Charles G. Harper

“ The cliffs here rise to their grandest in the magnificent piles of granite blocks towering up at the crested promontory of Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the "Holed Headland in Penwith." The cliff-top walk has here broadened out to an expanse of short moss-like grass interspersed with rabbit-burrows, knobs of lichened rock and tufts of thrift or sea-pink. It is good going for the pedestrian, but the grass is apt to be slippery. ”

“ A boating trip is certainly the best method of seeing the coast between Cadgwith and the Lizard. You see more, and to better advantage, than by tramping round the interminable headlands and down one not very interesting valley, up to the next hill, conscious all the while that the real beauty of the coast lies under your feet, in the sea-fretted caverns that the waves never leave. The finest of these is Dolor Hugo: ogof, the old Cornish word for "cave." This is a magnificent cavern in the dark but richly variegated serpentine rock. ”

“ At the head of this remote tongue of water, where the salt tide idly laps, stands the hamlet of Forder. Turner painted Trematon Castle, and in his day the crenellated walls of that amazing strong place could easily be seen from the creek. In these latter days the trees of the Castle hill have grown so tall and dense that little of the ancient stronghold can be glimpsed. A carriage-road winds up the hill, for a residence—not in the least pretending to be a castle, one is happy to say—stands in midst of the fortress precincts. ”

“ It is half a mile from the stony hamlet of Trereen to the Logan Rock, which stands up against the skyline towards the seaward extremity of that magnificently rugged headland, Trereen Dinas. The narrow neck of this peninsula is deeply scored across with a ditch and heaped with a parallel wall of stones and earth, the defensive works of a long-forgotten people, but it is not so much to see these vestiges of insecure prehistoric times, nor even to view the fine scenery, that a continual stream of visitors comes hither all the summer. It is the Logan Rock that attracts them. ”

“ When the boats are in harbour, the gulls are at home, too. Every roof-ridge is alive with them, and they even take an intelligent interest in the domestic cooking. It is one of the most ridiculous sights to observe a gull perched on the edge of a chimney-pot smelling the odours that come up from cottage chimneys. When the tide is out, the gulls quest diligently in the ooze and scavenge all the offal that is plentifully flung into the harbour, for there is nothing nice in the feeding of a gull. Dead kittens and dogs come as handy and as tasty morsels as potatoes and cabbage-stalks. ”

“ Of all the many varied and delightful steamboat trips that await the pleasure of the Plymouth people, or of visitors, none is so fine as the leisurely passage from Plymouth to Calstock and back, first along the Hamoaze and then threading the acutely curving shores of the Tamar, rising romantically, covered exquisitely with rich woods. At the end of the voyage from Plymouth, Calstock is invaded by hungry crowds. One of the especial delights of the place is found in its strawberries, for the neighbourhood is famous for its strawberry-growing. ”

“ A general deceptiveness as to scale pervades the Cove: the rock of Mullion Island is, for instance, a mile in circuit, and does not appear to be one quarter that size. But the calm of a typical August day is the deepest deception of all. It requires one of the autumn equinoctial gales to reveal the innate unconquerable savagery of the place, when a strong man can scarce stand before the wind, and giant waves leap over the arms of the harbour and rush, seething and hungry for prey, up the shore. ”

“ And now we all know that, as the world is round, there cannot be any land's end, anywhere, here or at Finisterre, or in any other country; and that in the quest of it we should be like so many futile Wandering Jews. One almost envies those heretics—that small but constant band—who persist in their faith that the earth is flat; for that view surely connotes a Land's End, somewhere. Meanwhile, we must put up with the chastened feeling of romance with which a journey to the Land's End of Cornwall is first undertaken. ”

“ That is Sennen. If you be a painter, you will not need to set your palette with many or brilliant colours to represent it as it is. It does not seem attractive; but in spite of all this gaunt, weatherbeaten character Sennen is not unlovely. The pearly, often opalescent, qualities of the Cornish skies are capable of transcending even four-square grey granite houses with slate roofs, and ugly chapels of the like, and of glorifying even stone hedges and unfertile fields ”

“ Levan was solitary. The immediate neighbourhood of the church is even now not very densely populated, for the visible buildings are only the rectory and a cottage; and it can, I conceive, scarcely be called cheerful; for the bell-buoy on that submerged rock, the Rundlestone, out to sea, is for ever heard tolling, sometimes like a funeral knell and at others like some harsh gong, calling lost mariners to dinner down there in weedy caves with the mermaids. ”

“ To style Chair Ladder and the other rocky spires neighbouring it piles of rock is by no means straining language, for they have exactly the appearance of having been heaped one upon another by some superhuman energy, the granite cubes being jointed like so many blocks of rude cyclopean masonry. The coast here indeed displays some of the most curious imitative forms in natural architecture, and every point and every little porth has its old Cornish name. ”

“ Sennen is the very negation of life. Conceive a village that is no village, but only a small, grey, solemn church, a plainly built inn with creaking sign, swaying in the wind, a few whitewashed granite cottages, and a gaunt granite chapel. Through the place runs the road to the Land's End, and all around are fields enclosed within stone hedges. ”

“ Charlestown itself is more curious than beautiful. It is, in fact, the port of St. Austell, of which it is really an extension, and was formerly called Polmear. Charlestown is a place with one small, but very busy and crowded dock; and the dock and the quays, and all the roads into and out of the place are a study in black and white, and barrels. The stranger to Cornwall, proceeding westward for the first time, is apt to be puzzled by these strange evidences. He has come, unaware, upon the first signs of the great and prosperous Cornish china-clay industry. ”

“ Veryan, the village that gives a name to the bay, does not lie upon the seashore. You come to it round the majestically romantic cliffs past Port Holland, a small fisher-hamlet perched upon the rocky outlet of a quite solitary valley, and thence a little way inland, and presently out [79] again and very steeply and lengthily down, so that you wonder when you will reach the bottom, to Port Loe, a gloomy inlet amid dark overhanging cliffs. Down there is the poor fishing village, in a primitive state, absolutely untouched by pleasure-seekers, and apparently not thriving in its fishery. ”

“ A smart hotel—I do not know the name of it—stands on the headland and seems to insolently hint that, even here, mankind has tamed the wilds. He certainly has made the Cove, down there, look toy-like, and the road up to Mullion village now resembles that through some ancestral park. But nature has provided the huge and savage setting that makes the little enfolding walls of the harbour, the little pool within, and the two or three little houses, look smaller than they really are. ”

“ Lizard Town simply grew at haphazard, on the extremity of the level, heather-clad waste of the Lizard promontory, and with so little directing hand or purposeful mind that its component houses form hardly any recognisable lines of streets, running in any definite directions. They may be fitly likened to a flock of sheep huddled together, facing all ways, to escape a tempest raging from all quarters at once. The population appears to a casual observer to consist wholly of families of Jose and Roberts, all inter-related, like the Cadgwith people, who are all either Janes or Stevenses. ”

“ And strangers tend to increase in Scilly and its surrounding seas, in spite of the voyage from Penzance. The isles, truly the Fortunate Isles, where there is no income-tax and there are no motor-cars, and the post comes but once a day—and sometimes not even then—and the only police-force necessary is one officer, who combines all ranks, and even then has little to do, are further blest with a delightfully equable climate, and good hotel and other accommodation. They look with some pity upon the turmoils of the adjacent island of Great Britain. ”

“ But it is now a well-understood and greatly practised thing that you may cheaply live in a tin house in the wilderness, without servants, on tinned provisions, and on tinned bread from the nearest machine-bakery, and yet be in the intellectual movement of the time, and without reproach, even though your sanitary arrangements be such that even the old-time cottager might consider scandalous, and although, with the lengthening of your sojourn, your rising zareba of empty tins makes ever more squalid the surroundings. ”

“ It is a busy market-town all the year round, with a considerable harbour. The long straight thoroughfare of Market Jew Street, rising steadily to the Market House, which is the centre of Penzance, is a street of shops. The Market House is a rather gloomy granite building, with a cupola that bulks out conspicuously in distant views and stands for Penzance. Indeed, in reminiscences of the place you do not so much as think of the sea-front as of this extraordinary municipal building, that shows the ideas of Ionic architecture prevailing in 1837, the time when it was built. ”

“ But to-day every one in Newlyn knows much better than that; all have got some idea of artistic terms and slang, and scarce a man among the blue-jerseyed lot who lean against the railings on the cliff-top between going out to the fishing-grounds and digging the potato-patch but has sat as a model or has watched the progress of a canvas. ”

“ All around is the level, treeless, windswept heath of the Lizard district, but down in this sheltered hollow one is in the atmosphere of a conservatory. Perhaps one person among every hundred of those who come to Lizard Town discovers Church Cove and the village of Landewednack, which is the mother-village whence Lizard Town, half a mile away, has sprung; and the ninety and nine return home, having just caught a glimpse of the lighthouse, and think, vainly, they have seen all there is to be seen. ”

“ The great harbour of Falmouth and the many creeks of the estuary of the Fal, running far inland to Truro and Tresilian Bridge, rival the Hamoaze and the estuary of the Tamar in size, and more than rival them in beauty. Or perhaps, instead of setting them in competition with one another, it may be said that their beauty is of different character. Along the shores of Hamoaze and Tamar, the great commercial and naval and warlike interests of Plymouth and Devonport form striking features, and you can by no means lose sight of them until Saltash is passed. ”

“ The ancient proverb is sadly at fault, for it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
The new beauty of Truro Cathedral at present lacks those weatherings that only time can give. The fine-grained granite and the Box stone dressings have not attained the stains and bloom of years, and so it is impossible to altogether judge the merits or drawbacks of the exterior; but that the architect strove to be pictorial, and that he rather overstrained in that direction, seems undeniable. ”

“ From a cycling point of view, the roads are perfection, and although dreariness is again the word when a cyclist strives along them in the teeth of a gale, to be blown mile after mile on a cycle with the wind is exhilarating. There are few villages here. Inland from Lizard Town you see the church-tower of Grade peering across the flats, but it is a village only of "farm-places." ”

“ According to a wild legend, it was to the shore by Perranuthnoe that an ancestor of the Trevelyans came on horseback [199] from the submerged land of Lyonesse between Land's End and Scilly. The roaring waters that had engulfed that fabled land and its 140 churches could not keep pace with his marvellous steed.
The scenery has for several miles past been distinctly inferior in interest and beauty to that of Mount's Bay and westward; but as it is the most truistic of truisms that every eye forms its own beauty, there may conceivably be those who can find it otherwise. ”

“ Here, in New Grimsby Harbour, are the ruins of "Cromwell's Castle," and out in the channel is Hangman's Island, where vague legends say he hanged his prisoners. Not far off are the ruins of Charles Castle. The shores are thickly grown to the water's edge with vivid-coloured mesembryanthemum, an alien plant, which looks better than its name. And in the cliffs on the headland is the dark cavern of "Piper's Hole," running a long way in, with a stygian lake in its midst and a boat to take you across to further exploration, which is weirdly done by the aid of torches. ”

“ Keverne cannot easily comprehend the dangers of the scatter of rocks extending seaward for nearly a mile and a half. The spot is by no means dramatic. It is even commonplace, and has no hint of the scenes of terror and despair that have been enacted out yonder. And the photographs of the wreck that were afterwards plentifully taken are probably the tamest among such things, showing merely the funnel and the four masts standing upright from the waves and disclosing that the Mohegan sank on an even keel in comparatively shallow water. ”

“ No one knows how Mousehole, the fisher-village beyond Newlyn, got its name. It lies, it is true, in a hole, but so also do most of these villages; and there is also a cavern along the shore, beyond the little harbour, but it is not supposed that it originated the name. Mousehole is a smelly place, but its smells are neither so many nor so penetrating as they used to be. It is remarkable for the sturdy old granite manor-house of the Keigwin family in its very midst, with very boldly projecting porch. For many years past it has been the "Keigwin Arms" inn. ”

“ There is no gain in the scenic way by following the coast from Par to Charlestown. Nothing of any outstanding character appears along those coastwise paths, which are long and obscure. This is not to say that the road inland is in any way delightful. It is, in fact, a plaguey ill-favoured road, for when you have left the various railway bridges and junctions of Par behind, you come to a very Gehenna of a place; a sterile plain through whose midst the highway proceeds bumpily. ”