This morn we breakfasted betimes, settled our modest score, and trudged away, up steep hillsides and across meadows, to Lansallos, and from Lansallos to Lanteglos-juxta-Fowey.
We came to Lanteglos before (according to the map) we had any right so to do, going to it through steep hillside fields. I don’t think there is any village to speak of, but there is a fine church, picturesquely out of plumb, with a four-staged tower, strong and plain, without buttresses, standing, with its churchyard, beside a “farm-place,” as the Cornish folk sometimes call their farm-yards, filled with great stacks of corn, stilted on long rows of stone staddles.
There stands beside the church porch one of the finest crosses to be found in Cornwall, of fifteenth-century date, with head elaborately sculptured into tabernacles, containing representations of the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion, and two figures of saints. This cross was discovered some years ago, buried in the churchyard, and was set up by the then vicar in its present position, with a millstone by way of pedestal.
The guide-books tell of great store of brasses within the church; but the building was locked, the keys were at a cottage far down the valley, the sun was hot, and, lastly but not least, we were lazy; so we only stayed and sketched the exterior, and peered through the windows at the whitewashed walls and old-fashioned pews, and presently went away.
LANTEGLOS-JUXTA-FOWEY.
From Lanteglos good but steep roads lead down to Polruan, a manner of over-the-water suburb of Fowey, set picturesquely on the west shore of Fowey River. As we went down the steep street, children were singing the ribald song which pervaded London, and the country generally, all last year. I am not going to name it here; let it die, and be deservedly forgotten. But, par parenthèse, I will put a question here to philosophers. We know at what rate light travels, and sound too, but at what rate of speed does the comic song fare on its baleful course? Who, again, shall estimate how rapidly the contagion spreads of those now happily defunct songs of an appalling sentimentality—“See-Saw,” “The Maid of the Mill,” or, to sound deeper depths, “Annie Rooney,” and “White Wings”?
A ferry runs between Polruan and Fowey, the latter a town that has grown from its former estate of slumberous seaport into a “resort” of quite a fashionable and exclusive flavour. It is “still growing”—worse luck. The visitor may easily recognise Fowey as the original of “Troy Town,” by “Q.,” whose initial, being interpreted, stands for Mr. A. T. Quiller-Couch, himself a Cornishman. The salient features of Fowey to the eye, the nose, the ear, and the mind are sea- and land-scapes of wondrous beauty, fish odours, the clangour of a disreputable brass band, and historical legends of a peculiarly romantic character.
A wonderful old church of a peculiar dedication—Saint Finbarrus—stands in midst of Fowey town. We explored its interior on the evening of our stay at Fowey, attracted by its lighted windows and the weekly practising of the choir then going forward. The chancel was lit up, and the church itself lay either in deep shadow or in mysterious half-lighting. The choir and the choirmaster, standing in the gas-lit circle, with the broad pointed arches of the nave arcade yawning around them, and the queer memorials of centuries ago, with their figures of dames and knights, touched to uncanny resemblances by the incidence of the shadows, made an extremely delightful picture, and one eminently paintable.
There are many Treffrys and Rashleighs buried within Saint Finbar’s—two families with which the history of Fowey is interwoven. One John Treffry, buried here, seems to have been something of an eccentric, for he had his grave dug during his lifetime, and lay down and swore in it, “to shew the sexton a novelty.” His epitaph is a curious jingle—the work of the man himself, one would say. Here it is—