The Cornish Coast (South), and the Isles of Scilly

by Charles G. Harper

The castle looks sufficiently thrilling, and might, with its surrounding fitly set the stage in Ruddigore, but the inevitable guide-book spoils the thrill it gives, by letting us into the secret of its being built in 1808, when country mansions took the form of "castles" only for "picturesque" reasons. No bad baronet resides there, only the worthy commoner family of Williams; and any one who is afraid of a person called Williams, who lives in a sham castle, must be a poor creature, even though the castellan does display threatening notice-boards, setting forth what trespassers may expect to suffer. St. Michael Caerhayes was anciently the seat of the famous Trevanion family, extinct a century or more ago, and their old house demolished to make way for the present building. There are many place-names in Brittany parallel with those in Cornwall, and St. Michael Carhaix is one of them. Not only so, but a justification of Cornwall and of the Breton "Cornouaille" calling cousins is further shown by a singular occurrence which happened during our wars with France towards the close of the eighteenth century. Among the French (or rather Bretons, for Brittany is not France to a Breton, any more than Cornwall to a Cornishman is England), among the Breton prisoners, therefore, landed at Falmouth, was one Jean Trevanion de Carhaix.

In Mevagissey the people talk strangely about the seclusion sought for at St. Michael Caerhayes, and tell weird tales of photographers and artists prevented from taking views of this lovely spot. So it was, perhaps, not altogether without trepidation that the sketch for the accompanying illustration was taken, from the seashore. No angry Williams, no brutal bailiff, appeared; and so perhaps the Mevagissey folk exaggerate. And since then a report of the visit of an antiquarian society to the dread castle itself has appeared, by which it seems that the owner had not lured the party into his stronghold with a view to casting them into noisome dungeons, or having them flung from the battlements, or anything else in that full-flavoured way. He simply welcomed them, as any civilised being would have done, and the only outstanding feature of the day seems to have been his remark that, except the collections of different kinds in the house, there was really nothing of antiquity left; not even the stone sculptured with arms, of the time of Henry the Eighth, which the guide-books declare to be here, but is not.

ST. MICHAEL CAERHAYES.

The Church of St. Michael Caerhayes stands high, somewhat inland. One comes to it through a wan and sorry avenue of spindly sycamores, past the lodge-gates of the "castle"; and then it is seen standing in a bald, exposed situation beside the road. The last vestiges of the olden Trevanions are seen in the church. An alien fowl has nested on the site of their ancient home, but still the church houses the rusty helmets of their funeral armour, and a sword, said to be the identical falchion wielded by Sir Hugh Trevanion at Bosworth, August 21st, 1485, hangs among them. The last Trevanions, whether pure-blooded, or merely Bettesford-Trevanions, would seem, according to the evidence of the monumental inscriptions of a century or so ago, their natural force abated, to have slid early and gratefully out of an existence of pain and suffering.

But the most interesting object in the church, interesting because of its mystery, is a black-painted, life-sized statue, in Coade-ware, dated 1812, of a naval officer, with a real sword. The singular thing is that, although the antiquity of the thing is of the slightest, nobody knows who is represented by it. It is thought to be one of the Bettesford-Trevanions. Yet, although we have lost count of this recent statue's identity, the mummified Pharaohs of thousands of years ago are identified with certainty.

Veryan, the village that gives a name to the bay, does not lie upon the seashore. You come to it round the majestically romantic cliffs past Port Holland, a small fisher-hamlet perched upon the rocky outlet of a quite solitary valley, and thence a little way inland, and presently out again and very steeply and lengthily down, so that you wonder when you will reach the bottom, to Port Loe, a gloomy inlet amid dark overhanging cliffs. Down there is the poor fishing village, in a primitive state, absolutely untouched by pleasure-seekers, and apparently not thriving in its fishery. But its situation down there, below the echoing cliffs reverberating to the mocking cries of the sea gulls, is magnificent.

"PARSON TRUST'S HOUSES."

Veryan, on the other hand, is a picture of inland prosperity. It is a long, scattered village, beginning on a hill and continuing down through a wooded valley, with the church at the bottom, and ending on another hilltop. And at either end, the road is flanked by two strange old thatched round-houses, with a cross on the roof of each. The local story is that they were built by "Parson Trust," to keep the Devil out of the village; but the identity of "Parson Trust" has not been established. The simplicity which not only believes in a personal Devil, but assumes that he must of necessity come by road, is essentially and delightfully Cornish.