Nooks and Corners of Cornwall

by C. A. Dawson Scott

Harlyn Bay

In 1900, when digging for the foundations of a house, an oblong slate kist, lying north and south, and containing a "crouched" burial, was found. The drift sand lay some 8 to 10 ft. above the grave, within which the skeleton lay on his side, his hands over his eyes, his knees bent under him in what seems to us an attitude of devotion; as he lay the first ray of the rising sun would strike athwart his face. Further investigation showed that the discovered kist was only one of a group of interments, and that the graves covered some 90 ft., giving signs of a long continued series of burials, rather than of a great number within a short period. The date of interment is considered to be that of the later iron age, no great antiquity it is true, but some few thousand years ago. The kind and courteous owner, Colonel Bellers, allows access to this prehistoric graveyard—locally known as the Boneries—and near by is a small museum for the preservation of interesting finds. Some of the kists have been left in situ and, to preserve them from wind and weather, have been covered with a sort of cucumber frame, and the stranger looks down through the glass on to the brown bones in their enduring coffins of slate. Here lies a chieftain, for over his kist were heaped rough lumps of quartz crystal; here a mother and child, little bones and bigger; and here, in a heterogeneous mixture of all sorts and sizes, is a hint of tragedy. Were they the result of a battle—of a cannibal feast—or of justice done!

A tooth from this strange and lonely graveyard was enclosed in a little box and sent to a friend in London with instructions to place it unopened in the hands of a clairvoyant. No information was vouchsafed with the tooth, and the mystified go-between was only asked to take down what was said, and this he did. At first the clairvoyant seemed rather puzzled. "I can see a wide, sandy bay with rocks and cliffs, a rough tumbling sea, and at the head of the bay a dense wood; but the people are not like any I've ever seen before. They seem to be skin-clad savages with black hair. There are quite a lot of them. One is running across the sands and others are rushing after him; they have weapons in their hands and he is fleeing in deadly terror. Ah, he has run into the wood—now they've all disappeared!"

Was the last scene in that prehistoric man's life being re-enacted before the clairvoyant's gaze? Had he contravened his fellows' unknown laws and so been hunted to his death?

After a little the seer continued: "I see the bay again, but it's a little different, more sand and fewer trees. Some men in present-day dress are standing by a hole in the ground. They——" and a description was given of the people who had been present at the opening of the kist. "I think the hole is a grave, though it seems too short to be that" (the kist being a "crouched" burial was, of course, much shorter than an ordinary grave), "at any rate there are bones in it."

Of the gold ornaments found in Cornwall the most remarkable are the two torques found near Harlyn; bronze fibulæ have also been found here, but a good many of these finds are now in the Truro Museum. Harlyn, in spite of the grisly nature of its chief attraction, is an incomparable bay of wide firm sand, rock pools, and low safe cliffs. As it is sheltered by Trevose Head, the bathing is safe. A little way along the cliffs is a disused fish-cellar, over the door of which is the motto: "Lucri dulcis odor"—sweet is the smell of gold! But the fish have left these shores and the big black boats—boats that are oddly reminiscent of the Viking's ships at Christiania—lie rotting in the sun.

Trevose Head

Trevose Head (lighthouse), blunt and rounded, with an ear on each side of its broad head, is a somewhat eerie place. On its western slope is a large and sinister blow-hole, and much of the land seems to have slipped a little and to be slipping more. It is here, by the rabbit burrows, that so many worked flint arrow-heads and fish spears have been found; while on its eastern side are caves inaccessible to the ordinary person, but if report says truly once of great use to the smuggler. The cliffs are of catacleuse, a dark and durable stone, of which on the cave side there are quarries.

Beyond Trevose Head, with its view from Cape Cornwall to Lundy Isle, the land curves inward past the rocky ridges and big rolling sand-dunes of Constantine. A shepherd's family is said to have held for many generations a cottage on Constantine under the lord of Harlyn Manor by the annual payment of a Cornish pie made of limpets, raisins, and sweet herbs. Food is cheap in Cornwall, but wages are correspondingly low. A farm pays its labourers—it calls them the cowman, the bullockman, and the horseman—from 13s. 6d. to 18s. a week, and with that, though conditions differ a little on different farms, they generally give a cottage, 100 ft. of potato ground, the run of a pig on the land, 100 battens of tamarisk wood—almost the only wood on this part of the coast—and, most prized of all, the right to let lodgings. On this the labourers sometimes manage to save. In one absolutely authentic instance, a couple, labourer and farm-servant, who married at twenty-one and eighteen, contrived to rear a healthy family of three and before they were forty to save enough to buy a piece of land, build a lodging-house, and go into business on their own account. "Never refused a day's work in my life," said the woman, "but we lived on what he brought home, and saved what I made." And what he brought home had been from thirteen to fifteen shillings a week. "Nor I never bought any tinned stuff," she said. "There's a deal of money goes that way, if the young women nowadays 'ud only believe it. Why, a tin of pears, where's the nourishment in that, and think of the price. Nearly a shilling gone."

And that woman baked her own bread, did, not only her own "bit of washin'," but that of the one or two houses in the neighbourhood, went out charing and cleaning, and took lodgers! They were thrifty folk, never dreamed of buying a newspaper, and as a consequence had to save every scrap of letter-paper, grocery bags, and oddments in order to have the wherewithal to light the fire in the slab range. The pig was their great stand-by. His meat, frugally cut, distributed in pasties with a careful hand, lasted them the greater part of the year, and then there were the lodgers. The tourist is not over-welcome to the farmer on account of his carelessness with regard to gates. He lets the young stock in among the corn and passes on oblivious of the damage he has caused, but he is a godsend to the labourer's capable wife.