Port Eliot, the seat of the Eliot family, whose ancestor, Sir John Eliot, played so prominent a part in the period just anterior to the Civil War, stands quite close to the great church, which, separated from it only by greensward and a narrow road, is well worth a visit.
But all these things, including Landulph, with its old church and the monument to Theodore Paleologus, of Pesaro in Italy, “descended from ye Imperyail lyne of ye last Christian Emperors of Greece”; and the Castle of Tremanton on Lynher River can only be visited by one who has much time at his disposal.
Of the beauties of Mount Edgecumbe a great deal has from time to time been written. Under its shelter lay Howard’s fleet, and along its shady avenues have walked many of the greatest sons of the West Country in past centuries. It is this, as Garrick calls it, “mount of all mounts in Great Britain” that attracts the eye as one enters the Sound, and it is at this lovely heritage of tree-crowned heights, valleys, and wide, stretching sward that one gazes when, with the anchor weighed, one drops down the water bound further west.
Chapter IX
St Looe—Polperro—Fowey—Mevagissey—and Some Coves
Lovely Cawsand Bay is one of the fairest of havens and a good place in which to lie in almost all winds save south-east; but with quaint St Looe ahead and a fair wind one does not stand into the bay, but lays a course for Pellee Point and thence round Rame Head, with its ruins of the ancient chapel, and then there is a straight course for Looe Island and the harbour, which, in the season, is so picturesque with and full of pilchard boats.
Seen from the pine-tree-clad hill above the town, and looking up the river to the bridge, St Looe inevitably reminds one of Dinan, just as the Looe River possesses a marked resemblance to the Rance. The architecture of the quaint houses, which huddle close together on the Point and spread upwards to the hillsides, have a distinctly Breton character, which may or may not be because the port of Morlaix is straight across the water.
There are, however, two towns which, whatever the differences in far back times may have been that led to division of strength where one might have imagined such a course undesirable, are nowadays connected by the old, weather-stained bridge of eight arches, on which and against the parapet of which the fishermen ashore lean and contemplate the river and harbour, and artists take up a vantage ground.
This little port is indeed a delightful place, with a climate so mild yet withal so bracing that it threatens to turn this “sleepy hollow,” with its memories of past centuries, into a fashionable winter resort, and thus destroy it with that modern bane of picturesqueness—prosperity. A well-known writer has aptly summed up the delight of its quaint architecture, which, as well as its fisher types, has drawn painters from all parts to revel in its sheer delight. He says: “Such houses, never certainly except in some medieval town abroad, show such startling illustrations of the ideas of the old house builders, with gables quaint and rugged as Ruskin could have wished, or Turner desired to paint.”