At Turnchapel the ferry steamer takes the wearied exerciser upon Shanks’s Mare across the Catwater to Phœnix Wharf and the old original Plymouth, adjoining the Barbican and Sutton Pool.
OLD PLYMOUTH, FROM MOUNT BATTEN.
Every one knows the stream that comes down from Dartmoor and falls into the Laira creek as the Plym, but its original name was the Cad, and Plymouth was originally “Sutton”: still known as “Sutton-on-Plym.” It is found under this name in Domesday Book. The name Catwater, or Cattewater, as it is also spelled, may be a survival of the original name of the river, as well as being one of the numerous stretches of water with this prefix: the Cattegat, i.e., the “narrow gate,” at the entrance of the Baltic; Catford, near London, Catawade, on the river Stour, near Manningtree; all with the same meaning of narrowness.
There is some ground for supposing that the original name of Plymouth, or a portion of the vast site now occupied by the Three Towns of Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse, was in Saxon times “Tamarweorth,” and the present name only begins to figure in ancient documents of the mid-thirteenth century, in a tentative way, as “Sutton-super-Plymouth.” After that period it gradually rose to importance, being first represented in Parliament in 1298. Sutton Pool, the innermost basin of Plymouth, the old original harbour, and still the place to which the fishing smacks and many of the local steamers come, is bordered by the ancient quays and the queer old houses of the Barbican, once a district inhabited by merchant princes, but now pre-eminently “Old Plymouth,” and although exceedingly picturesque, scarcely a residential quarter. The Barbican took its name originally from the castle, now the citadel, which guarded the narrow entrance to Sutton Pool, across which was stretched every night, in the time of Henry the Eighth, a protective chain. From these defences the existing arms of Plymouth, four black castles between a green saltire, are said to derive. The pious motto of the town is Tunis fortissima est nomen Jehovah, but at the same time Plymouth is very strongly fortified in the military way.
THE BARBICAN: WHERE THE PILGRIM FATHERS EMBARKED.
Certain very definite and picturesque scenes arise out of the dim abysmal, grey and confused rag-bag of history here in this fishy Barbican. Most definite of all the last farewell to England of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. On the pavement, by the quay, is a modest stone, inscribed, “Mayflower,” with the date; and near at hand, let into a wall, a less modest commemorative bronze tablet, with this inscription:—