The place teems with legends. Thus, the great granite rock in the churchyard, called "St. Levan's Stone," with a grass-grown gap in it, is the subject of a local rhyme, which tells us that when this slowly widening fissure has grown large enough for the passage of a packhorse, the Day of Judgment will be at hand. Personal observation and judicious enquiries justify me in assuring trembling sinners that, if this be indeed a guide, that day is yet far off.
I have said St. Levan was solitary. The immediate neighbourhood of the church is even now not very densely populated, for the visible buildings are only the rectory and a cottage; and it can, I conceive, scarcely be called cheerful; for the bell-buoy on that submerged rock, the Rundlestone, out to sea, is for ever heard tolling, sometimes like a funeral knell and at others like some harsh gong, calling lost mariners to dinner down there in weedy caves with the mermaids.
The little church of St. Levan is rich in old bench-ends, displaying his fishes, a palmer with cockle-shells in his hat, knights, ladies, and jesters; while the chancel-screen is enriched with the eagle of St. John, the lily of the Virgin, the sacred monogram, and the spear, nails, and hammer of the Crucifixion. The Virgin herself is rendered, with round silly face and coif and fifteenth-century ruff. There has been a great deal of restoration effected here of late years.
A sundial in the churchyard displays a solemn motto: Sicut umbra transeunt dies, and a memorial to one of the Telegraph Company's probationers, drowned while bathing at Porthcurno, stands near by the grave of Captain Henry Rothery and the twenty-two others lost in the wreck of the Khyber at Porthloe in the storm of March 15th, 1905.
The narrow cliff-path from St. Levan presently leads to the small and rocky fishing-cove of Porth Gwarra, the foreshore roughly paved with granite blocks in between the projecting rocks, which are here hollowed into caverns, where the few boats and lobster-pots are stored. A yellow snapdragon grows profusely in the cliffs here, and ivy richly mantles some of the crags along the coast towards Land's End; while a curious plant with fleshy leaves, curved like giant talons, and red and yellow flowers, called the "ice-plant," thickly drapes many of the rough walls enclosing fields.
The cliffs here rise to their grandest in the magnificent piles of granite blocks towering up at the crested promontory of Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the "Holed Headland in Penwith." The cliff-top walk has here broadened out to an expanse of short moss-like grass interspersed with rabbit-burrows, knobs of lichened rock and tufts of thrift or sea-pink. It is good going for the pedestrian, but the grass is apt to be slippery. A stranger wandering here alone suddenly finds the chasm that gives Tol Pedn its name, directly in his path.
There are few places on the coasts of Cornwall really dangerous, unless you go out of your way to court danger, but this abrupt hole in the cliff-top is really a deadly place. That no one appears ever to have fallen down it and broken his neck seems to be because strangers who walk these cliffs generally do so with a very proper sense of the perils which lie in the way of those who do not exercise due caution. Any one who walked here in one of the frequent sea-fogs would stand an excellent chance of walking right over the edge of this hole in the headland, and so falling an inevitable one hundred feet to his death. This great circular gap, the "Funnel," as some call it, is about thirty feet across, and is a real startler. It was formed just in the same manner as the "Lion's Den," near the Lizard, and the "Devil's Frying Pan," near Cadgwith, by the falling-in of the roof of a cave; and the beach down below communicates with the sea. Adjoining it, from the cliffs' edge, rises the impressive pile of granite rock called "Chair Ladder," tinted all hues by weathering and by lichens, from black and grey to green, red, and a vivid orange. It is not difficult to climb down into the black depths below Chair Ladder, or to the beach, but it requires rather more energy to return. To style Chair Ladder and the other rocky spires neighbouring it piles of rock is by no means straining language, for they have exactly the appearance of having been heaped one upon another by some superhuman energy, the granite cubes being jointed like so many blocks of rude cyclopean masonry. The coast here indeed displays some of the most curious imitative forms in natural architecture, and every point and every little porth has its old Cornish name.
