THE PINNACLES, BOLT HEAD.
Beyond the wood you come to very weird scenery indeed, along the boulderesque footpath, with bracken and hoar rock intermingled, and the blue sea below on the left and great grey spires of cliff overhead on the right, splashed with lichens red, golden, tawny, pallid green—all colours. Then rise in front of you the Pinnacles. You see at once, when you are come in sight of them, that you are come by quick change from the territory of the little folk into some Arthuresque land of the giants, for the great fantastic pinnacles are in twisted and contorted forms that suggest having originally been fashioned when warm and plastic by some Titan hand.
The slaty stratification of the surrounding rocks lends itself to the most outlandish horrent shapes of monstrous jibing faces, anvils, halberds, battle axes, and the likeness of a perfect armoury of magic weapons of offence, taking their most uncanny guise in the ragged mists that almost always enwrap and cling about The Bolt.
It seems that, contrary to general belief, this headland, of which these Pinnacles are the culminating point, is not the real Bolt Head. It is the further point, across the intervening valley, where the explorer finds the coastguard path die away, and himself perilously walking on the treacherous grassy slopes, where a slip will conduct at express speed on to some particularly sharp and cruel-looking rocks. It is like an inferno down there, in the sense that the descent is fatally easy, and to retrace one’s steps—or rather, flight—impossible. It is here that, warily shirking the point, you wish you hadn’t come; that you were a goat or a chamois, or, at the very least of it, that you had spikes in the soles of your shoes.
But they are lovely, as well as awe-inspiring, glimpses down there, sheer into the sea, where the cliff-walls are as black as coal and the sea now a dark, now a light green, here and there ringing a half-submerged rock with creamy foam. Hollow sound the surges in those cavernous depths, and reverberant the cries of the seagulls. Such is the extremity of the real Bolt, out yonder.
The descent from the Pinnacles leads down into a solitary valley, with towering fantastic rocks on the one side and the sea on the other. A deserted cottage standing near the sea emphasises the loneliness. The cottage has a story, for it was built to house the submarine cable from Brest, landed here in May 1870. Here, thank goodness, you plunge out of the over-civilisation of to-day, and, leaving hotels behind, come for a space into something of the rural England of sixty years since. Here, where nature is so beautiful and the littlenesses of towns are left behind, one can understand something of that latter-day portent, Anarchism, which, in this close touch with mother earth, reveals itself as a divine discontent with lovely things exploited and degraded, rather than the bogey of statesmen and sociologists.
Stair Hole Bottom they call this valley. It is carpeted with bracken; a little peaty stream comes oozing along in boggy places, or purling, as from the lip of a jug, over scattered boulders, overhung by the nodding foxglove. It is, in a word, Cornish, rather than Devonian, and, as commonly is the case in Cornwall, you have to pick your way among the chancy places, for lack of road or path.
Looking back, the Pinnacles show fitfully through the mist, the hole through them, like an All-seeing Eye, glowering darkly as the mists close in, or lightening, with a tinge of beneficence, in the sun.
On those moist, hot, steamy Devonshire days, when the mist, condensed off the sea, rolls like smoke over the rocky ledges, you look over the cliffs’ edge into a pillowy whiteness, which, for all you may discover, is the next field, or a sheer drop of three hundred feet on to a rocky beach. But through the smother, like a warning cry, comes dully the turmoil of the waves, the husky voice of the sea, sounding to the unromantic Londoner like the roaring of the traffic in his native streets, as heard from one of the metropolitan parks.