The Isles of Scilly

by Jessie Mothersole

She remained sad and silent during the year of her novitiate, taking interest in nothing except the tending of a rose-bush, which she made her special care. When the time came for her to take the vows, she mysteriously disappeared from the chapel where she was keeping midnight vigil, and was seen no more until, many years later, she was found in that same chapel, lying dead before the altar, with no sign of age upon her pure face, and with a cluster of roses in her bosom.

Her lover is said to have been killed in battle many years before.

There is still a rose-tree growing up between the stones at Holy Vale, which the children used to look upon as the bush of Sister Mary.

There are no remains of the convent at Holy Vale, and there is only tradition to tell us that it ever existed. Whitfeld, writing in 1852, does indeed speak of the top of a freestone arch which he saw there, covering the entrance of a pig-sty, and which he supposes to have been a relic of the ancient monastic buildings. It is a beautiful sheltered spot, the most sheltered in the island, hidden away in a hollow, and surrounded by tall trees. Two farm-houses lie close together in the valley, near to a pond of fresh water under the trees; and on every side there are the fields of flowers, now the chief produce of the farms.

One of the pioneers of the flower industry, Mr. Mumford, used to live at Holy Vale.

The other, Mr. William Trevellick, lived at Rocky Hill on St. Mary’s until his death, in 1910, and was always ready to show his beautiful gardens to any one who wished to see them. Rows of palm-trees grow along the hedges at Rocky Hill, and form the boundary lines. “Look well at this,” Mr. Trevellick used to say. “It is not often that you will see in the British Isles a field surrounded by palm-trees.” He dearly loved his garden, and spent most of his time there. The robins knew him so well that even in summer-time at his call of “Dick, Dick” they would come and eat from his hand the food he kept ready for them in his capacious pockets.

Mr. Trevellick was also keenly interested in antiquities, and had collected at Rocky Hill a number of relics of the past of every description—ancient stone querns, quaint gaily-coloured figureheads from wrecks, Parliamentary cannon-balls, and a Druid trysting-stone, through the hole in which lovers used to clasp their hands when they plighted their troth. This last is in two halves, both of which had been built into a stone hedge; the second half was not discovered till many years after the first, and if you know anything of antiquarians, you can picture the joy with which its discovery was hailed! It was a day’s work to pull down the stone hedge, to secure the treasure, and then to build the wall up as before.

It was always a matter of great interest to Mr. Trevellick that an old Roman road runs through the Rocky Hill gardens, the large, evenly laid paving-stones showing very few signs of their age.

St. Mary’s Island is supposed to be nine miles round, but I would defy any one to restrict his first walk round it to nine miles. One is sure to be decoyed into many a By-path Meadow—but not of the kind in which there lurks a Giant Despair!

For beauty-spots are to be found in such plenty on St. Mary’s that it would be impossible to name them all. I have already spoken of the gorse-covered Garrison Hill, which is itself a little nest of beauty-spots. So in its way is Peninnis, “head of the island,” that wild and rugged peninsula which juts out between Porth Cressa and the Old Town Bay, and is sometimes thought to be the most beautiful part of St. Mary’s. It is strewn and scattered all along its coast with rocks and boulders of immense size, and of endless variety of form. I have already referred to two of these, which go by the names of the Pulpit and the Tooth. Close to the Tooth, on the head of Peninnis, there rises from the sea a huge rock, which is known as the Monk’s Cowl, from the fancied resemblance of the summit to a hooded head. From this point there is one of the finest views of the many-coloured rocks, covered here and there with shaggy grey-green lichen, standing boldly out of the sea or tumbled about in every direction, and with the little island of St. Agnes bordering the horizon. During a big storm the waves will dash right over the top of the Monk’s Cowl, and will swish along the top of the down behind it, before retreating in cascades of foam.