A lonesome, sea-girt land where storms and sea-mists, sweeping from the wide Atlantic, wreath the steadfast hills in unsubstantial vapours, through which each beetling precipice that frowns across the ocean looms like some weird vision of a dream. Amidst such scenes as these, the fantastic creations of the Keltic imagination must readily have found 'a local habitation and a name.'
Well, revenons à nos moutons, after this excursion into legend-land. Seated on a mossy stone, we contemplate the age-worn cliffs whose ruddy bastions, carved into a thousand castellated forms, range their impregnable fronts against old Ocean's impetuous artillery. A steady south-westerly breeze sends the green, translucent rollers vollying with thunderous roar against the weed-fringed rocks upon the shore; while flocks of gulls wheel overhead, drifting on motionless, angular pinions, or sweeping across the breakers with harsh, discordant cries.
We now seek out a view-point for a sketch of the lonely hermitage, a matter of no small difficulty owing to the tumbled nature of the ground; but eventually we select a sheltered spot where the noontide sun, peering downward from the cloudless vault of heaven, draws out the rich, sweet odours of sea-pink, wild-thyme and gorse.
Mounting again to the brow of the cliffs, we ramble around the lonely coast, which hereabouts is indented with a series of 'crankling nookes' that penetrate, like long fingers, deep into the land.
Here is the wild and perilous abyss yclept the Huntsman's Leap, from the story of some fabulous rider who, putting his horse to full gallop, plunged across the unexpected chasm, only to perish from sheer fright upon regaining his home! The nodding cliffs approach so closely upon either hand, as to have been not inaptly likened to a pair of leviathan vessels locked fast in collision.
A bowshot westward lies Bosheston Meer, a similar cavern sunk fathoms deep in the solid rock. Near it is a funnel-shaped aperture that acts in stormy weather as a blowhole; whence it is said the waves are driven high above the land, plunging back again with a roar that can be heard far inland.
Strange tales were told in bygone times of the freaks of this tempest-torn abyss. George Owen, an Elizabethan chronicler, observes: 'If Sheepe or other like Cattell be grazing neere the Pitt, offtimes they are forcibly and violently Drawne and carryed into the pitt; and if a Cloke, or other garment, bee cast on the grownd neere the Pitt, at certaine seasones, you shall stande afarre off, and see it sodainely snatch'd, drawne and swallowed up into the Pitt, and never seene againe.'
Quitting this wild and fascinating spot, we pass near the grass-grown mounds of a prehistoric camp; and then, striking a little inland, make for a sort of green oasis that marks the 'Sunken Wood.'
A vast, shelving pit, sunk some 50 feet below the level of the ground, and twice as many across, is filled with a grove of vigorous ash-trees. Their dense foliage entirely covers the top of the chasm; where it is cut off, smooth as a well-trimmed hedge, by the sea-spray borne upon the gales from the adjacent ocean.
Many conjectures have been formed as to the origin of this remarkable freak of Nature; the most plausible being that, the subsoil having been excavated by the waves through some subterranean fissure, the ground has fallen in from above and formed this cavity.