VII
THE INLETS OF THE SOUTH COAST
Fowey is perhaps the best known by name of all the Cornish towns. This is due in some measure to its being the home of Sir A. Quiller-Couch, who has made it familiar to thousands in his stories of Troy Town and The Delectable Duchy. But people who go to Fowey should be prepared to find it unlike anything anywhere else. Fowey Harbour is a long narrow slit penetrating into the land and closed in on each side by very steep hills which drop down sharply to the water. On the west lies Fowey town close to the mouth of the harbour, built on the hillside. It consists of one long narrow street, so constricted that only here and there, where the houses fall back a little, has it been found possible to drop in a few feet of pavement, otherwise foot-passengers take their chance with the traffic. There are houses on each side. Those on the seaward side are built right on to the water so that many of them have ladders hanging from their backyards by which the men can climb down into their boats. Passing casually along the main street and glancing into an open doorway one sometimes sees the passage falling downwards like an open shaft, the lower end a rectangle of blue dancing water!
On the other side the levels, if they can be called levels—for there is hardly a foot of level land anywhere—rise high overhead. In following any of the quaint crooked streets it is possible at one moment to look up at school children playing in a courtyard high overhead and five minutes later to survey the same children shortened in perspective by being seen from above!
In the very midst of the town is the splendid old church, and near it, but so tucked away it is not easily discovered, is Place House, the seat of the Treffrys, an old Cornish family. The oldest parts of this have stood since 1457 and it is said that here once was a palace of the old Earls of Cornwall, which is quite probable, as they could hardly have chosen a better spot.
FOWEY
If we pass on by the long narrow main street we come out eventually on heights terminating in Gribbin Head. But Fowey is not recommended for people with weak hearts unless they intend to sit upon the charming verandah of the hotel as suggested in the first chapter. Wherever one turns there are steep hills to negotiate, and the magnificent views gained across the deep inlet must be bought by hard labour. Yet having said that it is but fair to add that nowhere in Britain are there sights to beat these. The harbour lies like a Norwegian fiord between its hills, and the water ranges in all imaginable blues and greens as the light wanes and changes, while there are ever coming and going craft of many kinds. Fowey is not a fishing village; anyone who said it was would have to reckon with Sir A. Quiller-Couch! The harbour is visited by ships in search of cargo such as the china-clay which forms so large a proportion of the export, and the graceful vessels, often sailing-ships, which come to fetch it, are towed in and out by the little tugs which work unceasingly about the narrow straits. And the inlet is one of the most popular for yachts all along the coast. There is here reproduced a most interesting chart of Fowey Harbour, drawn in Henry VIII.'s time, and now in the British Museum. This reproduction is taken from Lysons' Magna Britannica. As will be seen, it shows Lostwithiel, Liskeard, and even Bodmin, with a pictorial representation of the stags grazing in Restormel Park. Even at that date the twin forts guarding the narrow entrance to the harbour were "decayed."