MOUNT'S BAY
From Loe Bar the Porthleven sands take us on to the busy little
fishing-port of Porthleven itself, whose mother-parish is Sithney. It
is becoming quite a popular watering-place, not only with Helston
folk, who have only about two and a half miles to come, but with
visitors from a greater distance. Porthleven is now a separate parish,
with a modern church of its own, and a large Methodist chapel at
Torleven that cost L3,500. Its name clearly embodies that of St.
Levan, whom we shall meet again near Land's End. An association with
that saint gives it a tolerable antiquity, but the place lacks any
picturesque garb of the ancient, and its chief pleasantness lies about
the harbour. There are fine views of Mount's Bay to be gained from the
higher grounds. The harbour and docks were incorporated a century
since; the pier is 465 feet long, and the basin has stout granite
jetties. Granite and china-clay, fire-bricks and fish are exported
here, and the fishing done is fairly extensive. The harbourage is
good, but rather difficult to make in rough weather; south-westerly
winds drive the seas fiercely against its mouth. As might be imagined,
wrecks have been plentiful here, and along the Methleigh shore are
the graves of many drowned persons--interred here in days when the
right to consecrated earth was denied. The coast had also an evil
reputation for wrecking--not what the underwriters style "act of God,"
but the dark and mysterious crime of luring vessels on a rock-bound
shore:--
"God keep us from rocks and shelving sands,
And save us from Breage and Germoe men's hands!"
The parish of Breage has a specially attractive church, dedicated to
St. Breaca, who landed in the Hayle estuary some time in the sixth
century; she was an Irish lady, said to have been the sister of St.
Uni, of Euny Lelant and other churches. The church is large and
shapely, but its ancient character has hardly been preserved by the
redecoration that took place in 1890, though happily that restoration
revealed some fine frescoes that had been covered with whitewash. One
of the figures is the popular one of St. Christopher, like that of
Poughill in north Cornwall; other figures are St. Michael, St. Giles,
and St. Cury. The altar-slabs are old, and may once have been taken
from altar-tombs. There is a good tower-arch, a five-shafted font, and
excellent wagon-shaped roofs; chancel-screen and reredos are modern.
Of the two bells, one, the tenor, is the largest in Cornwall, with a
diameter of 54 inches; it is said that there was formerly a peal, but
that the bells were recast into this single form. It is natural to
find traces of the Godolphins here, their seat being so near. The
national history has much to say of one Godolphin only, Sidney, the
Lord Treasurer, whom Macaulay treated not too tenderly; but Cornwall
knows of many, and is especially loving to the memory of Margaret, the
wife of Sidney, whose tomb is in the church of Breage. She has had the
benefit of a memoir by John Evelyn, her faithful friend, and his
account of her is a beautiful picture of womanhood. Being appointed
Maid of Honour to the Duchess of York in her twelfth year, the girl
retained her purity in a Court that was notoriously impure, and it was
thus that she met her two friends, the young Godolphin who married her
nine years later, and the older man Evelyn, who gave her devotion and
tender counsel. It was in 1678 that Margaret Godolphin died, after the
birth of her only child. A few days before her illness she had written
to her absent husband: "If I might, I would beg that my body might lye
where I have had such a minde to goe myselfe, att Godolphyn, among
your friends. I believe, if I were carried by sea, the expense would
not be very great; but I don't insist on that place, if you think it
not reasonable; lay me where you please." To Cornwall her sorrowing
husband brought her, laying her in this church of Breage, where her
remembrance is of a very sweet savour; and when we recollect how
fondly her lord had loved her, and how he never sought to fill the
vacant place, we must needs think with greater gentleness of one who,
for his age, was a patriotic and high-minded statesman. An earlier
Godolphin had been one of the "four wheels of Charles's Wain." There
are heroic memories clinging to the now extinct family; and it is well
to find that at least the name survives in vital fashion here around
their old manor-house. That house is now a farm, but it retains traces
of old manorial grandeur--some panelled rooms with great windows, a
hall with lofty fireplace, and the fishponds of the gardens. On the
seaward side of the house rises Godolphin Hill to a height of about
500 feet, giving a noble view of St. Michael's Mount and Bay. There
are many remains of former mining. Tregonning Hill, close by, is
somewhat higher, and its summit has a fine entrenchment with a
striking inner vallum. The Latin epitaph to Margaret Godolphin upon
her altar-tomb was written by Evelyn, and the same inscription was
placed upon her coffin. It is followed by her favourite motto, the
beautiful _Un Dieu, un amy_ ("One God, one friend"). Evelyn knew
better than to write any fulsome compliments upon her tomb.
A little westward of Tregonning is Germoe, its church dedicated to St.
Germoe, or Germoc. The pinnacles of the Perpendicular tower are
specially notable, while the gable-cross and corbels of the porch are
of a kind rare in this part of the country. The body of the church is
Decorated, but its font must be far earlier; it is rather like a huge
stoup, of remarkably rude formation, and may perhaps be Saxon in date.
But the structure known as St. Germoe's Chair, in the graveyard, is
even more curious; it consists of three roofed sedilia, fronted by two
pillared arches. W. C. Borlase thought that the erection was simply an
altar-tomb, but, as another writer has said, "there is more than one
story attached to this chair. One is to the effect that the saint sat
in the central chair with the two assessors, one on either side of
him; another legend is that the priests rested in the chair; whilst a
third is that pilgrims to the tomb of the saint also rested therein.
Be that as it may, however, it is possible that this is a shrine, and
that the body of St. Germoe rests underneath it." There is a
folk-rhyme attaching to the parish:--
"Germoe, little Germoe, lies under a hill,
When I'm in Germoe I count myself well;
True love's in Germoe, in Breage I've got none;
When I'm in Germoe I count myself at home."
Pengersick in this parish has still some remains of a castle built in
the time of Henry VIII. by a man named Milliton, but there was
evidently a far older castle here belonging to the Pengersicks, and a
cluster of ancient legends gathered around the place. Cornish
imagination usually stopped short at folk-lore and gave nothing to
literature; in folk-lore it was certainly rich. One of the stories is
of a former inhabitant of the castle who had doings with a king's
daughter abroad, and when she followed him to his Cornish home, he
threw both the lady and her child into the sea. The boy was rescued by
a passing vessel (of course to return later); the woman changed into a
white hare, who one day ran in front of the man's horse, startling it
so that it rushed with its rider into the waves, and both were
drowned. White hares play a striking part in Cornish traditions.
Another story says that the castle was purchased by one of the
Millitons, who, having murdered a man, shut himself up here in terror
and remorse. A further legend speaks of another Milliton who lived
here with a wife whom he hated, and whom he often tried to get rid of,
but her wits proved equal to his. At last, feigning reconciliation,
he invited her to sup with him, and then suddenly told her that the
wine she had drunk was poisoned. "Then we die together," she answered,
"for I had my doubts and I mixed the contents of the goblets." A
terrible tempest came on, and wild shrieks came from the chamber; the
servants, hastening to the room in alarm, found their master and
mistress lying dead on the floor, while looking through the window
they could see their spirits being carried off in triumph by a winged
demon. It is singular how legends of this nature should attach
themselves to certain localities and persons; but the occupants of
Pengersick appear to have had differences with the clergy in old
times, and the priests generally contrived to blacken the characters
of those who became obnoxious to them. It was a terrible power, the
making or marring of future reputation.
[Illustration: PRUSSIA COVE.
_Photo by Gibson & Sons._]
On the coast the beautiful Praa sands stretch for a mile towards
Prussia Cove, with Praa Green at their head; the sands in its season
are glorified with wild convolvulus, and the gently lapping waves
often have little enough to tell us of their disastrous fury in time
of storm. But enough has been said on the dismal subject of wrecks.
Human remains, supposed to date from the Old Stone Age, have been
found at this spot; they, if they could speak, might tell us something
well worth listening to. But their memories would be of a Cornwall
very different from the present, and they would probably look to see
St. Michael's Mount in the midst of a forest.
If we are tired of shipwrecks, perhaps we are not tired of smugglers,
and we come on their footsteps in very vivid fashion at Prussia Cove,
whose original name was Porthleah. The place was a veritable hot-bed
of smuggling long before the days of John Carter, prince of smugglers,
who went by the name of King of Prussia, and gave its present name to
the little cove. Some say that in boyish play-fights he always assumed
the name of King of Prussia, and the title stuck. In Cornwall his
reputation quite over-shadowed that of his Continental namesake; so
that when the news of the battle of Jena and the defeat of the real
King of Prussia reached West Cornwall, a Mousehole man exclaimed,
"Misfortunes never come single; I'm sorry for that man. Not more'n six
weeks ago he lost three hundred keg o' brandy, by information, so I'm
towld." Carter had a brother almost equally famous, Captain Henry, and
the two between them, with much able assistance, rendered this coast a
very hot corner for the Preventive men. Sometimes it very closely
resembled actual war, as when the smugglers, mounting a small battery,
fired openly on a revenue cutter. "A smuggler chased by a revenue
cutter, being somewhat pressed, ran through a narrow channel amongst
the rocks between the Enys and the shore. The cutter, not daring to
venture amongst the shoals, sent her boat in. And the King, with his
merry men, opened fire on the boat. They loaded up the little guns so
that every time they fired the guns kicked over completely backwards,
and had to be replaced. The boat was driven back, and the cutter held
off for the night. Next morning the fight was renewed, the cutter
opening fire from the sea, while a company of riders fired from the
hedge at the top of the hill on the rear of the men in the battery.
This turned the tables on the smugglers, who sought shelter in Bessie
Bussow's house." Nothing serious appears to have happened, however.
Bessie Bussow, who kept the "Kiddleywink" inn, has passed to
immortality in connection with Bessie's Cove, which Nature seems to
have contrived especially for the doings of smugglers. The tempting
caverns remain, but we cannot compass much smuggling now, however much
we might like to; and the coves are chiefly devoted to crabbing. Men
like the Carters were heroes in the profession and gave it a certain
amount of dignity; romance and picturesque colour it always had.
Perranuthnoe, a little beyond the modern Acton Castle, whose situation
is of great beauty, is locally known simply as Perran; the second half
of its name seems to point to an earlier saint than Piran. Perhaps
there was a St. Uthnoe whose name survives also at Sithney. The
fourteenth-century church is very interesting, with a granite figure
of St. James over the south doorway, said to have been brought here
from Goldsithney, about a mile inland. Another mile along the coast,
and we are at Marazion--
"Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold."
It is the presence of the Mount that gives its wonderful charm to this
wide Bay, beautiful in itself, but from this feature receiving
something of the mystic and spiritual, a touch of varying
suggestiveness, a glamour of the remote and the unusual. There is
nothing else quite like it in Britain; to match and surpass it we have
to go to that other Mont St. Michel across the Channel. There is a
strange kinship in the two Mounts; but in spite of the superior
architecture of the Norman eminence, we might not perhaps be very
willing to take it in exchange for our own Cornish mount of St.
Michael. It is natural that myth and tradition should haunt here and
at Marazion, whose very name has an Oriental suggestion of romance
about it. And yet the name seems to mean nothing more romantic than a
market-place; and in spite of its alternative Market-Jew, seized
eagerly by those who are trying to prove that all Britons are
Israelites, neither name must be taken to denote any connection with
Jews or Jerusalem. The oldest name was doubtless _Marghas-iou_,
meaning "the markets" in an early form of Cornish; and in a later form
of Cornish we have _Marasion_, which meant the same thing. But Camden
says that the name Market-Jew arose from the town's having a market on
Thursday, the day of Jove or Jupiter--_quod ibi mercatus die Jovis
habeatur_; an explanation that is probably quite fanciful. Of course,
the name has been held to prove the claim of St. Michael's Mount to be
the Ictis of the ancients, but the idea that the natives would have
carried their tin across to this incommodious little islet for the
sake of selling seems absurd, when we consider that they could have
sold it much better on the mainland. The description by Diodorus
Siculus, often quoted, has a tempting look, but it cannot persuade us
that the Mount was Ictis. He says: "They that inhabit the British
promontory of Belerium, by reason of their converse with merchants,
are more civilised and courteous to strangers than the rest. These are
the people that make the tin, which with a great deal of care and
labour they dig out of the ground. Then they beat it into square
pieces like a die, and carry it to a British isle, near at hand,
called Ictis. For at low tide, all being dry between them and the
island, they convey over in carts abundance of tin." To suppose
that Ictis was the Isle of Wight would carry us too far back, for it
was only in prehistoric days that Wight was connected to the mainland
so closely; and the general conclusion now seems to be that Ictis was
the island of Thanet, in every sense convenient for the traffic. Our
connection with the Continent has always been most intimate at this
eastern corner, and the tin was conveyed along the trackways from west
to east. Sea passage was a consideration in those days. That
Phoenicians and other eastern merchants came to the Cornish coasts
cannot be denied, and for those who came by sea from the Mediterranean
Cornwall was more convenient than Kent; but the more regular centre of
traffic must have been at the eastern corner, and in no case can we
suppose that this steep rock would have been selected as a
market-place. Marazion is different, and may have welcomed many early
traders; but there is little to record of its past. It was certainly a
smelting-place for tin. Formerly in the parish of Hilary, it now has a
church of its own. Historically its chief incident seems to be the
attack by the French in 1514; and there was also trouble here in
connection with the religious revolt of 1549. The mother-church at
Hilary stands so high that it is said St. Ives folk used to make a
regular allowance to pay for its spire being whitewashed, that it
might serve as a mark at sea. Spires are rare in Cornwall, and this
one, of early Decorated style, is of special interest, having happily
survived the fire that destroyed the main building in 1853. There are
some curious blocked spire-lights. Outside the church is an oblong
stone of some size, of which the only decipherable words are
_Noti-noti_, with some indistinct symbols. This has been interpreted
as the inscription of a certain Notus; but others have regarded it as
simply a Roman milestone.
[Illustration: ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT, FROM MARAZION.
_Photo by Gibson & Sons._]
There is another stone, formerly outside the church but now taken
within, which gives the name of Constantine Caesar, thus establishing
its date as 306. Marazion is a pleasant little place, but of course
its chief interest is as the stepping-stone to St. Michael's Mount. It
is well known that Mount's Bay gives many traces of submerged forest,
and the old Cornish name of the Mount, meaning "the hoar rock in the
wood," gives further evidence. William of Worcester tells us that it
once stood six miles from the sea, in a track of country that must
have been a portion of the lost Lyonesse. The archangel himself is
said to have appeared on its summit in the fifth century, but we need
not associate the name of the Mount with any visit of this sort, for
churches on high places were constantly dedicated to the charge of St.
Michael, with the idea that he could protect them from evil powers of
the air. There may have been a religious cell here at a very early
date, but the earliest establishment of which we are certain is the
chapel endowed by Edward the Confessor, and gifted to the monks of St.
Michel in Normandy. The position of the Mount caused it to become not
only ecclesiastic but a secular stronghold, and it is in this
connection that it chiefly claims historic notice. In the time of
Richard I. it was held for King John by Henry de Pomeroi, but in no
part of the country was John greatly beloved, and on the return of
Richard from captivity the garrison surrendered voluntarily, Pomeroi,
it is said, committing suicide. During the Wars of the Roses some
fugitives from the battle of Barnet gained admittance to the Mount in
the disguise of pilgrims, and then, declaring themselves, held the
castle against all comers. Doing his duty as sheriff of the Duchy, Sir
John Arundell was killed in attacking them, and they resisted till a
pardon was granted them. In those days almost the only danger in such
a spot was the risk of famine; apart from that the place was
practically impregnable. Yet during the religious rebellion of 1549 it
twice yielded to attack, being taken for the King during the absence
of its governor, Arundell of Lanherne, and retaken by the Cornish; in
both cases we must suspect that the defence was half-hearted or the
supplies insufficient. In the Civil War Sir Francis Basset held the
Mount for the Royal cause, but surrendered after a gallant defence
when his case became hopeless. The Mount is now the seat of Lord St.
Levan, the representative of the St. Aubyn family, who gained
possession after the Bassets; and the little hamlet of St. Michael
lying at its foot is occupied by their retainers. The entire rock is
only about a mile in circumference, yet room is found on the very
small portion of level ground for a tennis-court, and even golf is
sometimes played. Anciently a resort of pilgrimage as the shrine of
St. Michael, the pilgrims that now cross by the causeway at low tide,
or are rowed over to the small quay, are lovers of the romantic and
the picturesque; but they are not allowed to ramble at will about the
buildings. Only a part is shown, including the chapel, which is
Perpendicular with some older fragments. The tower was a sort of
lighthouse or beacon for the guidance of fishermen--churches have
often fulfilled this double purpose, a lighthouse for both worlds; and
the lantern is now known as St. Michael's Chair, with a tradition that
whichever of man and wife sits there first will thereafter rule
supreme in all domestic matters; but the true Chair, as Carew
described it, was "a little without the castle," a craggy seat on the
western side of the Mount, where there was once an oratory. There was
good reason why pilgrims should resort hither in the past: "Know all
men that the most Holy Father Gregory, in the year from the
incarnation of our Lord 1070, bearing an affection of extraordinary
devoutness to the Church of St. Michael's Mount, has piously granted
to all the faithful who shall reach or visit it, with their oblations,
a remission of a third part of their penances." The human aspect peeps
out in the mention of alms and oblations; centres of pilgrimage have
always had a rich pecuniary value. Southey deals with St. Michael's
Chair in one of his ballads, which reminds us that St. Keyne, whom he
also treated poetically, is supposed to have visited the Mount when
she came to Cornwall--to which we must add a surmise that this saint
may not have been a woman at all, but was really St. Kenwyn. The Mount
is only insular during high tide, yet at such times, exposed to the
full force of the sea, the passage sometimes becomes impracticable;
and there are many low tides when it is not safe or even possible to
cross the causeway. Perhaps at any time those who see the rock from a
distance can best appreciate its charm. From Marazion to Penzance
there are three miles of flat, uninteresting road--perhaps the dullest
bit of coast-road in all Cornwall, were it not for the beauty of the
Bay.