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

by Charles G. Harper

But, whether you first see St. Michael's Mount at high tide, when it is an island, or at the ebb, when it is joined to the land by half a mile of slimy, seaweedy causeway, it is grand.

At the same time, I like best to think of St. Michael's Mount as I first saw it, on first coming into Cornwall. I had come by train from Paddington, and the day had long given place to night. The weary train pulled up for the ticket-taking at Marazion Road, and in the quiet interval the wind boomed about the station buildings, and the wash of the waves could be plainly heard on the sands. Eagerly one looked out upon the night for a possible glimpse of the famous Mount, and there indeed, guided by a twinkling light so high that it looked like a star, the eye saw vaguely a monstrous pyramidal bulk, a something darker than the surrounding darkness. "It is the Mount," I said, and a thrill of romantic delight possessed me.

Well, you know, St. Michael's Mount is 231 feet in height. It is no mean altitude, and the rise is so sharp up its sides that one need not be of the Falstaff kind, fat and scant of breath, to find the climbing it something tiring on a hot day. But St. Michael's Mount the next morning was a less impressive object than that darkling glimpse gave warranty for. It was inevitable. Just as the impression overnight had been finer than expected, so the reality suffered. But ordinarily St. Michael's Mount does not disappoint; always with this proviso, that you do not see its bigger brother, Mont St. Michel, on the coast of Normandy, first.

An ingenious eighteenth-century writer remarked of St. Michael's Mount that "it seemed emblematic of a well-ordered State, its base being devoted to Trade and Commerce, its sides to the service of the country, and its summit to the glory of God." By "trade and commerce" he indicated the little village and harbour at the foot of the Mount, and the reference to the glory of God was of course an allusion to the remains of the Abbey, but what he could have meant by "the service of the country" I cannot tell, unless by any chance it was an allusion to the ineffectual popgun battery mounted on the crags.

The history of St. Michael's Mount begins like most history, in uncertainties. It is supposed—and much criticism has not destroyed the supposition—that it is the place called Iktis, referred to by Posidonius, who travelled in Britain during the first century before the Christian era. He spoke of the "little islands called Cassiterides, lying off the coast of Iberia," from which much tin was obtained, and then mentioned the isle of Iktis, in Britain. It is quite clear, therefore, that the supposition that by the Cassiterides he meant the Scilly Islands, or any islands in Britain, must be baseless. They were what we know as the Balearic Islands, off the coast of Spain, the Iberia of the ancients. But in other writers we find the Cassiterides to indicate tin islands in general.

Diodorus Siculus, who was contemporary with Julius Cæsar, and wrote a Universal History, a considerable undertaking for one man even then, appears to have copied a good many of the statements made by Posidonius, in addition to having described places seen in his own travels. He is not always regarded as a reliable authority, but there seems no reason to doubt the essential truth of his statements. Referring to "Belerion," otherwise Cornwall, he says: "The inhabitants of that extremity of Britain both excel in hospitality and also, by reason of their intercourse with foreign merchants, are civilised in their mode of life. These people prepare the tin, working very skilfully the earth which produces it. The ground is rocky, but has in it earthy veins, the produce of which is wrought down and melted and purified. Then, when they have cast it in the form of dice-shaped cubes, they carry it into a certain island adjoining Britain, and called Iktis. For, during the recess of the tide, the intervening space is left dry, and they carry over abundance of tin to this place in their carts. And there is something peculiar in the islands of these parts lying between Europe and Britain, for at the full tide the intervening passage being overflowed, they appear islands, but when the sea retires, a large space is left dry, and they are seen as peninsulas. From them the merchants purchase the tin of the natives and transport it into Gaul, and finally, travelling through Gaul on foot, in about thirty days they bring their burdens on horses to the mouth of the river Rhone."

That Diodorus should refer to "islands," rather than the one island that becomes a peninsula at low water, has been held as a proof that he knew nothing at first hand about this coast, but it may well be that in the changes known to have taken place here, other islands have disappeared. Quite apart from the fantastic legends of the lost land of Lyonesse between Scilly and the Land's End, where the lone waters, empty except for a few intervening reefs, now roll, it is quite certain that at some early period what is now Mount's Bay was a forest. Hunt, in his "Popular Romances of the West of England," tells us—not romancing: "I have passed in a boat from St. Michael's Mount to Penzance on a summer day, when the waters were very clear and the tide low, and seen the black masses of trees in the white sands, extending far out into the bay. On one occasion, while I was at school at Penzance, after a violent equinoctial gale, large trunks of trees were thrown up on the shore, just beyond Chyandour, and then with the other boys I went at the lowest of the tide, far out over the sands, and saw scores of trees embedded in the sands. We gathered nuts—they were beech-nuts—and leaves in abundance." I, too, have found, cast upon the shore, traces of this submarine forest.

Now it is a curious thing, in this connection, that, among the various names by which St. Michael's Mount has been known, including the earliest of all, "Din-Sûl," or the "Fortress of the Sun," is that of Carregloose-in-coes, which, spelled in slightly different ways, means the Hoar Rock (that is to say the grey rock) in the Wood. "Coes" appears to have been a form of the early British "coed," for woodland. The town of Cowes, for example, in the Isle of Wight, takes its name from the woodlands that once occupied its site. St. Michael's Mount was once, therefore, a part of the mainland, and if we observe, still further, that the Chapel Rock on the approach to it, and the great pyramidal form of the Mount itself are hard greenstone and granite, resting upon slate and clay, we shall see exactly why they remain whence all other land has disappeared.

That foreigners, in times long before the Romans came to Britain, were accustomed to resort to this neighbourhood for tin has already been shown, and that they were Phœnicians is certain. Many people dismiss the Phœnicians as a people almost as mythical as the phœnix itself, but they were the earliest maritime traders. They were the people who founded Carthage, and they penetrated to the ends of the known world. Also they were of a strongly marked Semitic, or Jewish type; and thus ancient Cornish traditions about "the Jews" are well based on facts.