Bosula—“The Owls’ House”—lay in the Keigwin Valley, about six miles
southwest of Penzance. The valley drained the peninsula’s bare backbone
of tors, ran almost due south until within a mile and a half of the sea,
formed a sharp angle, ran straight again and met the English Channel at
Monks Cove. A stream threaded its entire length, its source a holy well
on Bartinny Downs (the water of which, taken at the first of the moon,
was reputed a cure for chest complaints). Towards the river’s source the
valley was a shallow swamp, a wide bed of tussocks, flags, willow and
thorn, the haunt of snipe and woodcock in season, but as it neared
Bosula it grew narrower and deeper until it emptied into the sea,
pinched to a sharp gorge between precipitous cliffs.
It was a surprising valley. You came from the west over the storm-swept,
treeless table-land that drives into the Atlantic like a wedge and is
beaten upon by three seas, came with clamorous salt gales buffeting you
this way and that, pelting you with black showers of rain, came suddenly
to the valley rim and dropped downhill into a different climate, a
serene, warm place of trees with nothing to break the peace but the
gentle chatter of the stream. When the wind set roundabouts of south it
was not so quiet. The cove men had a saw—
“When the river calls the sea,
Fishing there will be;
When the sea calls the river,
’Ware foul weather.”
Bosula stood at the apex of the angle, guarded on all sides, but when
the wind set southerly and strong the boom of the breakers on the Twelve
Apostles reef came echoing up the valley in deep, tremendous organ
peals. So clear did they sound that one would imagine the sea had broken
inland and that inundation was imminent.
The founder of the family was a tin-streamer from Crowan, who, noting
that the old men had got their claws into every inch of payable dirt in
the parish, loaded his implements on a donkey and went westward looking
for a stream of his own. In due course he and his ass meandered down
Keigwin Valley and pitched camp in the elbow. On the fourth day Penhale
the First, soil-stained and unkempt, approached the lord of the manor
and proposed washing the stream on tribute. He held out no hopes, but
was willing to give it a try, being out of work. The lord of the manor
knew nothing of tin or tinners, regarded the tatterdemalion with casual
contempt and let him draw up almost what terms he liked. In fifteen
years Penhale had taken a small fortune out of the valley, bought
surrounding land and built a house on the site of his original camp.
From thenceforth the Penhales were farmers, and each in his turn added
something, a field, a bit of moorland, a room to the house.
When John Penhale took possession the estate held three hundred acres of
arable land, to say nothing of stretches of adjoining bog and heather,
useful for grazing cattle. The buildings formed a square, with the yard
in the center, the house on the north and the stream enclosing the whole
on three sides, so that the place was serenaded with eternal music, the
song of running water, tinkling among bowlders, purling over shallows,
splashing over falls.
Penhale, the tinner, built a two-storied house of four rooms, but his
successor had seven children, and an Elizabethan, attuning himself to a
prolific age, thirteen. The first of these added a couple of rooms, the
second four. Since building forwards encroached on the yard and building
backwards would bring them into the stream they, perforce, extended
sideways and westwards. In John Penhale’s time the house was five rooms
long and one thick, with the front door stranded at the east end and the
thatch coming down so low the upper windows had the appearance of old
men’s eyes peering out under arched and shaggy brows. There was little
distinctive about the house save the chimneys, which were inordinately
high, and the doorway which was carved. Penhale the First, who knew
something of smelting and had ideas about draught, had set the standard
in chimney pots, but the Elizabethan was responsible for the doorway. He
pulled a half-drowned sailor out of the cove one dawn, brought him home,
fed and clothed him. The castaway, a foreigner of some sort, being
unable to express gratitude in words, picked up a hammer and stone
chisel and decorated his rescuer’s doorway—until then three plain slabs
of granite. He carved the date on the lintel and a pattern of interwoven
snakes on the uprights, culminating in two comic little heads, one on
either side of the door, intended by the artist as portraits of his host
and hostess, but which they, unflattered, and doubtless prompted by the
pattern below, had passed down to posterity as Adam and Eve.
The first Penhale was a squat, burly man and built his habitation to fit
himself, but the succeeding generations ran to height and were in
constant danger of braining themselves against the ceilings. They could
sit erect, but never rose without glancing aloft, and when they stood up
their heads well-nigh disappeared among the deep beams. This had
inculcated in them the habit of stooping instinctively on stepping
through any door. A Dean of Gwithian used to swear that the Penhale
family entered his spacious church bent double.
The first Penhale, being of small stature, made his few windows low
down; the subsequent Penhales had to squat to see out of them. Not that
the Penhales needed windows to look out of; they were an open-air breed
who only came indoors to eat and sleep. The ugly, cramped old house
served their needs well. They came home from the uplands or the bottoms
at the fall of night, came in from plowing, shooting, hedging or driving
cattle, came mud-plastered, lashed by the winter winds, saw Bosula
lights twinkling between the sheltering trees, bowed their tall heads
between Adam and Eve and, entering the warm kitchen, sat down to mighty
meals of good beef and good vegetables, stretched their legs before the
open hearth, grunting with full-fed content, and yawned off to bed and
immediate sleep, lulled by the croon of the brook and the whisper of the
wind in the treetops. Gales might skim roofs off down in the Cove, ships
batter to matchwood on the Twelve Apostles, upland ricks be scattered
over the parish, the Penhales of Bosula slept sound in the lap of the
hills, snug behind three-foot walls.
In winter, looking down from the hills, you could barely see Bosula for
trees, in summer not at all. They filled the valley from side to side
and for half a mile above and below the house, oak, ash, elm and
sycamore with an undergrowth of hazel and thorn. Near the house the
stream, narrowed to a few feet, ran between banks of bowlders piled up
by the first Penhale and his tinners. They had rooted up bowlders
everywhere and left them lying anyhow, on their ends or sides, great
uneven blocks of granite, now covered with an emerald velvet of moss or
furred with gray and yellow lichen. Between these blocks the trees
thrust, flourishing on their own leaf mold. The ashes and elms went
straight up till they met the wind leaping from hill to hill and then
stopped, nipped to an even height as a box-hedge is trimmed by shears;
but the thorns and hazels started crooked and grew crooked all the way,
their branches writhing and tangling into fantastic clumps and shapes to
be overgrown and smothered in toils of ivy and honeysuckle.
In spring the tanglewood valley was a nursery of birds. Wrens, thrushes,
chiffchaffs, greenfinches and chaffinches built their nests in scented
thickets of hawthorn and may; blue and oxeye tits kept house in holes in
the apple and oak trees. These added their songs to that of the brook.
In spring the bridal woods about Bosula rippled and thrilled with liquid
and debonair melody. But it was the owls that were the feature of the
spot. Winter or summer they sat on their boughs and hooted to each other
across the valley, waking the woods with startling and eerie screams.
“To-whoo, wha-aa, who-hoo!” they would go, amber eyes burning, and then
launch themselves heavily from their perches and beat, gray and ghostly,
across the moon. “Whoo, wha-hoo!”
Young lovers straying up the valley were apt to clasp each other the
tighter and whisper of men murdered and evil hauntings when they heard
the owls, but the first Penhale in his day, camped with his ass in the
crook of the stream, took their banshee salutes as a good omen. He lay
on his back in the leaves listening to them and wondering at their
number.
“Bos hula enweer ew’n teller na,” said he in Cornish, as he rolled over
to sleep. “Truly this is the owls’ house.”