with what dignity we could amidst a remarkable miscellany of
packages. Once arrived at Kingsley's hero-town, we read, as in honour
bound, the opening chapter of "Westward Ho!" crossed the historic
bridge and sought out in the church the brass erected to the noble
memory of Sir Richard Grenville, who drove the little _Revenge_ with
such a gallant recklessness into the thick of the Spanish fleet,
fought his immortal fight, and died of his wounds "with a joyful and
quiet mind." The exceeding charm of this Bristol Channel coast made us
intolerant of trains and even of coaches, so that at lovely, idle
Ilfracombe we took to our feet again and walked on by a cliff path to
Combe Martin. Here we were startled, on going to bed, to find packed
away between the thin mattresses a hoard of green pears, hard as
marbles, and not much bigger, which the small boy of the inn,
apparently intent on suicide, had secreted. The towered church, some
eight or nine centuries old, was shown to us by a sexton who claimed
that the office had descended in his family from father to son for the
past three hundred years. However that may be, he was an entertaining
guide, reading off his favourite "posy-stones" with a relish, and
interpreting the carvings of the curious old rood-screen according to
a version of Scripture unlike any that we had known before. Thence our
way climbed up for two toilsome miles through a muddy sunken lane, in
whose rock walls was a growth of dainty fern. It was good to come out
in view of the rival purples of sunny sea and heathery hills, good to
be regaled on "cold shoulder" and Devonshire junket in a stone-floored
kitchen with vast fireplace and ponderous oaken settles, good to start
off again across Trentishoe Common, glorious with gorse, and down the
richly wooded combe, past a farmyard whose great black pig grunted at
us fearsomely, and still down and down, through the fragrance of the
pines. We turned off our track to follow the eddying Heddon to the
sea, and had, in consequence, a stiff scramble to gain our proper path
cut high in the Channel side of the cliff. We walked along that narrow
way in a beauty almost too great to bear, but the stress of emotion
found some relief in the attention we had to give to our footing, for
the cliff fell sheer to the sunset-coloured waters. We spent the night
at Wooda Bay, walking on in the morning for a jocund mile or two
through fresh-scented larchwoods, then across Lee Abbey Park and
through the fantastic Valley of Rocks, along another cliff-walk and
down a steep descent to Lynmouth, where Shelley's "myrtle-twined
cottage" stands upon the beach. Lynmouth, where the songs of sea and
river blend, was more to our taste in its picturesque mingling of the
old and the new, of herring-village and watering-place, than its airy
twin, Linton, perched on the cliff-top four hundred feet above, but
both are little paradises and, having located ourselves in one, the
first thing we did was to leave it and visit the other. We lingered
for a little in this exquisite corner of creation, till one blithe
morning we could put up no longer with the saucy challenge of the Lyn
and chased that somersaulting sprite, that perpetual waterfall, five
miles inland, so coming out on the heathery waste of Exmoor.
We would gladly have turned gipsies then and there, if so we might
have wandered all over and over that beautiful wild upland, and down
through the undulating plain of mid-Devon, with its well-watered
pastures and rich dairy-farms for whose butter and cheese the
Devonshire sailors, as Hakluyt's narratives tell, used to long sorely
on their far voyages. But the genuine garden of Devon is South Hams,
below Dartmoor and between the Teign and the Tamar. This is the
apple-country of which the poet sings:
"For me there's nought I would not give
For the good Devon land,
Whose orchards down the echoing cleeve
Bedewed with spray-drift stand,
And hardly bear the red fruit up
That shall be next year's cider-cup."
Little as Parson Herrick, the indignant incumbent of Dean Prior,
enjoyed his Devonshire charge, the cider industry of the region must
have appealed to him.
But this broad county, outranked in size only by York and
Lincolnshire, has in its south, as in its north, a desolate tableland.
Dartmoor has been described as a "monstrous lump of granite, covered
with a peaty soil." The rocks are rich in lead and iron, tin and
copper, but the soil is too poor even for furze to flourish in it.
Heather, reeds, moss and whortleberries make shift to grow, and afford
a rough pasturage to the scampering wild ponies, the moor-sheep and
red cattle. It is a silent land of rugged tors and black morasses, of
sudden mists and glooms, of prehistoric huts, abandoned mines, and,
above all, for "Superstition clings to the granite," of dark stories,
weird spells, and strange enchantments. Indeed, it folds a horror in
its heart,--Dartmoor Prison, where our American sailors suffered a
century ago, and where English convicts are now ringed in by grim
walls and armed sentries. It is said that even to-day, when a Dartmoor
child gets a burn, the mother's first remedy is to lay her thumb upon
the smarting spot and repeat:
"There came two angels out of the west,
One brought fire, the other brought frost.
Out, fire! In, frost!
By the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!
Amen, amen, amen."
Among the mysterious groups of so-called Druid stones is a circle
known as the Nine Maidens, for these uncouth grey shapes were once
slender girls so fond of dancing that they would not cease on Sunday,
and for that sin were petrified. And still every Sabbath noon these
impenitent stones come to life and dance thrice around in a circle.
FOOTNOTE:
[9] Tennyson's "The Holy Grail," 36-64.
CORNWALL
But the veritable Pixydom lies south of the Tamar. In Cornwall, that
stretch of deserted moors furrowed on either side by little
river-valleys, that rocky promontory which seems to belong more to the
kingdom of the sea than to England, the Celtic imagination has rioted
at will. There were giants in the land in bygone days, for the
wanderer among those strangely sculptured crags of granite, slate, and
serpentine chances at every turn on a Giant's Cradle or a Giant's
Chair, Giant's Spoon, Giant's Bowl, Giant's Key, Giant's Hat, Giant's
Table, Giant's Well, Giant's Pulpit, Giant's Grave. Cornishmen have
heard the music and seen the fairy dances, spied on fairy banquets,
and peeped in on fairy funerals. The Small People have been gay and
kindly neighbours, sometimes whisking away a neglected baby and
returning the little mortal all pink and clean, wrapped in leaves and
blossoms, "as sweet as a nut." These are the spirits of Druids, or of
other early Cornwall folk, who, as heathen, may not go to heaven, but
are too innocent for hell. So they are suffered to live on in their
old happy haunts, but ever dwindling and dwindling, till it is to be
feared that bye and bye, what with all the children growing stupid
over schoolbooks, and all the poets writing realistic novels, the
Small People will twinkle out of sight. The Spriggans, lurking about
the cairns and cromlechs, where they keep guard over buried treasures,
could better be spared. They are such thievish and mischievous trolls,
with such extraordinary strength in their ugly bits of bodies, it is
more likely they are the diminished ghosts of the old giants. The
Piskies are nearly as bad, as any bewildered traveller who has been
Pisky-led into a bog would testify. The only sure protection against
their tricks is to wear your garments inside out. Many a Cornish
farmer has found a fine young horse all sweated and spent in the
morning, his mane knotted into fairy stirrups showing plainly how some
score of the Piskies had been riding him over night. And many a
Cornish miner, deep down in the earth, has felt his hair rise on his
head as he heard the _tap_, _tap_, _tap_ of the Knockers, souls of
long-imprisoned Jews sent here by Roman emperors to work the tin-mines
of Cornwall. The Brownies, who used to be so helpful about the house,
have grown shy of late and can be depended on for assistance only when
the bees are swarming. Then the housewife beats on a tin pan, calling
at the top of her voice: "Brownie! Brownie!" till she sees that he has
heard her and is persuading the bees to settle. Offended mermaids have
choked up Cornish harbours and buried sea-coast villages under sand.
If you doubt it, go and look at the little church of St. Piran--the
miners' saint, who came sailing from Ireland on a millstone and
discovered the Cornish tin--the church that for seven centuries was
hidden under the sands and then, as the restless winds sifted and
searched them, rose again to human sight. Spectral hounds bay across
the moors, and a phantom coach is sometimes heard rolling with a
hollow rumble along the deep-hedged roads. Ghost ships with all sail
set drive by the shores on gusty nights, and the Death Ship, tall,
dark, square-rigged, with black sails and a demon crew, has been
known to come, in crashes of thunder and flare of lightning, for the
soul of a notorious wrecker. Drowned sailors call from under the tide
or speed along the strand with dripping clothes and hair. Witches,
sorcerers, fortune-tellers, charmers and "cunning men" are among the
historic characters of Cornwall. In fact, the Witch of Freddam still
rides the seas in her coffin, stirring up storms with her ladle and
broom. The luckless sailor who has set eyes on her will not see his
home again. Miners, too, have their special dangers. The goblins that
they sometimes chance on underground, hunched up into uncouth shapes
or tumbling heels over head, are not ill-met, as their presence
indicates rich lodes, but it would never do to mark a cross on the
wall of a mine gallery, or to pass a snail on your way to the shaft
without dropping for it a morsel of tallow from your candle. The newly
dead notify their friends of the event in many a curious fashion, even
by shaking the milk in the pans and spoiling the clotted cream. A
woman shamed to suicide haunts her betrayer in the form of a white
hare. Cornishmen cannot die easy on a feather-bed, nor in a house
where any key is turned or bolt is shot, nor would they be carried to
the grave by a new road, nor buried on the north side of the church.
If rain fall--as in Cornwall it often does--on a bier, it is a sign
that the soul has "arrived safe."
Amid all these supernatural influences, it is reassuring to know that
the Devil never enters this county, having a wholesome fear of being
made into a pie. His cloven hoofs once ventured across the Tamar, but
he was dismayed to find that the Cornish women put everything, fish,
flesh, fowl, vegetables, whatnot, into pie. By the time poor Beelzebub
had partaken of fishy pie, stargazy pie--made of pilchards,--conger
pie--made of eels,--lamy pie--made of kid,--herby pie, parsley pie,
and piggy pie, his nerves gave way, and he bolted out of the shire so
precipitately that he strewed the hills and the coast with his
travelling equipment of Devil's Bellows, Devil's Ovens, and Devil's
Frying-pans.
It is mainly in West Cornwall that such fantastic figurings in the
rocks are referred to the Devil or the giants. On the eastern moors
they are more commonly attributed to King Arthur, whose Beds and
Chairs and Cups and Saucers and the Footprints of whose horse are
numerous enough to put the skeptic out of countenance. But not only
our first encounter, as we entered Cornwall by the east, was with King
Arthur, but almost our last, as we left the Duchy by the west,--for
this shire is proud to be known as the Royal Duchy, claiming that the
eldest son of the Crown is born Duke of Cornwall and only subsequently
created Prince of Wales. Within what seemed but a short time after
crossing the broad boundary stream, dotted with sleepy craft, we found
ourselves at Liskeard, a sleepy old market-town blest with a noble
church on whose outer wall is a sundial with the grave motto: "So soon
passeth it away." It was already late in the afternoon, but a dark,
thin, bright-eyed Cornishwoman in the railway carriage had given us
most cheering information. Could we drive to Dozmare Pool before
sunset? Easily; it was only a round of three or four miles and would
take us by the Devil's Cheesewring and The Hurlers and St. Keyne's
Well. The waters of this well, she went on to tell us, have the magic
property of giving the upper hand to that one of a wedded pair first
drinking of them after the ceremony; and she recited with charming
vivacity snatches of Southey's ballad, while a burly, red-faced,
blue-eyed, beaming tourist from over the Tamar, the only man in the
compartment, blurted out a gallantry to the effect that ladies ought
to have their way anyhow, wells or no wells, and his silent little
wife smiled a knowing little smile.
The people at the inn exchanged glances when we announced our route
and although, setting out at five, we confidently ordered dinner at
seven, the landlady slipped a packet of sandwiches and two bottles of
ginger ale into the carriage. The coachman, thin and dark and vivid of
countenance, like all the rest of this new Cornish world about us,
kindly but firmly refused to include in the drive St. Keyne's Well,
the Cheesewring, a curious pile of granite blocks some thirty feet
high, whose topmost stone is so sensitive that it whirls about three
times whenever _it hears_ a cock crow, and The Hurlers, three
prehistoric stone circles reported by legend, in its later Puritan
garb, to be groups of young Cornishmen thus enchanted for indulging
on a Sunday in the traditional Cornish sport of "hurling." Dozmare
Pool was all that our determined Jehu would undertake, although he
graciously allowed us, in passing, a glimpse of St. Cleer's Well. This
is not as famous as the well of St. Neot the Pigmy, who endowed the
sacred waters with miraculous virtue by standing in them, day after
day, immersed to his neck, while he repeated the entire book of
Psalms, or of various others, but it is a spring of old renown,
covered over by a steep-pitched roof supported on time-worn pillars
and arches. The niches of this little open-air baptistry are now empty
and its pinnacles are broken, but beside it still stands an ancient
cross. The lofty-towered church of St. Cleer was close by, and we
entered to bow our heads for a moment under its vaulted and timbered
roof.
Our coachman would allow no further pause. The sunset was already
casting a crimson light over the wastes of fern and bracken and the
earthscars of abandoned mines, for the hills all about contain tin and
copper, which it does not pay to work. Our old white nag--I hope his
name was Merlin--seemed incapable of fatigue. I half suspect he was a
sorcery steed of metal. Up and down the hills he scrambled with
unquenchable enthusiasm. As the sun sank into a bed of bracken, we
marvelled that the driver could be sure of his way across those dim
and featureless moors, but he turned unerringly from one deep lane
into another. As we drew nearer the Pool, that "middle mere" into
which Sir Bedivere flung the jewel-hilted Excalibur, the evil powers
began to array themselves against us. For the wild spirit Tregeagle,
whose howling as he is chased by demon dogs has been heard all over
Cornwall, is doomed for his sins in this mortal life to labour
endlessly at the hopeless task of emptying Dozmare Pool. It is so
deep--notwithstanding the awkward fact of its going dry in rainless
summers--that not all the bell-ropes in Cornwall can reach to its
bottom, and a thorn-bush, once flung into it, floated out into
Falmouth harbour. The bailing must be done by a limpetshell with a
hole in it and, altogether, it is no wonder that Tregeagle's temper
has grown exceedingly morose. For change of occupation, he is
sometimes taken to the north coast and set to spinning ropes of sand,
or is given a choked-up harbour to sweep out, but these tasks please
him no better, and the shrieks of his torment are borne on every
storm.
As we drove on, a light mist crept over the meadows and defined the
course of an attendant stream. Clouds and trees took on weird aspects.
There were Druid robes floating across the sky, misshapen figures
crouching under the hedges, menacing arms shaken from the trees, and
one wizard branch shot out and splashed our faces with unholy dew. The
mist thickened and rose. The carriage left the road and bumped
uncertainly along till it came to a stop at what we vaguely made out
to be the foot of a hill. For by this time the clinging vapours had
driven us into our waterproofs and so blurred all vision that the
driver, who could not leave his fiery veteran of a horse, would not
let us attempt the half-mile climb alone, but sent a shout plunging
through that wet, white air and brought out some bogie of the moor
embodied as a gaunt old Cornish dame to be our guide. Feeling her way
with a stout stick, she led us up the hill and along a stony track
where we could not see our steps nor one another's faces. When she
stayed us with her staff and said we had reached the pool, we could
discern nothing of the sort, but reckless of life and limb we followed
her down an abrupt bank and over a hummocky bit of ground to the very
brink, as she assured us, of the bottomless tarn. We tried to think we
saw a glimmer, although we heard not even
"the ripple washing in the reeds,
And the wild water lapping on the crag."
Lacking an Excalibur, I cast a stone into the invisible, hoping I
might hit Tregeagle, but the hollow splash that came back aroused such
uncanny echoes we all three with one accord skurried away and
scrabbled back down sandy ruts to the haven of the carriage. As we
gratefully munched our sandwiches, we reflected that perhaps the
mystical mere was more impressive so than if we had actually beheld
that little fresh-water pond, about a mile in circumference and some
eight or ten feet deep, lying on its mid-Cornwall tableland with the
crest of Brown Gilly rising up behind. Our eyes had told us nothing
that we could urge against Malory's geography, with its sea-route from
Dozmare to Glastonbury.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. COLUMB MINOR]
"Then Sir Bedivere took the King upon his back, and so went
with him to that water side, and when they were at the water
side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many
fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all
they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when
they saw King Arthur. 'Now put me into the barge,' said the
King; and so he did softly. And there received him three
queens with great mourning, and so they sat them down, and in
one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that
queen said, 'Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long
from me? Alas; this wound on your head hath caught overmuch
cold.' And so then they rowed from the land, and Sir Bedivere
cried, 'Ah, my lord Arthur, what shall become of me, now ye
go from me and leave me here alone among mine enemies?'
'Comfort thyself,' said the King, 'and do as well as thou
mayst, for in me is no trust for to trust in. For I will into
the vale of Avalon to heal me of my grievous wound.'"
But the Cornish mist in which Arthur fought his last "dim, weird
battle of the west" was to us no longer a fable.
"A death-white mist slept over sand and sea;
Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew
Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold
With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
And some had visions out of golden youth,
And some beheld the faces of old ghosts
Look in upon the battle."
Now that we had braved Tregeagle and done the deed, that heavy mist
thinned away as suddenly as it had gathered, and when, at ten o'clock,
we reached our inn, the sky was bright with stars, and a great moon
was slowly drifting up from the horizon.
But the paramount Table Round locality in Cornwall is Tintagel on the
western coast where Arthur's Castle stands and where, moreover, the
hushed tide brought him first from the mystery of "the great deep."
"For there was no man knew from whence he came;
But after tempest, when the long wave broke
All down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss,
There came a day as still as heaven, and then
They found a naked child upon the sands
Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea;
And that was Arthur."
The high, bleak, rugged and desolate tract of Bodwin Moor, at whose
heart is Dozmare Pool, lies between the four towns of Liskeard,
Bodwin, Launceston and Camelford. This last was our starting-point for
Tintagel. We had reached Camelford by a day's journey from Penzance,
setting out by train through a country seamed all over with abandoned
surface diggings of the tin mines, pierced by shafts and defaced by
heaps of mineral refuse to which heather was already bringing the
first healing of nature. We had our nooning at Newquay and would have
been glad to linger on its broad beach, looking up at the twin barrows
where sleep, according to tradition, two kings of long ago,--kings who
fought on that open headland a whole day through and fell together at
sunset, each slain by the last thrust of the other. But we pressed on
by carriage, hardly glancing at the long, low, stately towered church
of St. Columb Minor, and cutting short our survey of the curious old
panels, so richly carved with sacred emblems--pelicans, crosses, the
instruments of the Passion, the pierced hand, a heart within a crown
of thorns, the lamb, the wafer and the cup--in the brother church of
St. Columb Major. From the depths of our Cornish road shut in by banks
and hedges some ten or twelve feet high, we eyed the ripe blackberries
hanging well above our reach; we saw a blazing rick on one side and,
on the other, a maze of white butterflies circling among the fuchsia
trees; we met a group of rustic mourners pushing a bier set on wheels;
and just as the hedges began to open here and there, giving us vistas
of wheatfield, moor, and sea, we found ourselves at Wadebridge, a
little town with a street of ivy-greened houses dignified by a grey
church-tower. We crossed a stone bridge of many arches that seemed too
big for its river, and took train for Camelford. On our right we had
the granite masses of Brown Willy and Rough Tor and presently, on our
left, the great gashes of the Delalobe slate quarries.
[Illustration: ARTHUR'S CASTLE, TINTAGEL]
These held the close attention of a Cornish miner who, after forty
years of fortune-seeking in Australia, was coming home to Camelford
for a visit. He drove up with us in the rattling wagonette, gazing on
ragged hedge and prickly furze as a thirsty soul might gaze on
Paradise. The fulness of his heart overflowed in little laughters,
though the tears were glistening on his lashes, and in broken words of
memory and joy. He kept pointing out to us, mere strangers that we
were, not noting and not caring what we were, the stiles and streams
and rocks associated with special events of his boyhood and youth.
As we went clattering down into the little stone huddle of houses, we
had to turn away from the rapture in his eyes. Brothers and sisters
were waiting to greet him, with tall children of theirs that had been
to him but names, yet the human welcome could hardly penetrate through
his dream, through his ecstatic communion with the scene itself. As we
were driving out of Camelford early the next morning, we caught sight
of our grizzled Cornishman once again, standing in one of those humble
doorways with the shining still upon his face.
A man like that would make anybody homesick and, to speak impartially,
we thought that Camelford was far less worthy of such emotion than two
villages we severally remembered over sea. We fell out of humour with
the poor old town, would not hear of it as the Arthurian Camelot,
"a city of shadowy palaces
And stately,"
and disdained the tradition that the blameless king fell at Slaughter
Bridge. My athletic comrade, however, to the admiration of a flock of
little schoolgirls, swung herself down the riverbank to see his
tombstone and reported it as reading:
_Caten hic jacit filius Marconi._
The drive to Tintagel was through a world of slate,--slate everywhere.
There were slate walls, slate houses, heaps of slate-refuse, banks of
broken slate feathered with gorse and heather, yawning mouths of
disused slate quarries. We passed through defiles where slate was
piled cliff-high on either side. Slate steps led up to the footpaths
that ran along the top of the hedge-banks. By way of this forsaken
region we came to a sleeping town. Tintagel Church lay before us,
hoary, silent. Not a soul was in the streets,--not the fierce ghosts
of Gorlois and of Uther Pendragon, nor the sad ghost of Igraine, nor
the loving ghosts of Tristram and Iseult. We left the carriage and
climbed by slippery paths to Arthur's Castle, which is no castle, but
a colossal confusion of tumbled rocks, some heaped and mortared once
by human hands, some grouped in the fantastic architecture of nature.
There we sat astonished and dismayed, for the place is like a robber
hold, a den of pirates fortified against the land, rather than a court
of chivalry. But the scene was superbly beautiful. The ocean on which
we looked was a dazzling blue, and far to north and south stood out
the stern, dark outlines of the coast. The sunshine that filled the
surf with shimmering tints gleamed on the white plumage of a gull
enthroned on the summit rock of the castle,--most likely the spirit of
Guinevere, for Arthur, when he revisits Tintagel, comes as the Cornish
chough,
"Talons and beak all red with blood,"--
a bird which no true Cornishman will shoot.
The monstrous crags and huge fragments of old wall were cleft in a
fashion strongly suggestive of
"casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairylands forlorn,"
and we shuddered to imagine with what stupendous force the terrible
tides of winter must beat against that naked coast.
We realised what the fury of the sea-winds here must be as we strolled
through the churchyard, whose slate slabs are buttressed with masonry
and, even so, tip and lean over those graves too old for grief. All is
ancient about Tintagel church, and most of all the Norman font whose
sculptured faces are worn dim and sleepy with innumerable years, each
year bringing its quota of babies for the blessing of the holy water.
[Illustration: BOSCASTLE]