By the row-boat ferry at Yealm Mouth the explorer is put to the tiring scramble towards Wembury. Descending the hillside fields of corn, the lonely church is seen, and over it, out to sea, the famous Mewstone appears, rising, a huge, abrupt and angular mass of dark limestone rock, a mile off-shore. Dangerous, and nearly inaccessible though it be at most times, it and its surrounding sea look so innocent and harmless under the sun of a still day in July that the evil reputation of that rock and these waters seems based on insubstantial grounds. Yet the Mewstone has amply occasioned the poetic tribute:
“The sullen crash, the shriek of wild despair,
One moment swell the gust that whistles by;
The next—no sound of living voice is there,
None, save the waken’d sea-mew’s dreary cry.”
The verse points to the origin of the name of this and the several other Mewstones along this coast of Devon; the sea-mew is of course the sea-gull, and these isolated reefs so many “sea-gull rocks.” References are often found in literature to the “laughter of the gulls,” but the name of “sea-mew” more nearly indicates the sound of the peevish cry of those birds, which closely resembles the mew of a cat.
About 1836 the Mewstone was inhabited by one Samuel Wakeham and his wife, who lived in a little rustic house and looked after Squire Calmady’s rabbits, which swarmed the seemingly lifeless rock. The Mewstone was made the subject of an article in a local South Devon magazine, and (according to the editor of it) drew the annexed reply from the “Lord of the Isles,” as the editor calls him. The thing is amusing, but smells suspiciously like an editorial invention:
“On bored the moostone septembur The fust Sur, i ham verry mutch obliGed to u for puttin a drawen of the moostone an mi howse into youre booke an I Rite this to tel u that no won cant wark from the moostone to the shoar At lo warter for a six ore gig as i nose cud be toed over the roks without runnen fowl of it or a smawl bote mite sale over in good Wether squire kill maid he nose the same i ave a been livin hear a long time an i Never seed the hole beech all across dry at No time whatsumdever the see warshes over sum part of them for I Nose all the roks an goes down their to pik sof crabs for bate gainst i goes a chad fishen an me wife youre hum Bell servant
“to cum hand samel warkeam
“Po. scrip