The hardy fisherfolk exist chiefly on seine-net fishing and crab and lobster-catching. The trained Newfoundland dogs that are still a feature of this hamlet and of Beesands are fewer than of yore. There were some seven or eight of them, taught to swim out through the particularly rough surf of this shore, to meet incoming boats and bring the end of a rope to the beach, so that the boats might be hauled in.
The later history of Hall Sands is somewhat thrilling. It seems that for some years past the shingle in front of Hall Sands has been dredged away by the contractors for the extension works at Keyham Dockyard, Plymouth, for the purpose of making concrete, and that the Government committed the incredible folly of allowing it. The inevitable and foretold result happened. In September 1903 most of the foreshore disappeared in a storm, and in the spring of 1904 the very existence of Hall Sands was threatened. The one inn of the place, the “London,” stood with other cottages on a piece of rock jutting out to sea. Suddenly, one afternoon, a heavy ground-swell wrecked them. The landlady was making tea, when the side of the house disappeared, without warning. Since then Hall Sands has been without an inn. To help build the new concrete sea-wall and the slipway, which have since been built in the effort to remove the danger that ought never to have been incurred, the Government granted £1,750, while the Member of Parliament for the county division subscribed £250, and the contractors contributed an unascertained sum. The whole miserable history would assure us, if we did not already know it, that Governments—it matters not of what party—are entirely callous upon subjects that do not endanger their own existence. Now if this had happened in Ireland, the outcry against the “murdering Saxon” would have been appalling.
CHAPTER XXII
THE START AND ITS TRAGEDIES—LANNACOMBE—CHIVELSTONE—EAST PRAWLE—PORTLEMOUTH
The Start looms up prominently from here, but it is a long scramble up out of Hall Sands and round by the coastguard path to that weird spot.
The uncanny-looking Start has impressed itself upon the imaginations of most of those who have seen it. Polwhele, the historian of Devon, led to the thought by the fantastic solemnity of the rocky headland, and by the sound of its name, gravely assures us that here, in the dim dawn of history, stood a temple of the Phœnician goddess, Astarte, the “Ashtoreth” of the full-blooded Scriptural denunciations of the “worshippers of strange gods”; the more suave and worshipful Venus Aphrodite of the Greeks, fair goddess of the sea.
The Start—Start “Point” is a redundancy—has, however, nothing to do with heathen mythology, suitable though it be, above all places, for altars of hungry sea-gods. The name of the headland is the Anglo-Saxon “Steort,” which itself means simply a point or tail; as seen in the name of the Redstart, or “redtail”; but to the fanciful, these cruel rocks, the scene of so many fearful wrecks, seem not unlike the sacrificial altars of some blood-stained superstitious cult.
The Start projects far out to sea, a dark mass of gneiss rock with quartz veins. It is in the uncomfortable shape of a razor-backed ridge, with demoniacal-looking humps, spires, and spines of iron-hard rock, ranging from prominences like the vertebræ of a crocodile’s back to sharp points in the likeness of hedge-stakes. The weird imagination of Doré never conceived anything in scenery more shuddery than that of the Start, and the coastguards, who declare that you have not seen England until you have come to the extremity of this difficult point, are not without some reason for their cryptic saying.
