POLDHU AND THE MARCONI STATION--MODERN CORNWALL--GUNWALLOE--THE
"DOLLAR WRECK"--WRECK OF THE "BRANKELOW"--WRECKS OF THE "SUSAN AND
REBECCA" AND OF H.M.S. "ANSON"--LOE BAR AND POOL--HELSTON AND ITS
"FURRY"--PORTHLEVEN--BREAGE--WRECK OF THE "NOISIEL"--PENGERSICK CASTLE.
A coastguard path runs along the cliffs from Mullion Cove, descending
to the sandy shores of Polurrian, and thence to the smaller, but still
sandy, Poldhu Cove. Enterprising builders of hotels have erected
large and florid and up-to-date caravanserais here, and golfers have
impudently taken possession of the waste-lands. And wireless telegraphy
presides visibly over the scene; visibly because, although wireless in
one sense, it still has taken, besides the four enormously tall iron
and steel towers that stand on Poldhu headland, a vast quantity of
interlacing wires to form this chief among the Marconi stations. Those
great towers, with their staircases that go winding round and round to
the dizzy summits, are an obsession, not only here, but all over the
Lizard district. You may see them quite easily, ten miles away.
It is the last touch of modernity; and yet, you know, although these
towers are so ugly, they are the visible representatives of an
invisible power of communication through the ether that is very much
more wonderful than any tales of magic ever told in Cornwall.
For the other modern things in Cornwall--barrack-hotels, golfers,
"tinned" bread, and scientific methods of dealing with the milk--there
is no excuse. Before these developments, Cornwall--save in the matter
of overmuch rain--was near perfection.
The curses of modern Cornwall, from the point of view of any one
who prefers honesty, old-fashioned ways, and the continuance of the
ancient manners and customs of the delightful country west of the
Tamar, are High Churchism, golf, tin bungalows, huge caravanserai
hotels, and tinned bread. To these some might add "Riviera" expresses
and motor-cars, for they are opening up, between them, the uttermost
corners of what was once a difficult land for the tourist; and the
more you do thus "open up" Cornwall, the less like the dear delightful
old Duchy it ever becomes, and the more closely it approximates to the
cockneyfied shores nearer London.
Golf is certainly the prime offender. It is a scourge that has
devastated the once beautiful wild sandhills and coastwise heaths,
and reduced them to the titivated promenading grounds of the wealthy
bounders who generally used to confine their energies to the unhealthy
atmosphere of the billiard-room. The newer order of things is better
for the bounders, but very bad for the unconventional beauties of the
wilds. That desolating game is producing, here as elsewhere, a loafer
class of caddies, cockneyfying and undermining the sturdy Cornish
character, and changing the uprising rustic youth into a loafing,
cigarette-smoking type of wastrel who becomes unemployable and vicious
when youth is left behind, having learnt nothing but the vices of the
rich, which they have not the means to satisfy, while they have lost,
beyond recovery, the habit of industry. It was a bad day for England
when golf crossed the Scottish border and invaded our land.
Most of the other curses of Cornwall are the direct and inevitable
outcome of better local intercommunication, and of easier travel and
the consequent increase of tourists and summer residents. Few ever
foresaw, when corrugated, galvanised iron was introduced, how in less
than a generation the tin Bungalow and the Simple Life would go hand
in hand, and settle on the loneliest spots to be found along our
seaboard. I will leave it for future philosophers to determine which
invented the other; whether the Bungalow produced the Simple Life, or
whether an already existent desire for the simplification of existence
produced the Bungalow; with passing references to the Servant
difficulty and to that latter-day institution, the Week-end. But it is
now a well-understood and greatly practised thing that you may cheaply
live in a tin house in the wilderness, without servants, on tinned
provisions, and on tinned bread from the nearest machine-bakery, and
yet be in the intellectual movement of the time, and without reproach,
even though your sanitary arrangements be such that even the old-time
cottager might consider scandalous, and although, with the lengthening
of your sojourn, your rising zareba of empty tins makes ever more
squalid the surroundings.
Machine-made bread is a very real offence and distress to any one who
has known Cornwall for a considerable number of years, for it is a
comparatively recent introduction. Until quite lately, Cornwall was
one of the last strongholds of that admirable lady, the old-fashioned
housewife who was proud to make her own bread. She would, dear lady,
as soon thought of getting outside help for having the beds made, as
purchasing what she would have called, with contemptuous inflection,
"Baker's bread." But nowadays not only the resident, but the farmer
even, and the veriest cottager, gets his loaf from the baker's cart
that has now taken to calling for orders every morning, even in rural
districts, as though they were merely London suburbs. And such a
perverted taste in bread exists that not merely decent "baker's bread"
now prevails in these parts, but a dry, husky, leathery kind, that is
baked in tins, which Providence never intended bread to be.
DISILLUSION
He thought he saw the sun to shine
Effulgent o'er the land
He looked again--it rained in sheets,
With mud on either hand,
"If it were only dry," he said,
"This country would be grand."
He thought he saw a rustic inn
Of which the poets tell;
He looked again, and lo! it was
A brand-new Grand Hotel.
He looked a trifle glum, and said:
"Alas! it is not well."
He thought he saw a table spread
With honest English cheer;
He looked again, and there he saw
Tinned bread and lager beer.
He turned away, and sadly said:
"I take no luncheon here."
He thought to quench a raging thirst
(The way was long and rough);
He bought a glass of milk, and cursed:
'Twas "separated" stuff.
He hurried off; of modern ways
He'd had about enough.
He thought he saw a fisherman--
One of a sturdy race--
He looked again, and saw a youth
Of weak and vicious face.
"A golfing caddie," he remarked,
And fled the curséd place.
From Poldhu the cliffs die down for an interval and disclose a flat
shore. The little church lying down there, on the other side of
the sandy cove, its small detached tower half built into the rocky
hillside, is that of Gunwalloe. There is no village of Gunwalloe, and
the living is held with that of Cury, two miles inland. Scarce removed
above high-water mark, and in storms exposed in a large degree to the
fury of the waves, the lonely situation of Gunwalloe church excites
much wonder. Legends tell with misty vagueness that it was founded here
as the result of a vow made by a storm-tossed mariner that, should
Providence bring him safe to land, he would build a church where he
came ashore. There is not the least reason for doubting the truth of
this, and indeed it is the only probable explanation of a church being
built on such a spot. The existing building is a late fifteenth-century
structure obviously replacing a very early building, of which the
bowl of a Norman font is the only relic. The usual mean and skimping
restoration and refitting with pitch-pine may be noticed here.
St. Winwaloe, to whom the church is dedicated, died, in A.D. 529, Abbot
of Landevenec, in Brittany. His life was written by Abbot Wurdestan
of that place, in A.D. 884. "Gunwalloe" is simply a perversion of his
name, which is sometimes also written "Guenole." A curious epitaph may
be noted, on John Dale, drowned April 1808, in attempting the rescue of
a sailor wrecked on Loe Bar.
"When softest pity mov'd his heart
A brother's life to save,
Himself alas! a victim fell
To the relentless wave.
"But though his mortal part be dead,
His spirit lives above;
Where he may bathe from dangers free
In seas of heavenly love."
It is a disastrous sign of the times that at Cury, and here at
Gunwalloe, Ritualistic excesses are alienating from the Church of
England even those few who have hitherto adhered to it. These doings
so angered the people a year or two back that they threw the pictures
and candles and other Romish frippery into the sea; but the folly of it
goes on, and theatrical parties, wrongly styled religious processions,
of clergy proceed occasionally, with pomp of vestments and swinging of
incense, to the shore, reciting prayers for those drowned at sea, who,
poor souls are quite beyond this sort of thing. Even the bunches of
flowers the children are taught to throw into the waves don't help them
to salvation.
[Illustration: GUNWALLOE.]
Among the many wrecks at Gunwalloe, the story of what is called the
"Dollar Wreck" stands out most prominently. On a stormy night in 1787
a Spanish vessel struck on the cliffs by the church and became a total
loss. She had among her cargo a great quantity of silver dollars,
computed at the lowest at seventeen tons weight. Ever since that time
the story of the "dollar wreck" has been kept alive, not only by
tradition, but by scattered coins being occasionally flung upon the
beach by the waves, after some exceptionally heavy storm. Gunwalloe, in
fact, reeks with well-authenticated stories of dollars. The earliest
among these is that of a wonderful dream by a Mrs. Jose, not long after
the wreck. She saw in the vision a heavy bag of dollars lying on the
sands, and begged her husband to go and secure it. He laughed the idea
to scorn, but she persisted and was so in earnest about it that she got
up and dressed; and there, sure enough, lay the bag of dollars. But
just as she was rejoicing over the find, a number of wreckers happened
along this way and seized the treasure for themselves, quarrelling over
it until they resorted to bloodshed.
In 1845 a serious attempt was made to secure the buried dollars. The
position of the wreck was located, iron stanchions were fixed in
the cliffs, and a stone dam built out to enclose the spot, with the
intention of pumping out the water, but when those preparations were on
the eve of completion a storm came and utterly abolished all the works.
Another party of adventurers tried, about 1865, and sank a shaft into
which the sea burst, and in 1872 a further effort was made. The scheme
of operations was on this occasion altogether different, the idea being
to introduce pipes into the water and by powerful pumps to suck up the
sand and incidentally the dollars. But storms made short work of that
enterprise also. Attempts are even now in progress for the recovery of
the treasure that has been waiting over a hundred and twenty years for
the finding.
A mysterious wreck, not, however, so mysterious but that it was quite
certainly the result of foul play, happened on Gunwalloe sands on April
21st, 1890. The steamship _Brankelow_, from Cardiff for Cronstadt, with
a cargo of 3,000 tons of coal, ran at full speed ahead at midnight on
to the sands. Fortunately it was not rough weather at the time, and the
crew were got off safely, although it was stated that they were all
drunk. The cause of the vessel being driven directly for the land was
found to have been a malicious tampering with the compasses by Trades'
Union men at Cardiff, and by violent damage done wilfully to it on the
voyage. Two magnets had been inserted at Cardiff, by which the needle
was wrong to the extent of five points. The _Brankelow_ eventually
became embedded in the sand and was a total loss.
Up out of Gunwalloe the road skirts Halzaphron Cliffs, and thence
descends to the sands of Loe Bar. At Halzaphron on November 4th, 1807,
the ill-fated _Susan and Rebecca_ transport, homeward-bound from Buenos
Aires, was wrecked. Of the 180 on board, forty-one were drowned and
buried on the cliff-top. H.M.S. _Anson_ took the sands on Loe Bar,
December 28th, 1807, and was wrecked, with the loss of her captain and
sixty sailors.
[Illustration: LOOE POOL.]
Loe, or properly Looe, Bar is a belt of sand thrown up by the sea,
obstructing the outflow of a stream called the Cober, which has too
feeble a discharge to clear away the obstruction, causing the valley
running two miles and a half inland to Helston to assume the aspect
of a lake. In the summer these waters would to some degree percolate
through the sand, but in the winter's rains they could not escape so
quickly, and consequently the level of Looe Pool would rise by some
ten feet or more, a source of some inconvenience. From this arose an
ancient custom, by which the corporation of Helston presented the
lord of the manor with a leathern purse containing three-halfpence,
soliciting permission to cut the sandbar and so permit the water to
escape. Permission graciously accorded, workmen were engaged who cut
a trench in the sand, and so the stream burst through and regained
its summer level. This done, the sea began to choke up the outlet as
before, and the process was repeated the next winter.
This quaint old custom is now a thing of the past, it having been of
recent years somewhat belatedly realised that a culvert constructed
under Looe Bar would effectually drain the waters off, without the
periodic cuttings.
But Cornwall being the Cornwall of legends, it was known perfectly well
that satanic agency and not natural forces originally produced Looe
Bar. Time was, according to these legends, when Helston was a thriving
port, with trading vessels sailing up the estuary. It was Tregeagle
who did the mischief. Every one in Cornwall has heard of Tregeagle,
the dishonest steward, who pervades many legends and lives in many
centuries, these stories not being particular in the matter of ten
centuries or so. Set to work by St. Petroc at Gunwalloe, his task was
to carry sand in sacks across the mouth of the estuary and empty them
at Porthleven. Laden with a sack of enormous size, the doomed spirit
was wading across when one of the wicked demons, who were always on the
watch for him, tripped him up, and the contents of the sack fell into
the sea.
Helston is nowadays a quiet, uninteresting town, by no means looking
its age. It was in existence at the time of the Norman Conquest, for it
appears in Domesday Book as "Henlistone." Of its castle, as likewise of
its old-time Parliamentary importance of returning two members, nothing
is left; and only once a year does Helston advertise its existence to
the world, when its annual Furry, held on May 8th, is duly chronicled
in the newspapers. It attracted more attention in 1907, because that
was the year of Sir William Treloar, a native of Helston, being Lord
Mayor of London; and the sun shone that day on the unwonted spectacle
of a Lord Mayor jigging down the principal street of Helston in the
Furry Dance:
"With Hal-an-tow, Rumbelow!
For we are up as soon as any, O,
And for to fetch the summer home,
The summer and the may, O!
For summer is acome,
And winter is agone."
Such is the chorus of the Furry Song, sung to an immemorially ancient
tune. The Furry, which some hold to be a survival of the Roman
"Floralia," and is obviously in any case a celebration in honour of
spring, is observed with great earnestness and is officially recognised
by the Mayor and Corporation of Helston, who take active part in it.
The woods of Penrose descend beautifully to the shares of Looe Pool,
and they are exchanged with some regret for the not very interesting
cliff-road on to Porthleven, a small harbour town, situated on steep
hillsides overlooking a pool. Granite is shipped at the quays, and much
yacht- and boat-building is carried on. Inland is Breage, a village
lying just off the modern high-road between Helston and Penzance, and
suffering from the fact that it has thus been shouldered aside, in the
deviation of traffic. You may perceive, in the following lines, the
pronunciation of the place-name:
It lies off the road to the Lizard,
The weary old village of Breage,
You need be no prophet nor wizard
To tell that its living is vague.
Its cottages falling in tatters;
Their thatch sprouting grasses and weeds;
A place where not anything matters:
A village that nobody heeds.
Its existence is rather uncertain,
Its future decidedly vague,
Unfertile the tillage around that old village,
The derelict village of Breage.
[Illustration: BREAGE.]
The church is dedicated to a woman-saint, Breaca, one of the band of
Irish missionaries who landed at Hayle River. It is a large and fine
building. A prominent feature of the interior is a fresco, discovered
of late years, representing the Saviour as the benefactor of all
callings. The almost nude figure, ten feet high, is crowned. Gouts of
blood, like crows' feet or broad-arrow marks in shape, are plentifully
distributed over body and limbs, and all around are shown some fifty
articles of handicraft, including scythe, rake, saw, trowel, plumber's
iron, harp, zither, pitcher, cart, plate, sickle, axe, anchor, anvil,
and horseshoe, all connected with the figure by spurts of blood,
typifying the blood of Christ crucified sanctifying all callings. The
wheel on which the figure stands seems to typify eternity. A similar
fresco has already been noted at Poundstock.
The coast from Porthleven offers no exceptional features until after
passing Trewavas Head, when the smooth expanse of Praa Sands is seen.
Here the iron barque _Noisiel_, of Plymouth, was driven ashore in a
storm on the night of Friday, August 4th, 1905, and became a total
wreck. She was on her way from Cherbourg with 600 tons of armour-plate,
and weathered Rinsey Head only to become embayed off Praa Sands.
Anchors were let out, but failed to hold on the sandy bottom, and the
_Noisiel_ was driven in, broadside on, and the waves speedily broke her
back. The crew mostly jumped overboard and struck out for the shore.
Two of the nine aboard were drowned. The vessel was a total loss. Some
of the armour-plates still remain, half buried in the sand.
[Illustration:
_Gibson & Sons, Penzance._]
WRECK OF THE _NOISIEL_, PRAA SANDS.]
A little way onward and a quarter of a mile inland is the fine old
embattled tower of Pengersick Castle. It stands in a pleasant meadow,
and is now part of a "farm-place." The tower is of comparatively late
date, and seems to have been built in the reign of Henry the Eighth
under mysterious circumstances, by a person named Millaton. We need not
believe the tale that he had committed a murder in some distant shire,
and hid himself here, building the tower for defence, in the event
of justice nosing him; for the arrival of a stranger and the hasty
building of a defensible tower would at once have attracted undesirable
curiosity. Moreover, the masonry is of such exquisite fineness that it
is quite evident it was only built at leisure and by the most skilled
of craftsmen. Millaton is further said to have lived here with his wife
an unhappy existence. They hated one another to extinction; but at
last he pretended a reconciliation and planned an elaborate dinner to
celebrate the event. After dinner he raised his glass, in a toast, and
drained it off. She followed suit. Then said she: "Yours was poisoned,
and in three minutes you will be a dead man!"
"So was yours," he rejoined, "and you will be a dead woman in five
minutes!"
"No matter for that," replied his wife, "for I shall have two minutes
left, in which to kick your dead body!"
Germoc lies just inland from this place. Its church, in a hollow
beneath the high-road, is dedicated to St. Germoch, another of the
Irish saints. "St. Germoe's Chair," a canopied stone building, stands
in the churchyard. The corbel-stones of the south porch are carved with
figures of monkeys.
[Illustration: PENGERSICK CASTLE.]
Beyond Pengersick comes Hoe Point, and then Prussia Cove.
[Illustration:
_The Coast of Cornwall_
NORTH-WEST AND SOUTH-WEST.]