A little river flows into the Poldhu cove, running down from the charming wooded estate of Bochym, mentioned in Domesday as Buchent. There was formerly some fine old tapestry and stained glass in the mansion, but these have gone; however, its oak room with sliding panel and secret staircase remains, and the garden has some remarkable tropic growths. A number of prehistoric relics have been discovered on this estate. Close to Bochym is another old manor, Bonython; it is said that the poet Longfellow was descended from one of the Bonythons, who was an early settler in America. We are now in the parish of St. Cury, or Corentin. He is a saint better known in Brittany that in Cornwall, but it must always be remembered that the two countries are very closely connected in race and tradition; also even in name, for there was a Cornouaille in Brittany which former chroniclers have sometimes confused with the English Cornwall.
The church, which is chiefly late Decorated, has a very good Norman doorway, and a most interesting hagioscope, resembling that of Landewednack, with the difference that the Cury window is a single light. Much change and mutilation seems to have taken place in this church; a former vicar found many remains of alabaster figures hidden among plaster and débris behind a slab. There is a very singular aumbry or alms-box, formed in an oak bench-end near the door. The rugged old building is finely placed, with a magnificent view over land and sea. But the ordinary visitor takes more notice of Grunwalloe, which is one of the most curiously situated churches in the kingdom, standing where the sea-spray sometimes makes a clean sweep over it. Its churchyard walls rise immediately from the sands of Gunwalloe Church Cove—at times the very graveyard has been invaded by dashing waves; and its little campanile tower is literally built into the solid rock. Thus founded on rocks, it stands old and weather-beaten, in a desolate district of sand-towans. The dedication is to St. Winwaloe, and it must be left to more learned hagiologists to decide who this Winwaloe really was, or whether he was identical with the founder of Landewednack. There are about half a dozen churches with detached belfries in Cornwall, but this of Gunwalloe is perhaps the most striking; the campanile here stands 14 feet west of the main building. It is difficult to account for the peculiarity, but of course there are stories that attempt to solve the mystery. The church itself is said to have been the votive offering of a survivor from shipwreck; some, however, speak not of a single survivor, but of two sisters whose lives were saved here, and who could not agree about the exact position of the church they desired to erect as a thank-offering. The result was a compromise. There are traditions of buried treasure here, as well as of wrecked dollars; and in both cases much time and money have been spent by treasure-seekers.
It is possible that the Goonhilly Downs, which occupy the high-lying and barren interior of this Lizard district, really embody a corruption of the name of Gunwalloe, though the name is generally explained as meaning "hunting down." These downs belong to the true meneage or stony district, but in the past they seem to have been covered with thickets and wild beasts. It is still a lonely, deserted track of country, with prehistoric hut-circles and entrenchments, crossed by two good roads, now often traversed by brake and motor and cycle, leading from Helston to St. Keverne and the Lizard. Leland speaks of "a wyld moor, called Gunhilly, wher ys brood of catyle"; perhaps the cattle were the once-famous Goonhilly nags referred to by Norden. "There is a kinde of nagge," he says, "bred upon a mountanous and spatious peece of grounde, called Goon-hillye, lyinge between the sea-coaste and Helston; which are the hardeste naggs and beste of travaile for their bones within this kingdome, resembling in body for quantitie, and in goodness of mettle, the Galloway naggs." The breed seems now to be extinct, though there are doubtless living descendants; and Goonhilly remains an almost treeless table-land, broken by streamlets where it meets the sea. There are many to whom this inland portion of the Lizard country may seem dreary enough, but others will be touched by its indefinite charm of breezy expanse, the beautiful colour of its Cornish heath, the loneliness of its pools and hollows, the call of its curlews, the hum of its summer bees.
Just below Gunwalloe fishing-cove are the fine Halzaphron cliffs, on which a transport was wrecked about a century since, and the bodies then buried are said to have been the last shipwrecked persons to be laid in unconsecrated ground. Public opinion rebelled against the so-called heathen burial given to such remains, and an Act was passed in Parliament sanctioning their interment in the churchyards of the parishes on which they were cast. Whatever advantage there may be in lying in consecrated earth is now freely granted; the unknown drowned are given the benefit of the doubt, and their bodies committed to the dust in Christian fashion. In parishes like these of the Lizard, and on the north Cornwall coast at places like Morwenstow, this duty of giving Christian sepulture has been no sinecure.
We come across traces of an ancient Cornish family at Carminow, the eastern creek of Loe Pool; but the most tangible relics of the Carminows now remaining are the two effigies in the church of Mawgan-in-Meneage, in which parish we find ourselves once more after having made the tour of the Lizard peninsula. Various tales are told of the Carminows; it is said they claimed descent from King Arthur—it is even said that a Carminow fought against the Romans at their first landing, which would carry them far eastward of Cornwall. Hals thought that the Mawgan figures were brought from the old chapel of their manor-house, which stood here by the Carminow creek; but Blight is of opinion that the effigies were removed from Bodmin. In Loe Bar we have a formation slightly resembling the famous Chesil Ridge of Dorset, and the bar at Slapton Sands in Devon; but this Loe Bar is on a much smaller scale. Being formed of very fine pebbles, the waters of Loe Pool are in ordinary times able to percolate to the sea; but after much rain there is more water than can thus be carried off, and it was formerly the custom to cut the Bar at such times that the superfluous flood might rush through. A culvert has now been constructed for this purpose, so that the cutting of the Bar is now superseded. A writer who was at school at Helston tells us that "when the floods became serious, and the Loe too near Helston to be pleasant, there was a solemn function performed by the men of Helston, with the Mayor at their head, called breaking the Bar. The Loe was so full that a small trench cut between it and the sea let out the waters; there was then a rush of water and the Loe became connected with the sea by a deep chasm through which the tide flowed. I have never seen the Bar broken, but I have seen the deep chasm in the bar of sand with the tide flowing in and out. The natural forces which originally made the Bar restored it, and in the course of some months it became the same as before." Mr. Hind says he was told by a sailor that "when he was a boy Loe Bar used to be broken once a fortnight"; but we sometimes exaggerate the things that we remember of our boyhood, and certainly the cutting can never have been as frequent as this. C. A. Johns, who knew Helston well, says that it was rarely necessary to cut the Bar more than twice a year, sometimes not even once; and further, describing a cutting, he says: "In a few hours a deep mighty river is bursting out with inconceivable velocity, and engaging in violent conflict with the waves of the ocean; as the two meet they clash together with terrific uproar, while the sea for twenty, or even thirty miles, is tinged of an ochreous hue. Even at the Scilly Islands the cutting of the Loe Bar has been notified by the altered colour of the water." As the pool belonged to the lord of Penrose, it was customary to present him with a purse containing three-halfpence to obtain his permission for the cutting of the Bar. All this is a thing of the past, but Loe Pool remains as the only sheet of water in Cornwall worthy to be termed a lake, with banks finely wooded and carpeted with flowers. In shape it is more like a broad river than a lake, and it is in fact the land-locked estuary of the Cober, cut off from full intercourse with the sea by this pebbly and sandy spit. Helston claims that it was once a seaport, with vessels sailing close up to its walls; and the formation of the Loe Bar, which destroyed all access, is said to have been one of the accidents of the doomed Tregeagle, whose story will be told later. The Pool is about seven miles in circumference, and affords some excellent fishing; it is the one great attraction that Helston can boast. When Tennyson wrote his "Morte d'Arthur," the germ from which all his Arthurian Idylls sprang, and in some respects the finest portion of them, he described how the knight Bedivere carried the wounded Arthur after his last battle—
"And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full."
It has been sometimes imagined that this "great water" was none other than Loe Pool, and certainly the spot has a better claim than Dozmare on the Bodmin Moors; but the placing this last battle in the West at all is merely a concession to fancy, and to the desires of West Countrymen. History tells us that Arthur's last fight must almost certainly have taken place in Scotland. But Tennyson's localities are a land of dream and myth; we do better not to try to identify them—their beauty may go with us from place to place, their atmosphere bring peace and soothing to us wherever our steps may be.
It is probable that the origin of the name of Helston is the Cornish hêl, "water," as at Helford and Hayle; but some Saxon derivations have been suggested, and certainly the name was once Henlistone. It is a clean, bright little town of about five thousand inhabitants, with a broad main street. Relatively, the town was once of greater consequence than now; its earliest known charter was granted by King John, with many later charters from other monarchs. It was an active centre of mining, and became a stannary or coinage town. The Grammar School (now extinct) was notable in the days of Derwent Coleridge, son of the poet, who was headmaster here at a time when Charles Kingsley was pupil; the second master was Johns, known to all botanists by his Flowers of the Field, and to all lovers of Cornwall by his Week at the Lizard. Kingsley utilised his knowledge of this corner of Cornwall when he wrote his Hereward, and there is no doubt that he derived much good from his schooling under such excellent masters as Coleridge and Johns. When writing of Helston it is customary to say a great deal about its Flora, or Furry Day, the 8th of May—a relic of old Maytide saturnalia. Though the dance through the streets to a special kind of hornpipe, in at the front doors and out at the back, is still continued, the old spirit that actuated it is dead—it has become very much of a make-believe, a show for visitors, a galvanised custom that might as well be decently buried.
If we believed the guide-books, we might imagine that Cornish folk were still a gay, childlike, merry-making people, carrying on the customs of their forefathers, cherishing the old traditions, nursing the old myths and superstitions, dreaming dreams and seeing visions. Even writers who might know better try to present them as a race apart, sharing to the full in that character of mysticism and vision which is attributed to Celtic peoples. As a matter of fact the Cornish are by no means gentle-minded simpletons nor poetic visionaries, though, of course, there may be a few of either class among them; and these nominally Celtic folk have no greater power of imagination than the natives of other English counties nominally Saxon. There is a strain of difference—something that is possibly pre-Celtic—something at times sinister, passionate, incoherent; but there is nothing that is more romantic, more thoughtful, than may be found in the average countryman of the southern counties. We have all met delightful Cornish people—hospitable, kindly, lovable; but, thank God, such are to be met with elsewhere. It is not that the Cornish are to be under-valued or slighted, but they are to be defended from the foolish claims of casual visitors and the equally unwise assertions of some natives. There is one grave charge that may be laid against the people—Mr. W. H. Hudson made it in his beautiful book on the Land's End: this is a charge of cruelty, especially against birds. There could be no good in repeating this—it is never pleasant to say things that sound unkind and perhaps uncharitable—unless it be that when the people realise that certain practices are thought cruel by outsiders, they may in time come to see the cruelty themselves. There is also the supposed religiousness of Cornwall. From reading certain books we might be led to imagine that Wesley found the Cornish savages and left them Christians. He did a great deal certainly—let no one say a word against that noble-hearted man. But the aspects of Wesley's teaching that took chief root in Cornwall, as also in Wales, were just those parts on which he himself would have laid least emphasis—the excitability, the emotionalism. We do a grave wrong to Wesley in giving his name to those manifestations of frothiness and of undue familiarity with the Deity that have too often been classed as Wesleyanism. These, coupled with sectarian bitterness against the Church of England, may flourish if their votaries desire; but why should they take the name of one who was an earnest and sober-minded Churchman? Of course there is much in Cornwall of which Wesley or any other religious teacher might well be proud; but there are other aspects also, and plenty of room for those who shall teach the people love, charity, and tenderness towards all forms of sentient life.