_Aspect of the country--Gilpin on Cornish scenery--The
farm-houses--Footpaths and stiles--Cattle and pigs--A friendly sow--Dogs
and foxes--Stony fields--Farmers' love of their holdings--An old
farmer._
|THE coast country at the end or the western extremity of Cornwall
presents an aspect wild and rough as any spot in England. The
eighty-miles-long county, which some one compares to a malformed knobbly
human leg in shape, narrows down near its termination to a neck or ankle
of land no more than six or seven miles wide, with St. Ives Bay on one
(the north) side, and Mount's Bay on the other, with its group of places
of famous or familiar names--Mousehole, Newlyn, Penzance, Marazion and
St. Michael's Mount. Then the land broadens again, forming that rounded
bit of country, the westernmost part of England, containing seventy-five
or eighty square miles of hilly and moorland country, in great part
treeless, with a coastline, from bay to bay, of about thirty miles.
Following the coast, one does not wish them more: the most enthusiastic
lover of an incult nature, who delights in forcing his way over rocky
barriers and through thickets of furze, bogs and rills innumerable, will
find these thirty miles as satisfying as any sixty elsewhere. And the
roughest, therefore most exhilarating, portion of the coast is that
between St. Ives and Land's End, a distance of about twenty miles. This
strip of country has been called the Connemara of Cornwall. William
Gilpin, that grand old seeker after the picturesque at the end of the
eighteenth century, once journeyed into Cornwall, but got no further
than Bodmin, as he saw nothing but "a barren and naked country, in all
respects as uninteresting as can well be conceived," and he was informed
that west of Bodmin it was no better. It is, indeed, worse, and one
wonders what his feelings would have been had he persevered to the very
end--to rough "Connemara" and flat, naked Bolerium! His strictures
on the scenery would have amused the present generation. For all
that repelled Gilpin and those of his time in nature, the barren or
"undecorated," as he would say, the harsh and savage and unsuited to
human beings, now most attracts us. And of all places inhabited by man
this coast country is the most desert-like and desolate in appearance.
The black, frowning, wave-beaten cliffs on the one hand, the hills and
moors on the other, treeless, strewn abundantly with granite boulders,
rough with heath and furze and bracken, the summits crowned with great
masses of rock resembling ancient ruined castles. Midway between the
hills and the sea, half a mile or so from the cliffs, are the farms, but
the small houses and walled fields on the inhabited strip hardly detract
from the rude and savage aspect of the country. Nature will be Nature
here, and man, like the other inhabitants of the wilderness, has adapted
himself to the conditions. The badgers have their earths, the foxes
their caverns in the rocks, and the linnet, yellow-hammer, and magpie
hide their nests, big and little, in the dense furze bushes: he in like
manner builds his dwelling small and low, sheltering as best he can in
any slight depression in the ground, or behind thickets of furze and
the rocks he piles up. The small naked stone farm-house, with its little
outbuildings, corn-stacks, and wood piles huddling round it, seem like
a little flock of goats drawn together for company and shelter in some
rough desert place on a cold windy day. Looking from a hill-top on one
of the small groups of buildings--and in some instances two or three
farms have clubbed their houses together for better protection from the
blast--they resemble toy houses, and you have the fancy that you could
go down and pick them up and put them in your pocket.
The coast road, running from village to village, winding much, now under
now over the hills, comes close to some of the farms and leaves others
at a distance; but all these little human centres are united by a
footpath across the fields.
[Illustration: 0050]
It is very pleasant to follow this slight track, this connecting thread,
which brings to mind Richard Carew's account of the poor Cornish farmers
of his time, three centuries ago, when he says that "amongst themselves
they agree well and company lovingly together." I recall, too, that some
social rodents, that live in communities, in collections of burrows or
villages, have a track of that kind leading from village to village,
worn by the feet of the little animals in visiting their neighbours. The
fields being small you have innumerable stiles to cross in a five or a
ten miles walk; but they do not want climbing, as they are very nearly
all of that Cornish type made with half a dozen or more large slabs
of granite placed gridiron-wise almost flush with the ground. You step
easily over the stones: but the cattle do not follow, since, owing to
their inability to see just where their feet will be set, their legs
would come down between the slabs.
Cows are in most of the fields, the dairy being the main thing in these
farms; and next to the small Jersey-like cow, the native breed, the pig
ranks in importance. It is pleasant to see the pigs in these parts, as
they are allowed more liberty in the fields and about the house than
they usually get in other places; or, indeed, anywhere on this side of
St. George's Channel. If not "the gintleman that pays the rint," the pig
contributes a good deal towards it, and short of liberty to walk in
at the front door and take his place in the family circle he has every
consideration paid him. On going up to a farm-house one is sometimes
obliged to get round or step over a pig lying comfortably in the path.
One day, going to call on some friends who had taken lodgings at a small
farm, I found a portly sow lying in the way a dozen yards or so from the
front door. My friends were getting ready for a walk, and when we came
out the sow got up and, placing herself at the side of the lady, set out
with us. We all tried our best to turn her back, shouting indignantly at
her and pushing her away with our sticks and boots, but all in vain--she
would come. "I'm to blame," said the lady. "When we first came we had
tea out of doors, and when this pig came up to look at us I foolishly
gave her a slice of bread and butter and spoke kindly to her, and now
I can't get away from her. I give her nothing, and I try to escape her
attention, but she watches the door, and when she sees me with my things
on she insists on keeping with me even if I walk miles. It is most
inconvenient." It certainly was, and we carefully avoided the village
for fear of remarks. Fowls, too, are reared in numbers, and it is a
great grievance of the farmers that foxes must be religiously preserved
along this coast where they cannot be hunted. Here, again, I am reminded
of Carew's _Survey of Cornwall,_ in which he writes: "The fox planteth
his dwelling in the steep cliffs of the seaside, where he possesseth
holds, so many in number, so dangerous of access, and so full of
windings, as in a manner it falleth out a matter impossible to disseize
him of his ancient inheritance." He still keeps it, and after three
centuries is more secure in it than ever, since there is now no stronger
law than this unwritten one which gives immunity to the fox.
As a rule, several dogs are kept on the farm; but he cares little for
them. His fastness is close by in the cliffs, and between it and the
farm there is a wilderness of furze bushes and stone fences, the ins and
outs of which he knows better than the dogs. They cannot come near him.
At one place the farmer's wife told me the foxes came about the house
almost every night and started barking, whereupon the dogs barked in
reply, and this would go on, bark fox, bark dog, by the hour, keeping
them awake, until at last the dogs, tired of the useless contest, would
go to sleep; then the foxes would sneak in to see what they could pick
up.
There is very little cultivation--hardly more than is required for the
use of the farm, and in many fields even this little is carried on under
difficulties on account of the stones. The stones are taken out and
piled on to the walls or hedges at the side, and though this process
has been going on for centuries many boulders and huge blocks of granite
still remain in the little fields. I was amused one day at the sight of
a field of only about two acres on which I counted 135 stones appearing
like huge mushrooms and toadstools over the ground. Corn had been grown
on it, and I asked the farmer how it was managed. He answered that he
would laugh to see a man and horses from any other part of the country
try to cultivate that field and others like it. Here the men are used to
it, and horses know their part so well that if the share touches a stone
they stop instantly and wait for the ploughman's word to move on.
This same farmer told me that one day last summer a lady visitor staying
in the neighbourhood came to where he was doing some work and burst
out in praise of the place, and told him she envied him his home in
the dearest, sweetest, loveliest spot on earth. "That's what you think,
ma'am," he returned, "because you're here for a week or two in summer
when it's fine and the heath in bloom. Now I think it's the poorest,
ugliest, horriblest place in the whole world, because I've got to live
in it and get my living out of it."
They certainly have to work hard to make the per acre they have to
pay for their stony fields. But they are a tough, industrious, frugal
people, in many instances little removed from peasants in their way of
living, and are strongly attached to their rude homes and rough country.
If you tell them that their lot is exceedingly hard, that they pay
too high a rent, and so on, enumerating all the drawbacks, they assent
eagerly, and will put in many little touches to make the picture darker;
but if you then advise them to throw up their farms and migrate to some
place you can name, in the Midlands say, where they will pay less for
better land, and be out of the everlasting wind which tears every green
leaf to shreds and makes their lives a perpetual discomfort, they shake
their heads. They cannot endure the thought of leaving their homes. It
is only the all but complete ruin of the tin-mining industry that has
sent so many Cornishmen into exile in distant lands. But these wanderers
are always thinking of home and come back when they can. One meets
them every day, young and middle-aged men, back from Africa, Australia,
America; not to settle down, since there is nothing for them to do--not
just yet at all events; but because they have saved a little and can
afford to take that long journey for the joy of seeing the dear old
faces again, and the dear familiar land which proved so uninteresting to
the reverend author of _Forest Scenery_.
But farming, unlike the mining and fishing industries, cannot fail
utterly, and so long as a living can be made out of it these men will
stick to their farms.
One brilliant spring-like day in midwinter I came upon an old man on the
footpath at some distance from the nearest house, painfully walking to
and fro on a clean piece of ground with the aid of two sticks. An old
farmer, past work, I thought. His appearance greatly attracted me, for
though his bent shrunken legs could hardly support him, he had a fine
head and a broad, deep, powerful-looking chest. His face was of that
intensely Irish type so common in West Cornwall, but more shapely, more
noble, with a look of strength and resolution not at all common.
Seeing that he was old I supposed he was deaf, and shouted my "Good
day," and the remark that it was a very fine day. But there was no need
to shout, his senses were very good. "Good day to you," he returned,
his stone-grey stern eyes fixed on my face. "Yes, it is a fine day
indeed--very, very fine. And no frost, no cold at all, and the winter
going on, going on. We are getting on very well indeed." And to this
subject he kept in spite of my attempts to lead the talk to something
else. The lovely weather, the extraordinary mildness of the season, the
comfort of a winter with no frost or cold at all--to that he would come
back. And at length, when I said good-bye and left him, the last words
I heard him say were, "Yes, the winter is going--very freely, very
freely."
For he was old--his age was eighty-seven; he had come to that time of
life when the weather becomes strangely important to a man, when winter
is a season of apprehension; when he remembers that the days of our age
are three-score years and ten, and though men be so strong that they
come to four-score years, yet is their strength then but labour and
sorrow, so soon passeth it away. I was told that he had farmed the land
where I found him taking his constitutional since he was a young man;
that some months ago, on account of his infirmities, he had handed
the farm over to one of his sons, and that he was still able to help a
little in the work. His arms were strong still, and once up on the seat
he could drive a cart or trap or reaping machine as well as any one.
He was but one of several grey old men I met with on the farms, and it
seemed to me that they were something like their neighbour the badger,
that they are as tenacious of their dreary-looking little homesteads and
stony fields as that tough beast is of his earth among the rocks.
[Illustration: 0057]