THE LOGAN ROCK AND ITS STORY--PORTHCURNO AND THE TELEGRAPH STATION--ST.
LEVAN--PORTH GWARRA--TOL-PEDN-PENWITH--CHAIR LADDER--LAND'S END.
It is half a mile from the stony hamlet of Trereen to the Logan Rock,
which stands up against the skyline towards the seaward extremity of
that magnificently rugged headland, Trereen Dinas. The narrow neck
of this peninsula is deeply scored across with a ditch and heaped
with a parallel wall of stones and earth, the defensive works of a
long-forgotten people, but it is not so much to see these vestiges of
insecure prehistoric times, nor even to view the fine scenery, that a
continual stream of visitors comes hither all the summer. It is the
Logan Rock that attracts them. This rock, one of the many "logans" in
Cornwall which are so balanced or pivoted by the natural weathering
of ages that they "log," or oscillate slightly, to a vigorous push,
is the most famous of its kind, both for its own self and for the
circumstances of its later history. It is an irregular cube of granite
weighing sixty tons, some say ninety, poised upon a great mass of
fantastic rocks, curiously jointed, and overlooking the sea from a
height of about two hundred feet. Borlase, writing in his "Antiquities
of Cornwall," 1754, declared it to be "morally impossible that any
lever, or indeed force, however employed in a mechanical way, can
remove it from its present situation." The same view was held by the
country people, and so worked upon Lieutenant Goldsmith of H.M.S.
cutter _Nimble_, cruising off-shore on the look-out for smugglers,
that he determined to overthrow the stone and thus prove himself a
fellow clever beyond all expectation. So, on April 8th, 1824 (it would
have been more appropriately done on the 1st), he landed with a boat's
crew of nine men, and with handspikes and much personal exertion did
succeed in performing that which Borlase and the united voice of the
countryside had declared to be impossible. He overthrew the Logan
Rock, and had it not become lodged in a cleft, it must have descended
into the sea and been lost for ever. He did, incidentally, a great
deal more. The wanton act of folly rightly aroused Cornwall to furious
indignation, and he went in great personal danger for awhile. If such
an ass as he had been lynched it would have been a salutary warning to
others. The Admiralty could not ignore the anger that had been aroused,
and speedily intimated to Lieutenant Goldsmith that he must either
replace the rock or lose his commission. The tackle for the purpose was
lent to him from the dockyard at Devonport, and after much preparation
and the construction of elaborate staging, the rock was returned to
its place on November 2nd, in the presence of a vast crowd assembled
to witness it. The work was costly beyond the means of a lieutenant,
and was carried through by subscription. Goldsmith's career was ruined
by this act of folly, and he died in 1841, without promotion. The
"logging" of the rock was quite destroyed and, although it appears
still to be delicately poised, it requires great exertion to induce
even the suspicion of a tremor.
[Illustration: TREREEN DINAS.]
[Illustration: THE LOGAN ROCK.]
There is an excellent good climb for the young and active and the
reckless down from this grim granite promontory of Trereen Dinas to an
exquisitely secluded sandy cove, and thence up again, and over more
tumbled hummocks of the all-pervading granite, to the sandy and shelly
shore of Porthcurno, properly Porth Kernow, the "Port of Cornwall."
But halt awhile! secluded, did I say that sandy cove to be? So it
may seem at certain hours of the day, when the young barbarians of
the Eastern Telegraph Company are in office, at work; but even then,
when this yellow strand under Trereen Dinas is indeed solitary,
the observant explorer, who thinks himself one of the very few who
ever scale these rocks and pace these selvedges of the sea, will be
startled, even as was Robinson Crusoe on a memorable occasion, by the
imprint of a human foot. _A_ human foot? Nay, dozens of them, for
this is, in short, one of the favourite bathing-coves of the ninety
or so telegraphist probationers of the Eastern Telegraph Company
at Porthcurno. For at Porthcurno the cable lands from Gibraltar
and all the wide world, including the Cocos Islands and places of
unpronounceable name in tropic climes, where white men sweat and fume
far from their kind and dwell lovingly on the good time coming, when
they shall be home and in London again, living instead of existing.
At Banjoewangi (which is a real place on the Telegraph Company's
system, somewhere back even of Back of Beyond, and not what it looks
like, a nigger-minstrels' kingdom-come), London, you know, seems a very
desirable place.
Well, here is the E. T. C. telegraph station, up inland a quarter of
a mile from the cove; a square white building with a flat, bomb-proof
roof, and here in various quarters are the officials, and here too
are some ninety probationers of sixteen to eighteen years of age, or
thereabouts, all learning telegraphese, the punching of dots and dashes
on endless tapelike strips of paper and the reading of the same: a
sufficiently beastly business, so what wonder if these ninety in their
off-hours be somewhat untamable!
All these things are late developments. A few years ago Porthcurno was
a wild little place, and quite behind the age. Now it is perhaps even
a little in advance of it. An almost typically suburban street runs up
inland, and on the elegantly thin iron telegraph-poles that carry the
land-lines of the E. T. C. are incandescent electric globes with white
shades, which light the road at night. And on the cliffs the Telegraph
Company is trying a wireless installation of its own, of which the
visible evidence is a very tall and very groggy-looking pole, stayed
and tied elaborately. Such is Porthcurno, the "PK" of telegraphists.
From Porthcurno, to reach the church of St. Levan, you take the church
path, avoiding the hideous houses on the headland, plastered and of a
dismal neutral tint, that have recently been built there. Through three
fields runs the church-path, and then the sea, with distant horizon,
opens out between the flanks of a combe, the four pinnacles of St.
Levan church-tower suddenly rising before you, scarce above your line
of vision. The church, in fact, is built in a hollow--once a solitary
hollow--giving upon the sea, a place where few strangers ever came in
those distant fifth-century days when St. Levan lived the hermit life.
We know very little of that saint, except the tale of the disastrous
entertainment he offered his sister when she came to visit him here. It
seems that he subsisted entirely upon the fish he caught, and thinking
he would spread a dainty meal before his visitors, he went out and
caught a chad. The fish that came to his line he did not consider
good enough, so he threw it back. Not before the identical fish had
been caught three times did he accept the inevitable, and he cooked
it accordingly; but at the first bite the child was choked. St. Levan
was illogical enough--and I think blasphemous enough--to consider this
a judgment of Providence upon himself for refusing what had been sent
him. The chad was long called locally "chack-cheeld." "St. Levan's
Path" to the rocks where he used to fish is still pointed out.
[Illustration: ST. LEVAN.]
The place teems with legends. Thus, the great granite rock in the
churchyard, called "St. Levan's Stone," with a grass-grown gap in it,
is the subject of a local rhyme, which tells us that when this slowly
widening fissure has grown large enough for the passage of a packhorse,
the Day of Judgment will be at hand. Personal observation and judicious
enquiries justify me in assuring trembling sinners that, if this be
indeed a guide, that day is yet far off.
I have said St. Levan was solitary. The immediate neighbourhood of
the church is even now not very densely populated, for the visible
buildings are only the rectory and a cottage; and it can, I conceive,
scarcely be called cheerful; for the bell-buoy on that submerged rock,
the Rundlestone, out to sea, is for ever heard tolling, sometimes
like a funeral knell and at others like some harsh gong, calling lost
mariners to dinner down there in weedy caves with the mermaids.
The little church of St. Levan is rich in old bench-ends, displaying
his fishes, a palmer with cockle-shells in his hat, knights, ladies,
and jesters; while the chancel-screen is enriched with the eagle of
St. John, the lily of the Virgin, the sacred monogram, and the spear,
nails, and hammer of the Crucifixion. The Virgin herself is rendered,
with round silly face and coif and fifteenth-century ruff. There has
been a great deal of restoration effected here of late years.
A sundial in the churchyard displays a solemn motto: _Sicut umbra
transeunt dies_, and a memorial to one of the Telegraph Company's
probationers, drowned while bathing at Porthcurno, stands near by the
grave of Captain Henry Rothery and the twenty-two others lost in the
wreck of the _Khyber_ at Porthloe in the storm of March 15th, 1905.
The narrow cliff-path from St. Levan presently leads to the small and
rocky fishing-cove of Porth Gwarra, the foreshore roughly paved with
granite blocks in between the projecting rocks, which are here hollowed
into caverns, where the few boats and lobster-pots are stored. A yellow
snapdragon grows profusely in the cliffs here, and ivy richly mantles
some of the crags along the coast towards Land's End; while a curious
plant with fleshy leaves, curved like giant talons, and red and yellow
flowers, called the "ice-plant," thickly drapes many of the rough walls
enclosing fields.
The cliffs here rise to their grandest in the magnificent piles
of granite blocks towering up at the crested promontory of
Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the "Holed Headland in Penwith." The cliff-top
walk has here broadened out to an expanse of short moss-like grass
interspersed with rabbit-burrows, knobs of lichened rock and tufts of
thrift or sea-pink. It is good going for the pedestrian, but the grass
is apt to be slippery. A stranger wandering here alone suddenly finds
the chasm that gives Tol Pedn its name, directly in his path.
There are few places on the coasts of Cornwall really dangerous,
unless you go out of your way to court danger, but this abrupt hole in
the cliff-top is really a deadly place. That no one appears ever to
have fallen down it and broken his neck seems to be because strangers
who walk these cliffs generally do so with a very proper sense of the
perils which lie in the way of those who do not exercise due caution.
Any one who walked here in one of the frequent sea-fogs would stand an
excellent chance of walking right over the edge of this hole in the
headland, and so falling an inevitable one hundred feet to his death.
This great circular gap, the "Funnel," as some call it, is about thirty
feet across, and is a real startler. It was formed just in the same
manner as the "Lion's Den," near the Lizard, and the "Devil's Frying
Pan," near Cadgwith, by the falling-in of the roof of a cave; and the
beach down below communicates with the sea. Adjoining it, from the
cliffs' edge, rises the impressive pile of granite rock called "Chair
Ladder," tinted all hues by weathering and by lichens, from black and
grey to green, red, and a vivid orange. It is not difficult to climb
down into the black depths below Chair Ladder, or to the beach, but
it requires rather more energy to return. To style Chair Ladder and
the other rocky spires neighbouring it piles of rock is by no means
straining language, for they have exactly the appearance of having been
heaped one upon another by some superhuman energy, the granite cubes
being jointed like so many blocks of rude cyclopean masonry. The
coast here indeed displays some of the most curious imitative forms in
natural architecture, and every point and every little porth has its
old Cornish name.
[Illustration: "CHAIR LADDER."]
The point of Carn Guethensbras, the "Great Carn," juts out beyond Chair
Ladder, and encloses Porthloe, the "Lake Port." It was here that the
homeward-bound sailing ship _Khyber_, from Australia, was cast away in
March 1905, and twenty-three of the twenty-six aboard were drowned. An
Admiralty signalling station has since been established on the cliffs.
I was walking here in August 1909, and two men came hurrying out of the
signal-station.
"Are you a doctor, sir," they asked.
I felt unreasonably ashamed that I was not.
"What's the matter?"
"Why, 'zno, a man, one of a party camping tu Porth Gwarra, runnen along
th' cliffs, has fell'd down a hunner 'an twenty feet, an' scat's head
all to bits, an' we'm most at our wits' end what to du."
It seemed, hearing a report like this, that there was really nothing
to do but hold an inquest; but doctors had been telegraphed for to
Penzance, and when at last they arrived, the man was not dead. It
was a marvellous escape. Falling down the jagged rocks, into a place
difficult of access, from which the coastguard only brought him up on a
stretcher after great exertion, he was not killed outright; and indeed,
according to later advices, eventually recovered.
A lovely nook opens out beyond Pendower Cove, at Nanjizel, or Mill
Bay, where there is a natural archway and a tall rifted cavern in the
headland of Carn-les-Boel, known as the "Song of the Sea," perhaps the
most entirely beautiful and romantic cave in Cornwall.
Past this, the point of Carn Voel is reached, with the "Lion's Den"
cavern. Ahead, the heights of Pardenick Point rise in columnar majesty,
the point whence Turner painted his view of the Land's End, that
extraordinarily fantastic and darkling composition, in which the rocks
on the hillsides look more like sheep than rocks.
There stretch the stacked rocks of _Bolerium_, the Land's End, in
Cornish "Pedn-an-Laaz," and in Welsh, "Pen-Gwaed," the Headland of
Blood; in effect not remotely resembling bundles of cigars set on end.