The country of this Mount Edgcumbe peninsula is beautifully wooded. Inland from Millbrook towards Antony again, you come to St. John's, a pretty village, with an old church and plenteous elms. And then, having explored the peninsula, the way out to the coast line on to Looe is up again to Tregantle, whence a coastwise road leads past Crafthole and Portwrinkle to Downderry. Those places may easily be dismissed, together with the coast on which they stand. They are quite recent collections of houses, mostly of an extremely commonplace plastered type, devoted to letting lodgings for the summer months. Their situation has nothing to recommend it, for the coastline here is quite bald and uninteresting, and the country immediately in the rear is for the most part treeless downs. Downderry is the largest of these settlements. Those who merely follow the coast-road through Downderry will never appreciate the exquisite appropriateness of that name. The gradients that way are not steep. But let Downderry be approached from the direction of St. Germans, and the steep two-miles' descent shall prove there to be something in a name. At the same time, it is but fair to add that the name did not derive from the hills, but from Dun-derru, i.e. "Oak Bank."
Beyond Downderry the road descends to a marshy valley crossed by a small stone bridge, at the point where a stream hesitates between percolating through the sands and running back upon itself to convert the marshy vale into a lake. This is marked on the maps "Seaton," but for town or village, or even hamlet, the stranger will look in vain. From this point it is a long four miles into Looe, and I can honestly say that, whichever way you go, by the road leading inland, and incidentally as steep as the roof of a house, or by the cliffs, in places considerably steeper, you will wish you had gone the other way. For indeed both ways are deadly dull. Coming on a first occasion by road the reverse way, from Looe, an old man, indicating the way, remarked that it would be a very good road "ef 'twadden for th' yills. Ye goo up th' yill, and ye tarn" (I forget where you turn), "an' then ye goo straight down th' yill to Satan."
As one had not at that time heard of Seaton, this final descent had a certain awful speculative interest.
Even the cliff route into Looe ends at last. There, almost hanging over the brink of Looe, as it were, you realise for the first time, in all the way from Rame, that you are really in Cornwall, for the coast has hitherto lacked the rugged beauty that is found almost everywhere else. But Looe makes an honourable amende. It might not unfittingly typify Cornwall. Conceive two closely-packed little towns down there (for there are two Looes, East and West), fringing the banks of an extremely narrow and rocky estuary, widening as it goes inland; and imagine just offshore on the further side a craggy island, and there you have the seaward aspect of the place. Looe has been considerably altered during the last few years, but it can never be a typical seaside place; its physical peculiarities forbid that. It has no sea-front, and possesses only the most microscopic of beaches, just large enough to hold a few boats and to launch the lifeboat. The life of the Looes, East or West, is all along the streets and quay beside the estuary. The place is, as it were, a smaller Dartmouth, but with the added convenience of a bridge crossing the Looe River, half a mile from the sea.
The Looe River is partly an actual river, but very much more of a creek: a lakelike creek at high water, dividing above the bridge into two creeks, into which freshwater streams trickle from Liskeard and the Bodmin moors. Looe, in fact, takes its name from these lakelike estuaries. It signifies "lake," and has a common ancestry in the Welsh "llwch" and the Gaelic "loch." Thus in speaking of Looe River "we admit not only a redundancy but actually a contradiction. There are two Looes, or lakes, the East and the West, just as there are the two towns so-called. Between these two waters, three miles inland, is the rustic village of Duloe, whose name is supposed to have originally been "Dew Looe," i.e., the Two Looes. "But there has always been great variety of opinion about this, and old writers on Cornwall have variously considered it to be "Du Looe," or "God's Lake," or "Du Looe" (spelled the same way), "Black Lake." A resourceful antiquary has, in addition, pointed out the difficulties of finding the true origin of place-names by advancing no fewer than six other possible origins:—
Dehou-lo = south pool.
Dour-looe = water lake.
Dewedh-looe = boundary lake.
Du-low = black barrow.
Dewolow = the devils.
Du (or tu) looe = Lake-side.
LOOE.
The "black-barrow" or "devils" derivations, it is said, might come from the remains of a prehistoric stone circle still existing at Duloe, where eight stones from four to ten feet high, are still standing. They may have once formed an awe-inspiring sight to the early peoples who gave names to places.