From the North Foreland to Penzance

by Clive Holland

In the end the attempt to destroy the fleet had to be abandoned, although one cannot quite comprehend why a general bombardment was not undertaken of “Fowey’s little castles,” to the credit of which and to Fowey gunners the repulse of the Dutch was due.

Never again, so far as we have been able to discover, did the Fowey forts play so gallant a part in defence of England and of English ships. Possibly they were made ready to do so when the shadow of Napoleonic invasion rested so heavily on the towns and seaports of our southern coasts. Who can tell? But we have found no record of even the fringe of the fighting, which made the Channel an almost ceaseless naval battleground during the long French War, having touched the town of Fowey itself. The coming and going of privateers alone, and the enterprises of the daring smugglers who made the town notorious in the annals of contraband trade may be said to have kept the place in touch with the stirring events of the last years of the eighteenth and early ones of the nineteenth centuries.

Jonathan Couch, in his History of Polperro, has something to say concerning the bold smugglers of Fowey. And his account of one of many lawless incidents gives one a very vivid idea of the state of things which existed in the district towards the close of the eighteenth century.

“On one occasion,” he writes, “intelligence had been received at Fowey that a ‘run of goods’ had been effected at Polperro during the previous night, and several men of a cutter’s crew were accordingly sent as scouts to get all the information they could. At Landaviddy they met with a farm labourer, who, it was suspected, had been engaged in this particular transaction; they tried to extract information from him by stratagem, but finding that he was not to be entrapped they tried the opposite plan, and threatened him with immediate impressment into the king’s service if he did not tell them where the goods were hidden. They succeeded in frightening him, and he informed them that a large number of kegs were hidden in a certain cellar above Yellow Rock, which he promised to point out by placing a chalk mark on the door.

“Having from the opposite hill seen this done, a portion of the crew returned to Fowey to get a reinforcement. Headed by the Custom House officers they soon returned, and proceeded in the direction of the cellar. The arrival of the force and their object was discovered, and a band of desperate smugglers, armed with cutlasses and pistols, assembled on New Quay Head, which place commanded an open view of the cellars which contained the kegs. A large gun was drawn down, and loaded and pointed, while a man with a match stood by, waiting the command of the skipper to fire. The revenue men were then defied and threatened in a loud and determined voice. They consulted their prudence, and resolved to send for a still stronger force. In a few hours a well-armed band arrived and rushed into the cellar, but found, to their great disappointment, that, although the place had been watched from the outside, the kegs, which had really been there, had been removed they knew not whither.”

In the twenties and thirties of the last century Fowey carried on a brisk smuggling trade with Roscoff, and in November of the year 1832 we read the following: “The Rose sailed from Roscoff for Fowey with 100 tubs of brandy,” and a little later on in the same month the fact is recorded that the Eagle, thirty-five tons, and Rose, eleven tons, both of Fowey, left Roscoff, bound for the Cornish port. Another famous smuggling craft of Fowey, which made many trips across Channel, and was remarkably successful with her runs, and in eluding and also deluding the revenue authorities and cutters, was the Dove. This boat was commanded by one of the Dunstans, members of a famous smuggling family, of whom one was living till about twenty years ago, full of romantic stories of the daring deeds of the old “free trading” days. Enough has, however, been said to give some idea of Fowey of the past.

Of Fowey of the present very little more need be added to what we have already set down. Although there are many quaint nooks, there are but two historically important buildings surviving from the days of old. One is the fine parish church of St Fin Barre of Cork, standing a little way up the hillside. This church was rebuilt in about 1336, and was appropriately rededicated to St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. The interior is of very fine proportions, and there are quite a number of interesting monuments, notably one in alabaster to John Rashleigh. Although the building has at various times been altered and restored, the work has, on the whole, been judicious, and has in no way destroyed the effect of its beautiful and impressive proportions. The exquisite choir screen, though modern and dating only from 1896, is in the style of one of the fine fifteenth-century Devonian screens. The oak pulpit will have a romantic interest for many, inasmuch as it is traditionally supposed to have been made out of the timbers of a Spanish galleon, a prize of Fowey men in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.

The other building of note is Place House, which stands, with its castellated tower showing above the trees and surrounding houses, quite close to the church. It has been for many centuries the family mansion of the Treffry family, and in it is a wonderful porphyry hall, but it is, after all, the romantic element of the building rather than the place itself which has most appeal.

It was in this house that a few men of Fowey, with some women and children, gathered and took refuge on the disastrous night in 1457, when the French, under the Lord of Pomier, landed and sacked the town. Hals writes of the incident thus: “The stoutest men, under conduct of John Treffy, Esquire, fortified themselves as well as they could in his then new-built house of Place, yet standing, where they stoutly opposed the assaults of the enemies, while the French soldiers plundered that part of the town which was unburnt without opposition in the dark.”

One is happy to know that Place was not taken and sacked, like the rest of the town, on that night of long ago, when the streets ran blood, and women and children were ruthlessly massacred, but stands very much as it was in Hals’s day. At various times the house has been restored and practically rebuilt, but it contains many fine and unique relics of Tudor times, including the chair in which Queen Elizabeth sat when on a visit to the then Bishop of Exeter.