Jessie Mothersole

“ MAP OF THE SCILLY ISLES George Philip & Son Ltd
I
INTRODUCTORY A “COLOUR-BOOK” on Scilly needs no apology, so far as the subject is concerned, for there is no corner of Great Britain which more demands or deserves a tribute to its colour than do these little islands, scattered about in the Atlantic twenty-eight miles from the Land’s End.
For they are all colour; they gleam and glow with it; they shimmer like jewels “set in the silver sea.” No smoke from city, factory, or railway contaminates their pure air, or dims the brilliancy of their sunshine. ”

“ The rays of the sun are like a moving finger, tracing out the form of distant farm, and tree, and wall, on the hillside, and then passing on.
Then another change: heavy clouds appear to the north-west, and the rain comes down and blots out the Solway; which yet again gleams out in a long line of silver light before another half-hour has passed.
From the top of Winshields at midday I have more than once seen a huge red flare, like an evening sun, spring up and disappear again almost immediately. ”

“ ANNET AND THE SEA-BIRDS THE sea-birds are everywhere in Scilly. All the year round the gulls fill the air with their cries, and cormorants and shags skim the water and dive beneath its surface.
No “Scilly-scape,” if I may use the word, seems complete without a few gulls. We see them circling and wheeling high above us; dropping, suddenly, to rest upon the dancing waves; chasing each other in turn from the tops of the chimneys; sitting in rows on the ridges of the roofs; quarrelling for fish over St. Mary’s Pool ”

“ I love the Wall for the way in which it overcomes obstacles, never swerving from its determination to keep to the highest at all costs, while the Vallum allows itself to be turned aside to the south by even such a little obstacle as Down Hill.
And I love the Wall for the sense of strength which it gives, even in its present battered condition, a sense of strength and solidity which no number of ditches and earth mounds could ever give. Earth mounds (of a sort) can be made by earth-worms; for stone walls it takes men! ”

“ Nor do the islands lack variety. There are downs covered with the golden glory of the gorse, with the pink of the sea-thrift, with the purple of the heather; there are hills clothed with bracken breast-high in summer, and changing from green-gold to red-gold as the year advances; there are barren rocks on which the sea-birds love to gather; there are lovely beaches of white sand, strewn with many-coloured shells and seaweed; there are clusters of palm-trees growing with Oriental luxuriance, next to fields and pastures where the sheep and cattle feed ”

“ GRINSDALE TO DRUMBURGH
To follow the Wall to Kirkandrews, I had to cross the village street, and pass through a farm-yard gate beside a letter-box. This brought me out into meadows. Such a beautiful golden meadow was the first which came, with dark-grey guinea-fowls making a foil to the buttercups, and giant trees here and there. In the shade of one large chestnut-tree, a handsome lad was shearing sheep. ”

“ In Scilly no two fields are alike, and it is difficult to find one that is flat and uninteresting. They cover the slopes facing to the west and south; very often they run down almost to the edge of the sea, with only a low stone hedge to divide them from the shore. What would Wordsworth have felt, I wonder, to see these waves of dancing daffodils? Perhaps he would have preferred the scattered groups and clusters that spring up of themselves in the hedges by the wayside, or even on the beach itself. ”

“ On such a day one is inclined to feel that the lot of a Roman sentry on the Wall was to be envied, until one remembers the other side of the picture—the drenching rain, the bitter wind, the snowdrifts, to say nothing of the constant sense of the need for vigilance, and the actual encounters with an unscrupulous enemy.
Here at Sewingshields we are farther from shops and civilization than at any other point on the Wall. It is 5 miles to Haydon Bridge, the nearest post-office. ”

“ On the western edge of the downs there are the scanty ruins of Charles’s Castle, which is probably the one described by Leland as “a lytle pyle or fortres.”
As we stand by the ruins and look down we can see below us, on a ledge of rocks jutting out into the sea, our old friend Cromwell’s Castle—a strong little tower, with walls twelve feet thick. The flooring and other woodwork of the interior has mostly disappeared, and what remains is green with damp; but the outer walls are just as strong as ever. The flat bomb-proof roof, once armed with a battery, is now overgrown with grass and brambles. ”

“ I love the Wall because I can picture it, manned by the soldiers of the cohorts, as a living thing, all eyes and ears; a link from sea to sea; a chain of forts and turrets threaded on a single string!
And I love it because of its plain straightforward purpose. No one ever doubts what it was meant to be or to do; whereas the object of the Vallum is still to some extent a matter of conjecture, over which wordy battles may be fought. ”

“ For then the men, women, and children would gather and build the kilns—pits scooped in the sand, measuring about seven feet across and three feet deep in the centre. While the men finished lining the sides of the kiln with stones, the women and girls would leap into it with armfuls of furze, which they lighted, and so, strewing the dried ore-weed upon it, built little by little into a blazing pile. The great sea-lights which ring the islands now make a brave show and one which the visitor carries away as the most enduring, most characteristic recollection of his sojourn ”

“ I think I love this view to the north, bare as it is, even more than the one to the south, over the fertile Tyne valley.
An ideal Wall-day is a day of mingled cloud and sunshine, with a bit of a breeze, and yet not enough to make it "windy;" a day when heavy cumulus {111} clouds marshal themselves along the horizon, and then spread, and scatter, and form again, always threatening to do something great, but always thinking better of it; a day when it is perhaps raining heavily over Barcombe, or over Tindale Fell, and rainbows are chasing each other across the rolling fells to the south ”

“ For beauty-spots are to be found in such plenty on St. Mary’s that it would be impossible to name them all. I have already spoken of the gorse-covered Garrison Hill, which is itself a little nest of beauty-spots. So in its way is Peninnis, “head of the island,” that wild and rugged peninsula which juts out between Porth Cressa and the Old Town Bay, and is sometimes thought to be the most beautiful part of St. Mary’s. It is strewn and scattered all along its coast with rocks and boulders of immense size, and of endless variety of form. ”

“ The fact that the Wall is the mightiest antiquity of Britain is not of itself sufficient to account for the glamour it sheds. We must seek a more subtle reason; and the true {2} source of its attraction is that it stands for a great ideal.
As we follow it in its unfaltering course from sea to sea, and mark how bravely it has withstood the ravages of time and the hand of the destroyer, it dawns upon us that it stands for something permanent, something eternal, something in the very nature of man which can never die. ”

“ Let us visit the islands on an April day, and see for ourselves [Pg 13] this harvest of gold and silver. For once we will be day-trippers in fancy though we would scorn to be in fact.
Here in Scilly we find land and sea flooded with spring sunshine, while on the “adjacent island” which we have just left every one is lamenting the cold and the rain. The flower-harvest is nearly over, yet still there are wide fields of dazzling white and yellow, and many hundreds of boxes will yet leave the quay for the mainland. ”

“ Are we just beginning to learn that the true "walls" which can alone preserve any nation or empire from destruction or decay, and which do indeed ensure its stability, are not walls of brick or stone, not armies, Dreadnoughts, aeroplanes nor submarines, but great moral and spiritual qualities, high aspirations, an ideal of unity which views the whole world as one, faced by one common enemy, and sees that, with the nation as with the individual, true greatness consists in humility and willingness to serve? ”

“ And what no one can fail to appreciate is the situation of the gardens, which rise in terraces from [Pg 143] very little above the sea-level up to the height of 100 feet. As you mount to the upper terraces and look back, you will catch sight of the sea, through and beyond the masses of flower and leaf; and from the very top you will see spread out beneath you the surrounding islands, showing pearly grey-green or with a tender warmth of colour against the sea, and each with its little rim of white sand at low tide, except where the rocks run down to the water’s edge. ”

“ The Wall-ditch runs along the fields, in splendid condition, down to the valley of the Tipalt. The path lies along the north margin of the ditch. It led me over a fence at the bottom of the second field into a beautiful little tree-filled glade, with great swelling undulations in the surface of the ground as it sloped rapidly down to the Tipalt. At the bottom of this glade Thirlwall Castle came suddenly into view, and I must confess I was greatly struck by the beauty of its situation. ”

“ From Hugh Town one comes to all that is left of it by a road bordered (as most roads are in Scilly) by flower-fields on the right and on the left; past masses of fragrant wallflowers and beds of sweet violets, until the curve of Old Town Bay is reached, with the houses of Old Town grouped together at its farther end.
The Castle Rocks rise steeply from the midst of the houses, and up them one must clamber. There is nothing whatever to show what was the original way of entrance into the fortress, but probably it was on the east side, where the ground slopes up more gently. ”

“ The effect when I saw it was heightened (if such a thing were possible) by the marvellous clothing of gorse, glorious clusters of gold, as if Nature herself desired to do honour to this great achievement.
From the top of the next hill the Vallum can be seen to perfection, running up the slope of the hill facing us; nowhere is it better. Soon after this, the distant hills come into view, over the tops of which we are to follow the Wall.
Just before reaching the eighteenth milestone, another mile-castle can be very distinctly traced. ”

“ The sweet-smelling Ornatus narcissus is now at its best, and its perfume fills the air. Arum-blossoms, thousands of them in a single field, stand stiffly waiting to be cut, while in the more exposed places late daffodils linger, nodding their yellow heads in the breeze that comes in from the sea. Everywhere there are flowers, flowers, flowers—such a wealth of flowers as one never saw before; and every one is either picking flowers, tying flowers, packing flowers, selling flowers, buying flowers, or talking of flowers. ”

“ These visitors are neither so many nor of such a kind as to take away from the peaceful charm of the place. You can always get peace and quiet in Scilly, even in the most “tripperish” season, for the trippers follow a beaten track which it is easy enough to avoid. And the islands are, fortunately, quite unspoilt by any efforts to cater for their supposed wants. Not a single penny-in-the-slot machine flaunts its vermilion and yellow in your face; there are no niggers on the beach, nor brass bands, nor cinematographs; no dancing on the pier ”

“ The path leads through a wicket-gate right into and along the ditch, and brings us to the Wall. It is a magnificent piece of Wall! It is 7 feet high, with nine courses of facing-stones in place on both sides, and it must be 60 feet long at least. Yew-trees, hawthorns, oaks and nut-stubs are growing on the top. Two altars lean against the north face. I climbed the Wall, with religious care not to disturb a stone, and found myself standing above the first turret we have come to, and perhaps the finest there is to see. ”

“ All the summer through, day after day, at low water, the islanders would be out upon the beaches cutting the ore-weed, and, as the tide rose, would drag it in sledges up the foreshore, and strew it above high-water mark, to dry in the sun. ”

“ The ditch of the Vallum and its triple mounds are very clearly marked on the right of Wade's Road, and the Wall-ditch is very plainly visible on the left. The low rays of the sun cast shadows which emphasize the form, and all round the eye can follow wave upon wave of undulating ground, right into the dim blue distance. ”

“ For those who do not care to walk all the way, and who wish to see a great deal of the Wall in a short time, the George Inn at Chollerford makes a delightful centre. It stands on the bank of the North Tyne, with well-kept gardens sloping down to the water's edge, just where a five-arched stone bridge crosses the river. The bridge dates from 1771, the year when every bridge over the Tyne except the one at Corbridge was swept away by heavy floods. ”

“ Annet is known by the name of “Bird Island,” from the immense numbers that breed there. In the early summer the sea all round is black with puffins and razor-bills, their white breasts being hardly noticeable as they sit on the surface of the water; and the air above is dark with clouds of gulls, and full of their ceaseless cry. Puffins (also called sea-parrots) have bred on the islands from time immemorial. ”