PORTHPEAN.
Returning to the coast, at Charlestown, Porthpean is reached; apparently a small holiday-resort of the burgesses of St. Austell. You see from this sketch exactly what it is: a little sandy bay with a few row-boats and sailing-vessels, a few bathing-machines, and a refreshment-house or two. More or less steep and obscure paths lead from it round Black Head, and so down hill into Pentewan, a very busy little port with railway-sidings and docks, and vessels waiting cargoes of tin-ore and china-clay.
Mevagissey, three miles or more, by Pennare and the cliffs, is two staggeringly steep miles distant by road, ending in a murderous crooked descent. At the same time, it is all nonsense to say that cycling is not possible in Cornwall. Work, courage, and good, reliable brakes are requisite, it is true; but although a good deal of hard work and much walking uphill (and some down) are necessary, cycling, after all, saves effort, here as elsewhere. In the far from bracing climate of Cornwall, the exertion of carrying one's own body is often more tiring than even pedalling hard uphill. Even on the shocking coastwise bye-roads, apt often to be mere cascades of loose stones, and full of sharp turns, it is often better to have a cycle than to be without one. Even so, letting the machine go down these dubious ways, I murmur, as did the pious knights of old, travelling the haunted valleys and the darkling woods, 'In manus tuas, Domine,' and brave the unknown perils that lurk behind hairpin corners and down steep gradients.
Mevagissey is said to derive its name from Saints Mewan and Issey, to whom its church is dedicated. It is a little town as crowded together as Polperro, but not by any means so picturesque. Also it faces more directly upon the sea, and although it offers no sands for the visitor and has a very fishy, smelly little harbour, it has in many ways been modernised. Take it for all in all, Mevagissey looks its best from the sea. Perhaps Mevagissey has been frightened into modern ways, for it had an unexampled experience among Cornish villages in 1849, when cholera was so rampant that it was deserted until a thorough cleansing was effected.
If we may trust a satirical saying of Fowey and St. Austell, the Mevagissey people are not, or were not used to be, given to acknowledging authority. One man they considered to be as good as another, and thus the old local by-word may yet be heard in the district: "Like the Mevagissey volunteers; all officers and no privates." But the allusion is over a century old, and belongs to that volunteering epoch when Napoleon was threatening to invade England; so let us hope things have altered since then.
There are sands of some small extent at Portmellin, up out of Mevagissey and then steeply down, half a mile distant, to where the land begins to trend abruptly out towards Chapel Point, and a few bungalows have, in consequence, been lately built in what was until recently a lonely hollow. Looking backwards for many miles, the china-clay works on the distant hills about St. Stephen-in-Brannel shine white, like the glorious camp of some heavenly host.
Always steeply up, the road goes on to Gorran, a mile inland, with Gorran Haven, a little crabbers' and shrimpers' village, as a kind of seashore annexe. The Dodman, a desolate headland, shuts out everything to the westward and forms the eastward horn of Veryan Bay. On its cliffs, of three hundred feet and more, a coastguard station looks out upon many empty leagues of troubled waters.
St. Michael Caerhayes lies snugly in a little bay within the greater bay of Veryan. The road, curving a little way inland, out of sight of the sea, descends steeply through overhanging trees and suddenly emerges upon a level strand, where the sea comes rolling in, over sands that afford a foothold as unyielding as the floor of a room. On either side of the inlet rise picturesque rocks, those on the western side the bolder of the two, and draped, moreover, with luxuriant vegetation, and further crested with larch and pine. Whether you look out to sea, or, standing on those yellow sands, face inland, the scene is of the most romantic description and worthy of the great Skelt himself, of the famous "Skelt's Juvenile Drama." Indeed, those massed and jagged rocks, with darkling fissures, on whose summits the pine-trees seem to cling desperately, might well have served as models for the set scenes of Skelt's thrilling stage, in "The Red Rover," or "The Smuggler," or other of his melodramas. Out to sea, in the "offing," ships hover; inland, under the lee of the wooded rocks, rises a castle. The place is instinct with drama, and it has a name of the strangest—St. Michael Caerhayes—but it is quiet enough for all that, and there is no village.