The very mention of Cornish seas has an alluring sound, and one already feels in the realm of romance when he descries in the mellow light of an afternoon in late summer that smallest of villages perched upon a rock overlooking the bluest of seas with its perpetual fringe of powdery foam. Here at the edge of the Atlantic is a most beguiling stretch of water, filling innumerable bays—water so clear and calm and deep-hued far away that it is hard to realise that it makes a cruel and treacherous sea in which only on the gentlest of days dare a swimmer plunge and feel his way among the underlying rocks, or upon the roaring waves of which dare a hardy sailor venture his boat. In storm this sea is terrible. The waves upheave themselves like solid hillocks of water, black at the base, and hurl themselves with appalling force against the huge rocks, which have already been worn and broken by them into a thousand fantastic shapes. Here and there the propelling force of the incoming tide, working like a gigantic engine, sends with torrent-force along narrow open passages a seething stream which beats its way upward and dashes headlong over the barriers of wood and stone; and the great smoke-coloured waves beyond rear themselves heavily, topple, and crash down into the abyss with thunderous roaring. On they come, nearer and nearer, louder and louder, those hard, rising, climbing, dissolving bodies of incalculable strength, dashing themselves furiously over every obstacle, sweeping with a hiss across the tracts of sand, and obliterating the tall rocks which can be toilsomely climbed when the waters retreat. Beneath this raging, battering sea lies a fabled domain with all its fair cities and towers, and every watcher of those stupendous, merciless billows can realise their potentiality to tear away the land and drag it into the unseen deeps. Storm at Tintagel or Trebarwith is both revelation and conviction: it is a manifestation of remorselessness, a suggestion of irreparable ruin, desolation, and loss. Easy indeed is it to imagine that the treacherous and cruel waves driving rapaciously landward have already had their victory and are savagely seeking to extend their conquest, and that hereabout lie “the sad sea-sounding wastes of Lyonnesse.”
No one has described this wildly beautiful sea with greater charm and realism than Swinburne, who has watched it in all moods, seen it in the blueness of calm, seen it strive and shiver “like spread wings of angels blown by the sun’s breath,” seen it when the glad exhilarated swimmer feels
“The sharp sweet minute’s kiss
Given of the wave’s lip, for a breath’s space curled
And pure as at the daytime of the world,”
—seen it again when the east wind made the water thrill, and the soft light went out of all its face, and the green hardened into iron blue. A walk from Camelford to Tintagel, passing Trebarwith, and on from Tintagel to Boscastle, passing Bossiney and many a smaller cove on the way, reveals the most wonderful and alluring of all changeful sea-pictures, and displays most vividly the marvel and magic of the rugged coast. The towering rocks have been wrought by time and carved by wind and wave into grotesque images, broken at the base into sunless caves, worn at the heights into sharp and gleaming pinnacles, fretted and cut, rounded and cracked, sundered and cast down, the massive blocks made veritably the sport of the elements, so that the beholder may easily believe himself in the realm of enchantment. All the sounding shores of Bude and Boss are legend-haunted. The mariner hears the chime and toll of the lost bells of Bottreaux when he comes within sight of the “silent tower,” which stands white and grim upon the headland. The wail of lured voyagers and the despairing lament of the smugglers who brought them with false lights to their doom are listened to in awe on stormy nights, and there are visions of good ships that went down among the rocks in the tragic desperate days of which so many ghastly tales are told. The last of the Cornish wreckers, for whom, when he lay dying, a ship with red sails came in a tremendous sea and bore him shrieking away, looms as an apparition on the darkest nights, and the cries of tormented spirits mingle with the blast. Merlin, with flowing beard, is said to pace the shore, and Arthur and his knights to revisit the scenes of their exploits. The spirit of the king hovers about sea and land in the form of the almost sacred chough, reverenced and preserved by the inhabitants that they may not unwittingly injure their hero. Further north at Bude Haven the long Atlantic breakers roll, and perhaps there is no more imposing spectacle than the coil of waves coming in upon the far-extending and rock-strewn sands. The undulations, miles long, seem to rise and curl far out at sea at short regular distances from each other, and mass upon mass they break with thunder-sound and cataract upon the shore. The most brilliant of sunsets glow in the perfect summer weather when day dies slowly over these “far-rolling, westward-smiling seas,” and they leave the night still radiant. The whole land is sweet and bright with flowers: on one side lies the glittering surf lacing itself in white foam about the boulders, and on the other side rises the circle of hills topped by the massy brown summits of Row Tor and Brown Willy. Sometimes the deserted quarries give a spectral look to the landscape, and when the rain spatters and darkens the piles of rough slate the aspect is weird and gloomy indeed. But given a day of sunshine when the sea is a sparkling emerald or the deepest of blues, when the sky is clear or only softened with diaphanous rings of cirrus-cloud, when the moss glistens on the rocks and the expanse of meadowland is a vivid carpet of green, when the winding hilly lanes flanked by tall hedges are white and shadowless, and the little tinkling runlets are silver gleams, and then this tract of Arthur’s Cornwall is almost the land of faerie which poets have sung.
Photo: R. Webber, Boscastle]
THE ELEPHANT ROCK, BOSSINEY COVE
[To face p. 102