Cornwall

“ Here in out-of-the-way places are relics of forgotten creeds and peoples, earthworks, amphitheatres, castles, the caves of smugglers, and the subterranean hiding-places of neolithic man. There is so much to interest, so much to see—almost too much it would seem, certainly too much for any one holiday; but Cornwall is a place to go to again and again, to go to till it seems as your own land, and its people have forgiven you for being a "foreigner."
This Cornish folk, clannish but kindly, has of late years been decreasing. ”

“ The very appearance of Cornwall is eloquent of its granitic structure; nothing less enduring could have survived the stress to which it is daily exposed. All softer measures have been eroded by the fierce wash of Atlantic seas; what we may consider a gaunt, bare backbone has stood the test, and the Cornish coast to-day confronts forces that would play havoc with the more yielding and gentle curves of east and south-east England. ”

“ In Cornwall everything is alive—the mine, the moor, the sea, the deep pools, the brooks, the groves, the sands, the caves; everything has its moan and harmony and inspiration. And the land under the sea, which is called Lyonesse by the poets, was a fairy zone, and some say it sank in the night, and some say other things harder to believe.
Cornwall under the sea has been there a long time. Some people, who like to be accurate above all things, say it disappeared in the year 1089, and contained 140 parish churches, and God wot how many chapels, and baptistries, and holy wells, and places. ”

“ But though this aspect is the keynote of almost every advertisement, or at any rate every winter advertisement, it is by no means the most prominent or characteristic one of Cornwall, which appeals far more to the hardy than the weak. When I think of Cornwall the vision that comes before me is not that of sheltered sun-bathed balconies, but rather of a high wind making the breakers frill around the jagged bases of the cliffs, while above, amid the towans or sandhills covered with bent grass, the golf-balls fly. ”

“ The Bookworm said Cornwall was a bigger place than it looked, or than could be gripped between the arms of the Atlantic, because of the tributaries it sent all over the world, every man taking with him a bit of Cornish earth and love, and setting up a new colony beyond the seas, just as the old Greeks carried with them some of the fire from the ancient hearths. ”

“ I am frequently reminded of that difference here in Cornwall. Anywhere in Cornwall you may see a carter, a miner, a fisherman, a bricklayer, who with the high distinction of his finely cast face, the mingling in his manner of easy nonchalance and old-world courtesy, seems only to need a visit to the tailor to add dignity to a Pall Mall club. No doubt England is not a new country, and the English lower social classes have become in a definite degree more aristocratic than those of Russia or even Germany. But the forefathers of the Cornish were civilised when we English were a horde of savages. ”

“ Others again go to visit the Duchy and come away disappointed because they have not found exactly what they wanted or expected. They take small children to coast places of which they have only heard by name, and are dismayed to find there is no sand, no beach, no bathing—only hills steep as the blue slate-roofs; and a good deal in the "people's" part of the town, which is narrow, slatternly and disagreeable. But it is one of the traits of Cornwall that she embraces such wide variety and shows such startling contrasts close up against each other. ”

“ In Polperro, which might be a bit of Brittany planted wholesale in our land; or Fowey, with its unforgettable harbour, where the blue tide creeps up like a stain of spreading dye; or in Mullion, with its huge rounded masses of rock lying off the coast.
Another popular idea of Cornwall, also mistaken, is that the interior of the Duchy is hideous and only the coast beautiful. There is much that is ugly no doubt; raw places where the half-grown mounds of rubbish and crumbling chimneys mark disused tin-mines; where the sharp and hard outlines of slate shriek at you everywhere ”

“ You follow your long road, visible miles on before you, winding white and serpent-like over the dark ground, until you suddenly observe in the distance an object which rises strangely above the level prospect. You approach nearer, and behold a circular turf embankment; a wide, lonesome, desolate enclosure, looking like a witches' dancing-ring that has sprung up in the midst of the open moor. This is Piran Round. Here, the old inhabitants of Cornwall assembled to form the audience of the drama of former days. ”

“ The earldom and dukedom of Cornwall have, since his time, done no more than afford a revenue and bestow a name, like the shadows of a shade, with which the private gentlemen, holding hereditary seats in Parliament at the present time, continue to decorate themselves, by assuming the verbal denominations of offices extinct above three centuries, and which habit alone enables us to pronounce, as applicable to them, without a smile; but which offices, like the ancient earldom of Cornwall, while they had any existence, conferred real feudal sovereignty, proportionate to their different degrees. ”

“ On looking at the map of Cornwall, one is surprised to see it studded with the names of saints, of whom one knows nothing, and these names of a peculiarly un-English sound. The fact is, that Cornwall was, like Ireland, a land of saints in the fifth and sixth centuries. These were either native Cornwelsh, or were Welsh saints who migrated thither to seek on the desolate moors or wild, uninhabited coasts of Cornwall solitary places, where they might live to God, and fight demons, like the hermits of Egypt. Cornwall was the Thebaid of the Welsh. ”

“ One of the charms of Cornwall is that it gives one the sense of being such an old country, as if things had gone exactly as they do now, not merely since the days of King Arthur, but for ever so long before then. The Romans, the Phœnicians, nay, the heroes of pre-historic ages, such as Jack the Giantkiller and the giant Cormoran, seemed to be not impossible myths, as we gradually quitted civilisation in the shape of a village or two, and a few isolated farm-houses, and came out upon the wild district known as Goonhilly Down. ”

“ No road in England has been so wheel-worn as that strip running out to the most westerly point of England.
Some there are who are drawn by a similar magnet to the Lizard, the most southerly point of our land, but the attraction is not so potent. From time immemorial John o' Groat's to Land's End has formed the measure of Britain.
For very many years Cornwall has been known for its fine coast scenery, but wild and desolate scenery was not the fashion in Early Victorian days, and there were comparatively few brave souls who penetrated so far. ”

“ I suppose distinctively Cornish. Not that I care! I'm glad Graylees Castle isn't in Cornwall, which is much too far from town.
There were some mine-shafts about, to mar the scenery, toward the end of the journey, and the road surface was bad compared to what we've had. If the car weren't a very good one, we should have suffered from the bumps. Ellaline Lethbridge, by the way, said something about Cornwall which puzzled me. Suddenly she exclaimed: "Why, the atmosphere here is like Spain! Everything swims in a sea of coloured lights!" ”

“ Buryan in pursuance of his vow, when he returned victorious from the Scilly Isles. We get brilliant peeps in the legends of King Arthur; in the mysterious beehive huts and stone circles of a people who have vanished; in the whimsical tales of the early saints who scattered themselves so freely over the land on their arrival from Ireland; and we find hieroglyphic messages we cannot read in structures we call cromlechs and in the cliff-castles.
Small wonder that Cornwall is a land of legend and story, and that tales of fabulous men and wonder-working men abound. ”

“ When we reach the top of the mountain we part company with the rivulet, thinking, with perhaps a sigh, what a vast advantage water has over people—it always goes down hill. Cornwall now begins to show its beauties. It seems to be a big village composed of splendid residences and elegant family hotels—or rather huge summer boarding-houses. Excellent roads run in all directions, up and down, turning now to the right and now to the left, until a stranger loses all idea of the points of the compass. ”

“ Surely it affords an interest, and gives a zest to an excursion into Cornwall, when we know something of the founders of the churches, and they stand out before us as living, energetic characters, with some faults, but many virtues, and are to us no longer nuda nomina. ”

“ Thus is hospitality practised in Cornwall—a county where, it must be remembered, a stranger is doubly a stranger, in relation to provincial sympathies; where the national feeling is almost entirely merged in the local feeling; where a man speaks of himself as Cornish in much the same spirit as a Welshman speaks of himself as Welsh. ”

“ Thus it is that Cornwall holds a special magnet which steadily draws a never-ending succession of strangers. Look only at those who do the feat of cycling or motoring from John o' Groat's to Land's End. ”

“ The early history of Cornwall is inextricably mixed up with that of the saints who settled there, or who sprang from the native royal family. We have unhappily no annals, hardly a Cornish record, of those early times. Irish, Welsh, Bretons, have been wiser, and have preserved theirs; and it is to them we are forced to appeal to know anything of the early history of our peninsula. As to the saintly lives, it is true that they contain much fable ”

“ Another plan of a great work is in agitation, likely to render this beautiful and romantic neighbourhood the resort of strangers from all parts of the kingdom. Cornwall is stretched out into the sea by an interrupted chain of granite hills, extending from Dartmoor to the Land’s End. ”

“ The Cornish people are incomparably better off now, so far as material comforts go, than they were in the last half of the sixteenth century, when Richard Carew wrote his Survey of Cornwall; but there have been no really great, no radical changes—no transformations, as in so many other parts of Britain. The life of to-day is very much like the old life, and the people now are like their forefathers of three centuries ago as described by Carew. ”

“ Cornwall no longer offers the same comparatively untrodden road to the literary traveller which it presented when I went there. Many writers have made the journey successfully, since my time. Mr. Walter White, in his "Londoner's Walk to the Land's End," has followed me, and rivalled me, on my own ground. Mr. Murray has published "The Handbook to Cornwall and Devon"—and detached essays on Cornish subjects, too numerous to reckon up, have appeared in various periodical forms. ”

“ Cornwall has received princes from thence, and they from us. We had heretofore mutual interchanges of private families, but as to our speech we are alike careless. We can understand words of one another, but have not the benefit of conferences with one another in our ancient tongue. I have met with some Friars born and bred there, who, one would think, should be able to discourse of their own pristine tongue, and of their own birthplaces, yet found them, though not totally ignorant that such things had been, yet insensible and careless of their former condition. ”

“ We must assume, too, that this fusion of blood did not go so far and hardly took place at all in Cornwall. We see that the conquerors left but few and slight traces of their occupancy in the peninsula, and the presumption is that they did not take root in it, that when they had come and conquered and had their carousal of blood they were glad to sail or march away, like William Gilpin in search of the picturesque, from a country of so barren and repellent an aspect, to seek for a permanent resting-place in a softer, more fertile land. ”

“ No county in England has a stronger individuality than Cornwall, whether in economic or social conditions, in history, nomenclature, tradition, or even in the physical characteristics of the land. Such individuality is hardly to be compassed within political boundaries, and in some respects it is shared by the neighbouring county of Devon, yet the traveller hardly feels its influence before passing west of the Tamar. ”

“ Just put up a big board, gentlemen, and advertise 'Cornwall to Let: leases of life renewed to men with dollar-piles and tired of trying to be tired.' You'll have'm tumbling over in shiploads, for it'll suit their complaint, just like Lancashire air suits cotton. It'll just suit the Cornish complaint for them to come, now that 'fish, tin, and copper' aren't all flourishing. ”

“ But this parish is distinguished from all others in Cornwall by the locality of Roughtor and Brown Willy; these hills, pre-eminent from their elevation, and from the granite crags studded over the whole expanse of their surfaces, may be seen from an elevation crossed by the road near llfracombe in the north of Devon, and from the high land in Zennor, about ten miles from the Land's End. ”

“ It has been thought that because Cornwall is preeminently the land of strange beliefs and of old tales and legends relating to mythical saints and heroes, to giants and demons with a great variety of fantastic beings—mermaids, fairies, pigsies and piskies and other little people—the Cornish are a highly imaginative people. ”