MERTHER.
Higher up the creek, a little distance inland on the right, is the odd-looking little church of Merther, quite solitary except for one woodman's cottage. It is dedicated to St. Cohan, or Coanus, and owes most of its strangeness to the wooden, box-like finish to its tower: giving the effect of a sanctified pigeon-house. A little statue of St. Cohan, brought from his desecrated Holy Well, is within. The church is not now used for services, and is only retained as a mortuary chapel. "Merther" signifies "martyr," but history, and even tradition, are silent on the reason for conferring the name.
Tresilian Creek (the name "Tresilian" means "the place of eels") ends at Tresilian Bridge, spanning the dusty highway between Grampound and Truro. Here is the battlemented gateway to the park of Tregothnan.
VIEW FROM TRESILIAN BRIDGE.
The quiet pastoral scenery, and the elms and other trees here fringing the river, present a picture very little like Cornwall.
The bridge is modern, but the spot is historic; for this is that Tresilian Bridge where the long contest in the Civil War in the West was brought to a conclusion by the surrender of the Royalist Cornish army under Lord Hopton, to Fairfax, March 14th, 1646. It was an inglorious end to a struggle that had opened so brilliantly for the King at Stratton, when Grenville and Hopton smote the Parliament men hip and thigh, close upon three years earlier; but time told continuously against the King, whose troops grew more and more undisciplined and dispirited, while the earlier raw levies of the Parliament had become the famous Ironsides, who knew little of defeat.
The final advance of Fairfax, commanding the forces of the Parliament, into Cornwall was swift and certain. He was at Exeter on February 8th; at Chulmleigh on the 14th; and took Torrington by storm on the 16th, when he got Hopton's men on the run. Thence he advanced and entered Launceston on the 25th, and had come to Bodmin Downs by March 3rd, Hopton's force retreating and dissolving before him. The Prince of Wales, who hitherto had lain at Truro, found it prudent to change his residence to Pendennis Castle, Falmouth, and soon afterwards sailed for Scilly. Hopton at last saw the hopelessness of further resistance, and, after treating with Fairfax from March 8th, surrendered here, on terms, on the 14th. The terms were mildness itself: officers and private soldiers being allowed to depart to their homes on taking an oath not to fight again against the Parliament; and the officers were, in addition, permitted to keep their arms and horses.