As the launch draws near the landing-place in Perconger during the flower-season, you may see a long string of carts and barrows following each other down the hill to the sea-shore. These contain the wooden boxes of flowers which are to be loaded on the barge and towed back to St. Mary’s ready for the next day’s steamer.
We found very comfortable quarters on the island with the wife of the pilot’s son who so distinguished himself when the “T. W. Lawson” was wrecked, as described in another chapter. The accompanying illustration shows their little three-year-old girl trying to help her parents in the tying-house.
The very names on St. Agnes seem to be suggestive of the wild and rocky character of the island—names such as Camperdizl Point, Campergurling, and the Carns of Kestillier.
And is not Wingletang Down a picturesque and suggestive name?
A heather-clad stretch of open down, dotted with bushes of “whin,” or gorse, and with a fringe of “tang,” or seaweed, washed up all round it; great boulders of granite strewn over its surface, and bare patches of the living rock showing here and there through the soil—that is Wingletang Down, in the middle of which stands the strange rock called the Giant’s Punch-bowl.
In the sands of the little bay at the edge of the down it is the custom to search for beads, just as one searches for beads in the sands of the Egyptian desert. But these are not mummy-beads! only wreck-salvage from a vessel that was lost over two hundred years ago, and its wreckage was washed up in what has since been called “Beady Pool.”
On Wingletang Down one may, perhaps, see large blocks of granite drilled with rows of holes ready for quarrying. Until recent times the blocks were severed by driving wooden pegs into these holes, and wetting them until their swelling forced the stone asunder—just the same method as was used in ancient Egypt thousands of years ago! Nowadays slips of steel take the place of the wooden pegs.
The bay on the south of St. Agnes is known as Santa Warna Bay, because there, according to tradition, the Saint put in, in her little coracle, on her arrival from Ireland. On its shore is Santa Warna’s Well, now an insignificant little hole almost choked with dead bracken and weeds, and half-covered with a flat stone, but once considered the most important spot in the island. For, formerly, every year on the day after Twelfth Day, the well was cleaned out by the islanders and devotion paid to the Saint. This was still done in Heath’s time, and he says they used “certain superstitious ceremonies in their thanksgiving, which being ended they make a general feasting and rejoicing throughout the island.” It was here that, in the old wild days, the young girls used to come on foggy nights, before going to bed, and drop pins down the well, chanting—
“Good-night, father; good-night, mother;
Good-night, friends and foes;