No one who knows Fowey and its substantial charms will care to dispute the justness of the eulogies of either of the writers we have quoted.
Fowey harbour is indeed a convenient and picturesque inlet, which provides, after the headlands which guard the entrance are passed, a good and pleasant anchorage for all the yachts (and they are many) which come to it during the summer months, and to many other craft besides. The creek, and afterwards the river, extends to quaint Lostwithiel, six miles up, although the depth of water after the first mile or so is not considerable. It is not merely a pleasure harbour, either, for there is a considerable coasting trade, and huge vessels of two or three thousand tons come into Fowey at times to load up with the famous china clay of Cornwall for far distant countries of the world, some of it, so it is asserted, to return again from China and Japan transformed from amorphous masses into the delicate vases and egg-shell pottery of the East, and coloured with designs the equal of which for simplicity with effect only those lands can show.
In the town itself the salt sea breeze comes softened with that of the wind from off the flower-clad heights above it, and from the gardens of many of the cottages on the hill-slopes and upper portion of the little town. In these gardens are many blossoms which find a counterpart across the water on the coast of Brittany. The stocks, roses, hollyhocks, crimson valerian, and wild yellow wall-flowers, and “dragon’s tongue” flourish here in the gardens, and in the crevices of the crumbling grey walls, as they do in Breton Morlaix; perhaps a link with the past when Fowey, Cornwall, and Brittany were ever at warfare.
FOWEY
Of these stirring days there are many traditions, and it is right that there should be. Once Fowey was as noted as any port in the kingdom, let alone the west country, for her seamen, seamanship, and her ships. And when the third Edward, of daring enterprise, sought to gather together a fleet for the attack and siege of Calais in the autumn of 1346, Fowey’s contribution is the best indication of the town’s importance in those days. To the king’s fleet the town sent no less than forty-seven vessels, manned by nearly eight hundred men. London’s quota was scarcely more than half as great as regards either ships or seamen, and no other place in the kingdom, save Yarmouth with four ships less, even approached the magnificent provision of Fowey.
The town of to-day is in some respects not unlike Dartmouth. It is more open, one must admit, but there is the same close clinging of the houses to the hillside, the narrow entrance, and the river flowing down from Lostwithiel as does the Dart from Totnes. The streets are not less picturesque than that of what may not improperly be considered as the rival town, nor are they less steeply inclined; and there is just the same air of peaceful antiquity in many of its winding alleys. The long straggling street which leads from the railway station is narrow enough to please the artistic eye, if not wide enough for present-day convenience.
Fowey, however, shows some trace of modesty (for which, remembering its stirring history and swashbuckling of old, one might not be prepared to give it credit) when it merely calls its main thoroughfare Passage Street, and not Fore Street or High Street as do many other less important towns.
“Q” speaks of Fowey’s open-armed hospitality. This, too, is demonstrated by the neighbourly way in which the houses lean up against one another, and the manner in which the tortuous streets and by-lanes intersect, and merge one into the other as though the chief aim they had in view was self-effacement and the general puzzlement of the stranger.
“The beginnings of Fowey,” one writer has told us, “are lost in the mazes of antiquity. It is possible that Saxon pirates had a settlement here which afterwards passed into the possession of others in whose veins the rich blood of corsair ancestors had not been thinned by enervating land pursuits or cessation from struggle with the elemental forces of nature upon the narrow seas and, maybe, wider ones.” But whatever those beginnings were, the situation of the place was such as to commend itself irresistibly to the men who were its first inhabitants. “Many have called them pirates,” says another writer, for whom the character of the men of Fowey in past times seems of some concern, “but what were pirates? Were they not the very men who built up the greatness of England in the days when greatness upon the seas was not of less importance than to-day, and was only obtainable by irregular means?”