COVERACK COVE--POLTESCO--RUAN MINOR--CADGWITH COVE--THE "DEVIL'S
FRYING-PAN"--DOLOR HUGO--CHURCH COVE--LANDEWEDNACK--LIZARD TOWN--RUAN
MAJOR--THE LIZARD LIGHTHOUSE.
Striking inland from St. Keverne for Coverack Cove, something of the
stony character of the Meneage and Lizard districts is seen, together
with a good deal of the widespread lack of signposts common to all
Cornwall, but particularly distressing here. Wherever it is possible
for a stranger to lose his way--and that is very often here--be very
sure that the County Council has forgotten to place a sign-post; and
furthermore, be equally certain that, at those points where no one is
likely to go wrong, there will be very informative ones: exercises in
the obvious. But there is a deeper depth than this. A fork of roads may
be duly sign-posted, but it often leads to another, and a much more
puzzling and quite lonely fork, a long way ahead, where not the least
indication is vouchsafed. You are lucky if you do not at last find
yourself in the yard of some "farm-place," and have to return a mile or
more. Sorrow's crown of sorrow is, however, attained when a signpost
is seen in the distance. You hurry up; it points the way to, let us
say, the "Hotel Parvenu," one of the several up-to-date barrack hotels
that have of late risen upon desirable view-points. I want to know why
these things should be; not the hotels--we know the reason of them--but
why they should be allowed to play these dirty tricks on travellers.
We cannot all be guests; nor, perhaps, would very many who could. Why,
then, should the County Council permit the existence of these purely
commercial notices?
Coverack village, down upon the Cove, was the scene of the _Dispatch_
transport wreck in January 1809. A monument in St. Keverne church
narrates how over sixty were lost on that occasion, including
Major-General Cavendish. They were fresh from the blood-soaked fields
of Spain and the retreat upon Coruña.
Those who originally named Black Head, beyond Coverack, could scarce
have had any choice in the matter, for it is a lowering, sullen-looking
point. But the rock is rather a dark green in its original tone, when
closely examined. It is, in fact, the famed "serpentine" rock that
extends all the way from this place, past the Lizard, to Mullion.
The way round by the cliffs to the next headland, Pedn Boar, and beyond
it to Caraclowse Point, where there is a "cliff castle," is wearying in
its ups and downs with a stream to cross in one rugged valley, without
being exceptionally fine; but the paths or ragged grasslands on the
way to Kennack Sands give easier going. Kennack Sands form the only
available sandy foreshore for many miles along this rugged coast, where
the savage cliffs descend as a rule sheer to the water, and the jealous
sea generally leaves but a narrow sandy selvedge at the ebb. Small
wonder, then, that bungalows for summer bathers have appeared here.
But the trivial urbanities of Kennack soon fail him who fares by the
cliffs on to Caerleon Cove and Poltesco. Brambles clutch at his clothes
and bid him stay; stones, loose and knobbly, and tripsome, lie along
the path the coastguards seem to patrol all too seldom, and presently
the small cove of Caerleon appears, with a stream running down to it
and the derelict works of an abandoned serpentine factory on the shore.
Up inland, past a cottage, with a notice declaring that trespassers
will be prosecuted (which of course the wise pedestrian treats with
contempt), and then past a tree-surrounded farmhouse, displaying the
more hospitable intimation of new milk being sold, the watery valley
of Poltesco is reached, where a great mill-wheel, amid a paradise of
ferns, is worked by the spattering stream. I should think Poltesco
might be a very tedious place on a wet November day, and not good for
rheumatism; but, as an American girl tourist remarked, in summer it is
"just heavenly."
Abandoning the coast at this point, and content with seeing Ynys Head
in the distance, I walked the half-mile uphill to Ruan Minor, a pretty
little village with a very small but very perfect little Perpendicular
church, whose pinnacled tower, although well-proportioned, is not
higher than the roofs of the village houses.
[Illustration: CADGWITH COVE.]
The half-mile hence to Cadgwith Cove is a zigzagging and steep descent.
Deep down lies the village, with a street clinging to the sides of the
descent and thatched cottages at the bottom, facing the sea; one or two
in front of their fellows standing on a rocky projection called "The
Rodden." The sea comes hissing in upon a pebbly beach, alongside tall,
sheer cliffs.
It is even steeper up out of Cadgwith on the coastguard path to the
Lizard than on the other side; an obscure path leading up to scrubby
fields and a modern villa called "White Heather," facing the sea in
what seems a not altogether permanently safe position, considering
that the "Devil's Frying Pan" is in front of it. This is a chasm
formed in the cliffs by the falling in of the roof of a cave, leaving
a huge pit-like opening in the cliff-top, with a neck of land forming
a natural arch on the edge of the cliffs. Down below, the sea comes
foaming and hissing at high tide among the scattered boulders in a way
that suggested to some imaginative person the idea of a frying-pan. A
not very safe path leads round the landward edge of this place; but
the best and most impressive view is from the sea. It is a very short
boating trip from Cadgwith to the Devil's Frying Pan.
A boating trip is certainly the best method of seeing the coast between
Cadgwith and the Lizard. You see more, and to better advantage, than
by tramping round the interminable headlands and down one not very
interesting valley, up to the next hill, conscious all the while that
the real beauty of the coast lies under your feet, in the sea-fretted
caverns that the waves never leave. The finest of these is Dolor
Hugo: _ogof_, the old Cornish word for "cave." This is a magnificent
cavern in the dark but richly variegated serpentine rock. The archway
rises high overhead, admitting boats easily in calm weather, but the
roof soon descends and exploration cannot be pushed far. The Lizard
boatmen, too, are very alive to the dangers of the place. The solemn
beauty of it and the heavy ground-swell impress the stranger with a
full sense of the risks incurred in visiting Dolor Hugo, except in the
calmest weather.
[Illustration: THE "DEVIL'S FRYING PAN."]
At Cambarrow, the next headland, is the cavern of Ravens' Hugo, a
narrower fissure, the entrance hung with wild growths. Then comes
the sheer cliff called "The Balk," where serpentine quarries may be
observed, and round its precipitous adamantine wall the deeply cleft
little Church Cove, known also as Perranvose, Parnvoose, or Lizard Cove.
Church Cove itself is an almost solitary place, a narrow strip of beach
between sheer rocks; but the cottages along the tree-shaded lane that
runs up to Landewednack are as homely and sheltered, and as richly
embowered in roses, fuchsias, honeysuckle, and hydrangeas, as any place
in the West. All around is the level, treeless, windswept heath of
the Lizard district, but down in this sheltered hollow one is in the
atmosphere of a conservatory. Perhaps one person among every hundred of
those who come to Lizard Town discovers Church Cove and the village of
Landewednack, which is the mother-village whence Lizard Town, half a
mile away, has sprung; and the ninety and nine return home, having just
caught a glimpse of the lighthouse, and think, vainly, they have seen
all there is to be seen.
I have quite a budget of curious facts concerning Landewednack and its
church. To begin with, it is the parish church of that odd collection
of houses--the very negation of architecture--"Lizard Town," which
occupies the plateau just beyond this dell. That a place should elect
to style itself "Lizard Town," when it might be, and properly is,
Landewednack, is an odd study in perversity. Landewednack church is
also the most southerly church in England, and in it was preached in
1674 the last sermon in the Cornish language. A few years later, 1683,
died the Rev. Thomas Cole, stated in the register to have been 120
years of age. In the churchyard lie a number of persons who died of the
plague in 1645, but the spot where they were laid is unmarked.
[Illustration: LANDEWEDNACK.]
Furthermore, the stranger will not fail to observe that the huge
stones of which the tower is built are partly grey granite and partly
of local serpentine, giving a curiously irregular chessboard kind of
appearance. The dedication of the church is said to be to St. Winwaloe.
The place-name has its fellow in Brittany--that other Cornwall--in
Landevenec.
The church of Landewednack consists of nave, north aisle, and a south
transept, which has a low side-window at the angle formed by its
eastern wall and the wall of the nave. The font, dating from about
1404, is mounted on four modern pillars of polished serpentine. The
bowl bears an inscription including the name of the rector at that
period, "I.H.C. D. Ric. Bolham me fecit."
And now we come to Lizard Town. No one ever planned Lizard Town, any
more than its houses were designed. They were merely built, and the
"town," which is a simple collection of cottages and a hotel or two of
sorts, is much smaller than many villages. Its population, including
Landewednack, is only 683. Lizard Town simply grew at haphazard, on the
extremity of the level, heather-clad waste of the Lizard promontory,
and with so little directing hand or purposeful mind that its component
houses form hardly any recognisable lines of streets, running in any
definite directions. They may be fitly likened to a flock of sheep
huddled together, facing all ways, to escape a tempest raging from
all quarters at once. The population appears to a casual observer to
consist wholly of families of Jose and Roberts, all inter-related,
like the Cadgwith people, who are all either Janes or Stevenses. And
they are nearly all workers in serpentine, whose little workrooms and
shops are all of one peculiar pattern, with a small show-window closed
at night by a hinged shutter. In every one of these shanties a lathe
is at work shaping the rough serpentine rock down, and then turning
it into one or other of the many ornamental articles exposed for sale
in the windows: paper-weights, candlesticks, pen-trays, models of the
Eddystone lighthouse and of Cornish crosses, and so forth; beautifully
polished. "Serpentine" gets its name from the coloured streaks and
patches it displays.
The "Lizard district" is the name given to all that boldly projecting
peninsula south of the Helford River: the district that is properly
"Meneage," the "stony district," but "Lizard" is only rightly applied
to the actual headland. It has nothing to do with the reptile lizards,
but is equal to the Welsh "Llidiart," indicating a rocky height. There
is a Weston-under-Lizard in Staffordshire. The peninsula forms the
most southerly projection of England, and the Lizard Point by day or
the Lizard Light by night is the first glimpse homeward-bound voyagers
obtain of old England from the decks of the great steamships passing
up Channel. It is a wild, but scarcely picturesque land, consisting
of a high, but level, plateau of heaths and moors. Goonhilly Downs,
in its centre, in spite of their name, are not hilly, nor are they
what we generally understand to be downs, but just gently undulating,
or even flat, stretches of uncultivated and uncultivable land that
by some are styled "dreary." But the justness or otherwise of that
expression entirely depends upon the circumstances of the moment.
Given bad weather, Goonhilly Downs and the whole Lizard peninsula
are, indeed, dreary to the traveller, for shelter along the exposed
roads, for the most part treeless, lonely, and quite innocent of
hedges, is unobtainable for many miles; but in fine weather the purple
heather, the occasional wooded hollows and the innumerable grey
boulders scattered in these wilds, make a pleasant holiday jaunt.
From a cycling point of view, the roads are perfection, and although
dreariness is again the word when a cyclist strives along them in the
teeth of a gale, to be blown mile after mile on a cycle with the wind
is exhilarating. There are few villages here. Inland from Lizard Town
you see the church-tower of Grade peering across the flats, but it is
a village only of "farm-places." Grade church takes its name from St.
Grada, Crida, or Credanus, a more or less mythical companion of St.
Petroc, but it has been re-dedicated to Holy Cross.
Even less of a village is Ruan Major, whose church is seen amid a
cluster of trees on the right of the road to Helston. Ruan Major is a
paradoxical place, much smaller than Ruan Minor, consisting as it does
of a church and a farmhouse. St. Ruan, or Rumon, its godfather, was a
sixth-century Irish hermit who resided here--if that mode of living
may be called residence--both before and after he went to Brittany,
where he was not altogether favourably received. That he was much
better thought of in Cornwall and Devonshire seems evident in the
places named after him, and in the great honour paid to his relics
at Tavistock Abbey. The farm at Ruan Major and the little woodland
distinguishing the place from the surrounding open heaths perhaps
represent the "nymet," or sacred enclosure made by St. Ruan around his
hermitage.
Such then, with an occasional old manor-house and park like
Trelowarren, Bochyn, and Bonython, the last near Cury, formerly seat of
the old family of Bonython, is the wide district at the back of Lizard
Town. Strangers simply hurry over it, by motor-car or Great Western
motor-omnibus, all anxious to reach the Lizard itself, and to explore
Kynance Cove and be off again.
The Lizard lighthouse is three-quarters of a mile distant from Lizard
Town. It occupies the extremity of the point, the _Ocrinum_ of Ptolemy,
and is the successor of a lighthouse first erected in 1619 by Sir John
Killigrew. That early light was only established in the teeth of the
strongest discouragement by the Trinity House, which in those times
adopted what seems to us an extraordinary policy, directed against
the increase of lighthouses. Sir John Killigrew proposed to set up a
light here at his own expense and to gather voluntary contributions
from ship-owners towards the cost of it, but he found it necessary to
first obtain a licence to do so, and therefore petitioned James the
First to that effect. He would pay twenty nobles a year for leave to
collect voluntary sums for a term of thirty years. This proposition,
submitted to the Trinity House, produced the criticism that a light
was not required upon the Lizard, and that in fact any such light
would be dangerous, for it would serve as a beacon for pirates and
foreign enemies. But the King, really in this instance the Solomon his
flatterers pretended him to be, disregarded the unfavourable report,
and granted the petition, with the only proviso that the light should
be extinguished in time of war, when the approach of an enemy was
suspected. Killigrew thereupon began and soon completed his lighthouse,
much to the anger of the coastwise people. "The inabytants neer by,"
wrote Killigrew, "think they suffer by this erection. They affirme I
take away God's grace from them. Their English meaning is that now they
shall receve no more benefitt by shipwreck, for this will prevent yt.
They have been so long used to repe profitt by the calamyties of the
ruin of shipping that they clayme it heredytarye, and heavely complayne
on me."
A year's working, including the cost of building, cost Sir John
Killigrew £500. The light displayed was a brazier of coal, and this
alone cost ten shillings a night. As for the "voluntary contributions"
expected, they were simply nonexistent, and in consequence Killigrew
petitioned for, and obtained, the right to levy dues of one halfpenny
a ton on all passing vessels. Even then, he took nothing but a loss
out of his enterprise, for shipowners, backed by the Trinity House,
refused to pay, and in the end the lighthouse was pulled down.
The existing lighthouse dates from 1748, when a Captain Farrish
proposed a building that should display four lights. This was a wholly
commercial speculation. Farrish proposed to pay a yearly sum of £80 to
the Trinity House for leave to build, and obtained a lease of sixty-one
years; but the lease was taken over and the lighthouse actually built
by Thomas Fonnereau. The lights were first displayed on August 22nd,
1752, in the presence of a great assemblage of people, who had come
long distances to honour the event. Two lights appear to have been
substituted for the four in 1792, but not until 1813 did the coal
braziers give place to oil, and oil was replaced by the electric light
in 1878. About 1902 the lights were reduced to one powerful revolving
electric beam, the strongest in the world, visible for twenty-three
miles, and showing once in every three seconds. It is aided in foggy
weather by the most dismal of foghorns.
Hard by the lighthouse stands a notice-board of the National Lifeboat
Institution, giving a plain record of the doings of the successive
lifeboats that have been established down below, in Polpear Cove.
The Lizard lifeboats have rendered noble service, as shown by the board
telling the doings of them:
LIFEBOAT _ANNA MARIA_.
LIVES SAVED.
1861. Aug. 10.--Schooner, _Hurrell_, Penzance 4
1868. March 27.--Schooner, _Selina_, Swansea 2
1873. " 1.--Barque, _Fomahault_, Griefswald 11
1879. June 15.--Brig, _Scotscraig_, Dundee 9
1882. Aug. 9.--s.s. _Mosel_, Bremen 27
LIFEBOAT _EDMUND AND FANNY_.
1886. Sept. 28.--s.s. _Suffolk_, London 24
1887. March 13.--Schooner, _Gipsy Queen_, Padstow 5
1888. " 10.--Barque, _Lady Dufferin_, Plymouth 17
1893. " 4.--s.s. _Gustav Bitter_, Newcastle 3
1897. Nov. 23.--s.s. _Landore_, Liverpool 12
1898. Aug. 6.--Barque, _Vortigern_, London --
1900. Nov. 24.--_Glint_, Stavanger 4
LIFEBOAT _ADMIRAL SIR GEORGE BACK_.
1907. March 17-18.--s.s. _Suevic_, Liverpool 167
1907. July 23.--Ketch, _Fanny_, Bideford 3
The bald, unvarnished statement in this list under date of March 17th
to 18th, 1907, giving the list of saved from the _Suevic_, hides the
very narrow escape of the passengers and crew of that White Star
liner. She was homeward-bound from Australia, and had on board between
three and four hundred passengers, and a cargo of frozen meat. In the
middle of the night she struck upon the Brandies Rocks, immediately
under the Lizard lighthouse; thus affording another extraordinary
instance of the fatal attraction this, the most salient southerly
point of land in England, has for vessels, in spite of the lighthouse
exhibiting the most powerful light in the world. The Lizard, Cadgwith
and Mullion lifeboats put out, on hearing the news, and landed many of
the passengers, and one hundred and forty were taken off by the tug
_Triton_ of Falmouth. Fortunately the weather was moderate. The hull
was severed by dynamite about a week later, and towed round to Falmouth.
Scattered reefs stretch out beyond Lizard Point, and form the special
dangers of the place. They are known in general as "The Stags." A
vessel, wrecked on the Stags about 1845, was driven on to the island
rock of Crenval, where the crew refuged all night, while the good ship
was being reduced to matchwood by the waves. The next morning they were
brought ashore, and were greeted by their own cat, which had either
swum to land, or had been carried on the wreckage. Its tail had somehow
been nipped off in the process. The cat was sold to an innkeeper in
Lizard Town, and was long looked upon as very much of a hero.
Immediately to the eastward of the lighthouse is the funnel formed
in the cliffs by the falling in of the roof of a cave known as Daws'
Hugo. This subsidence happened on February 19th, 1847, and the hollow
thus produced was immediately given the name of "Lion's Den." Beyond
it is Housel Bay, with a hotel on the cliffs. The rugged Penolver Head
comes next, and then the amphitheatrical Belidden Cove, with Beast,
or Bass Point, enclosing it. Lloyd's signalling station, displaying
the word LLOYD'S in gigantic letters on its sea-front, stands on Beast
Point. Hence inward and outward-bound ships are telegraphed to London
as having "passed the Lizard." Beyond Hot Point, the next headland, the
coast comes to Kilcobbin Cove and again to Church Cove.