at first greatly against the will
of the then rulers of these parts. As they had
not been invited, so the Cornish were at first
disposed to resent these incursions, which, al
though made to appear purely missionary efforts,
were no doubt to a great extent methods of
what has been well named in modern times
" peaceful penetration." We are not, in our
own times, ignorant of troubles caused by mission
aries, and are familiar with the fact that gunboats
and " punitive expeditions " and suchlike things
follow their activities.
At any rate, Tewdrig, or Theodoric, the chieftain
who ruled over these parts, turned upon them
and slew some of the more prominent of the
missionaries who had come into his land. Gothian
was numbered among these. He was martyred
at Conetconia, a place which is represented to
have afterwards become a town, with two churches,
and to have been finally overwhelmed by sand.
It is represented to-day by the hamlet of Conner,
or Connerton, two miles inland. It would appear,
by the fact that Gothian had time sufficient to
build an oratory, that he and the other martyrs
were not at once attacked.
They are poor, scanty, and almost formless
remains, but they are probably of Gothian's

GWITHIAN 207
own original building, and are thus portions of
the earliest Christian church known in England,
older than St. Martin's, Canterbury, which was
founded by Augustine, a.d. 596, on the re-con
version of England to Christianity, and is generally
considered to be entitled to that honour.
The sand, that for many centuries had blown
inland, had in aU that while completely buried
St. Gothian's oratory, or " Gwithian old church,"
as it is called ; but tradition told of its existing
somewhere near. And then, in 1828, a more
than usually violent storm displaced some of the
sand and the low rough walls, roofless and ruined,
were exposed. Antiquaries measured the building,
and found its dimensions to be 48 feet in length,
by about 14 feet broad. The position of the
altar, and a stone seat running round the chancel,
were quite distinct. Excavation revealed some
skeletons. A few years later a roof was placed over the
remains and the building was used as a shed.
To-day, owing to wanton damage, only one angle
of the building is visible, and that consists solely
of a few courses of unmortared masonry. The
sands were kinder than the relic-hunters or
merely mischievous people who wrought thus
hardly with the ancient shrine.
Once a year the vicar of Gwithian holds service
on the spot, but not the least care is taken of it.
Navax Point stretches out far into the sea
from the desolate shore by the oratory, and the
rusty red river flows on to an empty beach, being

208

THE CORNISH COAST

ingeniously dammed here and there, and made
to deposit some small tribute of tin. There is a
lighthouse on Godrevy Island, off Navax Point,
established in 1858, to warn mariners off the
rocks known as " The Stones." Although so
near the mainland, the island has an effect of
loneliness, hardly matched even by the solitary
sentinels between Land's End and Scilly. It is
perhaps because of the paradox that the place

GODREVY LIGHTHOUSE.

looks so near and every detail of it is seen from
thejnainland, while yet an angry sea is set between.
Gwithian church has been rebuilt, except its
tower, and, with the small village, is uninteresting,
while the coast and the road alike in leaving
Gwithian grow exceedingly depressing. The coast
creates a sinking at heart, caused by the great
loneliness and desolation of drifted sand, which
for uncounted centuries has been blown inshore
by the prevailing north-westerly winds, and

PHILLACK 209
that of the road is the uglification and squalor
caused by the industrial conditions of the little
town and port of Hayle. Immediately on leaving
Gwithian the hideous sulphuric acid and dynamite
works come into view. Beyond them, on the
right, rise the sand towans, and on the left is a
stretch of poor, sour land. The towans, or hills
of sand, lying between the road and the sea are
sparsely grown with grass. They are remarkable
and forbidding, rising, as they stretch westward,
higher, and ridged fantastically into peaks. Where
the Copperhouse entrance to Hayle begins, a
creek of the Hayle river is seen, with a bridge
spanning it, leading to the village of Phillack,
situated by the waterside and on a rising strip
of land that by odd, inexplicable chance has
never, in all the long centuries of the sandy
invasion, been overwhelmed. The towans, ages
ago, surmounted the ridge and piled themselves
high upon it, but they have never desolated
the church and village of Phillack. The place
is considered to owe its name, in common with
so very many others in Cornwall, to the saint
to whom the church is dedicated, but of St.
Felicitas, martyred in a.d. 150, with her seven
sons, Cornwall knows nothing. They met their
fate in Rome. The real patroness of Phillack is
St. Fiala, one of the numerous Irish who came
across in the fifth and sixth centuries, with
successive swarms of their countrymen. Among
them was the woman whom the Irish knew as
Kiera, the " Fiala " or " Phiala," whose name
27

210

THE CORNISH COAST

is the original of " Phillack." She suffered mar
tyrdom, with Gothian and others, before the
Cornish became reconciled to the newcomers.
The body of the church was rebuilt in 1855,
and so is absolutely without interest ; but a
very curious discovery was then made, in pulling
down the east wall. A small cavity was discovered
under the chancel window, and in it was a phial
of iridescent glass, one-third filled with what

PHILLACK.

was thought to be the blood of the saint. It
was replaced on rebuilding.
Hayle, to which we now come, is an exceed
ingly ill-favoured place, with no redeeming features
It owes its existence and its name alike to the
river, or the estuary of the sea ; a little stream
running down at this point into the salt creek.
" Hayle " means in Cornish a creek or river. In
the West of England there has always been a
certain inability to distinguish between a river
and a creek. Here, where the inlet becomes
navigable, the town of Hayle sprang up. It

HAYLE 211
originated in a copper smeltery, which gave it
the original name of " Copperhouse," but that ore
is now wholly smelted at Swansea. Great iron
works then sprang up here, and finally came the
railway, running through on a long viaduct.
Hayle is a sad shock to the explorer of these
coasts. It is a squalid, grimy interlude, with
clouds of road-dust and coal-dust along its streets
and quays, and shops that are, or at any rate
look, poverty-stricken. And to fill in the picture
of a certain Cockney-like vulgarity, you see and
hear fish-hawkers, with carts and barrows, bawling
alliteratively, "fine fresh fish," or, descending to
particulars, crying " mack' rei," " pilchurrs," or
" pollock." These are the " jowsters," as they
are named locally, who buy fish as landed at St.
Ives, and retail it in this manner in the surround
ing towns and villages. No one would expect to
find anything of interest at Hayle ; but this place
of no attractions possesses a Romano-British in
scribed stone as interesting as any in Cornwall :
perhaps even more interesting than others, for
the reason that it has the longest inscription, save
one, in Cornwall. The stone, on the bank of the
Carnsew earthworks, is now within the limits of
the local public park. The inscription runs :
HIC CENVI REQUIEVIT CV NAT D° HIC
TVMVLO IACIT VIXIT ANNOS XXXIII
This is rendered, " Here Cenvi rests, who was
born in (the year) 500. In this tomb he lies.
He lived 33 years." Cenvi, who lies here beside^

212 THE CORNISH COAST
Hayle water, may have known King Arthur, may
even have fought for him. It is strange and a
little awesome, to stand and read his epitaph,
incised thus ruggedly nearly fourteen centuries
ago, and to reflect how, although little survives of
the story of those twilight times, when a civilisa
tion was being overthrown, these rude letters still
tell their own plain and simple tale.
There is a sandy bar across the mouth of
Hayle River, and a ferry below Lelant, on the
western shore. Down at the outlet to the sea
a world of sand stretches, the church of St. Uny,
Lelant, overlooking it in a hummocky solitude,
wherein one struggles up and down and back
and forth without much sense of direction, the
rise of one sandy ridge commanding only a suc
cession of others ; the surface yielding in one
place, and firm with a scanty growth of bents
and marram-grass in the next. Two lights mark
the entrance to Hayle channel, and rows of stakes
and iron posts stand at the edge of the shallows,
to guide the mariner's way. But cheerfulness
seems, to this observer at any rate, to reign on
the hither side, instead of the boding and desolate
aspect of the Phillack shore. Vigorous patches
of golden gorse have here and there established
themselves, larks shrill a resourceful song in the
sky, and reed-warblers whistle in the swampy
hollows, where strange growths are found. Here
under the lee of a bank, is the hut of a tin-streamer,
a solitary save-all, scratching together a liveli
hood from the washings of distant mines.

LELANT

213

Lelant church is dedicated to St. Uny, brother
of St. Ia, and St. Herygth, who all came over from
Ireland in the fifth century, and by methods
more or less miraculous. Lelant (" Le-lant " is

APPROACH TO LELANT

the proper pronunciation) was originally " Lan-
nant," the church in the valley. The suitability
of the name is not obvious until one has
climbed Lelant downs, near by, crested by Knill's

214 THE CORNISH COAST
monument. Lelant, according to a vague ancient
tradition, was at one time a seaport town, and
opposite was the castle of Revyer, River, or
Riviere : all overwhelmed by sand. In that
castle, continues the legend, dwelt in the fifth
century Theodoric, the Cornish kinglet, who slew
Fiala, and St. Ia and her saintly brothers.
The church of Lelant is a large, dignified
building, standing apart from the village and the
main road to St. Ives ; its size and position lending
some support to the legendary tale of the vanished
seaport. But that town must at any rate have
disappeared many centuries before the existing
church was built, on the site of an earlier. It is
now a Perpendicular structure of about 1430,
equipped with full complement of nave and aisles
and tower. A few fragments of a former Norman
and Early English church remain, in the nave
arcade. The characteristic west-country wreathed
capitals of the pillars are exceptionally fine. A
curious dial-marker on a sundial of the eighteenth
century, fixed on the porch, represents a crowned
skeleton, Death, the King of Terrors, aiming a
dart. It is not only curious as a piece of crafts
manship, but as typical of eighteenth-century
paganism and materialistic thought. It saddens
the beholder, and, teaching as it does that death
is the end of all things, is singularly unfitting for
a Christian church.
The monuments within Lelant church are of
true Cornish grotesqueness ; notably the seven
teenth-century slate slab to Stephen Pawley, his

CARBIS BAY 215
wife, and twelve children : all represented with
goggling eyes, like golliwoggs . The slab to William
Praed, 1620, and wife and four children, has the
Christian name neatly inscribed in a label over
each quaint little figure.
There are golf-links now on the towans at
Lelant, and they do not improve the place.
Perhaps the most charming " bit " in the parish
to an artist is the delightful hollow on the high
road as you proceed from Hayle to St. Ives, where
a few cottages and a curiously picturesque Wes-
leyan chapel, built in 1834, stand overhung with
trees. The road, for the most part, into St. Ives,
now wears a terribly suburban look : it is the
inevitable result of the favour into which this
lovely coast has come : and here you perceive the
evidences of it, in villas, wayside inns rebuilt in
the London suburban style, golfers, caddies,
tradesmen's carts, and a road tarred in order
to save every one from being choked with motor-
dust. For the motorists have discovered St.
Ives, I assure you. The pedestrian's remedy for
this is, however, easy. He proceeds along the
low cliffs or by the golden sands of the glorious
St. Ives Bay, passing first of all by Carbis Bay
and then, round a headland, to Porthminster
Beach and St. Ives town. Carbis Bay is a
favourite picnic place, and tea-rooms and gardens
are in plenty, but the exquisitely curving shore,
with the finest sands in Cornwall and the sea a
wonderful peacock-blue, are not easily spoiled
by much popularity. At Carbis Bay, too, Knill's

216 THE CORNISH COAST
monument is reached by turning into the high
road near the railway station and, crossing it,
ascending by a long steep pathway to the summit
of a lofty hill.
John Knill was not a native of St. Ives. He
was born at Callington in 1733, and began life as
clerk to a Penzance attorney, and thence went to
London. In 1762, when twenty-nine years of
age, he returned to Cornwall to fill an appointment
as collector of customs at St. Ives, a post he filled
for twenty years. During that time he became
the most important person in the town, and was
mayor in 1767, and owner or part owner of some
privateers, ostensibly licensed for the purpose of
harrying the merchantmen of the French, with
whom we were in those times almost incessantly
at war. It was generally suspected, however,
that this patriotic collector of customs, officially
the sworn enemy of smugglers, had really equipped
his vessels for the smuggling trade. In 1782, the
year of his resigning his position, and on the
eve of retiring to London, he built the locaUy
famous " monument " here, on Worral Hill, as a
mausoleum, intending that his body should be
laid in it on his death. He is said also to have
intended it to be a landmark for sailors making
St. Ives. He purchased the land occupied by it
for the moderate sum of five guineas, from Lord
Arundell of Wardour, the then owner of the
property and of Tregenna Castle, below. A rent
of sixpence a year is paid to the owner of Tregenna
for wayleave to the hilltop.

JOHN KNILL

217

Knill was not, after all, buried on his eyrie
overlooking St. Ives Bay. He is supposed to
have changed his mind on the subject. He lived
for many years in London, and died in 1811, aged
seventy-seven, and his body rests in the vaults of
St. Andrew's, Holborn, hard by the chambers in
Gray's Inn Square, where he died.
John Knill's monument, if indeed requiring

KNILL S MONUMENT.

some effort to reach it, is no obscure thing, standing
as it does upon the summit of the down, 540 feet
above the sea, where the winds blow great guns
in winter and are rarely still, even in summer.
It is visible for miles away ; but the lane near
at hand, leading to that airy height, is a shy,
narrow way, strewn with great stones, and
channelled deeply by the winter's rains. It
is a toilsome climb, past gorsy and heathery 28

218 THE CORNISH COAST
expanses, and finally to an enclosure in which is
seen the obelisk itself. The land is part of the
Tregenna Castle estate, now the property of the
Great Western Railway, and the Company has
a threatening notice, promising severe things to
those who injure the shrubs : the said shrubs
being, almost without exception, already in a
wilted, moribund condition, practically incapable
of further injury.
The obelisk is a substantial work of granite,
which cost £226 is. 6d. to build. It is a three-
sided structure, based upon a large plinth con
taining the chamber intended for the mausoleum,
and on its three sides are inscriptions : respectively
" Johannes Knill, 1782 " ; " Resurgam " ; and
" Nil Desperandum," used as a motto under
the heraldic device of a golden lion rampant on
a red field, surrounded by seven cross-crosslets.
The pun is obvious, and paradoxical. The Gen
tleman's Magazine, in 1853, in the course of an
account of Knill and his mausoleum, gives punning
inscriptions which never had any existence, except
in the imagination of the writer. This account
tells us that on one side is " Hie jacet nil," and
that it was originally intended, when Knill was
buried here, to add a " K " at the beginning of
the last word, and another " 1 " at the end.
On the other side was " Ex nihilo nil fit," to be
filled up in like manner. Knill had a certain
amount of mental agility, no doubt, but he did
not rise to such heights as these.
Although this eccentric lies far away, the

JOHN KNILL 219
odd provisions of his will are yet strictly observed.
He settled upon the mayor and burgesses of
St. Ives, for ever, an annuity of £10, charged
upon the rental of a freehold farm at Mawgan ;
to be annually placed in a chest and only with
drawn at the close of every five years. The
£50 thus accumulated he directed to be expended
in a variety of ways. In the first instance, a

ARMS OF KNILL.

dinner was to be provided for the mayor of St.
Ives for the time being, and the vicar, and collector
of customs, who might each invite two friends
to the feast. Secondly, he directed that £5
should be equally divided between ten girls,
natives of St. Ives, under the age of ten, who
were on July 25th, the day of St. James the
Apostle, to proceed to the mausoleum, between
the hours of 10 and 12 a.m., dressed in white,

220 THE CORNISH COAST
and there to dance and sing round it for a quarter
of an hour at least, to the tune of a fiddle played
by a fiddler who was to be paid £i for his services.
The song is as follows :
Shun the bustle of the bay,
Hasten virgins, come away ;
Hasten to the mountain's brow,
Leave, 0 leave, St. Ives below.
Haste to breathe a purer air,
Virgins fair, and pure as fair.
Fly St. Ives and all her treasures,
Fly her soft voluptuous pleasures ;
Fly her sons and all their wiles.
Blushing in their wanton smiles ;
Fly the splendid midnight halls ;
Fly the revels of her balls :
Fly, O fly the chosen seat,
Where vanity and fashion meet,
Hither hasten from the ring,
Round the tomb in chorus sing,
And on the mountain, aptly dight,
As we should be, all in white,
Pure to sight as driven snow,
Leave troubles and our cares below.
Two widows of the borough of St. Ives, of
sixty-four years of age, or upwards, were to
attend, each to receive £i ; a further £i to be
laid out in purchasing breast -knots for the widows
and the girls, and a cockade for the fiddler. At
the conclusion of the dancing the girls were to
sing the Old Hundredth Psalm.
A sum was to be reserved for the purpose of
keeping the mausoleum in repair ; and £5 to be
paid to a man and wife, widower or widow, sixty

JOHN KNILL 221
years of age or upwards, the man being an in
habitant of St. Ives, who shall have bred up to
the age of ten years and upwards the greatest
number of legitimate children without parochial
assistance. Furthermore, periodically, sums were
to be allotted to friendly societies, £5 to the
best female knitter of fishing-nets ; £5 to the
best female curer and packer of pilchards for
exportation ; £5 to the two fisher-boys who
shall have conducted themselves best during the
preceding fishing season ; all, of course, of St.
Ives. The latest occasion of " Knill's Day," up to
this time of writing, was 1906. The event has
always attracted numbers of people, and they
now come, owing to easy methods of travelling,
in vastly increased crowds.
It should perhaps be added that the song
given above is altogether misleading as to the
character of St. Ives. It was never like that.
The splendid and profligate character of the
place, gorgeously Sardanapalian, pictured in those
lines, had no existence at any time. Babylonian
revels are unknown, and as for " midnight halls,"
the stranger might seek in vain. But it may
well be supposed that he will not be so foolish as
to seek.

CHAPTER XII
ST. IVES
The everyday cheerful domesticities of detached
(and some semi-detached) villas, with dashing
butchers' carts and yowling milkmen at their
gates at the properly discreet hours, and of
callers at other hours, conduct into St. Ives,
and give the lie, as politely but also as flatly as
possible, to the Oriental splendours of wickedness
dimly set forth above. Suburbs do not sin —
openly ; and now all England is becoming sub
urban and discreet, and even the artistic colony
at St. Ives is moral — of the immoralities of the
amateurs' colouring and drawing we need say
nothing — and St. Ives is a great camping-ground
for the artistic. You come into the town, if by
road instead of Porthminster sands, down a steep
ening and narrowing highway, past Tregenna
Castle, that castellated granite residence of a
hundred and fifty years ago, now converted into
a Great Western Railway hotel. Tregenna, whose
name means " the dwelling at the mouth, or
entrance," stands in its own lovely grounds,
through whose wooded glades you glance back
along the coast to Godrevy lighthouse, a dazzlingly

aKfer£;£r.>Sir:?-". 'J,- = 4fil

¦Mi

ST. IVES 223
white object, set on a grey rock in a turquoise
sea. St. Ives owes its name to St. Ia, who is variously
named Hia, and Ewe. She was the daughter
of an Irish chieftain, and sister of St. Uny, and of
St. Heryghth, after whom the village of St. Erth
(still pronounced " Eerth ") is named. She landed
at Pendinas — the original name of what is now
St. Ives town — about a.d. 460. A long course
of reading in the lives and acts of the saints finds
us unmoved with wonder when we learn that
she sailed across the Channel on a leaf. Other
saints did much more wonderful things than
that, as we have already seen. The Cornish
chief of Pendinas permitted St. Ia to build a
chapel here ; but the existing great fifteenth-century
church is dedicated to St. Andrew, and the town
itself continued to be styled " Pendinas " until
the sixteenth century, when Camden referred to
it by that name. Leland, however, calls it
" St. les."
The other town of St. Ives, far away in Hun
tingdonshire, has only an accidental appearance
of kinship with this : the saint in that case
being one Ivo, traditionally an eighth-century
Persian bishop, who came on amission to England.
St. Ives is the principal fishing-town in CornwaU,
and at such times when its fleet is at home, and
the sturdy luggers drawn up in closely packed
ranks on the sands under the railway station,
the sight is astonishing. Often the vessels are
away for weeks together, going so far as the

224

THE CORNISH COAST

south coast of Ireland for herring and mackerel.
But pilchards are the chief harvest of the sea
in Cornwall. They are to these shores what
herrings are to Yarmouth, coals to Newcastle,

CROSS, ST. IVES CHURCH.

or cotton to Manchester, and a good season or
a bad means plenty or poverty to St. Ives and
other ports. The pilchard is a fish of peculiar
and unforeseen moods. Formerlv the " schools "

ST. IVES

225

or shoals came in August and September, but
now, for some unexplained reason, they are not

HICKS S COURT, ST IVES.

to be expected until October. Thus the summer
visitors see little of the real activities of St. Ives.
29

226 THE CORNISH COAST
The pilchard-fishery is more or less an off-shore
affair, the fish often, impelled by some extra
ordinary fatal instinct, choking the sands for a
mile or so by their suicidal rush into the bay.
Equally mysterious is the uncertain alternation
of good seasons and bad. There will be times
when millions of pilchards come to the coasts,
and others when the huers — that is to say, the
look-out men stationed on the cliffs — fail to sight
any. The most remarkable catch was a one-day
take in 1846, when seventy-five million pilchards
were secured. They filled 30,000 hogsheads which
at £2 per hogshead, brought £60,000 into St.
Ives. When a fisherman talks of that phenomenal
day, it is with a wistful, far-off look and in awed
tones, for the like of it has never since been
known. Ten and twenty millions have been
taken, but the season is short and the intervals
between such catches long. So the fishery, like
the mining industry, has all the uncertainties of
a gamble ; and when the huers have sighted a
shoal, and signal the approach of it with the cry of
" heva, heva ! " the excitement is equal to that
of a gaming saloon, and a great deal more demon
strative. The seine-boats are launched, and the
tuck-boats follow, with amazing rapidity, directed
in the way they should go by the signals of the
huer on the hill. And then the seine-net is shot
round the shoal and the capture brought close
in ; the big seine being emptied into tuck-baskets
and loaded into boats, which are rowed to shore
laden almost to the gunwale. All St. Ives is

ST. IVES 229
out to witness the landing. Children glean stray
pilchards by the hundred, and the ruling price
may be anything from five to twelve a penny.
It is obvious that only a small proportion of
these enormous takes can be consumed locally,
and indeed the chief value of the pilchard to
the Cornish is the demand from Italy. The
Mediterranean has the sardine, a similar, but
smaller and more delicate fish, and the Cornish
seas alone produce the pilchard. Italy sells us
canned sardines, and Cornwall exports pilchards
to Italy in enormous quantities, pressed and
packed into hogsheads. It is not at all unlikely
that the smaller of these pilchards come back
to us as " sardines." That pilchards imported
into Italy should have to pay duty is a grievance
to Cornish fishermen, and discloses one of the
disadvantages of our own system of " free trade,"
by which the foreigner can tax our goods and
we can make no effective reply. And yet Cornwall
remains Radical and opposed to tariff reform !
There is, of course, generally fine miscellaneous
fishing here, for conger, hake, and other fish
common in these waters, and the gulls that
haunt St. Ives in great numbers do extremely
well ; although, for that matter, no one has ever
known the extraordinary hunger of seagulls to
be satisfied. The fishermen are usually very
tender to the gulls, who know their immunity
from attack perfectly well. And what a silent
place St. Ives would be without the daily laugh
of those beautiful birds ; the almost human

230 THE CORNISH COAST
chuckle, with a note of wickedness in it, "Aha!
aha ! " changed, when the weather lowers, to a
melancholy piping, or when the fish are brought
in to a deafening, screaming chatter, and fierce
struggles among one another for share in the spoil.
The fisherfolk of St. Ives are not handsomely
treated by folklore, which brackets them with the
" wise men " — that is to say the fools — of Gotham,
for stupidity. They are credited with such pre
posterous doings as whipping a hake through
their town, to warn its hungry brethren off the
pilchards ; and were supposed to have sent out
boats to pick up floating millstones, and to have
shot their seine-nets to haul in a flock of sheep,
blown by a gale into St. Ives Bay. According to
further legends the inhabitants of Towednack
(Twennick " in local speech) were the idiots who
built the wall (or planted a hedge) round the
cuckoo, to imprison him, and so retard the coming
spring. The cuckoo flew away, just skimming
the top of the hedge in his flight.
" What a pity ! " exclaimed the Towed-
nackians, "ef us'd made the hedge a HIT higher,
we shud a' kip 'un in."
I do not see eye to eye with those guide
books which talk of the beauty of St. Ives as seen
from the bay, and speak of the stranger's admira
tion being modified when he enters the town.
Nor do I agree with the proposition that the town
has of late years been improved. That St. Ives
is found to be really beautiful is sufficiently evi
dent not only from its favour with the artists who

ST. IVES 231
live and paint here, but from the delight with
which the average stranger is taken. Twenty years
ago, it was even better, for there were then few
" residents " and fewer who wintered here for
sake of the fine climate, and St. Ives had then
hardly begun to remodel itself for their benefit.
Even yet it has, fortunately, not become a parasite
town, and lives its own life, quite apart from
the genteel villas on the hillsides. As for the
painters, they fit in and mingle with St. Ives,
without in the least spoiling its character, and
indeed, if that character be at all in danger of
eclipse, it is to the artists we must and can look,
to defend it.
The delightful old town lies well sheltered, by
the promontory called wrongly " the Island,"
from the south-westerly gales. Smeaton's old
stone pier, with its squatty little lighthouse at the
pierhead, juts out a short distance, and a little
way along the sandy shore rises the bold mass of
the old church, the churchyard walls washed by
every tide. Streets of the narrowest wind round
to the configuration of the bay, and off them branch
the oddest, most unexpected of courts and alleys,
with studios in lofts and in other whimsical situa
tions. And the names of St. Ives' courts and
alleys fully fit their odd and unconventional
appearance. "Academy Place" is for St. Ives
a commonplace name ; but " Salubrious Place,"
"Court Cocking," and "Bunker's Hill" are
remarkable, even here, while " Chy-an-Chy " is
regarded as rather a curiosity, even by the towns-

232

THE CORNISH COAST

folk. " Chy-an-Chy " means literally "house-by-
house," and possibly was a primitive street in
remote times, when houses at St. Ives were widely
scattered. There is still an old note of cosy and cheery

rfn^pgj^

A STREET IN ST. IVES.

self-sufficiency in St. Ives, handed down from
those old times when Francis Basset gave his
silver loving-cup to the town, and when John
Knill left his remarkable bequests. What says
the charming inscription on that loving-cup ?
If any discord 'twixt my friends arise
Within the borough of beloved St. Ives,

ST. IVES 233
It is desyred that this my cup of love
To everie one a peacemaker may prove ;
Then I am blest to have given a legacie
So like my harte unto posteritie. Francis Basset, 1640.
There are two kinds of sea at St. Ives, the
calm blue waters of the harbour and the bay, and
the rough, angry, and not so blue waters on the
western side of the Island. Thus, in dramatic
spectacular fashion, does that miscahed headland
justify the character it owns for sheltering the
town and port. I declare, you may have a house
up there, towards that exposed part, and be in
two climates by the simple expedient of looking
from its western or its eastern windows. Do you
wish to bask in still airs, then look east ; do you
long for the bracing breeze and the salt sea spray,
then your western windows will afford you all
you need. Happy the artists up here, whose
studios give them such variety.

30

CHAPTER XIII
THE ST. IVES CONSOLS — RADIUM — ZENNOR QUOIT
— ZENNOR — GURNARD'S HEAD — PREHISTORIC
CORNWALL
Taking the road out of St. Ives for Zennor and
the Land's End, the traveller finds himself breast
ing a long and steep street, extremely narrow for
the most part, and apt to be stuffy and enervating
until its upper reaches are gained. A boy, not
really poor, sitting lazily on a stone in the sun
shine, waiting for passing strangers, asked me, as
I went by, perspiring, for a copper. I told him
to go to Hayle (where the copper-works are, or
used to be) and passed on, angry.
Soon, the evidences of mines old and new
came in sight on either hand : giant refuse-heaps
turned out of the shafts of the great St. Ives
Consols mines during long years of prosperous
working, but with never a scrap of vegetation on
them. In their flush times the St. Ives Consols
were among the richest pits in Cornwall, but so
far back as twenty-five years ago they were silent
and deserted, and Stennack (the name of this
suburb) was woebegone in the extreme. To-day
the first chapter of a newer story is opening, for,
234

RADIUM 235
with the strong demand now arising for that
newly discovered and mysterious substance,
radium, the St. Ives Consols have entered upon a
new lease of life ; and where the old ruined engine-
houses and count-houses stood there has arisen at
the Trenwith Mine, an up-to-date maze of build
ings, hoisting-gear, and sheds. For it seems that
pitchblende, the rock in which uranium and
radium are found, is plentiful in Trenwith.
A new field of activity and prosperity, a field of
operations as yet only dimly perceived and un
explored, thus appears to be opening in Cornwall.
The history of radium is a very short one, and
the remotest scientific experiments that preceded
its discovery do not go back to a more remote
date than 1889, when certain substances, after
exposure to light, were observed to be capable of
throwing off radiations. Following upon this,
Rontgen in 1895 discovered the since then famous
so-called " X rays " (from X, the algebraic un
known quantity), which are rays invisible to the
human eye, produced by an electric discharge in
a high vacuum, and possessing the marvellous
property, among others, of penetrating sub
stances opaque to light, and of thus permitting
photographs to be taken through wood and metals,
and incidentally rendering the proverbial im
possibility of " seeing through a brick wall " in
some degree out of date.
Scientific researches, undertaken with the ob
ject of discovering if these dark rays were given
off under other conditions, resulted in the dis-

236 THE CORNISH COAST
covery that zinc sulphide, already known to be
temporarily phosphorescent on exposure to light,
also gave off invisible rays, which penetrated
ordinarily opaque bodies and affected photographic
plates on the other side. The next step was the
discovery that uranium salts, without the pre
liminary of exposure to sunlight, both phos
phoresced and emitted rays of the " X " nature.
Examination of uranium elicited the fact that it
was not uranium itself, nor the salts of it, that pro
duced these phenomena of radio-activity, " but
the existence in them of some impurity." This
fact, observed by Sir William Crookes, was carried
much further by Professor and Madame Curie in
Paris, who eventually, in 1903, after great labour
and exhaustive experiments, extracted from many
tons of waste uranium ore, from which the
uranium had already been taken, an infinitesimal
quantity of the " impurity " already noted in
uranium salts. This was the first radium (in
chemistry strictly known as " radium salts ") ever
produced. From eight tons of exhausted uranium ore only
fifteen grains of the new substance was extracted,
and although the somewhat higher ratio of
four grains from one ton has since been attained,
the difficulties and expenses of production
still render radium the most costly thing in
the world. To put it in more popular figures, a
ton of refuse yields only about 120th part of
one ounce, and the commercial value of radium,
of which only a small quantity has yet been

RADIUM 237
extracted, is three thousand times that of gold,
roughly £12,000 an ounce. The appearance of
this extremely precious substance is quite com
monplace, resembling ordinary table salt, but
giving forth a faint glow, only noticeable in the
dark, like the phosphorescence of decaying fish,
or the light of a glow-worm.
The behaviour of radium has excited world
wide interest and speculation, and has upset
most of the established laws governing matter.
It produces heat without combustion, spontane
ously creates electricity and throws off millions
of infinitely small sparks, atoms, or radiations,
either without wasting in the least degree, as
some say, or so insensibly as not to be measur
able. These emanations, subjected to extreme
cold, produce helium, a heavy gas of which
chemists think the sun is made. As in the
case of the " X rays," radium has been pressed
into the service of surgery and medicine, for the
cure or alleviation of cancer, lupus, and skin
diseases, in which its milder rays are made service
able ; but most readers of current literature are
familiar with the devastating results of handling
it without due precautions being taken : those
who did so without yet having ascertained its
deadly nature lying now the mutilated martyrs of
science. Radium burns produce painful sloughing
sores, often incurable, and gradually spreading
until joint after joint, and then limbs, have to be
amputated. It would seem, therefore, that science
might almost be said to have unloosed a devil

238 THE CORNISH COAST
upon the earth, were it not that its dangerous
properties appear now to be realised and guarded
against. For many years we have been familiar
with the expression, " electricity is life," and we
know well enough that it may also be death.
The same may now be said of radium, but in its
attenuated and dispersed forms it is curative,
and the healing waters of Bath, of Buxton, and
other places have since its discovery been found
to possess "radio-active " properties.
The pitchblende rights of the Trenwith mine
belong to the British Radium Corporation, which,
as most of its shares belong to the St. Ives Consols,
is practically the Consols company. Radium is
now being extracted here, and, the springs in the
levels being found to possess very marked " radio
active " qualities, it is proposed to establish a
spa and health-resort near by.
The last western district of Cornwall opens
out in stern and lonely grandeur as the hilly road
beyond St. Ives Consols reaches the summit of
this long rise. This is Penwith, a land where
the strivings of centuries towards cultivation
have left but little impress upon the stony waste.
The gaunt ribs of nature are too thinly covered
for the husbandman to find much profit in his
labour. Here and there, in some sheltered
hollow, in which there may be some little soil
spread over the granite, are a few farms ; but the
crested hills, each with its cairn of fantastically
piled rocks, hold only one kind of wealth : minerals.
Here are mines, abandoned but on the eve of re-

ZENNOR QUOIT 239
opening ; among them Great Rosewall on the hill
side to the left ; and on the way to Pendeen,
where the earth has been excavated for miles,
are more, but I do not believe this mining-field
has ever yet been fully exploited. The road — a
splendid highway for cycling and motoring, all
the way to St. Just — winds round the northern
side of Trevalgan Hill, and then, amid a profusion
of grey, lichened boulders and flaming gorse and
heather, makes for Zennor. But before hurrying
on to that village, let us seek Zennor Quoit.
Zennor Quoit, or Cromlech, lies not quite half
a mile to the left of the road, amid the furzy and
heathery boulder-strewn wastes that stretch for
miles southward. To find it, you turn out of the
high road opposite a country residence, with con
servatories, that nestles under a pile of rocks on
the right hand, and ascend a track amid heather
and bracken, strewn with giant boulders ; bearing
to the right of a ruined building (part of a mining
engine-house). The Quoit is then seen on the
sky-line. The Cromlech is the largest, not only in the
district, but in the kingdom. Unfortunately,
the " quoit," that is to say, the great covering
slab of granite, long ago lost the support of the
seven granite posts which held it up like a table,
and has slid down. It measures 18 ft. by 9 ft.
6 in., and must weigh many tons. By what means
the prehistoric people who raised this great tomb
to their chief managed to lift it cannot be con
jectured. The covering slab was in its place in

240 THE CORNISH COAST
the eighteenth century, when the earth that had
been heaped over the entire monument still
almost wholly covered it.
Amid the wild growths on this exposed heath
riots the plant called by the country folk after
the various unpleasant names, " Devil's saffron,"
" Devil's guts," and " Hellweed." It is true that
there are two pretty names for it, but they are
not often used. These are " Lady's laces " and
" Brides' laces." The plant made to masquerade
under so many names is the dodder (which is
perhaps almost as unpleasing a name as any of the
others), a leafless parasite, whose botanical name
is cuscuta. It is of a vigorous growth, of tough
elastic pink threads, and under conditions
favourable to itself is capable of strangling the
life out of plants of apparently more robust
type ; hence the ill-names conferred upon it.
The sea shines out yonder with that peculiar
mirror-like effect seen only in Cornwall. Against
those mysterious empty leagues of luminous
water the hills and clefts where the heath alter
nately heaves and sinks to the cliff' s-edge show
darkly. Gigantic boulders are everywhere, scat
tered in the wildest confusion. Looking seaward
from the Quoit, a hill silhouetted against sea and
sky is heaped with them ; fantastically shaped
rocks in the likeness of anvils, giant loathly
toads the size of houses, and things of vaguely
inimical outline. The untamed wilderness would
frighten a child, and it impresses even a
modern man, accustomed to reducing everything

ZENNOR QUOIT 241
to commonplace ; how greatly then must it
have influenced those untutored people who,
before the historic period, buried their chiefs
in the wild. When knowledge had only begun,
when the sequence of the seasons was thought
to be at the mercy of easily offended spirits, and
when it was considered a quite likely thing that the
sun, whose warmth had gradually died away with
the coming of winter, might never return in his

ZENNOR QUOIT.

old heat and strength, unless the proper magical
means were found to bring him back, then the
wild heaths of West Cornwall must have been
the scenes of strange rites. We who know that
beyond the lane of glittering light cast by the
setting sun on the water out yonder lies America,
thousands of miles away, are still impressed with
a sense of loneliness as we look upon it. That
is because we are descended from those people
of an immense past and have still, somewhere
within our modern mental equipment, a sense of
the awe and wonder which possessed their souls
31

242 THE CORNISH COAST
and led them, with some hidden symbolism, to
place the tombs of their great men, here and at
Chun within sight of the great mysterious water,
across whose emptiness their spirits had voyaged
into the Unknown.
Half a century ago, when Robert Hunt was
collecting information for his work on Cornish
folk-lore, a well-known character of Zennor,
Stevens, the local postman-poet, told him how
when new to Zennor, and first noticing the Quoit,
he enquired of a group assembled round the
village smithy whether any one could tell him
aught about the heap of stones on the hill-top.
Several had " niwer haard on 'en," but another
said, " Tes caal'd the gient's kite ; tha's arl I
knaw." At last, one more thoughtful, and one
who, I found out, was considered the wiseacre and
oracle of the village, looked up and gave me this
important piece of information : " Them ere
rocks were put there afore you or me was boern or
thoft on ; but who don et is a puzler to everybody
in Sunnur. I de bleve theze put up theer wen thes
ere wurld wus maade ; but wether they wus or no
don't very much mattur by hai accounts. Thes, I
know, that nobody caant take an' car 'em awaa ; ef
anybody was too, they'd be brot theer agin. Iss,
an' ef they wus tyked awaa wone nite, theys shur
to be hai rite up top o' th' hill fust thing in morenin.
But I caant tell 'ee s' much as Passon can ; ef
ye'd zee 'e, 'e'd tell 'ee hall about et."
Education since the time when the foregoing
conversation took place has made any repetition

ZENNOR 243
of that quaint talk unlikely, but if their speech is
not nowadays so uncouth down to Zennor church-
town, certainly their knowledge of the age and the
history of Zennor Quoit has not advanced, and
the nearest one can get to an opinion is that " 'tes
wunnerval auld : a many gentlemen comes to
see et, an' some thinks this an' some that. Lor'
bless ye, I've sin vivty or moor on 'em up theer
to once ; larned men, some on 'em, but I don'
knaw ; we've got plenty auld stones yur."
And so they have, for as you come down hill
into Zennor churchtown — that is to say, Zennor
village — and see the usual grey church tower
standing up boldly from the hollow, starkly
outlined against a world of waters and a horizon
half way up the sky, it is an amazing scatter of
boulderous disorder you see down in the little
plain surrounding the church and the few houses.
A large proportion of the great weathered knobs of
granite from the surrounding earns seem at some
distant period to have rolled down to the spot
where Zennor stands, and to have in after-ages
been left there from the sheer impossibility of
moving such ponderous masses without engineerng
aid. Grey and lichen-stained, they lie half em
bedded in the grass of the little common, through
which runs the road ; astonishing to a stranger,
Zennor has a curious reputation, derived from
these rocky circumstances. To all the villages
in the neighbourhood it is known as " the place
where the cow ate the bell-rope," because there
was no grass ; but Zennor does not allow this to be

244

THE CORNISH COAST

a true bill, and passes on the indictment to Morvah,
the next village westward. And when the traveller
proceeds to Morvah and thence arrives at Pendeen,
fie will probably feel inclined to fix the onus upon
Pendeen. But of that presently.
I have seen a cow — not cows— feeding at
Zennor, not on bell-ropes, but on the perhaps
scanty grass, and so things may have progressed
since that old reproach was new.
There are only two other places in England

f^ H«VTB

ZENNOR.

whose names begin with Z except the hamlet
of Zelah, near Mitchell ; Zeal Monachorum, in
Devonshire, and Zeals, Wiltshire. Nor should
that of Zennor begin with any other letter than
S, for the church-dedication, whence, as usual
in Cornwall, comes the place-name, is said to be
to one St. Senar, or Sinara, a virgin saint, of
whom nothing is known. West-country pro
nunciation has done the rest : just as Somerset
becomes " Zummerzet " in that county, so has
the softer sound of " Senar " or " Senan " changed
to the hard and uncompromising " Zennor."

ZENNOR 245
A modern historian of Zennor exhibits a
complete satisfaction at the restoration of the
church that does not find a response in the minds
of those who turn aside to visit it. He tells us
that it was " the last in the district to be re
novated " ; and renovated in the full sense of
the term it has been. The old carved seats, he
says, had all, with one exception, disappeared,
and had been replaced by family boxes. Two
old bench-ends remained. The " family boxes,"
that is to say, tall pews, have been removed,
and cheap, open seats put in their place. The
interior of Zennor church is thus up-to-date ;
and what a fine and desirable thing that is in a
wild and unconventional country !
A sad tale of an infatuated young man belongs
to Zennor. It is a tale of the folk-lore order, so
let. us hope it is not true. In the choir, it seems,
at some unspecified period, sang the squire's
son, and he sang so beautifully — probably he
was only a throaty tenor, but no matter — that
one of the mermaids who notoriously abounded
off Zennor Cove fell in love with him. And she
enticed him to the seashore, and thence into the
sea, and he was nevermore seen. To put this
lamentable incident on record for ever, the
wood-carvers, who in the fifteenth century filled
the. church with decorative bench-ends, in the
manner of that age, carved one of them with a
representation of the mermaid ; and it is precisely
one of the two that have survived. Looking
upon it, we see the conventional siren. In one

246

THE CORNISH COAST

hand she holds her mirror, and in the other a
comb large enough for a curry-comb. Her scaly
tail, you think, might of itself have frightened the
young man, but perhaps the transcendent beauty
of her face overcame that. Unfortunately, her
good looks is a subject on which we have no
information, for the features as shown on the
carving have been unkindly
obliterated, perhaps in the
interests of any other im-
pressionables of Zennor,
who might, taking the
lovely creature as a sample,
lose their heads and meet
a similar watery fate, down
among the dead men. Cer
tainly, time and wanton
damage have between them
spoiled any beauty she may
have displayed here ; but,
looking upon the uncouth
thing, one is strongly of
opinion that the intentions
of those old craftsmen were far in advance of their
execution, and that the figure could never have
been a good advertisement for mermaids.
' The Glory of the world Paseth," says a
sundial on the south wall of the church, made,
as the inscription tells us, by Paul Quick in 1737 ;
and the golden afternoon wanes ; so with a
glimpse of Pendour Cove, let us make for Gurnard's
Head, passing the head of Porthglaze Cove and

THE MERMAID OF ZENNOR.

GURNARD'S HEAD

247

so across a ridge and up a farm-track to where
Gurnard's Head is suddenly displayed : a rocky
mass jutting boldly to sea, connected with the
mainland by a grassy isthmus. Its olden name,
"Trereen Dinas," is exactly similar to that of
the headland on the south coast where the Logan
Rock is situated and the two places strikingly

GURNARD'S HEAD.
resemble one another. The cove on the eastern
side of Gurnard's Head, with the coastguard
station, is Roseanhale.
Here the sailing-vessel, Alexander Yeats, was
wrecked, September 20th, 1896. She was home
ward-bound from Darien with a cargo of pitch-
pine, and was in tow of a steam-tug. The hawser
parted in a gale, and the vessel drifted helplessly

248 THE CORNISH COAST
inshore under the eastern side. The Hayle and
St. Ives lifeboats both started for the scene,
but the first was obliged to return. The crew of
nineteen were saved, but the ship became a total
loss. Many people visit Gurnard's Head from Pen
zance and St. Ives, good roads leading from either
place, but few ever explore the many prehistoric
remains in this district. They take a great deal
more patience and determination in the finding,
being all in more or less wild and lonely situations.
Thus, in the rough moorland within three miles
of the cross-roads, leading to Gurnard's Head,
St. Ives, Penzance, and St. Just, there are no
fewer than seven interesting objects of the first
importance : the bee-hive huts at Bosporthennis,
Mulfra Cromlech, the Men Scryfa, the Men-an-Tol,
Lanyon Cromlech, Chun Castle, and Chun Crom
lech. Some of them are spectacular objects,
some not ; but all take a powerful deal of walking
and questing for, even though they are all situated
within such comparatively narrow geographical
limits. The Bosporthennis huts are the easiest to
find, simply because they stand just beyond the
farm-place of Bosporthennis, on the right hand
of the road from Gurnard's Head to Penzance,
and because, although you cannot see where
they lie, the way may be ascertained from the
people of the farm. There they stand, a quarter
of a mile away, in the corner of a ragged meadow,
in a tangle of blackberry brambles. There are

BOSPORTHENNIS 249
two of these ancient dwellings, of a later type
than the original beehive hut, consisting of the
original circular structure with a square chamber
added. The description " beehive " alludes to
the construction of the circular portion, where
each successive course of unmortared stones
slightly overlaps the lower, thus bringing the
opening at the top to such small proportions that
it could readily be closed with one slab. A
larger collection of such huts, but in less perfect
condition, is found at Chysauster, further on
the road to Penzance. The name means " the
heaped-up houses." No one has yet definitely
decided the age of these dwellings, which may,
indeed, belong to a very wide period, extending
from before the Romans to the Romano-British
period. The improvement of the original beehive
type seems to indicate a long occupation.
The farm-people at Bosporthennis cherish a
continual mild astonishment at the interest shown
by strangers in these relics. " Just auld stones,"
they say ; and add that " we can build better
now " : a proposition evident enough. But the
practical business of farming does not make for
sympathy with archaeology.
Mulfra Quoit, the next on the list of these
mystic relics, is best reached by returning to the
road and making for Mulfra Hill, on which it
stands. Moel, or Moelfre, is a Celtic word,
common in Wales, meaning a hill. The " Quoit "
strikingly resembles that of Zennor, in its fallen
position. 32

25o THE CORNISH COAST
The desolate, yet in its way beautiful, country
can be seen for many miles from this height of
Mulfra. There the dark moors stretch away, with
the engine-house of the deserted Ding-Dong mine,
said by some to be the most ancient in Cornwall,
the only sign of man's activities. And yet,
unknown years ago, these wilds must have been
populated by a hardy race. " But, Lord," as
Pepys might say, " knows who they were." Per
haps the astrologers and medicine-men of those
times had their observatories here, among the
tombs of the chieftains who were laid beneath
the cromlechs of Zennor, Mulfra, Lanyon, and
Chun ; for certainly the Men-an-Tol, across the
downs, is an astronomical or astrological instru
ment. We come to it by grassy tracks, first
passing the Men Scryfa, or " Written Stone,"
a rough granite pillar, nine feet ten inches in
height, capped with moss, and inscribed :
RIALoBRAN
CVNoVAL FIL
It seems clear enough that Rialobran, son of
Cunovalus, was a Romanised Briton, but it is
not so clear, as sometimes thought, that this
Cunovalus is identical with the British king
known in Shakespeare as Cymbeline.
The Men-an-Tol, that is to say, the stone with
a hole in it, lies close to the Men Scryfa, in a
south-westerly direction. This curious monument .
consists of three stones set in line. The central
stone, which gives the name to the group, is

MEN-AN-TOL 251
four feet in diameter and one foot thick, and the
hole that has been neatly made in it is one foot
three inches in diameter. Legends have, of
course, clustered around it. One of the most
popular stories about the " Crick Stone," as it
is locally known, is that, if a person with a crick
in the back crawls nine times through the hole,
and then sleeps with a sixpence under his pillow,
he will be straightway cured. But the effort of
performing this feat would initially be almost
impossible for any one so afflicted, and he would
need to be a person of an elegant thinness to
crawl through that hole. It was also thought a
sure cure for rickets in children, to pass them
through the hole ; and spinal diseases and scrofula
were supposed to be cured by the same agency.
But these were all superstitious accretions upon
the original purpose of the Men-an-Tol, which,
according to the latest scientific observations of
Sir Norman Lockyer, was astronomical. The
upright stones at either side are sighting stones
for observing the sunrise in May and August,
and in the opposite direction the sunset in
February and November.
To reach Chun Castle, the direction is still
south-west, and across the Penzance and Morvah
road. The walking is rough, but the uncertainty
of the way may be lessened by instructions to
make for the biggest of the carn-crested hills
'in front. That is Chun Castle, and the castle
amid the haggard rocks on the summit is a pre
historic hill-fort, rather than a mediaeval building.

252 THE CORNISH COAST
It is a grey vastness of heaped-up, unmortared
walls, three rings of walls within the mighty
ceinture of a forty-foot dry ditch ; the greatest
length of the circle thus enclosed, 145 feet. Con
fused ruins of subdividing walls and the remains
of a well are seen within. Chun Cromlech stands
below, on the western side. It is still perfect,
the capstone remaining in its original position.
Lanyon Cromlech lies away back to the east
again, in a field close to Lanyon farmhouse,
which stands beside the Penzance and Morvah
road. It is a fine spectacular object, the cap
stone, eighteen and a half feet in length, resting
on three rough pillars. It fell in 1815, and was
replaced in 1824 with the hoisting machinery used
by Lieutenant Goldsmith in replacing the Logan
Rock in its original position. Unfortunately,
not only was a portion of the capstone broken
in the fall, but the pillars were cut down, so
that the clearance from the ground is now only
five feet and a half. When Borlase wrote of
Lanyon Cromlech, the height permitted a man
on horseback to ride under it.

CHAPTER XIV
BOSIGRAN — MORVAH — PENDEEN — CARN KENID
ZHEK AND THE GUMP — THE LEVANT MINE—
BOTALLACK — WHEAL OWLES
Returning to Gurnard's Head, and continuing
the coast-walk from the Gurnard's Head Hotel,
that stands a little woebegone in these stark
latitudes, the head of Porthmear Cove is reached ;
a deep, secluded inlet, where he who would explore
must have a steady eye, sure feet, and some
endurance too, for descending and scaling the
rocky walls. A stream dashes down to the
sea, and completes a rarely beautiful scene
Across the next headland Bosigran Castle looms
grandly up ; one of the innumerable " cliff-castle "
headlands. Here the going is, if possible, worse,
and the scenery more grand. To search for the
Logan Stone on this pile of rocks is to endure
much, and when you have found it the thing
won't log to any appreciable extent.
There is a very welcome wayside house, half
farmhouse, half inn, beside the high road, half
a mile inland from this place, and taking its
name from it, the " Bosigran Castle." It has a
fine lawn, open to the road in front : a remarkable
253

254 THE CORNISH COAST
feature in this untamed country. Here the
weary traveller may well rest a night before
attacking the fine cliff scenery between this
point and Morvah. The distance is but two miles,
but the obstacles, in the way of deep valleys and
little porths, cleft sharply in the granite, entail
much climbing, and the scenery is too grand to
be hurried over. Porth Moina, i.e. Monks' Porth,
is the next to Bosigran, and then follow others
that appear by the maps to have no names. One
rocky ledge I remember, amidst granite pinnacles
that rise sharply from the sea, where a thin
stream of water comes spouting over the blackened
rocks and falls into the immensity of the ocean,
reminding one, somehow, of that striking passage
in the " Light of Asia " :
"... the sunrise comes,
The shining dewdrop falls into the sea."
Beyond Morvah, past the stony hamlets of
Higher Bojewyan, i.e. Jews' Home, and Bojewyan
Stennack, the road sweeps round inland to St.
Just-in-Penwith, but the coast juts out boldly
to Pendeen Watch, with Pendeen Cove under
its lee, where a few fishing-boats are sheltered.
A lighthouse now flashes a warning ray — four
flashes and an interval — from this point, and
so the reef known as the Three Stone Oar, half a
mile out to sea, has now lost some of its ancient
terrors. At Pendeen the old manor-house still
remains, now a farmhouse, where Dr. William
Borlase was born in 1695. At the back of it

PENDEEN 255
opens the artificial cave called Pendeen Vau, of
which he afterwards wrote learnedly. Pendeen
church overlooks the district from the mining
village inland : an ugly, soul-depressing building,
purporting to be a copy of St. Iona's cathedral,
but resembling its original so remotely that the
likeness is not easily seen. It was designed by
Robert Aitken, a man of curiously individual
character, who left the Church of England for
independent preaching, and then reverted to
the Establishment. Curate of Perranuthnoe from
1842 to 1844, he was afterwards vicar of this
then newly constituted parish of Pendeen, and
died m 1873.
The church is of his own design, and the
miners of Pendeen worked the granite and
helped with the building, for love of him
and admiration of his preaching ; which seems
to prove him a better preacher than architect.
It is enclosed within its churchyard by a wall
and a massive frowning gateway, and creates
the suspicion that some bygone government,
proposing to build a convict prison here, had
started with the chapel and then abandoned the
project. But the Pendeeners are very proud of
it. To be sure, they have little else of which
they can legitimately be proud here, for in every
direction the eye glances over a mining-field that
has been exploited with thoroughgoing diligence,
and is now declining. The land, parcelled into
fields and closes by rough stone walls, themselves
mostly ruinous, was never good, and is now heaped

256 THE CORNISH COAST
everywhere with the most hopeless rubbish ;
while up on the moors lowers the " whisht " district
known as " the Gump," with the cresting rocks
of Cam Kenidjack above. The miners have
never explored the Gump and Cam Kenidjack
for minerals, perhaps because they suppose none
are to be found there, but more probably because
of the superstitious awe they still have of the
place. Kenidjack, or Kenidzhek, is the Place of
Howling. It is the wind that howls up there,
amid the queerly shaped rocks, but these imagina
tive people have thought it that and more. Like
Tennyson, who exclaimed, when a boy of five,
" I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind,"
they have heard voices, and they knew (I
don't think they know it so certainly now) that
the Devil hunts lost souls up there o' nights.
The howling proceeds from them, pursued by
fiends riding the ancient decrepit horses that
are seen in these fields by day, and are made by
those fearful riders to perform super-equine deeds
when the midnight hour has come. Robert
Hunt well describes the place : " Hoary stones,
bleached by the sunshine of ages, are reared in
fantastic confusion. The spirits of the Celts,
possibly the spirits of a yet older people, dwell
amidst these rocks. Within the shadow of this
hill are mounds and barrows, and mystic circles,
and holed stones, and rude altars, still telling of
the past. The dead hold undisputed possession
of all around ; no ploughshare has dared to invade

LEVANT MINE 257
this sacred spot, and every effort made by modern
man to mark his sway is indicated by its ruin.
Nothing but what the Briton planted remains, and
if tales tell true, it is probable long years must
pass before the Englishman can banish the Celtic
powers who here hold sovereign sway."
Down by the seashore, all these romantic
imaginings give place to mining squalor, inter
rupted only by the less squalid activities of the
great Levant Mine : less squalid because they
still are active.
On the way from the Levant mine the cliffs
again present the same aspect of that worst form of
desolation, the end of a once prosperous industry.
Not one square inch of ground remains as nature
left it, but the rock has been heaped up and
scooped out and flung hither and thither in a very
abandonment of ruin. The " deads," or worthless
refuse of the pits, are furthermore mingled with
the shattered slates and scattered stones of
demolished engine-houses, as though the miners,
enraged at nature affording them no more metal,
had wantonly laid everything waste. The scene
curiously resembles the site of a great clearance
of houses in London. It has all the squalor of
hopeless disorder, accentuated by the acute con
trast with the clear air and the wonderful expanse
of sea and sky. The scene is, in fact, so at variance
with the romantic Land's End district, that it is
almost an indecency, like a handful of mud
thrown upon the Venus of Milo.
Here we come upon the site of old Botallack 33

258

THE CORNISH COAST

mine. Looking down over the dizzy cliffs' edge,
the roofless old engine-houses on the islanded
Crown rocks are seen, with the sea washing down
below. Botallack produced tin and copper, and
was for many years the " show " mine of Cornwall.
For nearly two centuries it had been producing
wealth, and was gradually pushed further out

BOTALLACK TO-DAY.

under the sea ; in that time earning a wonderful
and well-deserved reputation for picturesqueness.
The seventy-fathom level was driven out more
than four hundred feet from shore, and in that
gallery the miners could in time of storm hear
the waves and stones rumbling overhead. The
Boscawen shaft, an inclined plane, was begun in
1858, to strike a rich lode of copper, and at last
reached a depth of nearly half-a-mile. The maze

BOTALLACK 259
of perilous-looking wooden ladders and platforms
descending the face of the dark slate and horn
blende cliffs, exposed to the roughest weather,
never failed to attract the curiosity of visitors and
the pencils of artists, and there are still not a few
who, having heard of these marvels, proceed to
Botallack, to view them with their own eyes.
But all those hazardous holds are now gone, and
all that remains are the deserted engine-houses
down there, two hundred feet below.
Instead of these thrilling sights the stranger
will find, on the verge of the cliffs, a very new and
very large and commonplace red-brick engine-
house, of a type quite new to Cornwall ; resem
bling that of an electric generating station. It is
the most prominent evidence here of the recent
revival of Cornwall's chief industry, and is indeed
the electrically installed engine-house of the new
Botallack company.
For Botallack is again in work, after nearly
fourteen years of ruin and desolation. The en
hanced price of metals has largely contributed
to the beginning of this new enterprise, but a
newer and more scientific order of things has
had also a good deal to say to it. The engine-
house buzzes with electricity, and is filled with
the most costly and up-to-date plant, distributing
power very widely. The new company, with
a capital of £150,, 000 was formed in November
1906, and began crushing ore with twenty stamps
in June 1908.
Mining accidents, as already remarked on an

260 THE CORNISH COAST
earlier page, are not common in Cornwall, and the
memory of the dreadful disaster that happened
on January ioth, 1893, at Wheal Owles, just
outside St. Just, will therefore, if for that reason
alone, not soon or easily be forgotten. Wheal
Owles was a tin-mine on the face of these cliffs,
south of Botallack, and was at the date of the
accident the only portion still in work of a large
mine of that name, whose old workings extend a
considerable distance inland, as far as the road
itself into St. Just churchtown. The sole remain
ing shaft was approached by a climb down the face
of the cliff, and some of the levels extended beneath
the sea. Between seven and eight o'clock on that
fatal morning forty-one miners descended to their
work, some proceeding to the 55-fathom level,
some to the 65 fathom and some to the 125 fathom.
It was in the 65 level that the accident is believed
to have happened. It had long been known that
the levels were surrounded by huge bodies of
water, collected in the deserted works of Wheal
Drea and in the abandoned portions of Wheal
Owles itself, yet no danger seems to have been
anticipated, and boring and blasting were in
progress when the rocky walls suddenly fell in,
and a deluge of water came pouring through.
All but two of those at work in the level were
drowned, and they happened to be close to the
shaft. In the next lower level, the 75 fathom,
only one man escaped, and he had been tramming
ore to the shaft. He was flung violently up the
ladder by the tremendous rush of air forced along

BOTALLACK AS IT WAS.

KENIDJACK CASTLE 261
as the water filled the lower workings, extinguish
ing every light. Twenty-one were saved, and
twenty were drowned. Ninety-five fathoms of
water collected in the mine. It was found im
possible to drain it and the shaft was closed ; and
thus to this day the bodies of those twenty victims
remain in that cimmerian lake, five hundred feet
down there.
Kenidjack Castle is the name of the rugged
headland on the cliffs close by the scene of the
Wheal Owles disaster. Mine works, tumuli, and
the remains of a stone circle dispute possession of
the place. Southward, across the sandy Porth-
leden Cove, where a heavy surf thunders in the
westerly breeze like the distant booming of great
guns, rises Cape Cornwall, next to Pendennis,
near Falmouth, the largest of those singular head
lands common on these coasts, of which the
Gurnard's Head, and Trereen Dinas, near Porth-
curno, are the next most prominent examples.
All exhibit the feature of a promontory, with a
large, craggy, elevated head, approached by a low,
narrow and much less rugged neck ; generally
found to have been trenched across at its
narrowest part by the prehistoric peoples of this
land, thus converting the headlands into what
have been picturesquely called " cliff castles."
At present, however, instead of proceeding
to Cape Cornwall, I shall track along inland, up
the valley of a little stream, to the high-road at
the hamlet of Nancherrow, where, scaling a rise,
the road comes into St. Just churchtown.

CHAPTER XV
ST. JUST-IN-PENWITH — CAPE CORNWALL — WHITE-
SAND BAY — SENNEN COVE — LAND'S END
St. Just-in-penwith, so called to distinguish it
from St. Just-in-Roseland, near Falmouth, is a
dreary town that has seen better days ; better
days commercially, not architecturally speaking,
for it was in the times when mining was most
successful that the smug, common-place inns,
banks, shops, and private residences of the place
were built, without a trace of beauty or interest.
Every building is a plain matter-of-fact square or
oblong box, with a lid, and they all face arid,
expressionless streets, in which nothing is to be
found save sportive winds and dust : the two in
alliance forming miniature desert sandstorms.
Imagine the dullest, smallest provincial town of
your acquaintance, and further imagine it to be
the afternoon of an early-closing day, and there,
in brief, you have what the local people (being
usually unable in these parts to pronounce the
letter " j " or " g " without considerable difficulty)
call "St. Toost," or "St. Oost." From this
circumstance antiquaries, not always conversant
with this linguistic disability have been led to
?6?

ST. JUST 263
suppose the real dedicaton of the church— and
consequently therefore the name of the town—
to be St. Eustatius, in Cornish " Usticke " ; or
perhaps the Welsh St. Ust. There are twenty-
three St. Justs in the Roman calendar of saints ;
and it has been held that the St. Just here indi
cated is one of these, Justus, fellow-missioner with
St. Augustine to England in a.d. 596, afterwards

IffflK "f

A^A^AiAgssMgmSMm

ST. JUST CHURCH.

Bishop of Rochester, and Archbishop of Canter
bury in a.d. 616. But the ancient Cornish
legend of St. Just discloses him as a quarrelsome
fellow, contemporary with St. Senan, whose cell
was where Sennen is now, four miles south-west
in a straight line, and tells how the two angrily
flung boulders at one another, over that space.
It is quite certain that Justus would not have
done that, even supposing he could ; and the

264 THE CORNISH COAST
legend therefore points to one of the fifth-century
Irish saints sent over by St. Patrick to instruct
the Cornish in religion and manners.
St. Just church makes many amends for the
stark and stricken character of the town. It is
a fine early sixteenth-century example of Per
pendicular, with excellent south porch and tall
western pinnacled tower, diminishing markedly
by stages in what architects term awkwardly
a " batter." Whether the object of the designers
was to increase the apparent height, or whether
it was done to in some way neutralise the effect
of the winds upon a tower in this exposed district
does not appear.
The nave and aisles are long and low, the
piers to the springing of the nave-arcades
measuring only about seven feet, although their
graceful clustered shafts make them appear really
much taller. The walls, especially on the north
side, are constructed largely of enormous granite
boulders selected from the surrounding moors,
and unworked by the mason's tools. The interior
as well as the exterior now well discloses them,
the internal plaster having been stripped off at
the restoration of some thirty or forty years
ago : a restoration by Piers St. Aubyn, which
otherwise wrought frightful havoc with the in
terior. St. Aubyn, an arch-restorer in Cornwall
at that period, and perpetrator of many enormities,
found an ancient cross-shaft of the fifth or sixth
century, which had been built partly across the
arch of a window in the north aisle by the sixteenth-

ST. JUST

265

century men who rebuilt the church. Although
it bears finely interlaced patterns, he mutilated
it by cutting the projecting part away, so that it
should not interfere with the symmetry of the
window. At the same time the characteristic
old Cornish waggon-roof, carved in oak, was

A h^p^

INTERIOR, ST. JUST CHURCH.

torn down and replaced by the abomination of
pitch-pine. The wreathed sculpture of the pillar capitals
is very varied and exceptionally fine, by reason of
most of the pillars and their capitals being of
the more easily worked Beer stone, instead of the
stubborn granite. The tracery of the east win-
34

266

THE CORNISH COAST

dows of the north and south aisles is exquisitely
flowing. Better even than Flamboyant, although
somewhat partaking of that nature, it seems
almost to branch like some living plant. The
stops to the hood-mould of the south of these
two windows are very well worth notice. They
appear to stand for the initial J for Jesus, with
five pellets representng the five wounds of the
Saviour ; and the letter M for Mary, with seven

LABEL-STOP, ST. JUST.

pellets representing the seven dolours of the
Virgin. A sixth -century inscribed stone, now
placed at the west end of the north aisle, is one
of the four discovered in Cornwall bearing the
early Christian Chi-Rho device. Two others are
at Phillack and Southill, near Callington. This
example is apparently the tombstone of one
Selus, or Senilus, bearing the words " Selus ic
jacit," with the letters " ni " inserted above,
as though the untutored carver had originally
omitted them.

ST. JUST

267

The remaining example was a small cross,
brought about 1836 from a ruined chapel to St.
Helen, at Parc-an-Chapel, on Cape Cornwall. It
has long since disappeared, and is thought to
have been flung down a well with one other
cross by the Rev. G. C. Gorham, then vicar ;
the Gorham of the famous " Gorham Case."
He conceived a dislike to them, as savouring of
Roman Catholicism, and thus, with some con-

LABEL-STOP, ST. JUST.

siderable ceremony in the doing of it, disposed
of their hated presence. One has been recovered
since, but the relic from the chapel is still missing.
Even in dull St. Just, apart from its interesting
church, there is something of note, for hard by
the " Commercial Inn " are the remains of the
ancient amphitheatre in which the old Cornish
miracle-plays were acted. They are not very
striking remains, these low banks and enclosing
circle of the " plan-an-guare," literally the " place
for play," for time has worn them down ; but

268 THE CORNISH COAST
they serve to keep in mind those times when
many towns and villages in Cornwall had the
like. The Cornish in olden times seem to have
possessed the dramatic instinct very strongly
combined with religion, and heartily supported
religious dramas, of which the "Seven Champions
of Christendom," "The Origin of the World,"
and the moving tragedy of "St. George and the
Dragon " appear to have been public favourites.
The people patronised these displays in a way

£4

T

mr—~

IvJciA&T

THE SENILUS STONE, ST. JUST.

comparable only with the crowds that assemble
nowadays to watch cricket and football matches ;
and when the old miracle-plays ceased, and
religion declined, the " plans-an-guary " in Corn
wall became the scenes of wrestling, boxing,
hurling, and a variety of pagan displays that
remained popular until John Wesley — another
and a better Augustine — came in the eighteenth
century, and effected a sudden and complete
conversion. A considerable literature survives
of the old Cornish drama, by which it would
appear that some of the pieces lasted three days,
and that the audience camped upon the spot

CAPE CORNWALL 269
until the piece, however long, was concluded.
The scene of all these things is now overlooked
by mean cottages, and forms something in the
nature of a children's playground.
A mile and a half due westward of St. Just,
Cape Cornwall projects boldly into the Atlantic,
rising gradually from a meadow neck of land,
over a boulder-strewn down, to a considerable
height, whence you look down upon some more
deserted mine- works, and out to where " the
Brisons," or " the Sisters," two ugly, jagged
black island rocks, stand ringed about with foam.
They are three-quarters of a mile off-shore, but
the clearness of the Cornish air is such that they
appear to be only one-third that distance. No
vessel has any business so close inshore as the
Brisons, but fogs and gales, sometimes in com
bination along these terrible coasts, defy all
charts and reckonings, and thus those rocks
have been the scene of shipwrecks, none more
dramatic than that of the brig New Commercial,
January nth, 1851, when the ship struck and
immediately went to pieces. Eight out of ten
on board were drowned.
A frugal industry is carried on, temporarily
it may be supposed, between the summit of
Cape Cornwall and Porthleden Cove. It seems
that observant persons, noticing traces of tin in
the sands of the cove, have established wire cables
on the cliff-top which lead down to the shore,
and along these cables are sent up buckets of
sand, to be treated for the tin, which, it is thought,

270 THE CORNISH COAST
derives from the refuse rock thrown for many
years into the sea from Botallack.
Many years ago, walking round Cape Cornwall,
I met an old, old man who held me with his
glittering eye, as did the Ancient Mariner the
Wedding Guest. But he told no tale of an
albatross, nor of weird experiences afloat. He
said that Cape Cornwall was England's only
cape, and moreover declared that it was the
true Land's End, and really projected further
westward than the so-called " Land's End," four
miles southward of this spot. And, having
imparted these two items of information, he
went his way, having raised doubts as to the
credibility of surveyors and cartographers in
general, which have not been lessened in late
years by the discovery that several mountains
in various parts of the earth, on being re-surveyed,
have had their altitudes very considerably revised.
It is a horrid thought that, after all these un
counted years, in which millions of people have
flocked to the spot they have fondly believed to
be Land's End, every one may have been wrong,
and that, Cape Cornwall, which few people visit,
is the real farthest point. But the thought is
not without some compensation. A spot called
" Land's End " should certainly have more in
the way of tremendous climax and finality about
it than Land's End possesses ; and Cape Cornwall
is scenically much finer.
It is about five miles by the cliffs from Cape
Cornwall to Land's End, chiefly by coastguard-

/ I/O
I Ui  J)1:')

mmm

m

of/ in 1 11

SENNEN COVE 273
paths along low cliffs, and along the white sands
of Whitesand Bay to Sennen Cove. The un
pretending little nook southward of Cape Cornwall
is Carrickgloose, i.e. " Hoar Rock," Cove. Then
follow Porthnanven, with a little stream running
down from Nanjulian, Pol Pry = the Clay Pool,
Aire Point, Cam Creagle, the " Crying Cam,"
probably a look-out place for the huers of pil
chards, and Cam Olva, in the middle of Whitesand
Bay. Here, in a hollow called Vellandraeth, i.e.
" the mill in the sand," where a stream comes
trickling to the shore, the remains of ancient
tin stream-works were found many years ago,
together with the horns and skeleton of a deer
and some oak branches, thirty feet deep. Borlase,
writing in the eighteenth century, gives several
other names on the way to Land's End.
Whitesand Bay fronts sheer upon the Atlantic,
but is in some small degree sheltered between
the projecting points, north and south, of Cape
Cornwall and Land's End. Hence perhaps the
comparative calm of the waves that roll in upon
those white sands, and hence the repeated landings
here, of which history tells us : of Athelstan in
the tenth century, returning from subduing Scilly ;
of Stephen in 1135 ; King John, coming home
from Ireland ; Perkin Warbeck, in 1497.
It is a comparative calm only, and winter
tells a very different tale in Whitesand Bay and
Sennen Cove. Here the only lifeboat along the
coast in all the forty dangerous miles between St.
Ives and Penzance is stationed, and until the
35

274 THE CORNISH COAST
recent building of the breakwater here it was
often impossible to launch it. Hence the un
deserved reproach against the men of Sennen
Cove when they failed to go out to a wreck in
1890. Sennen Cove, sheltered under the low cliffs
at the southern extremity of this wide bay, comes
as a surprise, for it is not only a fisher village,
but nowadays something also of an artist colony ;
and a comfortable artistic home or so have been
built above the beach, and not often an Academy
exhibition. passes without a canvas or two painted
here. You may hear a good deal of the Sennen
Cove people in Penzance or St. Just, where they
still keep the reputation of being " a rough lot."
They live in a rough place, but the place and its
inhabitants have been a little polished in the
last few years ; and although it is still said of
them, with something of awe, " they do sweer,"
I confess to never having heard a single d — n.
But there is yet a certain isolation about the
folk of Sennen Cove that does not perhaps com
mend itself to other neighbourhoods. It is not
often visited, for the larger proportion of visitors
to Land's End just drive, or walk, or cycle from
Penzance and back, and give neither time nor
energy to this part of the coast. Under those
circumstances these hardy fisherfolk take on
something of the hard, stern character of the
seas and rocks that surround them. They are
sufficient to themselves, and this population of
some three hundred is perhaps the most self-

LAND'S END 275
contained to be found in England. Occasionally
their boats, with the distinguishing " S.C.," are
to be found in Penzance harbour, with catches of
mackerel, hake, or pilchards, but a large pro
portion of their fish is consumed in the Cove
itself, or in neighbouring St. Just.
The last mile to Land's End is on an ascending
scale of rugged beauty. Leaving the Cove behind,
the headland of Pednmaen-du, i.e. the " Black
stone headland," is reached, with a land- and
seascape unrivalled in its way, unfolded. A
mile and a quarter out to sea rises the Longships
lighthouse, with the Shark's Fin rocks half hidden
between it and the shore, and a family of reefs
close at hand, curiously named Little Bo, Bo
Cowloe, and Cowloe. The slate rocks here give
place to the granite. Maen Castle is passed, a
small example of the many prehistoric cliff-
defences, with the " Irish Lady " rock standing
boldly out of the sea and looking as little like a
lady, Irish or other, as could be imagined. If
the " dark Rosaleens " of Erin resembled that,
I should be sorry.
And then, rounding the rocky cliffs of Gamper
Bay, the stacked headland of Land's End comes
into view.

INDEX

Aire Point, 273
" A Pair of Blue Eyes," 82
Arsenic, 200
Arthur, King, 98, 102-4, 107,
1.13-18, 162
Barras Nose, 109
Basset family, of Tehidy, 191,
203, 232
Beacon Cove, 152
Bedruthan Steps, 143-50
"Beeny Sisters," 82
Blackapit, 95, 101
Black Rock, 71, 72
Bo Cowloe, 275
Bojewyan Stennack, 254
Bonython family, The, 161
Borlase, Dr. William, 252, 254,
273
Boscastle, 72, 83-97
Bosigran, 253
Bosporthennis, Beehive huts
at, 248
Bossiney, 97, 105-7
 Hawn, 105
Botallack Mine, 257-9
Brea Hill, 131
Brisons, The, 269
Bude, 18, 19, 34, 62-70
Butter Hole, 139
Cadon Barrow, ioi
Cambeak, 81
Camborne, 190, 191, 193, 204
Camel, River, 99, 130, 132, 133
Camelford, 96-100
Camelot, 98

Cape Cornwall, 261, 267, 269-
271
Carbis Bay, 215
Carnanton, 151
Cam Brea, 189, 190, 203
 Creagle, 273
 Kenidjack, 256
 Olva, 2 j t,
Carrickgloose, 2j^
Castle Point, j6
Cayack Cove, 188
Chapel Porth, 188
Chun Castle, 248, 251
 Quoit, 248, 252
" Cliff without a Name," 82, 83
Cligga Head, 184
Combe Valley, 37-41
Compass Point, 70
Connerton, 206
Constantine Church, 142
Copperhouse, 209, 211
Copper-mining, 4-6, 7, 10
Cornish Army, The, 50-61
 People, History of, 1-10
 pasties, 90
Cornwall, Mining Industry, 4-
10, 188, 191-201, 234, 238,
255-61
Cowloe, 275
Crackington Haven, 70, 76, 79,
81
Crantock, 165-9
"Cruel Coppinger," 15
Cubert, 170-73, 187
Delabole, 128
" Devil's Saffron," 240

277

278

INDEX

Dizard Point, 76
Dolcoath, 191-201
Doom Bar, The, 131, 139
Duck Pool, 34
Dunstanville, Lord de, 203
East Pentire Point, 165
Efford, 19, 66
 Beacon, 70
Egloshayle, 33, 133
Elephant Rock, 106
Ellenglaze, 175-7
Endellion, 3^, 83, 129
Forrabury, 92-6
Fox Cove, 143
Gamper Bay, 275
Gannel, The, 165, 167, 173
Godrevy Lighthouse, 208
Gooderne Hawne, 189
Grenville Family, The, 41-5,
51, 52, 54, 55, 58-61, 113
 Sir Bevil, 44, 51, 52, 54,
55. 58-61
Gulland, 139
Gump, The, 256
Gunver Head, 139
Gurnard's Head, 247, 253, 261
Gurney, Sir Goldsworthy, 69
Gwithian, 204-8
Harlyn Bay, 140
 Prehistoric man at, 141
Hawker, Rev. R. S., 17-33, 36,
37-40, 60, 75-7, 93
Hayle, 209-12, 234
 River, 209-12
Hennacliff , 1 6
High Cliff, 81, 82
Higher Bojewyan, 254
Holy Well, 170
Holywell Bay, 170
Illogan, 189
" Irish Lady," The, 275
Kellan Head, 129

Kelsey Head, 169, 170
Kenidjack Castle, 261
Kilkhampton, 44
Knill, John, 216-21
Knill's Monument, 216-21
Land's End, 270, 273, 274, 275
Langarrow, 173-5, T%3
Lanherne, Vale of, 151
Lanteglos-by-Camelford, 97
Lanyon Quoit, 248, 252
Lelant, 213-15
Levant Mine, The, 257
Ligger Point, 172
Little Bo, 275
Little Petherick, 134-6
Longbridge, 102
Lower Beeny, 82
Lower Sharpnose, 37
Lye Rock, 105
Maen Castle, 275
" Man and his Man," 187
Marhamchurch, 33, 70
Marsland Mouth, 12-14
Mawgan-in-Pydar, 150-53
Mawgan Porth, 150, 155
Men-an-Tol, The, 248, 250
Men Scryfa, The, 248, 250
Meropes, The, 139
Millhook, 75
Mining in Cornwall, 4-10, 188,
191-201, 234, 23S, 255-61
Minster, 91
Morvah, 244, 254
Morwenstow. 13-33, 41
Mouls, The, 130
" Mount Royal," 91, 126
Mulfra Quoit, 248-50
Nanceluke, 189
Nanchcrrow, 261
Nanjulian, 2y^
" Nanny Moore's Bridge," 70
Navax Point, 204, 207
" Neck," Custom of the, 47-9
Newland, 130
Newquay, 155-9, 165

INDEX

279

Norcot Mouth, 50
Padstow, 130, 131, 136-9
Parc-an-Chapel, 267
Park Head, 143, 145
Pednmaen-du, 275
Pendeen, 244, 254-6
 Vau, 255
Pendinas, 223
Pendour Cove, 246
Penhale Point, 170
Penkenner Point, 76
Penpoll, 165
Pentargan Bay, 82, 83
Pentire Point, 130
Pepper Cove, 143
— Hole, 139
Permizen Bridge, 139
 Hole, 140
Perranporth, 172, 173, 178, 184
Perranzabuloe, 175, 177, 179-
83
Phillack, 209, 212, 266
Pilchard Fishery, 224-9
Pity Me, 132
Plan-an-Guare, 267-9
Pol Prv, 273
Polzeath, 1 30
Port Gaverne, 128
Porth, 155
Porthcothan, 143
Porthglaze Cove, 246
Porthilly, 132
Porth Joke, 169
Porthleden Cove, 261, 269
Porthmear Cove, near Bed
ruthan, 143
 near Gurnard's Head, 253
Porth Moina, 254
Porthnanven, 273
Porthquin, 129
Porth Towan, 188
Port Isaac, 128
Portreath, 189, 202
Poughill, 68
Poundstock, 73
Prehistoric Man at Harlyn,

QueenBess Rock, Bedruthan
Steps, 144-50
 Victoria Rock, Boscastle,
88
Quies Rocks, 142
Radium, 235-8
Redruth, 189, 191
Resparvel Down, 81
Rock, 132
Rocky Valley, 102, 104
Roseanhale Cove, 247
Rumps, The, 130
St. Agnes, 184-8
St. Agnes Beacon, 184, 188
St. Breock, 1 34
St. Columb Major, .160-63
St. Columb Minor, 156, 159,
163
St. Constantine's Church, 142
St. Crantock, 167
St. Cubert, 170
St. Endellion, 33, 83, 129
St. Enodoc, 130, 131, 187
St. Felicitas, 209
St. Fiala, 209, 214
St. Gennys, 76
St. Gwithian's Oratory, 205-7
St. Ia, 213, 223
St. Ives, 214-33
St. Ives Bay, 181, 182, 217
St. Ives Consols, 234-8
St. Juliot, 83
St. Just-in-Penwith, 261-9
St. Merewenna, 33, 70
St. Merryn, 143
St. Michael's near Padstow, 132
St. Minver, 33, 132
St. Morwenna, 27, 32, 33, 105
St. Neot (Nighton, or Nectan),
33. 105
St. Nighton's Kieve, 102, 104
St. Petroc, 136, 143
St. Piran's Oratory, 175, 177,
179-83
St. Piran's Sands, 172-8, 179-
83

280

INDEX

St. Senan, 263
St. Senar, 244
Seal Hole, 139
Sennen Cove, 273-5
" Shark's Fin," 275
Sharpnose, 34
" Ship my Pumps," 138
"Silent Tower of Bottreaux,"
93-5
" Sisters," The, 105
Stamford Hill, Battle of, 51,
56-9
Stanbury Mouth, 34, 37
Stennack, 234
Stepper Point, 138, 139
" Stones, The," 208
Stoptide, 132
Stowe, 41-4, 51
Stratton, 18, 19, 50, 59, 66
Tehidy, 191, 203
Tennyson, Alfred, 32, 66, 67,
102, 107
Three Stone Oar, 254
Tin-mining, 4-10, 188, 191-201,
234, 238, 255-61
Tintagel (and Trevena), 107-25
Tobban Cove, 188
 Horse, 188
Tonacombe, 22, 35-7
Towan Blistra, 155
 Head, 156, 165
Towednack, 230
Trebarwith Strand, 126-8
Trebetherick, 130
Tregarget Beach, 128
Tregenna Castle, 216, 218, 222
Tregudda Gorge, 140
Treguth Farm, 170
Trelawny Ballad, 39
Tremoutha, 80
Trenance, 150
Trenwith Mine, 235, 238
Trethellan, 165
Trevalga, 10 1

Trevalgan Hill, 239
Trevaunance Porth, 187
Trevelgue Head, 155
Trevena (and Tintagel), 107-25
Trevethet Gut, 10 1
Trevillet Mill, 104
Trevone, 138
 Bay, 140
Trevose Head, 141
Treyarnon Beach, 143
Valency, River, 85
Vale of Lanherne, 151
Varley Head, 129
Vellandraeth, 273
Wadebridge, 69, 132-4
Wainhouse Corner, 70
Wanston Mouth, 72
Welcombe Mouth, 12
West Pentire Point, 165, 169
Wheal Friendly Mine, 188.
Wheal Owles Mine, 260
Whitesand Bay, 273
Widemouth Bay, 71
Willapark, 82, 95
Wrecking, 146
Wrecks : —
Alexander Yeats, 247
Alonzo, 32
Bencoolen, 67
Caledonia, 24, 30
Escurial, 190
Hodbarrow Miner, 152
Iota, 122
New Commercial, 269
Samaritan, 148
Seine. 178
Wilhelmina, 128
Yuol Mouth, 16
Zennor, 239-46
 Quoit, 239-43

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