A boating trip is certainly the best method of seeing the coast between Cadgwith and the Lizard. You see more, and to better advantage, than by tramping round the interminable headlands and down one not very interesting valley, up to the next hill, conscious all the while that the real beauty of the coast lies under your feet, in the sea-fretted caverns that the waves never leave. The finest of these is Dolor Hugo: ogof, the old Cornish word for "cave." This is a magnificent cavern in the dark but richly variegated serpentine rock. The archway rises high overhead, admitting boats easily in calm weather, but the roof soon descends and exploration cannot be pushed far. The Lizard boatmen, too, are very alive to the dangers of the place. The solemn beauty of it and the heavy ground-swell impress the stranger with a full sense of the risks incurred in visiting Dolor Hugo, except in the calmest weather.
THE "DEVIL'S FRYING PAN."
At Cambarrow, the next headland, is the cavern of Ravens' Hugo, a narrower fissure, the entrance hung with wild growths. Then comes the sheer cliff called "The Balk," where serpentine quarries may be observed, and round its precipitous adamantine wall the deeply cleft little Church Cove, known also as Perranvose, Parnvoose, or Lizard Cove.
Church Cove itself is an almost solitary place, a narrow strip of beach between sheer rocks; but the cottages along the tree-shaded lane that runs up to Landewednack are as homely and sheltered, and as richly embowered in roses, fuchsias, honeysuckle, and hydrangeas, as any place in the West. All around is the level, treeless, windswept heath of the Lizard district, but down in this sheltered hollow one is in the atmosphere of a conservatory. Perhaps one person among every hundred of those who come to Lizard Town discovers Church Cove and the village of Landewednack, which is the mother-village whence Lizard Town, half a mile away, has sprung; and the ninety and nine return home, having just caught a glimpse of the lighthouse, and think, vainly, they have seen all there is to be seen.
I have quite a budget of curious facts concerning Landewednack and its church. To begin with, it is the parish church of that odd collection of houses—the very negation of architecture—"Lizard Town," which occupies the plateau just beyond this dell. That a place should elect to style itself "Lizard Town," when it might be, and properly is, Landewednack, is an odd study in perversity. Landewednack church is also the most southerly church in England, and in it was preached in 1674 the last sermon in the Cornish language. A few years later, 1683, died the Rev. Thomas Cole, stated in the register to have been 120 years of age. In the churchyard lie a number of persons who died of the plague in 1645, but the spot where they were laid is unmarked.
LANDEWEDNACK.
Furthermore, the stranger will not fail to observe that the huge stones of which the tower is built are partly grey granite and partly of local serpentine, giving a curiously irregular chessboard kind of appearance. The dedication of the church is said to be to St. Winwaloe. The place-name has its fellow in Brittany—that other Cornwall—in Landevenec.