The Cornwall Coast

by Arthur L. Salmon

Cadgwith is certainly a most picturesque and attractive little place, and if it does not share the luxuriant fertility of Coverack, it has the compensation of being nearer to the wonders of the Lizard. It is in the parish of Ruan Minor, and this is a dedication to a saint whose name we also find at Ruan Major, Ruan Lanihorne, and Polruan near Fowey. He also appears at Romansleigh in Devon. He seems to have been an Irishman, some say converted by Patrick, who travelled widely, and when in Brittany was accused by a woman of being a were-wolf; she said he had eaten her child. The king of that part, who favoured the saint, said, "Bring him hither. I have two wolf-hounds; if he is innocent they will not harm him, but if there is anything of the wolf about him they will tear him to pieces." The dogs came and licked Ruan's feet; and the child whom he was supposed to have eaten was discovered hidden away. However, the saint found it well to leave Brittany for Cornwall. He is said to have been buried at Lanihorne, but Ordulf, who dedicated his abbey at Tavistock to the honour of Mary and St. Rumon, professed to have brought the saint's relics to his Devon foundation and there enshrined them. It proves how slightly Saxonised that part of Devon was, and how powerful was the Celtic tradition, that Ordulf should have selected a Celtic saint for his monastery. A portion of Cadgwith is in the parish of Grade, which is supposed to be a dedication to the Holy Creed; but here, as at Sancreed and St. Creed, Grampound, we may be safe in believing that there was a living personality behind the dedication, not a mere abstraction. Churches had definite founders in Celtic days, and there was a certain St. Credan who may be responsible for all these. But does the ordinary visitor care much about these questions of dedication and saint-lore? Probably not. South of Cadgwith are some of the grand caves and rock-freaks that have a more immediate appeal, and north of the hamlet some of the best serpentine is obtained. Serpentine is a blend of silica and manganese, so named from its imagined resemblance to a snake's skin; its colour varies from green to red and brownish yellow, and is often remarkably beautiful. It has been used with striking effect, architecturally, in Truro Cathedral; while with regard to its use for ornaments and decoration, the visitor has many opportunities of judging for himself.

When we remember the seas to which these shores are exposed, it is easy to understand how the coast has been eroded into its present contorted and cavernous condition. Massive rocky frameworks have resisted the action of the waves, but softer measures have yielded; the shore has been licked into hollows, basins, caves, by continuous water-action, and the process continues unendingly. One remarkable excavation of this kind is the Devil's Frying-pan, covering about two acres, which the sea enters through an archway of rock at high tides; the pit is nearly 200 feet deep. Literally, it is a cave whose roof has fallen in. Close to this is Dollar Hugo, a cave whose roof has not fallen nor seems likely to, with a magnificent gateway of serpentine. The name is sometimes spelt Dolor, suggestive of grief, but its origin is not easy to trace; Hugo seems to be a corruption of the Cornish word fogou, meaning a cave. Johns, who wrote a very interesting book about the Lizard some sixty years since, said that "of all the caves that I have ever inspected, this wears the most perfect air of mysteriousness and solemnity. At the entrance it is large enough to admit a six-oared boat, but soon contracts to so small a size that a swimmer alone could explore it. Its termination is lost in gloom, but as far as the eye can discriminate the water is unceasingly rising and falling with a deep murmuring sound, which is reverberated from a great distance, and falls on the ear with a most imposing effect. The colouring of the rocks at the entrance is magnificent. The base is of a deep rose-pink; the sides rich dark brown, with blotches of bright green and rose colour; the roof purple and brown. The water is very deep and of a fine olive green, and, being remarkably clear, the light stones lying at the bottom are distinctly visible, among which at my last visit we could descry great fishes, probably bass, pursuing shoals of launces." By "launces" the writer meant what we should now call the lancelet. Just south of Dollar is the old smugglers' cave known as Raven's Hugo. Below this to the extreme point of the Lizard the coast is a series of jagged cliffs and clefts, with tiny coves and black chasms. For seaward and distant views it is best to take the head of the cliffs, but for the caverns a boat should be used, and this of course necessitates caution. We have now reached Lendewednack, the true Lizard parish and the most southerly in England. Apparently the dedication, like that of Towednack, near St. Ives, is to a St. Winoc or Gwynog. There is a church with the same name (Landevenech) in Brittany; yet there has been some attempt to prove that Winwaloe, whom we find at Gunwalloe on the western side of the headland, was the founder. This seems unlikely, unless it can be shown that Winwaloe and Winnow or Winoc were the same person. The church is interesting in itself, and beautifully placed, giving traces of many periods of architecture, from Norman to Perpendicular. The font, which happily was preserved by former coats of whitewash, is Early English; it bears the inscription "Ric. Bolham me fecit." The lofty south doorway is a very good specimen of Norman; the pulpit, which is modern, is of serpentine, and there are serpentine tombstones in the graveyard. Like St. Keverne, this is a burial-ground of the wrecked. It has also been the sepulchre of persons dying from the plague, of which there was a severe visitation in 1645. It is said that, about a century later, the soil where its victims had been buried was dug to receive shipwrecked seamen, and that, in consequence, the plague reappeared. The bells have Latin mottoes and some curious bell-marks. The blending of granite with darker local stone in the tower has a rather singular effect; it makes the walls look like a chequer-board. Landewednack claims to be the last place where a sermon was preached in the Cornish tongue, in 1678; as was natural, the old language lingered longest in isolated districts of the Lizard and Land's End. It may be guessed that some of his younger hearers would not have understood the preacher, for the language had already greatly decayed. It was never a particularly rich dialect of the Celtic, and left no remains worthy to perpetuate its existence. Norden, who wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century, stated that "of late the Cornishe men have much conformed themselves to the use of the English tongue, and their English is equal to the best, especially in the eastern parts. In the weste parts of the countrye, in the hundreds of Penwith and Kirrier, the Cornishe tongue is most in use amongste the inhabitants." A little later, a loyal Cornishman bewailed "our Cornish tongue has been so long on the wane that we can hardly hope to see it increase again; for, as English first confined it within this narrow country, so it still presses on, leaving it no place but about the cliffs and sea, it being now almost only spoken from the Land's End to the Mount, and again from the Lizard towards Helston and Falmouth." The inevitable happened, just as somewhat the same process has taken place in Wales, in Ireland, and in the Scottish Highlands. In these three countries the old tongue had the aid of a powerful literature. Welsh and Erse may be very long in dying out, as we hope they will be; yet nothing can prevent the people of Wales and Ireland becoming bi-lingual, and this can only have one ultimate result. Commercially, a single language is necessary to the nation, and there has never been any doubt as to which that language must be. And some of those who cling to their vernacular as a proof of their Celticism may be making a great mistake; speech is never a proof of race, and survivals of other blood than Celtic adopted dialects of the Celtic speech.

CHAPTER VII

THE LIZARD TO HELSTON

Mr. Norway says that it would be hard to find an uglier spot than Lizard Town, but of course he fully admits the grandeur of the coast of which it is the small metropolis. The name, which first applied only to the most southern headland, was not given from any fanciful resemblance to a Lizard, but appears to be a corruption of the Cornish words Lis-arth, lis being the secular enclosure, the palace or court, as distinct from lan the sacred enclosure, and arth meaning high. Lizard Town is a cluster of houses, growing in number to meet an increasing popularity, of which Landewednack is the church town, about half a mile distant; it is served by motor-buses from Helston, and in time there will doubtless be a branch line of the railway here. Housel Bay, formerly Househole, is the bathing-place, with a large modern hotel standing close to the cliffs; on the east is Lloyd's signal station, and on the west the lighthouse. Vessels that used to call at Falmouth for sailing orders, or for other information, now receive these instructions by signal from Lloyd's station here, flags being employed by day and lights by night; a wireless telegraph has also been established. All vessels, outward or homeward, are thus reported at this most southern point of England. At the lighthouse there were formerly two lights, whose double purpose was to warn seamen not only of the Lizard but also of the Wolf rocks off Land's End; these rocks have now a light of their own, and at the Lizard is displayed a single electric lamp, of 1,000,000 candle power, revolving, whose reflection is visible at over sixty miles' distance. It is said that when its revolutions first turned its light towards the houses of Lizard Town, some alarm was felt at this sudden searching gaze piercing into the very heart of the dwellings; it was like the vivid illumination of a flash of lightning, a great prying eye which no one could avoid. To obviate this a screen has been placed on the landward side of the lantern. The light stands about 200 feet above the sea; and in addition to this there is a fog-siren, whose tremendous voice bellows through thick weather at intervals of two minutes. West of the lighthouse is the little fishing-cove and lifeboat station of Polpeor. In old times this headland was lit by a bonfire beacon, kept burning at night; and there is a story that a Government packet, passing in the days of our French wars, noticing that the sleepy watchman had allowed the fire to dwindle to a mere smoulder, discharged a cannon-ball at the spot to arouse the neglectful watcher. It must be remembered that the Lizard is rendered doubly perilous by a sea-covered stack of rocks lying to the southward. Before oil was introduced for the lamps it is said the lantern was lit by coal-fires—a kind of first-hand use of gas. Below the lighthouse is the striking Bumble Rock, and close to this the hollow known as the Lion's Den, formed by a natural sudden subsidence in 1847. This formation was an immediate object-lesson as to the manner in which these remarkable hollows, caverns, and rock-freaks have been produced in the course of time; and there can be no doubt that such natural weathering alone accounts for the Belidden Amphitheatre, east of the fine Penolver Point. Bass Point is the eastward bluff of this rugged and bare old headland, known to ancient geographers as Ocrinum, the southern extremity of the Britains.

Photo by][Gibson & Sons.

With many visitors, to speak of the Lizard is to speak of Kynance. It is Kynance that the guide-books and the artists have chiefly popularised; it is Kynance that is probably the most celebrated beauty-spot on the whole south-Cornish coast. Is it worthy of its reputation? Some visitors give an emphatic affirmative; others are a little dubious. To some the spot is a little spoiled by its popularity; during the season it is like a corner of a fashionable watering-place, covered with tourists, refreshment booths, and sellers of serpentine. But autumn and winter bring a grand solitude when all traces of the tripper are washed away: the storms cleanse it with their mighty lustrations; only the white sands, the black or richly stained rocks remain, a haunt of homeless winds and crying gulls. The cove is encircled by a group of off-lying rocks, insular at high tide; it is only at low water that Kynance can be explored. The Gull Rock, Asparagus Island, the Lion, the Steeple, the Kitchen, the Drawing-room—these names of the crags and clefts have become almost as familiar as household words; while every one knows that if you post a letter in the Devil's Post-office, it will presently be returned in a great outburst of water. It is of little use for the local authorities to forbid such posting, as being dangerous to the individual who waits too eagerly near for his reply; visitors will still venture, and are sometimes drenched, if nothing worse, by the natural blow-hole for their pains. There are other places here where care must be exercised—steep sudden descents, unguarded chasms, nooks and coves where it is easy to be entrapped by the tide; even the active and skilful may get into trouble, and visitors who bring venturesome boys must be prepared for alarms. It is natural that many a parent of a family should prefer a level sandy shore for his summer resort, and Cornwall happily has many such spots to offer, where father and mother can recline restfully without constant anxiety for their boys and girls.