Nooks and Corners of Cornwall Part 7

CHAPTER V

NOOKS AND CORNERS FROM LELANT TO PENZANCE

_Gold in Cornwall: Knill's Monument: The Antiquities of the Extreme West: Cliff Castles: Fogous: Menhirs: Dolmens: Oratories: Superst.i.tions: St. Ives: Wesley: Irving: A Ripe Old Age: The Mines: Sancreed and St.

Buryan: Lighthouses: Whitesand Bay: The Land's End: Mousehole and Dolly Pentreath: Newlyn: Penzance._

From Hayle to Marazion on the south coast is four miles--the narrowest part of the peninsula--and a railway runs from sea to sea. With a deep curve, however, the road goes on to low-lying Lelant (the valley church), which is traditionally said to have once been a large village and port, but to have been reduced to its present inconspicuousness by the drifting of sand into the haven. Parts of the church are Norman, and over the south porch stands an eighteenth-century copper sundial, on the pierced gnomon bracket of which is a quaint representation of Time and Death, a skeleton bearing an hour gla.s.s and a dart.

Among other antiquities discovered here was a large colt having in it some small bars of gold the size of a straw. A farmer found it embedded in ashes, and lying about 2 ft. below the surface. Gold has often been found in Cornwall, but always in small quant.i.ties--usually in grains from the size of sand to that of a pea! The largest piece ever found was said to have weighed down eight guineas in the scale.

KNILL'S MONUMENT

Not far from Lelant is Worwas Hill, on which a certain John Knill erected a mausoleum. By some mischance the gentleman was buried in London, but by his will he directed that every five years 5 was to be equally divided among ten girls, natives of the borough and daughters of seamen, fishermen, or tinners, each of them not exceeding ten years of age, who should between ten and twelve o'clock of the forenoon of a certain day, dance for a quarter of an hour at least on the ground adjoining his mausoleum and, after the dance, sing the 100th Psalm.

Alas, for the vanity of human hopes! Every five years the little girls, gaily be-ribboned, dance in the presence of the local notabilities, while the one thing that was to have given the ceremony weight and interest--the body of John Knill--is elsewhere.

THE ANTIQUITIES OF THE EXTREME WEST: CLIFF CASTLES: FOGOUS: MENHIRS

This narrow neck of land shuts off the small rounded end of the peninsula, a part that is peculiarly rich in prehistoric remains. It is as if the old forgotten peoples had been driven back and back, race after race pus.h.i.+ng the one before it into the sea, but each, before it pa.s.sed, leaving its footprint on the granite. On every headland are cliff castles--Cape Cornwall, Ballowal, Chun--the most remarkable being that of Treryn Dinas, a stronghold with a triple vallum and fosse which can only be approached by a narrow ridge and which consists of a huge pile of rocks jutting from a turf-clad neck of land. In contrast with these are the subterranean pa.s.sages and chambers (fogous) at Bolleit, Trewoofe, and Pendeen, the last-named said to be haunted on Christmas morning by a white-robed lady with the stem of a red rose between her lips. Above ground are a number of stone circles and solitary monoliths, from which, or from the cairns, comes the phrase "to raise a stone to his memory." The monoliths are known as the Pipers and the Blind Fiddler, the circles, as at Dawns Maen and Boscawen Un, as the Merry Maidens; and the legend with regard to them is always the same--that the Pipers played on a Sunday, and that the Maidens danced, their punishment approximating, in a more lasting form, to that of Lot's wife! Here, too, are the remains of ancient villages and beehive huts, and at one place--Chapel Euny--is a subterranean structure consisting of three long pa.s.sages and a beehive hut, while at Bosporthennis is a specimen of the beehive hut so good that it is said to be the best in England. This district of heath and lonely moorland is so spa.r.s.ely inhabited that the little old ruins have been left as they were until the antiquarian came and dug, unearthing the poor treasures of a simple state of civilisation, the spindle-whorls, the bone needles, the flint spear and arrow heads, and the coa.r.s.e black pottery. The coast scenery of this part is the finest to be seen for miles, and that not so much on account of the grandeur of the cliffs as of the tumbling seas, that roll in from the Atlantic; and days might be spent wandering over these high lands from castle to castle and from stone to stone, trying to discover the reason, whether sepulchral or religious, that the monoliths were set erect; to guess why those strange underground pa.s.sages were dug and walled, and what practical need they served; and what was the meaning of the various earthworks and entrenchments. The people to whom they needed no explanation have vanished, leaving only riddles behind, riddles that not the wisest among us, not the most enlightened, not the youngest, is able to solve.

DOLMEN: ORATORIES: SUPERSt.i.tION

We do at least know that the dolmen was raised above a burial, in the one instance of Zennor above two. In the dolmen proper, the supporters of the great capstone are columns and not merely slabs enclosing the s.p.a.ce. Dolmens are found not only in Cornwall, but along the west coast of Europe and the northern coast of Africa, also in Palestine, India, and j.a.pan, and appear to be the work of a seafaring people. Their date is said to be 2000 B.C., the age when bronze was beginning to replace stone and when the Swiss lake villages were being built. Three of the early Christian Councils regarded them with suspicion and ordered their destruction on the ground that they were objects of reverence to the Celtic Christians. At Lanyon, on Boswavas Moor, not far from the Mulfra Quoit, is a fine specimen. Unfortunately the great capstone, which was 18 ft. long and under which a man on horseback could ride, slipped from its supports in 1815. Lieutenant Goldsmith presently dislodged the Logan stone at Treryn, a ma.s.s of granite weighing sixty-five tons; and being obliged to replace it, the tackle he used was further utilised to replace the Lanyon capstone. To make this easier, however, the three uprights were cut down, and the cromlech now to be seen is by no means so imposing as in its prehistoric state. This seafaring folk, who left their tiny mark on the surface of the earth and then faded into obscurity, builded better than we with all our modern appliances!

It was unusual for the early Christians to order the destruction of monuments of this kind. As a rule they accepted and turned them to account. We have examples of this in the chapel at Porthcurnow, one of those very early buildings, formed of a double square, such as lie hidden among the s.h.i.+fting sands of Perran and Gwithian, and which was built on a spot already sacred as a place of burial; while on Chapel Carn Brea, which rises to a height of 660 ft., with Bartine at its shoulder still higher, is a cairn which held the bones of a Stone Age chieftain. Above them was a dolmen, and above that relics of British and Roman times, the whole being crowned by a Christian oratory!

It is hardly a matter for surprise if the people who dwell among these relics of the immemorial past still retain some of the superst.i.tions of their forefathers, if their wells still have miraculous qualities and the crickstone a strange virtue. To them witches are as real as wreckers, and they cannot believe that the "little people"--once perhaps inhabiting those subterranean pa.s.sages and huts--are gone for certain, and for ever. Get on the right side of an old miner and he will tell you of the "nuggies," of their silver anvils and their parlours, of how he has heard their little picks at work, and of how he has hoped all his life to one day catch sight of a nuggy slipping into its parlour, when he will, of course, follow and "strike it rich."

The housewife, on persuasion, may be got to tell how when she (or her mother) went in the morning to fill the kibble at the well she saw the pisky stealing away over the dewy fields by the first grey glimmer of light. Possibly he had taken eggs from her hen-roost, or if she were a wise woman and had baked him a hearth cake and left with it a sup of milk, he had perhaps "redded up" the place for her. It would be a matter of give-and-take, but the people in the low grey houses, with their thick walls and stone-held thatch, would be able to more than guess which mound it was into which the piskies vanished and which were the fairy rings about which they danced at dusk or in the moonlight. So wild was the country and so much does one piece of granite look like another that there were hiding-places in plenty, nooks that at a later date would be used by the smugglers and other law-breaking gentry, corners behind which the small race could lurk when the larger, more dangerous humans came striding by. Over against these tales of the "little people"

must be set the stories told by those little people themselves, the stories of the giants, of the bigger folk whose terrors they magnified a hundredfold that their babies might be thus persuaded to keep out of danger. And because after all there must have been intermarriage, the occasional courting of pisky and giant, both sets of stories have been handed down from one generation to another. The Cornish are not a booky folk, they have not produced a great literature, and even nowadays they read little but their Bibles. Such a people would be likely to remember and treasure up the stories handed down from mother to child. They are, moreover, very social. In the loneliest parts there is seldom an evening when the labourers do not drop in at each other's cottages for a "crack," and every now and then the soft deep voices utter a word that has dropped out of the common talk, but which for them still has its right meaning, and the fathers tell over again the stories their fathers told to them. Some of the stories have come to the surface and are known to the "foreigner" (as every one born east of the Tamar is called). We have, for instance, that of the Zennor mermaid, which has taken such hold on local thought that it is even carved upon a bench-end in the little grey church. It was the story of a squire's son who sang in the choir and sang so beautifully that Sunday by Sunday a mermaid (Cornish--merrymaid) crept up from the sea to hear him. Like Hans Andersen's story she had found her prince, but unlike that story she in the end persuaded him to go away with her; and as he never returned, the wiseacres shook their heads and thought of him as lying drowned under the blue waters.

The antiquities of this, the extreme west, and the resulting strange traditions and beliefs are not the only matter of interest in this part of the world. Superimposed upon the survivals of a far-off time are those of the last thousand and odd years when Cornwall was struggling with the disabilities of its exposed position, when the Danes fell on the coasts burning and harrying, and corsairs carried off the poor fishermen and sold them as slaves. In 1635 a Turkish pirate s.h.i.+p was brought _nolens volens_ into St. Ives Bay, and the peaceful folk, not immediately recognising her build, were surprised to hear sounds as of guns and firing. The firing was not at those on sh.o.r.e, it was in fact entirely confined to those on board, and it was as if the s.h.i.+p were divided against herself. In the end the truth appeared. The pirate had captured three small vessels of Looe and Fowey and seized their crews.

These men, however, were not of a slavish kind. Rising in a body, they knocked the captain overboard, drove the Turks below and set sail for St. Ives. Having a fair wind they made it safely; though the pirates, also a hearty folk, spent their time firing at them through the timbers of the deck.

WESLEY

We warrant those pirates had much the same reception at the hands of the St. Ives men as was dealt out to John Wesley when, in course of time, that small neat gentleman made his way into the district. The Cornish seem to have been--let us use the past tense--own brother to the Irishman in their love of a riot, any sort of a riot, for any reason or none; and Wesley got more than a taste of mob violence. Yet in the end he could say: "Here G.o.d has made all our enemies to be at peace with us, so that I might have preached in any part of the town. But I rather chose a meadow, that such as would might sit down, either on the gra.s.s or on the hedges--so the Cornish term their broad stone walls. Well-nigh all the town attended and with all possible seriousness. Surely forty years' labour has not been in vain."

So at last the little man was made welcome and could feel that he had roused the fis.h.i.+ng-town from its long religious lethargy. I wonder whether in his strenuous life, and he came twenty-seven times to St.

Ives, he ever found time to wander into the old church, study the wonderful carving of its bench-ends, and take pleasure in its ancient communion plate "and its pair of collecting basins with handles," or whether he was only occupied with things of the spirit?

IRVING

Inland from St. Ives lies the ugly mining village of Halsetown, where Sir Henry Irving spent the years of his childhood. His mother was a Cornish woman of the Behenna family, and to Halsetown she brought him to stay with an aunt. The uncle was captain of a local mine--"captain"

meaning any sort of an overseer from the manager to a man with only a boy under him! Here the lad ran wild with his cousins. "At any rate,"

said he in after years, "Halsetown gave me a good physical start in life. I attribute much of my endurance of fatigue--which is a necessary part of an actor's life--to the free and open and healthy years I spent there." Nor are these many hours of suns.h.i.+ne and the salubrious air only good for youth; life lengthens here unnoticeably until it has reached three figures, and even then shows a strength that is amazing. Mrs.

Zen.o.bia Stevens, who was buried at Zennor in 1763, aged 102, was tenant for ninety-nine years of the Duke of Bolton. On the expiration of her lease, being then in her hundredth year, she went on this matter of business to the Duke's Court at St. Ives; and it is said that she excused herself from accepting a second gla.s.s of wine on the plea that it was growing late and she had not only some way to go, but had to ride home on a young unbroken horse.

THE MINES

Among these rough cliffs are sudden smiling valleys, but the moors are disfigured by a number of mine workings that have ceased to pay, and the ruins of which add to the desolation of the scene. A little above St.

Just are three celebrated mines: Wheal Owles, into which the sea broke and which is now only the tomb of the eighteen men who were then working in her; Botallack, visited by King Edward and Queen Alexandra in 1865, while Prince and Princess of Wales, but no longer working; and Levant, exploited for tin, copper, and a.r.s.enic, and still employing several hundred men. The workings of this mine run for nearly a mile under the sea, and the men say that on stormy days the noise over their heads is terrific. These men live at St. Just, a mining town in the old church of which are some frescoes--St. George about to slay the dragon before Cleodolinda and her comrades, and Christ surrounded by the symbols of various trades. Of greater interest perhaps is the Plan-an-Guare, 126 ft. in diameter and with the remains of six tiers of seats. This rural amphitheatre is still sometimes used as a place of a.s.sembly and was once no doubt utilised for miracle plays, but who constructed it and for what purpose is lost in the mists of antiquity. Not far from the Plan-an-Guare is Kenidjack Cliff (the howling wind), a "hooting cairn"

regarded by the superst.i.tious country side as haunted by more than natural sounds. During the construction on it of b.u.t.ts for rifle practice, some twenty to thirty pieces of pure copper were found under stones which were probably the remains of an old building. The purity of the copper points to this h.o.a.rd having been the property of a founder of tools or weapons belonging to the Bronze Age, and no doubt this founder was a workman of some importance in the district. The story connected with him has been forgotten, the fact that he ever existed has pa.s.sed, but about the place still clings that old fear of the weapon-maker, whose every-day task it was to forge the mysterious givers of death.

SANCREED

It is a far journey from a "hooting cairn" to the pettiness of the social struggle, even though the struggle was for a precedence which has pa.s.sed out of fas.h.i.+on. In Bishop Sparrow's report of July 1671, on Sancreed Church, a curious state of affairs came to light, for the parish was quarrelling over precedence in church sittings! "One John Adams of mean estate and fortune" had actually seated himself higher up than "those who are of the Twelve of the parish and their wives," and great had been the scandal. Also one Francis Lanyon, who had married "into a very worthy family," his wife, if you please, being niece to Colonel G.o.dolphin, was without "a convenient seat." Sancreed has an old rood screen (or rather part of one), of which Sedding says: "I know of no finer specimen elsewhere in the county. Like so much old Cornish work it is more than local; it is purely parochial."

Its neighbour, St. Buryan, is also celebrated for its screen, which was, however, seriously injured by the vicar in 1814. From what remains, it would appear to have been exceptionally beautiful, carved, coloured, gilt, and of opulent and bold workmans.h.i.+p. This church stands high, 400 ft. above the sea; and about a mile distant are the remains of what is believed to be the oratory of St. Buryan. The story goes that first Egbert in 813 fought a battle here at Bolleit (place of blood) and later Athelstane in 926. There is no historical evidence for either battle, but tradition is a smoke under which a little flame may generally be found. At any rate, a battle was fought and the conqueror, standing on this high land, saw afar off the Scillies, and realised that there were yet worlds to conquer. So pleased was he, that he vowed, if successful, to found a college for priests on this high land, and so the church of St. Buryan came into being.

LIGHTHOUSES AND WHITESAND BAY

A mile and a half off the Land's End is the Longs.h.i.+ps Lighthouse. Built on a rock 70 ft. above low water and itself 55 ft. high, its top is yet often buried in the spray and the lanthorn broken. Further out, on the Wolf Rock, is another lighthouse; while off the Seven Stones, dangerous rocks between the mainland and the Scillies, is a lights.h.i.+p moored in forty fathoms of water, but in such an exposed position that it has before now been driven from its moorings.

But there were neither lighthouses nor lights.h.i.+ps on these rocks when Athelstane landed at Whitesand Bay on his return from the conquered Scillies. Even now it is an ugly bit of water to traverse, and it must have been worse then. He was probably glad enough to see the great stretch of white sand with Sennen Cove lying in the midst thereof like an emerald set in silver. Later the bay acquired a bad reputation. So far from the madding crowd, so secret and so storm-beaten, it gave evil-doers a sense of security. Who would dare to venture after them among these rocks and clefts? Corsairs, pirates, smugglers, each in turn made use of the white beach. Thither came Perkin Warbeck in 1497 with his four little barques and six score men; thither John Lackland when seeking to dispossess his trusting brother of the realm; thither Stephen, the oath-breaker, who was, however, none so bad a king. Rough are the winds and rougher still the seas that beat upon this lovely bay, and it is a little puzzling why these and other personages should have chosen it as a landing-place.

THE LAND'S END

Alas for romance, this same Land's End is but a low and unimpressive rock which, like the blunt head of some t.i.tanic animal, thrusts a grey muzzle into the water. It is only 60 ft. high, yet this is the last stone, the last bit of land, the ultimate west, this west that appeals so strongly to the Cornishman abroad:

"_There's never a wave upon western beaches Falls and fades to a wreath of foam But takes at the last a voice that reaches Over the distance and calls me home._"

LOWRY.

The Land's End, strange low headland, has seen plenty of stirring days, from the time when the Danish long-s.h.i.+ps came creeping round to harry Cornwall and Devon, to that later date when the great storm and the descendants--probably--of those very Danes sent the great Armada fleeing up the narrow seas. Turner came here for the colour and the wild blue seas, and Tennyson to wonder whether his Arthur had ever been so far south. The rock is of split and tumbled granite, one of the few instances in the duchy where that stone comes into contact with the sea; and if Penwith, as all that part is called, really means the "wooded headland," that barren rock and rough water must once have been far enough apart. A little south of the Land's End is the finer rock of Pordenack, and all round this southern point the bays and coves are charming, the cliffs fine and the caverns and rocks numerous and fantastic. Tol-Pedn (the holed headland--so called from a huge blow-hole) has its Witches' (or Maggy Figgy's) Chair and shelters the pretty hamlet of Porthgwarra, the inhabitants of which are darker than the majority of Cornishmen. Tradition is in favour of a wrecked Spanish galleon. Not, we suppose, the spectre s.h.i.+p of Porthcurnow, a neighbouring cove. There a black square-rigged vessel sails up the beach and up the combe, making no difference between land and water, and presently vanishes like mist--and that in the valley the Eastern Telegraph Company has made its own! The hamlet is interesting on account of its name. That distinguished scholar, Canon Isaac Taylor, says: "Cornwall, or Cornwales, is the kingdom of the Welsh of the Horn," but others think the name is from the Kernyw, the tribe who lived in these parts, they being called the Kernyw Gaels, to distinguish them from the Gaels of Wales and those of Brittany. Be it as it may, in Porthcurnow we have an interesting survival of the old tribal name.

The church of St. Levan is on the hillside in a deep valley and beyond its admirable carving, its screen with a geometrical pattern of leaves, its font of a stone not found in the neighbourhood, and its unusual holy water stoup--at the north and east entrances to the church are the old lych stones used as resting-places for funerals! There is also a cleft boulder of granite about which it was prophesied that when a pack-horse should ride through "St. Levan's stone" the world would come to an end, and the fact that such handy material for building has been left unused shows that for some reason it must have been held in veneration.

MOUSEHOLE AND DOLLY PENTREATH

Mousehole is said to have been the last place at which Cornish was spoken, and this has resulted in the legend of Dolly Pentreath. She was a fishwife who, in course of time, came on the parish; and it was believed, not only that she lived to a great age, but that she was the last person to speak the ancient language. Against this, the facts must be set forth. Dorothy Pentreath is given in the parish register as born 1714 and died 1777; while Wm. Matthews, who also spoke Cornish--speaking it with his cronies--and lived at Newlyn, did not die till 1800. In spite of this, however, two credulous persons--Prince Lucien Buonaparte and the Vicar of Paul--raised a stone to her memory in 1860, and referred in particular to the old age which was not hers and the language which she certainly spoke, but was not the last to speak.

"Here lieth interred Dorothy Pentreath, who died 1778, said to have been the last person who conversed in the ancient Cornish.

"Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land."

But if Mousehole has no right to its legend, its own age cannot be called into question. In 1347 it was recognised as a Cornish port, while in the time of Henry VII. a lay subsidy roll shows its inhabitants to have been nearly equal in number to those of Penzance.