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RAMBLES BEYOND RAILWAYS.
[Illustration: LAMORNA COVE.]
RAMBLES BEYOND RAILWAYS;
OR,
Notes in Cornwall taken A-Foot.
BY WILKIE COLLINS,
AUTHOR OF
"ANTONINA," "THE WOMAN IN WHITE," ETC.
[Illustration: The Land's End, Cornwall.]
_NEW EDITION._
LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY: NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.
1861.
DEDICATED TO
THE COMPANION OF MY WALK THROUGH CORNWALL,
HENRY C. BRANDLING.
PREFACE
TO
THE PRESENT EDITION.
I visited Cornwall, for the first time, in the summer and autumn of
1850; and in the winter of the same year, I wrote this book.
At that time, the title attached to these pages was strictly descriptive
of the state of the county, when my companion and I walked through it.
But when, little more than a year afterwards, a second edition of this
volume was called for, the all-conquering railway had invaded Cornwall
in the interval, and had practically contradicted me on my own
title-page.
To rechristen my work was out of the question--I should simply have
destroyed its individuality. Ladies may, and do, often change their
names for the better; but books enjoy no such privilege. In this
embarrassing position, I ended by treating the ill-timed intrusion of
the railway into my literary affairs, as a certain Abbé (who was also an
author,) once treated the overthrow of the Swedish Constitution, in the
reign of Gustavus the Third. Having written a profound work, to prove
that the Constitution, as at that time settled, was secure from all
political accidents, the Abbé was surprised in his study, one day, by
the appearance of a gentleman, who disturbed him over the correction of
his last proof-sheet. "Sir!" said the gentleman; "I have looked in to
inform you that the Constitution has just been overthrown." To which the
Abbé replied:--"Sir! they may overthrow the Constitution, but they can't
overthrow MY BOOK"--and he quietly went on with his work.
On precisely similar principles, I quietly went on with MY
TITLE-PAGE.
So much for the name of the book. For the book itself, as published in
its present form, I have a last word to say, before these prefatory
lines come to an end.
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. Under this change
of circumstances, it is not the least of the debts which I owe to the
encouraging kindness of my readers, that they have not forgotten
"Rambles Beyond Railways," and that the continued demand for the book is
such as to justify the appearance of the present edition. I have, as I
believe, to thank the unambitious purpose with which I originally
wrote, for thus keeping me in remembrance. All that my book attempts is
frankly to record a series of personal impressions; and, as a necessary
consequence--though my title is obsolete, and my pedestrian adventures
are old-fashioned--I have a character of my own still left, which
readers can recognise; and the homely travelling narrative which I
brought from Cornwall, eleven years since, is not laid on the shelf yet.
I have spared no pains to make these pages worthy of the approval of new
readers. The book has been carefully revised throughout; and certain
hastily-written passages, which my better experience condemns as
unsuited to the main design, have been removed altogether. Two of the
lithographic illustrations, (now no longer in existence) with which my
friend and fellow-traveller, Mr. Brandling, adorned the previous
editions, have been copied on wood, as accurately as circumstances would
permit; and a "Postscript" has been added, which now appears in
connexion with the original narrative, for the first time.
The little supplementary sketch thus presented, describes a cruise to
the Scilly Islands, (taken five years after the period of my visit to
Cornwall), and completes the round of my travelling experiences in the
far West of England. These newly-added pages are written, I am afraid,
in a tone of somewhat boisterous gaiety--which I have not, however, had
the heart to subdue, because it is after all the genuine offspring of
the "harum-scarum" high spirits of the time. The "Cruise of the Tomtit"
was, from first to last, a practical burlesque; and the good-natured
reader will, I hope, not think the worse of me, if I beg him to stand on
no ceremony and to laugh his way through it as heartily as he can.
HARLEY STREET, LONDON,
_March, 1861_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION 1
II. A CORNISH FISHING TOWN 5
III. HOLY WELLS AND DRUID RELICS 23
IV. CORNISH PEOPLE 55
V. LOO-POOL 86
VI. THE LIZARD 97
VII. THE PILCHARD FISHERY 120
VIII. THE LAND'S END 139
IX. BOTALLACK MINE 155
X. THE MODERN DRAMA IN CORNWALL 180
XI. THE ANCIENT DRAMA IN CORNWALL 197
XII. THE NUNS OF MAWGAN 216
XIII. LEGENDS OF THE NORTHERN COAST 231
POSTSCRIPT.
THE CRUISE OF THE TOMTIT TO THE SCILLY ISLANDS 253
RAMBLES BEYOND RAILWAYS.
I.
A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION.
DEAR READER,
When any friend of yours or mine, in whose fortunes we take an interest,
is about to start on his travels, we smooth his way for him as well as
we can, by giving him a letter of introduction to such connexions of
ours as he may find on his line of route. We bespeak their favourable
consideration for him by setting forth his good qualities in the best
light possible; and then leave him to make his own way by his own
merit--satisfied that we have done enough in procuring him a welcome
under our friend's roof, and giving him at the outset a claim to our
friend's estimation.
Will you allow me, reader (if our previous acquaintance authorizes me
to take such a liberty), to follow the custom to which I have just
adverted; and to introduce to your notice this Book, as a friend of mine
setting forth on his travels, in whose well-being I feel a very lively
interest. He is neither so bulky nor so distinguished a person as some
of the predecessors of his race, who may have sought your attention in
years gone by, under the name of "Quarto," and in magnificent clothing
of Morocco and Gold. All that I can say for his outside is, that I have
made it as neat as I can--having had him properly thumped into wearing
his present coat of decent cloth, by the most competent book-tailor I
could find. As for his intrinsic claims to your kindness, he has only
two that I shall venture to advocate. In the first place he is able to
tell you something about a part of your own country which is still too
rarely visited and too little known. He will speak to you of one of the
remotest and most interesting corners of our old English soil. He will
tell you of the grand and varied scenery; the mighty Druid relics; the
quaint legends; the deep, dark mines; the venerable remains of early
Christianity; and the pleasant primitive population of the county of
CORNWALL. You will inquire, can we believe him in all that he
says? This brings me at once to his second qualification--he invariably
speaks the truth. If he describes scenery to you, it is scenery that he
saw and noted on the spot; and if he adds some little sketches of
character, I answer for him, on my own responsibility, that they are
sketches drawn from the life.
Have I said enough about my friend to interest you in his fortunes, when
you meet him wandering hither and thither over the great domain of the
Republic of Letters--or, must I plead more warmly in his behalf? I can
only urge on you that he does not present himself as fit for the top
seats at the library table,--as aspiring to the company of those above
him,--of classical, statistical, political, philosophical, historical,
or antiquarian high dignitaries of his class, of whom he is at best but
the poor relation. Treat him not, as you treat such illustrious guests
as these! Toss him about anywhere, from hand to hand, as good-naturedly
as you can; stuff him into your pocket when you get into the railway;
take him to bed with you, and poke him under the pillow; present him to
the rising generation, to try if he can amuse _them_; give him to the
young ladies, who are always predisposed to the kind side, and may make
something of him; introduce him to "my young masters" when they are
idling away a dull morning over their cigars. Nay, advance him if you
will, to the notice of the elders themselves; but take care to ascertain
first that they are people who only travel to gratify a hearty
admiration of the wonderful works of Nature, and to learn to love their
neighbour better by seeking him at his own home--regarding it, at the
same time, as a peculiar privilege, to derive their satisfaction and
gain their improvement from experiences on English ground. Take care of
this; and who knows into what high society you may not be able to
introduce the bearer of the present letter! In spite of his habit of
rambling from subject to subject in his talk, much as he rambled from
place to place in his travels, he may actually find himself, one day,
basking on Folio Classics beneath the genial approval of a Doctor of
Divinity, or trembling among Statutes and Reports under the learned
scrutiny of a Sergeant at Law!
W. C.
HARLEY STREET, LONDON,
_March, 1861._
II.
A CORNISH FISHING TOWN.
The time is ten o'clock at night--the scene, a bank by the roadside,
crested with young fir-trees, and affording a temporary place of repose
to two travellers, who are enjoying the cool night air, picturesquely
extended flat on their backs--or rather, on their knapsacks, which now
form part and parcel of their backs. These two travellers are, the
writer of this book, and an artist friend who is the companion of his
rambles. They have long desired to explore Cornwall together, on foot;
and the object of their aspirations has been at last accomplished, in
the summer-time of the year eighteen hundred and fifty.
In their present position, the travellers are (to speak geographically)
bounded towards the east by a long road winding down the side of a rocky
hill; towards the west, by the broad half-dry channel of a tidal river;
towards the north, by trees, hills, and upland valleys; and towards the
south, by an old bridge and some houses near it, with lights in their
windows faintly reflected in shallow water. In plainer words, the
southern boundary of the prospect around them represents a place called
Looe--a fishing-town on the south coast of Cornwall, which is their
destination for the night.
They had, by this time, accomplished their initiation into the process
of walking under a knapsack, with the most complete and encouraging
success. You, who in these days of vehement bustle, business, and
competition, can still find time to travel for pleasure alone--you, who
have yet to become emancipated from the thraldom of railways, carriages,
and saddle-horses--patronize, I exhort you, that first and
oldest-established of all conveyances, your own legs! Think on your
tender partings nipped in the bud by the railway bell; think of crabbed
cross-roads, and broken carriage-springs; think of luggage confided to
extortionate porters, of horses casting shoes and catching colds, of
cramped legs and numbed feet, of vain longings to get down for a moment
here, and to delay for a pleasant half hour there--think of all these
manifold hardships of riding at your ease; and the next time you leave
home, strap your luggage on your shoulders, take your stick in your
hand, set forth delivered from a perfect paraphernalia of incumbrances,
to go where you will, how you will--the free citizen of the whole
travelling world! Thus independent, what may you not accomplish?--what
pleasure is there that you cannot enjoy? Are you an artist?--you can
stop to sketch every point of view that strikes your eye. Are you a
philanthropist?--you can go into every cottage and talk to every human
being you pass. Are you a botanist, or geologist?--you may pick up
leaves and chip rocks wherever you please, the live-long day. Are you a
valetudinarian?--you may physic yourself by Nature's own simple
prescription, walking in fresh air. Are you dilatory and
irresolute?--you may dawdle to your heart's content; you may change all
your plans a dozen times in a dozen hours; you may tell "Boots" at the
inn to call you at six o'clock, may fall asleep again (ecstatic
sensation!) five minutes after he has knocked at the door, and may get
up two hours later, to pursue your journey, with perfect impunity and
satisfaction. For, to you, what is a time-table but waste-paper?--and a
"booked place" but a relic of the dark ages? You dread, perhaps,
blisters on your feet--sponge your feet with cold vinegar and water,
change your socks every ten miles, and show me blisters after that, if
you can! You strap on your knapsack for the first time, and five minutes
afterwards feel an aching pain in the muscles at the back of your
neck--walk _on_, and the aching will walk _off_! How do we overcome our
first painful cuticular reminiscences of first getting on horseback?--by
riding again. Apply the same rule to carrying the knapsack, and be
assured of the same successful result. Again I say it, therefore--walk,
and be merry; walk, and be healthy; walk, and be your own master!--walk,
to enjoy, to observe, to improve, as no riders can!--walk, and you are
the best peripatetic impersonation of holiday enjoyment that is to be
met with on the surface of this work-a-day world!
How much more could I not say in praise of travelling on our own
neglected legs? But it is getting late; dark night-clouds are marching
slowly over the sky, to the whistling music of the wind; we must leave
our bank by the roadside, pass one end of the old bridge, walk along a
narrow winding street, and enter our hospitable little inn, where we are
welcomed by the kindest of landladies, and waited on by the fairest of
chambermaids. If Looe prove not to be a little sea-shore paradise
to-morrow, then is there no virtue in the good omens of to-night.
* * * * *
The first point for which we made in the morning, was the old bridge;
and a most picturesque and singular structure we found it to be. Its
construction dates back as far as the beginning of the fifteenth
century. It is three hundred and eighty-four feet long, and has fourteen
arches, no two of which are on the same scale. The stout buttresses
built between each arch, are hollowed at the top into curious triangular
places of refuge for pedestrians, the roughly paved roadway being just
wide enough to allow the passage of one cart at a time. On some of these
buttresses, towards the middle, once stood an oratory, or chapel,
dedicated to St. Anne; but no vestiges of it now remain. The old bridge
however, still rises sturdily enough on its ancient foundations; and,
whatever the point from which its silver-grey stones and quaint arches
of all shapes and sizes may be beheld, forms no mean adjunct to the
charming landscape around it.
Looe is known to have existed as a town in the reign of Edward I.; and
it remains to this day one of the prettiest and most primitive places
in England. The river divides it into East and West Looe; and the view
from the bridge, looking towards the two little colonies of houses thus
separated, is in some respects almost unique.
At each side of you rise high ranges of beautifully wooded hills; here
and there a cottage peeps out among the trees, the winding path that
leads to it being now lost to sight in the thick foliage, now visible
again as a thin serpentine line of soft grey. Midway on the slopes
appear the gardens of Looe, built up the acclivity on stone terraces one
above another; thus displaying the veritable garden architecture of the
mountains of Palestine magically transplanted to the side of an English
hill. Here, in this soft and genial atmosphere, the hydrangea is a
common flower-bed ornament, the fuchsia grows lofty and luxuriant in the
poorest cottage garden, the myrtle flourishes close to the sea-shore,
and the tender tamarisk is the wild plant of every farmer's hedge.
Looking lower down the hills yet, you see the houses of the town
straggling out towards the sea along each bank of the river, in mazes of
little narrow streets; curious old quays project over the water at
different points; coast-trade vessels are being loaded and unloaded,
built in one place and repaired in another, all within view; while the
prospect of hills, harbour, and houses thus quaintly combined together,
is beautifully closed by the English Channel, just visible as a small
strip of blue water, pent in between the ridges of two promontories
which stretch out on either side to the beach.
Such is Looe as beheld from a distance; and it loses none of its
attractions when you look at it more closely. There is no such thing as
a straight street in the place. No martinet of an architect has been
here, to drill the old stone houses into regimental regularity.
Sometimes you go down steps into the ground floor, sometimes you mount
an outside staircase to get to the bed-rooms. Never were such places
devised for hide and seek since that exciting nursery pastime was first
invented. No house has fewer than two doors leading into two different
lanes; some have three, opening at once into a court, a street, and a
wharf, all situated at different points of the compass. The shops, too,
have their diverting irregularities, as well as the town. Here you might
call a man a Jack of all trades, as the best and truest compliment you
could pay him--for here one shop combines in itself a drug-mongering,
cheese-mongering, stationery, grocery, and oil and Italian line of
business; to say nothing of such cosmopolitan miscellanies as wrinkled
apples, dusty nuts, cracked slate pencils and fly-blown mock jewellery.
The moral good which you derive, in the first pane of a window, from the
contemplation of memoirs of murdered missionaries and serious tracts
against intemperance and tight-lacing, you lose in the second, before
such worldly temptations as gingerbread, shirt-studs, and fascinating
white hats for Sunday wear, at two and ninepence apiece. Let no man
rashly say he has seen all that British enterprise can do for the
extension of British commerce, until he has carefully studied the
shop-fronts of the tradesmen of Looe.
Then, when you have at last threaded your way successfully through the
streets, and have got out on the beach, you see a pretty miniature bay,
formed by the extremity of a green hill on the right, and by fine jagged
slate-rocks on the left. Before this seaward quarter of the town is
erected a strong bulwark of rough stones, to resist the incursion of
high tides. Here, the idlers of the place assemble to lounge and gossip,
to look out for any outward-bound ships that are to be seen in the
Channel, and to criticise the appearance and glorify the capabilities of
the little fleet of Looe fishing-boats, riding snugly at anchor before
them at the entrance of the bay.
The inhabitants number some fourteen hundred; and are as good-humoured
and unsophisticated a set of people as you will meet with anywhere. The
Fisheries and the Coast Trade form their principal means of subsistence.
The women take a very fair share of the hard work out of the men's
hands. You constantly see them carrying coals from the vessels to the
quay in curious hand-barrows: they laugh, scream, and run in each
other's way incessantly: but these little irregularities seem to assist,
rather than impede them, in the prosecution of their tasks. As to the
men, one absorbing interest appears to govern them all. The whole day
long they are mending boats, painting boats, cleaning boats, rowing
boats, or, standing with their hands in their pockets, looking at boats.
The children seem to be children in size, and children in nothing else.
They congregate together in sober little groups, and hold mysterious
conversations, in a dialect which we cannot understand. If they ever do
tumble down, soil their pinafores, throw stones, or make mud pies, they
practise these juvenile vices in a midnight secrecy which no stranger's
eye can penetrate.
In that second period of the dark ages, when there were High Tories and
rotten boroughs in the land, Looe (containing at that time nothing like
the number of inhabitants which it now possesses) sent Four Members to
Parliament! The ceremony by which two of these members were elected, as
it was described to me by a man who remembered witnessing it, must have
been an impressive sight indeed to any foreigner interested in studying
the representative system of this country. On the morning of the "Poll,"
one division of the borough sent _six_ electors, and another _four_, to
record their imposing aggregate of votes in favour of any two smiling
civil gentlemen, who came, properly recommended, to ask for them. This
done, the ten electors walked quietly home in one direction, and the two
members walked quietly off in another, to perform the fatiguing duty of
representing their constituents' interests in Imperial Parliament. The
election was quite a snug little family affair, in these "good old
times." The ten gentlemen who voted, and the other two gentlemen who
took their votes, just made up a comfortable compact dozen, all
together!
But this state of things was too harmonious to last in such a world of
discord as ours. The day of innovation came: turbulent Whigs and
Radicals laid uncivil hands on the Looe polling-booth, and politically
annihilated the pleasant party of twelve. Since that disastrous period
the town has sent no members to Parliament at all; and very little,
indeed, do the townspeople appear to care about so serious a
deprivation. In case the reader should be disposed to attribute this
indifference to municipal privileges to the supineness rather than the
philosophy of the inhabitants, I think it necessary to establish their
just claims to be considered as possessing public spirit, prompt
decision, and wise fertility of resource in cases of emergency, by
relating in this place the true story of how the people of Looe got rid
of the rats.
About a mile out at sea, to the southward of the town, rises a green
triangular shaped eminence, called Looe Island. Here, many years ago, a
ship was wrecked. Not only were the sailors saved, but several free
passengers of the rat species, who had got on board, nobody knew how,
where, or when, were also preserved by their own strenuous exertions,
and wisely took up permanent quarters for the future on the terra firma
of Looe Island. In process of time, and in obedience to the laws of
nature, these rats increased and multiplied exceedingly; and, being
confined all round within certain limits by the sea, soon became a
palpable and dangerous nuisance. Destruction was threatened to the
agricultural produce of all the small patches of cultivated land on the
island--it seemed doubtful whether any man who ventured there by
himself, might not share the fate of Bishop Hatto, and be devoured by
rats. Under these pressing circumstances, the people of Looe determined
to make one united and vehement effort to extirpate the whole colony of
invaders. Ordinary means of destruction had been tried already, and
without effect. It was said that rats left for dead on the ground had
mysteriously revived faster than they could be picked up and skinned, or
flung into the sea. Rats desperately wounded had got away into their
holes, and become convalescent, and increased and multiplied again more
productively than ever. The great problem was, not how to kill the rats,
but how to annihilate them so effectually as to place the re-appearance
even of one of them altogether out of the question. This was the
problem, and it was solved in the following manner:--
All the available inhabitants of the town were called to join in a great
hunt. The rats were caught by every conceivable artifice; and, once
taken, were instantly and ferociously _smothered in onions_; the
corpses were then decently laid out on clean china dishes, and
straightway eaten with vindictive relish by the people of Looe. Never
was any invention for destroying rats so complete and so successful as
this! Every man, woman, and child, who could eat, could swear to the
extirpation of all the rats they had eaten. The local returns of dead
rats were not made by the bills of mortality, but by the bills of fare:
it was getting rid of a nuisance by the unheard-of process of stomaching
a nuisance! Day after day passed on, and rats disappeared by hundreds,
never to return. What could all their cunning and resolution avail them
now? They had resisted before, and could have resisted still, the
ordinary force of dogs, ferrets, traps, sticks, stones, and guns,
arrayed against them; but when to these engines of assault were added,
as auxiliaries, smothering onions, scalding stew-pans, hungry mouths,
sharp teeth, good digestions, and the gastric juice, what could they do
but give in? Swift and sure was the destruction that now overwhelmed
them--everybody who wanted a dinner had a strong personal interest in
hunting them down to the very last. In a short space of time the island
was cleared of the usurpers. Cheeses remained entire: ricks rose
uninjured. And this is the true story of how the people of Looe got rid
of the rats!
It will not much surprise any reader who has been good-natured enough to
peruse the preceding pages with some attention, to hear that we idly
delayed the day of departure from the pleasant fishing-town on the south
coast, which was now the place of our sojourn. The smiles of our fair
chambermaid and the cookery of our excellent hostess, addressed us in
Siren tones of allurement which we had not the virtue to resist. Then,
it was difficult to leave unexplored any of the numerous walks in the
neighbourhood--all delightfully varied in character, and each possessing
its own attractive point of view. Even when we had made our
determination and fixed our farewell day, a great boat-race and a great
tea-drinking, which everybody declared was something that everybody else
ought to see, interfered to detain us. We delayed yet once more, to
partake in the festivities, and found that they supplied us with all the
necessary resolution to quit Looe which we had hitherto wanted. We had
remained to take part in a social failure on a very large scale.
As, in addition to the boat-race, there was to be a bazaar on the beach;
and as fine weather was therefore an essential requisite on the
occasion, it is scarcely necessary to premise that we had an unusually
large quantity of rain. In the forenoon, however, the sun shone with
treacherous brilliancy; and all the women in the neighbourhood fluttered
out in his beams, gay as butterflies. What dazzling gowns, what flaring
parasols, what joyous cavalcades on cart-horses, did we see on the road
that led to the town! What a mixture of excitement, confusion, anxiety,
and importance, possessed everybody! What frolic and felicity attended
the popular gatherings on the beach, until the fatal moment when the gun
fired for the first race! Then, as if at that signal, the clouds began
to muster in ominous blackness; the deceitful sunlight disappeared; the
rain came down for the day--a steady, noiseless, malicious rain, that at
once forbade all hope of clear weather. Dire was the discomfiture of the
poor ladies of Looe. They ran hither and thither for shelter, in lank
wet muslin and under dripping parasols, displaying, in the lamentable
emergency of the moment, all sorts of interior contrivances for
expanding around them the exterior magnificence of their gowns, which we
never ought to have seen. Deserted were the stalls of the bazaar for the
parlours of the alehouses; unapplauded and unobserved, strained at the
oar the stout rowers in the boat-race. Everybody ran to cover, except
some seafaring men who cared nothing for weather, some inveterate
loungers who would wander up and down in spite of the rain, and three
unhappy German musicians, who had been caught on their travels, and
pinned up tight against the outer wall of a house, in a sort of cage of
canvas, boards, and evergreens, which hid every part of them but their
heads and shoulders. Nobody interfered to release these unfortunates.
There they sat, hemmed in all round by dripping leaves, blowing grimly
and incessantly through instruments of brass. If the reader can imagine
the effect of three phlegmatic men with long bottle noses, looking out
of a circle of green bushes, and playing waltzes unintermittingly on
long horns, in a heavy shower--he will be able to form a tolerably
correct estimate of the large extra proportion of gloom which the German
musicians succeeded in infusing into the disastrous proceedings of the
day.
The tea-drinking was rather more successful. The room in which it was
held was filled to the corners, and exhaled such an odour of wet
garments and bread and butter (to say nothing of an incessant clatter of
china and bawling of voices) that we found ourselves, as uninitiated
strangers, unequal to the task of remaining in it to witness the
proceedings. Descending the steps which led into the street from the
door--to the great confusion of a string of smartly dressed ladies who
encountered us, rushing up with steaming teakettles and craggy lumps of
plumcake--we left the inhabitants to conclude their festivities by
themselves, and went out to take a farewell walk on the cliffs of Looe.
We ascended the heights to the westward, losing sight of the town among
the trees as we went; and then, walking in a southerly direction through
some cornfields, approached within a few hundred yards of the edge of
the cliffs, and looked out on the sea. The sky had partially cleared,
and the rain had ceased; but huge fantastic masses of cloud, tinged with
lurid copper-colour by the setting sun, still towered afar off over the
horizon, and were reflected in a deeper hue on the calm surface of the
sea, with a perfectness and grandeur that I never remember to have
witnessed before. Not a ship was in sight; but out on the extreme line
of the wilderness of grey waters there shone one red, fiery spark--the
beacon of the Eddystone Lighthouse. Before us, the green fields of Looe
Island rose high out of the ocean--here, partaking the red light on the
clouds; there, half lost in cold shadow. Closer yet, on the mainland, a
few cattle were feeding quietly on a long strip of meadow bordering the
edge of the cliff; and, now and then, a gull soared up from the sea, and
wheeled screaming over our heads. The faint sound of the small
shore-waves (invisible to us in the position we occupied) beating dull
and at long intervals on the beach, augmented the dreary solemnity of
the evening prospect. Light, shade, and colour, were all before us,
arranged in the grandest combinations, and expressed by the simplest
forms. If Michael Angelo had painted landscape, he might have
represented such a scene as we now beheld.
This was our last excursion at Looe. The next morning we were again on
the road, walking inland on our way to the town of Liskeard.
III.
HOLY WELLS AND DRUID RELICS.
Fresh from the quaint old houses, the delightfully irregular streets,
and the fragrant terrace-gardens of Looe, we found ourselves, on
entering Liskeard, suddenly introduced to that "abomination of
desolation," a large agricultural country town. Modern square houses,
barren of all outer ornament; wide, dusty, deserted streets;
misanthropical-looking shopkeepers, clad in rusty black, standing at
their doors to gaze on the solitude around them--greeted our eyes on all
sides. Such samples of the population as we accidentally encountered
were not promising. We were unlucky enough to remark, in the course of
two streets, a nonagenarian old woman with a false nose, and an idiot
shaking with the palsy.
But harder trials were in reserve for us. We missed the best of the many
inns at Liskeard, and went to the very worst. What a place was our house
of public entertainment for a great sinner to repent in, or for a
melancholy recluse to retreat to! Not a human being appeared in the
street where this tavern of despair frowned amid congenial desolation.
Nobody welcomed us at the door--the sign creaked dolefully, as the wind
swung it on its rusty hinges. We walked in, and discovered a
low-spirited little man sitting at an empty "bar," and hiding himself,
as it were, from all mortal inspection behind the full sheet of a dirty
provincial newspaper. Doleful was our petition to this secluded publican
for shelter and food; and doubly doleful was his answer to our appeal.
Beds he believed he had--food there was none in the house, saving a
piece of _corned beef_, which the family had dined on, and which he
proposed that we should partake of before it got quite cold. Having said
thus much, he suddenly retired behind his newspaper, and spoke no word
more.
In a few minutes the landlady appeared, looking very thin and care-worn,
and clad in mourning weeds. She smiled sadly upon us; and desired to
know how we liked corned beef? We acknowledged a preference for fresh
meat, especially in large market towns like Liskeard, where butchers'
shops abounded. The landlady was willing to see what she could get; and
in the meantime, begged to be allowed to show us into a private room.
She succeeded in incarcerating us in the most thoroughly private room
that could be found out of a model prison. It was situated far away at
the back of the house, and looked out upon a very small yard entirely
circumscribed by empty stables. The one little window was shut down
tight, and we were desired not to open it, for fear of a smell from
these stables. The ornaments of the place consisted of hymn-books,
spelling-books, and a china statue of Napoleon in a light green
waistcoat and a sky-blue coat. There was not even a fly in the room to
intrude on us in our privacy; there were no cocks and hens in the yard
to cackle on us in our privacy; nobody walked past the outer passage, or
made any noise in any part of the house, to startle us in our privacy;
and a steady rain was falling propitiously to keep us in our privacy. We
dined in our retired situation on some rugged lumps of broiled flesh,
which the landlady called chops, and the servant steaks. We broke out of
prison after dinner, and roamed the streets. We returned to solitary
confinement in the evening, and were instantly conducted to another
cell.
This second private apartment appeared to be about forty feet long; six
immense wooden tables, painted of a ghastly yellow colour, were ranged
down it side by side. Nothing was placed on any of them--they looked
like dissecting-tables waiting for "subjects." There was yet another and
a seventh table--a round one, half lost in a corner, to which we
retreated for refuge--it was covered with crape and bombazine, half made
up into mourning garments proper to the first and intensest stage of
grief. The servant brought us one small candle to cheer the scene; and
desired to be informed whether we wanted _two_ sheets apiece to our
beds, or whether we could do with a sheet at top and a blanket at
bottom, as other people did? This question cowed us at once into gloomy
submission to our fate. We just hinted that we had contracted bad habits
of sleeping between two sheets, and left the rest to chance; reckless
how we slept, or where we slept, whether we passed the night on the top
of one of the six dissecting-tables, or with a blanket at bottom, as
other people passed it. Soon the servant returned to tell us that we had
got our two sheets each, and to send us to bed--snatching up the
landlady's mourning garments, while she spoke, with a scared, suspicious
look, as if she thought that the next outrageous luxury we should
require would be a nightgown apiece of crape and bombazine.
Reflecting on our lamentable situation the last thing at night, we
derived some consolation from remembering that we should leave our
quarters early the next morning. It was not Liskeard that we had come to
see, but the country around Liskeard--the famous curiosities of Nature
and Art that are to be found some six or eight miles away from the town.
Accordingly, we were astir betimes on the morrow. The sky was fair; the
breeze was exhilarating. Once past the doleful doorway of the inn, we
found ourselves departing under the fairest auspices for a pilgrimage to
the ruins of St. Cleer's Well, and to the granite piles and Druid
remains, now entitled the "Cheese-Wring" and "Hurler" rocks.
On leaving the town, our way lay to the northward, up rising ground. For
the first two miles, the scenery differed little from what we had
already beheld in Cornwall. The lanes were still sunk down between high
banks, like dry ditches; all varieties of ferns grew in exquisite beauty
and luxuriance on either side of us; the trees were small in size, and
thickly clothed with leaves; and the views were generally narrowed to a
few well-cultivated fields, with sturdy little granite-built cottages
now and then rising beyond. It was only when we had reached what must
have been a considerable elevation, that any change appeared in the face
of the country. Five minutes more of walking, and a single turn in the
road, brought us suddenly to the limits of trees, meadows, and cottages;
and displayed before us, with almost startling abruptness, the
magnificent prospect of a Cornish Moor.
The expanse of open plain that we now beheld stretched away
uninterruptedly on the right hand, as far as the distant hills. Towards
the left, the view was broken and varied by some rough stone walls, a
narrow road, and a dip in the earth beyond. Wherever we looked, far or
near, we saw masses of granite of all shapes and sizes, heaped
irregularly on the ground among dark clusters of heath. An old
furze-cutter was the only human figure that appeared on the desolate
scene. Approaching him to ask our way to St. Cleer's Well--no signs of
which could be discerned on the wilderness before us--we found the old
fellow, though he was eighty years of age, working away with all the
vigour of youth. On this wild moor he had lived and laboured from
childhood; and he began to talk proudly of its great length and breadth,
and of the wonderful sights that were to be seen on different parts of
it, the moment we addressed him. He described to us, in his own homely
forcible way, the awful storms that he had beheld, the fearful rattling
and roaring of thunder over the great unsheltered plain before us--the
hail and sleet driven so fiercely before the hurricane, that a man was
half-blinded if he turned his face towards it for a moment--the forked
lightning shooting from pitch-dark clouds, leaping and running fearfully
over the level ground, blackening, splitting, tearing from their places
the stoutest rocks on the moor. Three masses of granite lay heaped
together near the spot where we had halted--the furze-cutter pointed to
them with his bill-hook, and told us that what we now looked on was once
one great rock, which he had seen riven in an instant by the lightning
into the fragmentary form that it now presented. If we mounted the
highest of these three masses, he declared that we might find out our
own way to St. Cleer's Well by merely looking around us. We followed his
directions. Towards the east, far away over the magnificent sweep of
moorland, and on the slope of the hill that bounded it, appeared the
tall chimneys and engine-houses of the Great Caraton Copper Mine--the
only objects raised by the hand of man that were to be seen on this
part of the view. Towards the west, much nearer at hand, four grey
turrets were just visible beyond some rising ground. These turrets
belonged to the tower of St. Cleer's Church, and the Well was close by
it.
Taking leave of the furze-cutter, we followed the path at once that led
to St. Cleer's. Half an hour's walking brought us to the village, a
straggling, picturesque place, hidden in so deep a hollow as to be quite
invisible from any distance. All the little cottage-girls whom we met,
carrying their jugs and pitchers of water, curtseyed and wished us good
morning with the prettiest air of bashfulness and good humour
imaginable. One of them, a rosy, beautiful child, who proudly informed
us that she was six years old, put down her jug at a cottage-gate and
ran on before to show us the way, delighted to be singled out from her
companions for so important an office. We passed the grey walls of the
old church, walked down a lane, and soon came in sight of the Well, the
position of which was marked by a ruined Oratory, situated on some open
ground close at the side of the public pathway.
St. Cleer, or--as the name is generally spelt out of Cornwall--St.
Clare, the patron saint of the Well, was born in Italy, in the twelfth
century--and born to a fair heritage of this world's honours and this
world's possessions. But she voluntarily abandoned, at an early age, all
that was alluring in the earthly career awaiting her, to devote herself
entirely to the interests of her religion and the service of Heaven. She
was the first woman who sat at the feet of St. Francis as his disciple,
who humbly practised the self-mortification, and resolutely performed
the vow of perpetual poverty, which her preceptor's harshest doctrines
imposed on his followers. She soon became Abbess of the Benedictine Nuns
with whom she was associated by the saint; and afterwards founded an
order of her own--the order of "Poor Clares." The fame of her piety and
humility, of her devotion to the cause of the sick, the afflicted, and
the poor, spread far and wide. The most illustrious of the ecclesiastics
of her time attended at her convent as at a holy shrine. Pope Innocent
the Fourth visited her, as a testimony of his respect for her virtues;
and paid homage to her memory when her blameless existence had closed,
by making one among the mourners who followed her to the grave. Her name
had been derived from the Latin word that signifies _purity_; and from
first to last, her life had kept the promise of her name.
Poor St. Clare! If she could look back, with the thoughts and interests
of the days of her mortality, to the world that she has quitted for
ever, how sadly would she now contemplate the Holy Well which was once
hallowed in her name and for her sake! But one arched wall, thickly
overgrown with ivy, still remains erect in the place that the old
Oratory occupied. Fragments of its roof, its cornices, and the mouldings
of its windows lie scattered on the ground, half hidden by the grasses
and ferns twining prettily around them. A double cross of stone stands,
sloping towards the earth, at a little distance off--soon perhaps to
share the fate of the prostrate ruins about it. How changed the scene
here, since the time when the rural christening procession left the
church, to proceed down the quiet pathway to the Holy Well--when
children were baptized in the pure spring; and vows were offered up
under the roof of the Oratory, and prayers were repeated before the
sacred cross! These were the pious usages of a past age; these were the
ceremonies of an ancient church, whose innocent and reverent custom it
was to connect closer together the beauty of Nature and the beauty of
Religion, by such means as the consecration of a spring, or the erection
of a roadside cross. There has been something of sacrifice as well as of
glory, in the effort by which we, in our time, have freed ourselves from
what was superstitious and tyrannical in the faith of the times of
old--it has cost us the loss of much of the better part of that faith
which was not superstition, and of more which was not tyranny. The
spring of St. Clare is nothing to the cottager of our day but a place to
draw water from; the village lads now lounge whistling on the fallen
stones, once the consecrated arches under which their humble ancestors
paused on the pilgrimage, or knelt in prayer. Wherever the eye turns,
all around it speaks the melancholy language of desolation and
decay--all but the water of the Holy Well. Still the little pool remains
the fitting type of its patron saint--pure and tranquil as in the bygone
days, when the name of St. Clare was something more than the title to a
village legend, and the spring of St. Clare something better than a
sight for the passing tourist among the Cornish moors.[1]
We happened to arrive at the well at the period when the villagers were
going home to dinner. After the first quarter of an hour, we were left
almost alone among the ruins. The only person who approached to speak to
us was a poor old woman, bent and tottering with age, who lived in a
little cottage hard by. She brought us a glass, thinking we might wish
to taste the water of the spring; and presented me with a rose out of
her garden. Such small scraps of information as she had gathered
together about the well, she repeated to us in low, reverential tones,
as if its former religious uses still made it an object of veneration in
her eyes. After a time, she too quitted us; and we were then left quite
alone by the side of the spring.
It was a bright, sunshiny day; a pure air was abroad; nothing sounded
audibly but the singing of birds at some distance, and the rustling of
the few leaves that clothed one or two young trees in a neighbouring
garden. Unoccupied though I was, the minutes passed away as quickly and
as unheeded with me, as with my companion who was busily engaged in
sketching. The ruins of the ancient Oratory, viewed amid the pastoral
repose of all things around them, began imperceptibly to exert over me
that mysterious power of mingling the impressions of the present with
the memories of the past, which all ruins possess. While I sat looking
idly into the water of the well, and thinking of the groups that had
gathered round it in years long gone by, recollections began to rise
vividly on my mind of other ruins that I had seen in other countries,
with friends, some scattered, some gone now--of pleasant pilgrimages, in
boyish days, along the storied shores of Baiæ, or through the desolate
streets of the Dead City under Vesuvius--of happy sketching excursions
to the aqueducts on the plains of Rome, or to the temples and villas of
Tivoli; during which, I had first learned to appreciate the beauties of
Nature under guidance which, in this world, I can never resume; and had
seen the lovely prospects of Italian landscape pictured by a hand now
powerless in death. Remembrances such as these, of pleasures which
remembrance only can recall as they were, made time fly fast for me by
the brink of the holy well. I could have sat there all day, and should
not have felt, at night, that the day had been ill spent.
But the sunlight began to warn us that noon was long past. We had some
distance yet to walk, and many things more to see. Shortly after my
friend had completed his sketch, therefore, we reluctantly left St.
Clare's Well, and went on our way briskly, up the little valley, and out
again on the wide surface of the moor.