POLKERRIS--MENABILLY--PAR--THE BISCOVEY STONE--CHARLESTOWN,
ST. AUSTELL, AND THE CHINA-CLAY INDUSTRY--THE
MENGU STONE--PORTHPEAN--MEVAGISSEY--ST. MICHAEL
CAERHAYES--VERYAN--GERRANS--ST. ANTHONY-IN ROSELAND
There is little in Fowey for the landsman. Its chief delights are upon
the water: boating or sailing on the river, or yachting out to sea.
Yachtsmen are familiar figures, both at the inns and hotels of the
actual town, and at the new hotel outside, overlooking the Channel from
Point Neptune. A thirsty yachtsman, asking for some "Cornish cider,"
revealed by accident one article at any rate which Cornish local
patriotism does not approve. The Cornishman, it appeared, although
believing in most things Cornish, drew the line there, and Devonshire
cider was offered instead, with the admission that, although there
_was_ Cornish cider, no one who could possibly help themselves would
drink it.
The coast round past Point Neptune and by the wooded groves of
Menabilly, on to Polkerris, a queer little fisher-village, is much
better made the subject of a trip by sailing-boat than a tramp along
those rugged ways; and then, returning, the direct road from Fowey to
Par may be taken, past the lodge-gates of Menabilly, at Castle Dour.
The name originated in "Castell Dwr"--_i.e._, the "Castle by the
Water"--an ancient granite post, or cross, known as the "Longstone." It
is seen standing on a plot of grass in the road. This is the tombstone
of a Romanised Briton, and formerly bore the inscription, "CIRVSIVS HIC
IACIT CVNOMORI FILIVS," plainly. It is not now so easily read.
Soon the way leads almost continuously down hill to Par. On the
hedge-bank to the right is a striking modern wayside cross, bearing the
inscription, "I thank Thee, O Lord, in the name of Jesus, for all Thy
mercies. J. R., May 13, 1845, 1887, 1905." It was erected by the late
Jonathan Rashleigh, of Menabilly.
At the foot of the hill is Par. The name of the place means, in the
Cornish language, a marsh, or swamp, and Par certainly lies almost on a
level with the sea, where a little stream wanders out of the Luxulyan
Valley on to the sands of a small bay, opening to the larger bay of
Tywardreath. The original character of this once marshy spot is very
greatly hidden by the many engineering and other works established here
by J. T. Treffry. Here his Cornwall Minerals Railway, running across
country to the north coast at Newquay, comes to his harbour; and his
mines, canal, and smelting works make a strange industrial medley,
through whose midst runs the main line of the Great Western Railway.
The great enterprises of that remarkable man have long since suffered
change. His railway is now the Newquay branch of the Great Western, his
mines and canal have fallen upon less prosperous days, and the great
chimney of the smelting-works, 235 feet high--"Par stack," as it is
called--no longer smokes. The pleasant humour of the neighbourhood long
since likened silk hats, the "toppers" of everyday speech, to the big
chimney, and he who wore one was said to be wearing a "Par stack."
[Illustration: THE BISCOVEY STONE.]
There is no gain in the scenic way by following the coast from Par to
Charlestown. Nothing of any outstanding character appears along those
coastwise paths, which are long and obscure. This is not to say that
the road inland is in any way delightful. It is, in fact, a plaguey
ill-favoured road, for when you have left the various railway bridges
and junctions of Par behind, you come to a very Gehenna of a place;
a sterile plain through whose midst the highway proceeds bumpily.
Many years ago the miners turned the land at this point inside out,
in search of copper, and now that they have long left it, the place
remains the abomination of desolation, where nothing will grow amid
the mundic and heaps and hollows of tailings. South of the road at
Biscovey, past this desolate region, stood an ancient granite cross,
minus its head, but still seven feet eight inches high, known as the
"Biscovey Stone," and serving the humble office of a gatepost. It was
in 1896 removed to Biscovey churchyard. Its original function was that
of a monument to one Alroron, and it bears on its two broad sides, amid
curiously interlaced decorative patterns, the inscription "--Alroron
Ullici Filivs--."
The dusty road leads through Holmbush, a suburb of Charlestown, which
took its name from the wayside "Holly Bush" inn. Charlestown itself is
more curious than beautiful. It is, in fact, the port of St. Austell,
of which it is really an extension, and was formerly called Polmear.
Charlestown is a place with one small, but very busy and crowded dock;
and the dock and the quays, and all the roads into and out of the
place are a study in black and white, and barrels. The stranger to
Cornwall, proceeding westward for the first time, is apt to be puzzled
by these strange evidences. He has come, unaware, upon the first signs
of the great and prosperous Cornish china-clay industry. The whiteness
of everything that is not black is caused by the leakage of the
china-clay, and the blackness of everything that is not white is the
result of coal-dust.
China-clay is a substance greatly resembling chalk, and varying from
a putty-like consistency to a powdery brittleness. A little of it is
inevitably dropped in the cartage down from Carclaze, inland, where it
is got, through St. Austell, and down to the port, and a little more
is spread about in loading the vessels that take it abroad; and so,
as "mony a mickle makes a muckle," there is generally a good deal of
china-clay pervading the place. The mountains of clean new barrels,
just fresh from the cooper's, are for packing the clay for export.
Charlestown also does an import trade in coal, hence the alternative
to Charlestown's sanctified whiteness, but when it rains, as it not
infrequently does in Cornwall, the result here is a grey and greasy
misery, compact of these two substances.
China-clay is decomposed granite, rotted by the action of water during
uncounted thousands of years. Up at Carclaze and further inland, at
St. Stephen's-in-Brannel, it is dug out of quarries that were once
open workings for tin. The deposits are of great depth and extent.
Although so easily dug out, the white clay in its natural state is
mixed with hard and gritty particles of quartz, and has therefore to be
subjected to a refining process, to separate that undesirable element.
The method of separation is very simple, the clay being subjected to
a washing by which the heavy, useless particles remain, and the soft
material is carried down into a series of tanks. There it is left to
settle, and the water is then drawn off. The clay is then allowed to
dry, and is finally dug out and packed in barrels. Modern improvements
in the preparation of china-clay have been chiefly directed to the
quick-drying of the masses in these tanks, and minutes are now taken
instead of the months formerly occupied in natural evaporation.
China-clay, it may be added, is used for many other purposes than the
manufacture of porcelain, and, although the Staffordshire and foreign
potteries use it largely, it is extensively employed in loading calico,
and in giving inferior cottons a specious and illusory excellence. It
enters also into the composition of the heavier and more highly glazed
printing papers, chiefly those used for printing illustrations.
St. Austell and Carclaze owe their prosperity, in the origination
of all these things, to William Cookworthy, who first discovered
china-clay in England. He has his memorial in Plymouth, where he lived
for many years, for one of the fine series of modern stained-glass
windows in Plymouth Guildhall shows him as chemist and porcelain-maker;
but the landowners of Carclaze and the people of St. Austell have
certainly fallen short of their duty by failing to set up a statue of
him in some prominent place.
William Cookworthy, a native of Kingsbridge, in South Devon, was born
in 1705, one of the seven children of another William Cookworthy, a
weaver, who died early and left his widow and family with very narrow
means. They owed their sustenance, and the children owed their
education, to the Quakers of Kingsbridge. William was apprenticed to a
chemist and druggist, and eventually established himself in the same
way of business, wholesale, at Plymouth. The firm of Bevan & Cookworthy
prospered early, and Cookworthy at thirty-one years of age very largely
freed himself from its cares and devoted himself to preaching. Ten
years later, in 1745, he became interested in kaolin, or china-clay,
which until 1708 had been found only in China, giving that country the
entire output of porcelain, which from the land of its origin obtained
its very name of "china." Cookworthy, in common with several other of
his contemporaries, wished to produce "china," and when news came in
1745 that china-clay had been found in Virginia, he commissioned a
Quaker friend to obtain some for him. Travelling much in Cornwall, he
himself discovered a coarse variety of it on Tregoning Hill, in Germoe,
and a little later found the great deposits at Carclaze, in the parish
of St. Stephens, behind St. Austell.
In that year, 1758, he began experimentally making porcelain at
Plymouth. Already, in 1709, Dresden china was being made from the
kaolin found in Saxony, and a little later than his own beginning the
Sèvres porcelain factory was using a deposit found at Limoges. He was
joined by Lord Camelford, and a patent for making china was obtained in
1768, but the Plymouth factory was not at any time remunerative, and
the works were removed to Bristol and eventually into Staffordshire.
Cookworthy died in 1780, not in any way advantaged by his discovery.
The town of St. Austell--"Storsel," locally--does not in the least know
how it came by that name. An altogether uncertain "Augustulus" has been
presumed, while others think they find glimmerings of a hermit "St.
Austolus." It is a town of narrow, crowded streets, with little of
interest apart from the fine parish church, chiefly of the early part
of the fifteenth century. The font, however, is Norman, of the very
marked Cornish type, consisting of a bowl supported on four legs ending
in grotesque faces. The fine Perpendicular tower and the south aisle,
richly carved in the stubborn granite with numerous shields and devices
bearing the emblems of the Passion and Crucifixion, are among the most
ornate in Cornwall.
A mysterious inscription, whose meaning is still hotly debated, is
found above the west door, immediately surmounting a sculptured group
representing the "pelican in her piety." The old story of the pelican
wounding her breast--"vulning herself," ancient writers call it--for
the sustenance of her young, is here thought to typify the sacrifice
made by our Blessed Lord and Saviour for our sakes; and in this light
the inscription above may be read. The rudely sculptured letters of it
form the words and initials--
KY CH (or RY DU)
INRI
The original view was that RY DU was the correct rendering, signifying
in the Cornish language "God is King." Of the meaning of INRI there
can, of course, be no question; it is "Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judæorum."
It is now sometimes held that, as the lower line is Latin, the upper
is Greek, and is a contraction for Kyrius Christus, _i.e._, "Christ is
Lord." Yet other attempts take us into the Syro-Phœnician and Hebrew
tongues, and read the meanings, "Dearly Beloved," or, "He gave us His
blood." But no one will ever definitely put the question to rest.
There is but one other really interesting object in St. Austell.
That is the famous, but mysterious, Mengu, or Menagu, stone, removed
of late from the Market Place to the spot known universally in St.
Austell (but not officially named), as "Fool's Corner." It is placed,
or was placed, it is said, where the boundaries of the three manors of
Trenance--Austell, Treverbyn, and Towington--met. A brass plate fixed
upon it in 1892 gives a certain modicum of information respecting this
slab, but it is little enough, and to this day the words written by
Walter White, in his "Londoner's Walk to the Land's End," of 1854, hold
good. "Enquire," he says, "for anything remarkable in the town, and
you will hardly fail to be told of the Mengu Stone, regarded with some
veneration by its possessors because no one knows anything about it."
But is not that precisely the reason why so many things are venerated?
There is something of the sublime in the mere vague importance of
this stone, from which proclamations and announcements of local public
events have from time immemorial been made, and it is as important
to St. Austell as the famous stone of Destiny from Scone, now in the
Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey; the stone on which the ancient
Scottish kings were, and our own monarchs now are, crowned.
[Illustration: PORTHPEAN.]
Returning to the coast, at Charlestown, Porthpean is reached;
apparently a small holiday-resort of the burgesses of St. Austell.
You see from this sketch exactly what it is: a little sandy bay with
a few row-boats and sailing-vessels, a few bathing-machines, and a
refreshment-house or two. More or less steep and obscure paths lead
from it round Black Head, and so down hill into Pentewan, a very busy
little port with railway-sidings and docks, and vessels waiting cargoes
of tin-ore and china-clay.
Mevagissey, three miles or more, by Pennare and the cliffs, is two
staggeringly steep miles distant by road, ending in a murderous
crooked descent. At the same time, it is all nonsense to say that
cycling is not possible in Cornwall. Work, courage, and good, reliable
brakes are requisite, it is true; but although a good deal of hard work
and much walking uphill (and some down) are necessary, cycling, after
all, saves effort, here as elsewhere. In the far from bracing climate
of Cornwall, the exertion of carrying one's own body is often more
tiring than even pedalling hard uphill. Even on the shocking coastwise
bye-roads, apt often to be mere cascades of loose stones, and full of
sharp turns, it is often better to have a cycle than to be without one.
Even so, letting the machine go down these dubious ways, I murmur, as
did the pious knights of old, travelling the haunted valleys and the
darkling woods, '_In manus tuas, Domine_,' and brave the unknown perils
that lurk behind hairpin corners and down steep gradients.
Mevagissey is said to derive its name from Saints Mewan and Issey, to
whom its church is dedicated. It is a little town as crowded together
as Polperro, but not by any means so picturesque. Also it faces more
directly upon the sea, and although it offers no sands for the visitor
and has a very fishy, smelly little harbour, it has in many ways been
modernised. Take it for all in all, Mevagissey looks its best from
the sea. Perhaps Mevagissey has been frightened into modern ways, for
it had an unexampled experience among Cornish villages in 1849, when
cholera was so rampant that it was deserted until a thorough cleansing
was effected.
If we may trust a satirical saying of Fowey and St. Austell,
the Mevagissey people are not, or were not used to be, given to
acknowledging authority. One man they considered to be as good as
another, and thus the old local by-word may yet be heard in the
district: "Like the Mevagissey volunteers; all officers and no
privates." But the allusion is over a century old, and belongs to that
volunteering epoch when Napoleon was threatening to invade England; so
let us hope things have altered since then.
There are sands of some small extent at Portmellin, up out of
Mevagissey and then steeply down, half a mile distant, to where the
land begins to trend abruptly out towards Chapel Point, and a few
bungalows have, in consequence, been lately built in what was until
recently a lonely hollow. Looking backwards for many miles, the
china-clay works on the distant hills about St. Stephen-in-Brannel
shine white, like the glorious camp of some heavenly host.
Always steeply up, the road goes on to Gorran, a mile inland, with
Gorran Haven, a little crabbers' and shrimpers' village, as a kind of
seashore annexe. The Dodman, a desolate headland, shuts out everything
to the westward and forms the eastward horn of Veryan Bay. On its
cliffs, of three hundred feet and more, a coastguard station looks out
upon many empty leagues of troubled waters.
St. Michael Caerhayes lies snugly in a little bay within the greater
bay of Veryan. The road, curving a little way inland, out of sight
of the sea, descends steeply through overhanging trees and suddenly
emerges upon a level strand, where the sea comes rolling in, over sands
that afford a foothold as unyielding as the floor of a room. On either
side of the inlet rise picturesque rocks, those on the western side the
bolder of the two, and draped, moreover, with luxuriant vegetation,
and further crested with larch and pine. Whether you look out to sea,
or, standing on those yellow sands, face inland, the scene is of the
most romantic description and worthy of the great Skelt himself, of
the famous "Skelt's Juvenile Drama." Indeed, those massed and jagged
rocks, with darkling fissures, on whose summits the pine-trees seem to
cling desperately, might well have served as models for the set scenes
of Skelt's thrilling stage, in "The Red Rover," or "The Smuggler," or
other of his melodramas. Out to sea, in the "offing," ships hover;
inland, under the lee of the wooded rocks, rises a castle. The place is
instinct with drama, and it has a name of the strangest--St. Michael
Caerhayes--but it is quiet enough for all that, and there is no village.
The castle looks sufficiently thrilling, and might, with its
surrounding fitly set the stage in _Ruddigore_, but the inevitable
guide-book spoils the thrill it gives, by letting us into the secret
of its being built in 1808, when country mansions took the form of
"castles" only for "picturesque" reasons. No bad baronet resides
there, only the worthy commoner family of Williams; and any one who is
afraid of a person called Williams, who lives in a sham castle, must
be a poor creature, even though the castellan does display threatening
notice-boards, setting forth what trespassers may expect to suffer.
St. Michael Caerhayes was anciently the seat of the famous Trevanion
family, extinct a century or more ago, and their old house demolished
to make way for the present building. There are many place-names in
Brittany parallel with those in Cornwall, and St. Michael Carhaix is
one of them. Not only so, but a justification of Cornwall and of the
Breton "Cornouaille" calling cousins is further shown by a singular
occurrence which happened during our wars with France towards the
close of the eighteenth century. Among the French (or rather Bretons,
for Brittany is not France to a Breton, any more than Cornwall to a
Cornishman is England), among the Breton prisoners, therefore, landed
at Falmouth, was one Jean Trevanion de Carhaix.
In Mevagissey the people talk strangely about the seclusion sought
for at St. Michael Caerhayes, and tell weird tales of photographers
and artists prevented from taking views of this lovely spot. So it
was, perhaps, not altogether without trepidation that the sketch
for the accompanying illustration was taken, from the seashore. No
angry Williams, no brutal bailiff, appeared; and so perhaps the
Mevagissey folk exaggerate. And since then a report of the visit of an
antiquarian society to the dread castle itself has appeared, by which
it seems that the owner had not lured the party into his stronghold
with a view to casting them into noisome dungeons, or having them flung
from the battlements, or anything else in that full-flavoured way.
He simply welcomed them, as any civilised being would have done, and
the only outstanding feature of the day seems to have been his remark
that, except the collections of different kinds in the house, there was
really nothing of antiquity left; not even the stone sculptured with
arms, of the time of Henry the Eighth, which the guide-books declare to
be here, but is not.
[Illustration: ST. MICHAEL CAERHAYES.]
The Church of St. Michael Caerhayes stands high, somewhat inland. One
comes to it through a wan and sorry avenue of spindly sycamores,
past the lodge-gates of the "castle"; and then it is seen standing in
a bald, exposed situation beside the road. The last vestiges of the
olden Trevanions are seen in the church. An alien fowl has nested on
the site of their ancient home, but still the church houses the rusty
helmets of their funeral armour, and a sword, said to be the identical
falchion wielded by Sir Hugh Trevanion at Bosworth, August 21st, 1485,
hangs among them. The last Trevanions, whether pure-blooded, or merely
Bettesford-Trevanions, would seem, according to the evidence of the
monumental inscriptions of a century or so ago, their natural force
abated, to have slid early and gratefully out of an existence of pain
and suffering.
But the most interesting object in the church, interesting because of
its mystery, is a black-painted, life-sized statue, in Coade-ware,
dated 1812, of a naval officer, with a real sword. The singular thing
is that, although the antiquity of the thing is of the slightest,
nobody knows who is represented by it. It is thought to be one of the
Bettesford-Trevanions. Yet, although we have lost count of this recent
statue's identity, the mummified Pharaohs of thousands of years ago are
identified with certainty.
Veryan, the village that gives a name to the bay, does not lie upon
the seashore. You come to it round the majestically romantic cliffs
past Port Holland, a small fisher-hamlet perched upon the rocky outlet
of a quite solitary valley, and thence a little way inland, and
presently out again and very steeply and lengthily down, so that you
wonder when you will reach the bottom, to Port Loe, a gloomy inlet
amid dark overhanging cliffs. Down there is the poor fishing village,
in a primitive state, absolutely untouched by pleasure-seekers, and
apparently not thriving in its fishery. But its situation down there,
below the echoing cliffs reverberating to the mocking cries of the sea
gulls, is magnificent.
[Illustration: "PARSON TRUST'S HOUSES."]
Veryan, on the other hand, is a picture of inland prosperity. It is
a long, scattered village, beginning on a hill and continuing down
through a wooded valley, with the church at the bottom, and ending
on another hilltop. And at either end, the road is flanked by two
strange old thatched round-houses, with a cross on the roof of each.
The local story is that they were built by "Parson Trust," to keep
the Devil out of the village; but the identity of "Parson Trust" has
not been established. The simplicity which not only believes in a
personal Devil, but assumes that he must of necessity come by road, is
essentially and delightfully Cornish.
The road out of Veryan leads directly to Gerrans Bay, passing under
the shoulder of the strikingly sudden hill known as Carn Beacon. It
is a hill upon a hill, a sepulchral barrow heaped up upon a height
overlooking the sea; placed in this commanding position by way of
doing greater honour to the ancient chieftain buried there. This was,
traditionally, the sixth-century Cornish King and Saint, Geraint, or
Gerennius, who died in A.D. 596, from whom the village and the bay
of Gerrans are named. He is not to be confused with the Arthurian
Geraint, who died in battle. Tradition has been often proved true, but
the gorgeous story which told how the King had been buried here, in a
golden boat with silver oars, and with his sword and crown, has been
disproved, flatly enough, for the barrow was opened in 1855, and only
a stone chest containing the ashes of Geraint, or another, was found.
"Sold again!" as Smith Minor of the Lower Fourth might say.
The village of Gerrans calls for little remark. It stands high, some
distance back from the sea, and therefore suffers considerably from the
severe competition of its offshoot, Portscatho, down below, a thriving
seaside place on Gerrans Bay.
[Illustration: FALMOUTH HARBOUR.]
Three miles along a narrowing peninsula bring one to St.
Anthony-in-Roseland, where a charming little Early English church,
with stone spire, stands in the grounds of Place, a handsome mansion
belonging to the Spry family. In front of it rest the calm waters
of St. Mawes Creek, looking across to Polvarth and Porthcueil. The
extremity of the peninsula is occupied by St. Anthony's lighthouse,
lighting the entrance to Falmouth Harbour, over against Pendennis,
where the channel is one mile wide.