chartless. Certainly, when the maps deal with such little-travelled
districts as this, they become utterly untrustworthy for by-roads,
and are only to be followed with suspicion for the highways. We set
out for Truro, and at the outset were seduced from the narrow path by
the tempting clusters of blackberries that hung upon the hedges of a
hillside field. This led us at length upon the hamlet of Treworlas, a
few scattered houses set down upon the edges of a golden moor, free to
every breeze that blows, where the winds beat upon the walls of the
cottages and shook them, and fluttered the feathers of the scurrying
geese that patched the gold of the gorse and the green of the grass
with moving patches of white. There was a house to let here, an empty
house, with garden all overgrown with weeds, and a bill swinging in
the window by one corner; not at all an undesirable little place--for
a hermit. We inquired the rent of it--£5 per annum. Just the place for
retirement from one’s kind: the ideal retreat for one crossed in love
or soured by failure, or for the naturally misanthropical; we bear it
in mind, for, though we are none of these, yet a time may come! From
here we went on to Philleigh, a village that stands on a tongue of land
pushing out into the salt-water Fal, where Ruan Creek sends spreading
watery fingers between the hills. Steep, rain-washed roads, unkempt and
deep rutted, lead down to the water, and a homely inn, with flaunting
linen hanging out to dry, and gobbling ducks scavenging among the
cart-tracks, wears a name remarkably poetic--The Roseland Inn. A forest
of thick-growing, stunted oaks leads to the steam ferry at Trelissick,
where the Fal winds between lovely woods that grow down to the water’s
edge, and dip their branches in the stream. We crossed here mistakenly,
thinking it to be King Harry Passage, and thus missing a sight of
Tregothnan, Lord Falmouth’s country seat, famed in all the country
round about for the charm of its situation.
[Illustration: ROSELAND INN, PHILLEIGH.]
As the afternoon wore on to tea-time, we came into Truro, along a broad
and surprisingly well-kept highway. But never a sight was there of the
city until we had reached the hillside, where its outskirts of villas
straggle into the country, detached and semi-detached, with lawns and
flower-beds and gravel-paths, ah! so neat and clean-swept, all of them
bearing the most high-falutin’ names. Truro is folded away from distant
sight, in between the hills, where the Fal ceases its navigable course.
Truro is admirably situated, but the city does not do justice to its
site. Its buildings, substantial and enduring enough, since they
are built of granite, are commonplace in design, and their tameness
of outline is a weariness to the spirit, save, indeed, some modern
commercial structures that savour of architecture; but to mention these
by name in this place would be to incur suspicion of advertisement.
We came into the city down Lemon Street, past the melancholy statue
of Lander the explorer, standing atop of his Doric pillar, and were
disappointed on the instant of entering it by these things, and by the
colour-scheme of the place--a heavy grey, unrelieved by brick or other
stone than native granite. The prevailing stoniness continued even in
the roadways, paved with granite setts.
[Illustration: LANDER.]
Truro is now a cathedral city, with a cathedral in course of
construction in its midst. Already the choir and the transepts are
completed and consecrated, so we may form some idea of what the
building will eventually look like. Its style is Early English,
singularly refined and symmetrically ordered as regards the interior,
but “exteriorly”--as architectural slang hath it--it has an appearance
at once cramped and overladen with ornament of too minute a character,
and is “picturesque” with a studied ready-made quaintness that does a
hurt to the dignity of such a building. This irregularity of external
details, and the whimsical incidence of turret and spirelet, belong,
properly, not to an original building, but should be the outcome of
generations of alteration and addition, grafted by the varying tastes
of posterity upon a well-balanced design. Perhaps it was necessary for
the winning of the competition for the architect to send in a showy
elevation that should take the eyes of a committee, and in this Mr.
Pearson succeeded, but he has failed to satisfy a reasonable demand for
dignity and repose to the outward view.
The cathedral will be 300 feet in length, with two western towers and
a central spire. Its site, though central, is somewhat unfortunate,
because hemmed closely with the surrounding houses of High Cross.
It was the site of the old Church of Saint Mary, which became of
cathedral rank on the establishment of the Truro diocese in 1877, but
was demolished in favour of the new scheme, saving its south aisle,
retained and incorporated with the new building.
It was while I was sketching the cathedral from a point of vantage in
the High Street, surrounded, meanwhile, by an intensely interested
crowd of boys, that a stranger, apologising for the interruption, came
up and asked me if I would mind going with him to his house, and
giving an opinion as to the genuineness of a reputed Reynolds painting
he had bought for some few shillings. The picture proved to be a sorry
daub; but none the less for the adverse opinion, Mr. ---- proved very
friendly, and, as he was driving to Redruth that evening, invited self
and friend to accompany him at an appointed time.
LXII.
Punctually to appointment we set forth, and once past the incline by
which the city is left, whizzed along the smooth highway in the rear of
a sturdy cob. We cleared the suburbs, and presently came upon the great
mining-field that stretches its seamed and blasted waste over mile
upon mile of dingy hummocks and ruined engine-houses. Here and there
green oases of private parks and pleasaunces alleviate the harshness
of the towering piles of mining refuse that harbour no green thing.
But for these the scene is an abomination of desolation. Chacewater, a
commonplace, mile-long village, with a poetical name, set beside the
highroad amidst the heaps of rubbish, is a place of no conceivable
interest.
Our acquaintance beguiled the way with local legends and scraps of
entertaining information, and the sight of Chacewater moved him to tell
us this story:--
“Now Truro,” said he, “Truro used to have a bootmaking industry, and
in those times no love was lost between Truro folk and the miners of
Chacewater, I can tell you. Now, it so happened that my father was
driving home with a companion from Redruth one dark night, when, a
short distance out of Chacewater, a crowd of miners rushed out from an
old engine-house by the wayside and made for the trap, shouting, ‘Truro
cobblers!’ My father had been mistaken, in all likelihood, for another
party, but it seemed likely the error would not be found out until the
occupants of the trap had been severely handled. My father, though,
was a man of resource. He had bought, among other things, some brass
candlesticks at Redruth that day, and he suddenly remembered them.
Snatching up one in either hand, he dropped the reins, and presenting
the candlesticks point-blank, shouted, ‘Hands off, or, by the Lord,
I’ll shoot ’ee!’
“The miners left in a hurry.”
In the meanwhile we had come to Saint Day, which the Cornish folk call
Saint _Dye_, a little market-town situated in midst of mines, living
on mines, and sorry or glad only as mining prospers or is depressed.
Saucy Cornish girls blew kisses to us from the windows of Saint Day.
Sauciness is a quality in which the girls of Cornwall are rich. Alas!
our friend drove through the narrow streets all unheeding, like another
Jehu. If we had known him longer we would have cursed him for it, but
he was a “new chum,” and it could not be done. Discourtesy is always
reserved for friends of old standing. And thus we drove into Redruth on
a Saturday afternoon.
Redruth still remains a busy and populous town, despite the exhausted
condition of its neighbouring mining-fields. It is an unlovely town,
built at the bottom and sides of a valley, amid the scarred and tumbled
mine refuse of a thousand years.
The name of Redruth is one that invites attention: it is a name that
is more attractive than the town itself. Philological antiquarians
profess to find its derivation in the Cornish _Tretrot_, which, being
interpreted, means “the house on the bed of the river.” But from
such airy surmisings it is better to turn aside to the bed-rocks of
modern facts. For it was at Redruth that Murdoch, in 1792, discovered
gas as an illuminant; here, too, the same engineer invented the
traction-engine some four years later. The country-folk, who met it on
the roads at night, thought it was the devil.
When our acquaintance drove us to the top of the High Street, we said
good-bye, resisting his offers to drive us back to Truro.
Amid this Saturday bustle and press of business, we found it somewhat
difficult to find accommodation at a decent inn, where anything like
quietude reigned. At some places we could have had bedrooms, but no
tea; at others, tea, but no rooms. At one inn the servant asked us if
we were professionals, eyeing my huge sketch-book. “Professionals”--we
glanced at one another. Surely the girl doesn’t take us for
photographers?
“What professionals did you think we were?” asked the Wreck.
“Please, sir, I thought as how you was hactors,” she said. “There’s a
lot of ’em come down here to-day to play-act to-night.”
Alas! when we told her we were not hactors, we could see her face
change, and guessed that a fond illusion had been destroyed. We saw at
once that we were inferior beings, and regretted for the first time in
our lives that we were not upon the stage. It was perhaps as well they
had not sufficient room for us here: we should have felt, so long as we
stayed, how shamefully we had deluded that trusting servant girl, and
how guilefully personated those bright beings of a higher sphere than
ours, whose privilege it is to strike attitudes, and say, “Ah, ha!” at
frequent intervals, together with other such colloquial and ordinary
expressions.
At length we found tea and a rest for the remainder of the day--not
before they were necessary.
LXIII.
The rain rained all the remainder of the afternoon, and winds blew, and
evening mists eventually hid the dismal prospect. All the available
literature of the hotel lay in railway-guides and directories, an old
copy of the “Pickwick Papers,” and a copy of a new humorist, whose work
I am not going to mention by title. We glanced at Dickens with little
satisfaction. His humour has long gone threadbare; Pickwickian feasts
do not divert nowadays; the spreads are not appetising; the cakes are
stale; the ale flat. As for the new humorist, he gave us, as the Noo
’umor would have it, “the hump.” No man can read the Noo ’umor and yet
retain his literary digestion unimpaired. It seems the distinguishing
mark of this appalling novelty that its sentences be cut up into short
sharp lengths, with an effort at smartness; more often, though, the
result, instead of being smart, is merely silly.
But in authorship, even as in M.P.ship, there is, in these days, much
queer company, for, mark you, we may have in these latter times our
Stevenson, but also our Sullivan, of the dishonoured prize-ring; a
Barrie, but, _per contra_, him whom we may call by analogy _Monsieur
de Londres_, throttling Mr. Berry: these have each his place in the
catalogue of the British Museum Library, and, title for title, they
bulk the same, although the difference between them is the very
considerable one existing between letters and pothooks. As for the
Society of the Talking Shop at Westminister, are not ----[12] and
----[12] its admired and honoured members?
We found, too, some crumpled copies of local newspapers. Lord! how can
any one on this God’s earth read such chronicles of small beer. But to
whom had that stale copy of the _Guardian_ belonged that we discovered
behind the horsehair sofa? The Wreck found it with joy, for its bulk
promised plenty reading; but he presently slung the thing into the
coal-scuttle, with remarks uncomplimentary, to say the least of them,
to that flatulent print.
“Divinity,” said he, “I can understand, and ordinary worldly matters I
appreciate better still; but hang me if I can make much sense out of
that abominable mixture of this and other worldliness that seems to be
a printed corroboree by Fleet Street journalists masquerading in alb
and crucible.”
“Chasuble, you mean, dear boy,” I remarked.
“No matter,” he replied, with the slanginess which I grieve to report;
“they’re all the same price to me. Let’s go out.”
And we went.
The High Street was still noisily busy, and with the coming of night
was brilliant with many lights. The rain, too, sputtered only fitfully,
and so the open air stall-keepers hung out their wares again. This
was not like Cornwall, to our thinking; it more nearly resembled
the Edgware Road on a Saturday night, save that dissipation was not
evident. The folk were orderly, as might be expected of the Cornish
people, even on Saturday evening.
The Cornishman is imaginative, and deeply, emotionally, but
unaffectedly religious. He is a Celt, and consequently he generally
wears an air of gentle melancholy. Hospitality and warm-heartedness
are also among his characteristics, as all who have journeyed much in
Cornwall have occasion to know.
But although the Cornishman is so religiously disposed, Cornwall is
by no means a stronghold of the Established Church; the Cornishman’s
piety runs in the channel of Dissent, and in many lonely valleys, and
frequently on wild moorlands, far from sight of other houses, you come
upon his conventicles, built after the fashion of the houses that
are represented in children’s first efforts at drawing, in what I may
perhaps be allowed to term the “box-of-bricks” style of architecture.
These Bible Christian or Bryanite chapels, with their Wesleyan rivals,
are numerous above those of all other sects, and are nearly all
inexpressibly dreary in appearance. In the larger towns they are often
of immense bulk, as witness the chapels of the various Wesleyan sects
at Redruth, of a size larger beyond comparison with the parish church.
Not only is the Establishment weak in its hold on the people; it
labours under the additional disadvantage of scanty revenues; rich
livings are the exception rather than the rule in Cornwall. If you take
up the “Clergy List,” and scan the values of Cornish livings, you will
find them, in a very large proportion of cases, extremely meagre; the
clerk in holy orders frequently not receiving so large a sum as the
small stipend accorded his secular namesake of London city--poor clerk!
We did not remain at Redruth the following day (Sunday), but left the
town shortly after breakfast, on our way westward. Carn Brea Hill
loomed ahead beyond the works of the tin-streamers, and we made direct
for it.
LXIV.
Carn Brea is a hill of commanding personality, steep and rugged, and
encumbered with huge granite boulders, that give its highest point
a peculiarly fantastic corona. Here, where rocks are largest and
more wildly strewn, long-forgotten builders have contrived a gaunt
tower, perched airily on devil-poised crags, overlooking the scarred
and streaked mining-field that here stretches from sea to sea. It is
with disgust that, as you make a painful and involved ascent of the
hillside, and draw nearer this old fortress, you observe its walls
repaired with stucco, and its windows filled with ginger-beer bottles
and bottles of sweets.
[Illustration: CARN BREA.]
Exploration always brings its peculiar disillusionments; it had been
better for a proper and enduring reverence of Carn Brea and its gory
Druidic traditions to have gazed and speculated from below than to have
resolved our speculations into facts so uncongenial. For, really, to
view Carn Brea from the valley on a day of mingled storm and shine is
to receive an impression of grandeur and Brocken-like weirdness. The
Druidical cromlechs and stone altars of Borlase’s vivid imagination,
the craggy tower, the modern Dunstanville pillar, break the sky-line
into mysterious points and notches; even the white cottages, the brutal
ugliness of the Dissenting chapel, and the merely commercial aspect of
the tin and copper mines of Pool village, that straggle down into
middle distance and foreground, take a decorative value and strange
significance.
[Illustration: DRUIDICAL ALTAR, CARN BREA.]
The roadways that lead from Pool into Camborne are bordered on either
side with immense heaps of crushed rock and dirt, the roads themselves
grimy with coal-dust, where they are not stodgy with the overflowed red
mud from the mine-adits. Pool itself is notable for nothing, except
that its railway station, now named Carn Brea, was once a fruitful
source of error in sending passengers and goods to Cornwall, instead of
to the Poole in Dorsetshire. Hence the change of name.
Rather more than a mile down the road is Camborne, and midway are the
huge works of that very ancient tin and copper mine, Dolcoath, which
on week-days make the country side resound with the blows of their
steel stamps crushing up the ore-laden rock by the ton. Some of the
galleries of Dolcoath mine are 2300 feet deep, and over five million
pounds’ value of tin and copper ore have been brought to bank. I have
been here on a week-day, when the stamps were at work, and the noise
was simply terrific. I have never heard anything to equal it. Not only
is it impossible to hear or be heard in speaking, but the mind seems
almost to be stunned by the clamour. And to the stranger, the result
of all this uproar is merely so many streams of leaden coloured water,
flowing into what look like great mud reservoirs. But the grey and
slate-coloured particles that go to the colouring of those streams are
so many grains of tin ore, and the neat-looking girls who are stirring
up the reservoirs with brooms are not engaged upon making mud-pies,
but are busily washing the impurities from the metal grains.
Camborne streets straggle almost as far as Dolcoath, and doubtless
many of them are built over some of the galleries and levels of that
immense mine. Camborne is an offence to the eye. It is much larger than
either Truro, Redruth, or Penzance, numbering 15,000 inhabitants, most
of whom live upon mines, either directly or indirectly. Indeed, many
of them live in the mines, and merely come home to sleep. Thus it is
that all day long Camborne seems almost a city of the dead. It is a
town whose houses, if not squalid, are the most abjectly characterless
of any I have ever seen, stony granite affairs, which wear the look of
having once upon a time been inhabited--but a very long while ago, and
meanwhile having been preserved from decay by some mystic preservative
power.
LXV.
The finest thing in Camborne is the road that leads out of it. That
is a clumsy paraphrase of Johnson, I know, touched, too, with a
suspicion of Irishry; but for all that, true enough. I don’t know
that the little hamlet of Barrepper would, with an advent from more
pleasing scenes, have seemed so welcome a place, but after Camborne
it was welcome indeed. A little hamlet, Barrepper, on the highroad
to Hayle. It consists, apparently, of half a dozen cottages, every
one uninhabited and in ruins, and one general shop, which is also the
post-office. One wonders whence come the people to buy and post. No
one was there when we passed by, save the shopkeeper postmaster, and
he sat outside his shop, reading a newspaper in the road. Close by
a brooklet trickled across the highway, under a rude stone bridge,
and this was all of Barrepper. Now the country side became flat and
singularly uninteresting; utterly undistinguished. The mining-field
was left behind, and the streams ran clear again, but the level lands
and the smug hamlet of Carnhell Green, through which we passed,
were featureless. The straggling stony village of Gwinear, too, is
remarkable for nothing but its name--a name, like those of many Cornish
villages, full of possibilities.
The Cornish have a wonderful Procrustean trick of altering proper names
to suit the conveniences of their speech, only the trick works commonly
but one way with them, and that is with the lopping off, rather than
the addition or elongation of, syllables.
For example, the villages and churches of Phillack and Filleigh are
named after the martyr saint Felicitas; and what was once a baptismal
name for girls, Felicity, very often met with in the county, is at this
day not only colloquially but baptismally given as Filly or Philly.[13]
To see these names (as one frequently does) on tombstones of quiet
sober graveyards, strikes the stranger with an effect of misapplied
humour, but a Cornishman sees no levity in them.
But, in Cornwall generally, girls’ names are strangely contorted, as
witness the very favourite appellations of Jenifer for Guinevere, and
Tamsin for Thomasine. These we saw often, and once that rare and pretty
name, Avice.
To revert again to place-names, Saint Blazey is a rendition of Saint
Blaise; Saint Rumon, who lends his name to two parishes, becomes Ruan;
Saint Austell presumably derives from Augustulus; Saint Buryan is a
shortening of the name of Saint Buriana; the village of Gerran has its
name from Gerennius, who was nothing of a saint, indeed, but very much
of a chieftain; and Saint Mellion is from Saint Melanius. Sennen, too,
smells suspiciously like a corruption of Symphorien. Even where names
are not thus reduced, or where, being of but one syllable, they admit
of no further contraction, your true Cornishman will contrive to twist
them inconceivably. Of these, Saint Clare has become Saint Cleer, and
the name of Saint Erth, the village by which we now came into Penwith,
was once Saint Erith. Here we entered upon the final stage of our
journey, catching glimpses of Mount’s Bay and Saint Michael’s Mount,
and Marazion, as the sun went down.
When we came to the level-crossing that mars the roadway just
outside Marazion Road Station, the gates were closed for all but
foot-passengers, and we heard the rushing of the “down” train between
the hills. It was quite dark now, and I knew the road from here
into Penzance for a dusty and stony two miles, so we needed little
consideration upon the question whether or not we should take train
for that short distance. We took it, or, to avoid quibbles, I will say
it took us.
LXVI.
Now we were housed at Alverton, which, you should know, is the
Kensington of Penzance, a suburb of the old town, which has gradually
become absorbed, a place of many villas, where the visitor generally
finds his rest, where gardens meet the eye at every turn, where
fuchsias, geraniums, and myrtles grow to astonishing sizes.
Our windows looked down upon the sunlit waves of Mount’s Bay, while
through the open casements came the rich odours of these flowers, but
above all the piercing scent of the clove-carnation. Among the brave
show of blossoms were the peculiar waxy flowers of the _Escallonia_
shrub, brilliantly red.
From adown the street, sloping toward the shore, came every morning the
high-pitched cry of “Pilchers, fine fresh pilchers,” for there were
fine catches of pilchards overnight; and at a soothing distance, a more
or less German band generally murdered current comic operas.
[Illustration: SAINT MICHAEL’S MOUNT.]
Pirates there are not at Penzance, and nothing approaching them, unless
we except these German band-itti; but they are, indeed, or were, when
last I heard them, desperate characters, who would think nothing of
murdering “The Mikado” or “The Gondoliers.” Indeed, they have done
so many times, and will again, unless some action is taken in the
matter. I shudder to think how many fine and robust comic operas
have been done to death on moonlit nights upon the esplanade in front
of the Queen’s Hotel, or in the gloomy by-ways of the Morrab Road.
I have seen these bravos standing in a circle round their helpless
victim, and noted the brazen flash of their deadly weapons, and heard
the agonising demi-semi-quavers of his dying notes as the remorseless
band blew out his bars. Ah! sometimes, when they little thought their
criminal deeds were overheard, I have listened a while to them making
shameful overtures to their captives, and have presently hurried away,
fingers to ears, to shut out the fearful shrieks which such deeds
have produced. What class of people is it that supports these hired
assassins? Alas! I know not, but that they are supported is a solemn
fact. So callous are some of these folk that--I assure you it is
so--I have actually seen them place bribes in the hand of the chief
miscreant, and have observed them loitering by, with heartless smiles
of approval, until the deed was done. What harmony, what tender chords
can exist in a town where such doings fall flat upon accustomed ears?
[Illustration: PENZANCE from above Gulval]