The church of Landewednack consists of nave, north aisle, and a south transept, which has a low side-window at the angle formed by its eastern wall and the wall of the nave. The font, dating from about 1404, is mounted on four modern pillars of polished serpentine. The bowl bears an inscription including the name of the rector at that period, "I.H.C. D. Ric. Bolham me fecit."
And now we come to Lizard Town. No one ever planned Lizard Town, any more than its houses were designed. They were merely built, and the "town," which is a simple collection of cottages and a hotel or two of sorts, is much smaller than many villages. Its population, including Landewednack, is only 683. Lizard Town simply grew at haphazard, on the extremity of the level, heather-clad waste of the Lizard promontory, and with so little directing hand or purposeful mind that its component houses form hardly any recognisable lines of streets, running in any definite directions. They may be fitly likened to a flock of sheep huddled together, facing all ways, to escape a tempest raging from all quarters at once. The population appears to a casual observer to consist wholly of families of Jose and Roberts, all inter-related, like the Cadgwith people, who are all either Janes or Stevenses. And they are nearly all workers in serpentine, whose little workrooms and shops are all of one peculiar pattern, with a small show-window closed at night by a hinged shutter. In every one of these shanties a lathe is at work shaping the rough serpentine rock down, and then turning it into one or other of the many ornamental articles exposed for sale in the windows: paper-weights, candlesticks, pen-trays, models of the Eddystone lighthouse and of Cornish crosses, and so forth; beautifully polished. "Serpentine" gets its name from the coloured streaks and patches it displays.
The "Lizard district" is the name given to all that boldly projecting peninsula south of the Helford River: the district that is properly "Meneage," the "stony district," but "Lizard" is only rightly applied to the actual headland. It has nothing to do with the reptile lizards, but is equal to the Welsh "Llidiart," indicating a rocky height. There is a Weston-under-Lizard in Staffordshire. The peninsula forms the most southerly projection of England, and the Lizard Point by day or the Lizard Light by night is the first glimpse homeward-bound voyagers obtain of old England from the decks of the great steamships passing up Channel. It is a wild, but scarcely picturesque land, consisting of a high, but level, plateau of heaths and moors. Goonhilly Downs, in its centre, in spite of their name, are not hilly, nor are they what we generally understand to be downs, but just gently undulating, or even flat, stretches of uncultivated and uncultivable land that by some are styled "dreary." But the justness or otherwise of that expression entirely depends upon the circumstances of the moment. Given bad weather, Goonhilly Downs and the whole Lizard peninsula are, indeed, dreary to the traveller, for shelter along the exposed roads, for the most part treeless, lonely, and quite innocent of hedges, is unobtainable for many miles; but in fine weather the purple heather, the occasional wooded hollows and the innumerable grey boulders scattered in these wilds, make a pleasant holiday jaunt. From a cycling point of view, the roads are perfection, and although dreariness is again the word when a cyclist strives along them in the teeth of a gale, to be blown mile after mile on a cycle with the wind is exhilarating. There are few villages here. Inland from Lizard Town you see the church-tower of Grade peering across the flats, but it is a village only of "farm-places." Grade church takes its name from St. Grada, Crida, or Credanus, a more or less mythical companion of St. Petroc, but it has been re-dedicated to Holy Cross.
Even less of a village is Ruan Major, whose church is seen amid a cluster of trees on the right of the road to Helston. Ruan Major is a paradoxical place, much smaller than Ruan Minor, consisting as it does of a church and a farmhouse. St. Ruan, or Rumon, its godfather, was a sixth-century Irish hermit who resided here—if that mode of living may be called residence—both before and after he went to Brittany, where he was not altogether favourably received. That he was much better thought of in Cornwall and Devonshire seems evident in the places named after him, and in the great honour paid to his relics at Tavistock Abbey. The farm at Ruan Major and the little woodland distinguishing the place from the surrounding open heaths perhaps represent the "nymet," or sacred enclosure made by St. Ruan around his hermitage.
Such then, with an occasional old manor-house and park like Trelowarren, Bochyn, and Bonython, the last near Cury, formerly seat of the old family of Bonython, is the wide district at the back of Lizard Town. Strangers simply hurry over it, by motor-car or Great Western motor-omnibus, all anxious to reach the Lizard itself, and to explore Kynance Cove and be off again.
The Lizard lighthouse is three-quarters of a mile distant from Lizard Town. It occupies the extremity of the point, the Ocrinum of Ptolemy, and is the successor of a lighthouse first erected in 1619 by Sir John Killigrew. That early light was only established in the teeth of the strongest discouragement by the Trinity House, which in those times adopted what seems to us an extraordinary policy, directed against the increase of lighthouses. Sir John Killigrew proposed to set up a light here at his own expense and to gather voluntary contributions from ship-owners towards the cost of it, but he found it necessary to first obtain a licence to do so, and therefore petitioned James the First to that effect. He would pay twenty nobles a year for leave to collect voluntary sums for a term of thirty years. This proposition, submitted to the Trinity House, produced the criticism that a light was not required upon the Lizard, and that in fact any such light would be dangerous, for it would serve as a beacon for pirates and foreign enemies. But the King, really in this instance the Solomon his flatterers pretended him to be, disregarded the unfavourable report, and granted the petition, with the only proviso that the light should be extinguished in time of war, when the approach of an enemy was suspected. Killigrew thereupon began and soon completed his lighthouse, much to the anger of the coastwise people. "The inabytants neer by," wrote Killigrew, "think they suffer by this erection. They affirme I take away God's grace from them. Their English meaning is that now they shall receve no more benefitt by shipwreck, for this will prevent yt. They have been so long used to repe profitt by the calamyties of the ruin of shipping that they clayme it heredytarye, and heavely complayne on me."
A year's working, including the cost of building, cost Sir John Killigrew £500. The light displayed was a brazier of coal, and this alone cost ten shillings a night. As for the "voluntary contributions" expected, they were simply nonexistent, and in consequence Killigrew petitioned for, and obtained, the right to levy dues of one halfpenny a ton on all passing vessels. Even then, he took nothing but a loss out of his enterprise, for shipowners, backed by the Trinity House, refused to pay, and in the end the lighthouse was pulled down.
The existing lighthouse dates from 1748, when a Captain Farrish proposed a building that should display four lights. This was a wholly commercial speculation. Farrish proposed to pay a yearly sum of £80 to the Trinity House for leave to build, and obtained a lease of sixty-one years; but the lease was taken over and the lighthouse actually built by Thomas Fonnereau. The lights were first displayed on August 22nd, 1752, in the presence of a great assemblage of people, who had come long distances to honour the event. Two lights appear to have been substituted for the four in 1792, but not until 1813 did the coal braziers give place to oil, and oil was replaced by the electric light in 1878. About 1902 the lights were reduced to one powerful revolving electric beam, the strongest in the world, visible for twenty-three miles, and showing once in every three seconds. It is aided in foggy weather by the most dismal of foghorns.
Hard by the lighthouse stands a notice-board of the National Lifeboat Institution, giving a plain record of the doings of the successive lifeboats that have been established down below, in Polpear Cove.
The Lizard lifeboats have rendered noble service, as shown by the board telling the doings of them: