Will know the reason why."
The "Jolly Sailor" Inn at West Looe is perhaps the most picturesque building in the little town, whose long steep street goes staggering up towards Talland, and its toppling chimney is a familiar object. It is not so much an accidental as an intentional slant, designed to counteract the down-draught of the winds.
THE "JOLLY SAILOR," LOOE.
Talland, situated on the hill overlooking the solitary bight of Talland Bay, is just a church, a vicarage, and the old manor-house of Killigarth. The church is one of the six in Cornwall which have detached towers. The others are St. Feock, Gunwalloe, Mylor, Lamorran, and Gwennap. Part of Talland church is Early English, the rest Perpendicular. It contains, among other memorials, a monument to "John Bevyll of Kyllygath," 1570, with an effigy of him carved in relief on slate, and a long metrical epitaph, full of curious obsolete heraldic terms. If you seek to know anything of the marryings and intermarriages of the Bevill family, be sure that this monument sets them forth in full detail; and the fine bench-ends take up the story, and tell it abundantly in shields of many quarterings.
TALLAND CHURCH.
Talland was in the old smuggling days exceptionally notorious for the frequent landings of contraband on the lonely little beach below the church, and "Parson Dodge" was a famous devil-queller and layer of spirits, far and near. But he could not, or would not, lay the mischievous sprites who haunted his own churchyard, and were, in fact, not supernatural beings at all, but smugglers in disguise, whose interests lay in making Talland a place to be shunned at nights. There is a great deal of smuggling history connected with Talland, and among the grotesque epitaphs in the churchyard there is even one to the memory of a smuggler, who was shot in an encounter with the Preventive Service.[A]
The cliffs between Talland and Polperro are in places fast crumbling away, and no one seems in the least concerned to do anything; perhaps because anything that might be done would presently be undone again by the sea. "Ye med so well throw money in the sea as spend et on mending they cliffs," is the local opinion. At Polperro itself the cliffs are of dark slate, and seem almost as hard as iron.