Having been a little more than a fortnight at Penquite, he began his walking tour through Cornwall to the extreme west. At Mousehole, not far from the Land’s End, lived one Burney, an officer of the coastguard, who was a distant connection of the family. Taylor had given Borrow a letter of introduction to him. “You can only see Cornwall or know anything about it by walking through it,” he wrote to his wife. The secrets of Cornwall, the conditions of its detachment, the spell of its romance, can only be penetrated by the man who “the known track . . . deserts, and has a by-way of his own.” He must explore its hills and combes, and its remoter villages for their archæological treasures—whether of the prehistoric races who have left their mark upon its sad grey stones, or of the saints and heroes of the early Christian time, or of the authors and the actors of its Mystery Plays—and he must know the simple folk of its ancient blood to probe the riches of their lore. Even Borrow hardly turned far enough aside from the beaten paths to get more than a very general impression of the country; but he was a man who observed readily and absorbed eagerly.
Nicholas Borrow, his cousin, was his topographical mentor and guide on many expeditions, and, now that he was leaving for the West, accompanied him on horseback across country to set him in the main road. He saw Tremewth, where his father’s comrade, Thomas Honey, lived on the top of the hill, and the field near Redgate containing the grave of King Doniert (or Dungerth), the lord of the Western Britons in the ninth century, with its broken pillar and Latin inscription. Parting with his cousin, he walked on to Lostwithiel, the end of his first day’s journey, took his ease in the Talbot Inn, and feasted on roast fowl and bacon. The ancient stannary town, with its shire hall dating from the thirteenth century, and its memories of the Civil War—when Essex stabled his horses in the church, and his troopers brought a horse to the font and with a mock baptism sardonically gave it the name of Charles—produced mingled emotions in Borrow’s mind, for, in spite of his militant Protestantism, he was a staunch Tory and a Royalist. Turning aside to see the hoary Castle of Restormel, which had been a ruin since the time of Edward the Third, he recorded some vivid impressions of the neighbourhood as “the most beautiful he ever saw.”
They will not appear exaggerated to those who have approached it as Borrow did through the wonderful Glyn Valley, by the road which follows the river brawling down from its moorland birthplace towards the sea at Fowey. The second day he covered twenty-four miles to Truro. The sight of a cairn on a hill top “brought the Spirit of Old upon my mind.” Antiquis debetur reverentia was always a potent principle with Borrow; nevertheless, the modern Protestant within him sometimes got the better of the antiquary. On the previous day he had seen a cross, and examined it. This monument “seemed to have been raised by some Puseyite. The base contained a nonsensical inscription to the effect that it had been erected on a place which had been devoted to ‘Druidic Idolatry.’ The Druids were no idolaters, though the Papists are.” [179] It was darkening to evening when he passed through Grampound, one of the minute derelict boroughs of Cornwall, whose disfranchisement in 1821 was the one and only result of Lord John Russell’s first agitation against electoral corruption. The appearance of The Dolphin Inn, looking snug with its lighted windows and air of warmth and comfort, was a strong invitation to a tired wayfarer who had more often than most men
“. . . by care oppressed
Found in an inn a place of rest.”
He looked wistfully at it, but withstood the temptation (with the assistance of Swayne Vonved), and pushed on through the rainy night to Truro, and to dinner and bed at the Royal Hotel.
In the morning he inspected the town, and visited the church—which no longer exists save as a fragment built into the northern side of Benson’s great cathedral—and then started again for the West. His walk extended no farther than ten miles that day. On his arrival at Redruth, one of the centres of the mining district, he was arrested by the great hill of Carn Brea, to the north-west of the town. Its noble summit is one of the most striking features of the landscape viewed from any part of West Cornwall, and it is the haunt of many legends—mostly unauthentic and nearly all ridiculous. The entertaining old Borlase, in his “Antiquities of Cornwall,” invented a grotesque set of theories about the origin of the curiously-shaped rocks that strew the long length of the hill’s crest. Borlase saw Druids everywhere, and Druidical sculpture in every freak Nature had played through countless centuries with the granite which she found so pliable. It was inconceivable in his time that the “basins” and channels in the rocks of Carn Brea could have been merely the result of “weathering,” as the geologists inform us now they must have been. “In yonder grave a Druid lies” was predicated by Borlase of every mound he saw. One perceives that Borrow adopted all his theories without modification. On Carn Brea he was not merely on a magnificent precipitous hill, with a wide-stretching view away to the Atlantic on the north; he was in the midst of a thousand memories of the past; the “Spirit of Old” came upon him again; white-robed priests defiled along the heather, and performed their sacrificial rites upon the granite altars. The notes he made about Carn Brea were, says he, “written on the top of the sacrificial rock. In the upper basin, the horrid place of sacrifice, there are outlets for the blood to stream down. There seem to be about eight basins in all.” William Borlase himself could have accomplished nothing better than that.
On January 12th he set off from Redruth towards Penzance in torrents of rain. Just above Rosewarne he came across a gypsy caravan, and of necessity must go to find its inhabitants and talk with them. A dark woman addressed him; he asked her her name in Romany. She pretended at first not to understand, but finally answered him. Presently her husband, “a remarkably knavish-looking personage,” put out his head and began to discourse with him. He told him that their name was Bosvile. It will be remembered that the “Flaming Tinman” of Mumper’s Dingle was called Bosvile. The Bosviles, or Boswells, as they were called in later days, were, in fact, a well-known tribe of gypsies in the West of England. Another family, real Cornish in all their associations, formed a branch of the ubiquitous Smiths. In 1866 they departed from England almost in a body for America, where most of the Stanleys and the Coopers had already gone.
While talking with Bosvile and his mort, Borrow heard the sound of fiddles in an adjoining tent, and was invited to join the company, for doubtless his perfect knowledge of the language and his unfailing fascination over the gypsies had overcome all their first suspicions; but he told them that he was “mokhado” (muddy and dirty), gave them a four-penny piece, and departed. He went through Hayle, then, and now, one of the Cornish homes of industry, which he contemptuously dismisses as “a filthy place.” Reaching Penzance in the evening, he dined at the Union Hotel, and held converse with a mining agent, whom he discovered to be “a sensible man, full of Cornish patriotism.”
On the 13th he turned up Mr. Burney at Mousehole, one of the quaintest fishing villages among the hundred peppered round the Cornish coast, and found him excellent company. There is just a glimpse in his memoranda of the kind of miscellany Borrow might have given to the world if he had ever written his book on Cornwall—a mixture of travel and religion, legend and dialogue, philology and adventure. A page or two would certainly have been occupied by the story which Burney told him the first day they met of his doings on the West Coast of Africa—many naval officers of the mid-century could relate good stories of slave-chasing in those regions—and especially of the triumphant expedition to the town of a native king, who at first resisted their demands, his capital being fortified and defended by thirty guns of sorts. The essence of the tale was that while the palaver was in progress Burney’s gunner went round and drenched the touch-holes of all the thirty defending pieces. Borrow returned to Penzance that night: again, had the book been written, we should doubtless have been in possession of the full narrative of the experiences of that mining agent who had been in Greenland; but he is only just dotted down, a bare, unclothed lay figure in the surviving Notes. For the rest of his time in West Penwith, Borrow was the guest of Mr. Burney, exploring the country of Dolly Pentreath, who in the eighteenth century had spoken the Cornish language, and examining the traces there remaining of the Spanish expedition against the Cornish coasts in 1595. On the Sunday he went to church at Paul (where Dolly Pentreath was buried), and in the evening “read the Bible and prayers to the family” of Burney.
There was, of course, a trip to St. Michael’s Mount, the show-place of those parts, that castle on an island in Mount’s Bay, which approaches in singularity and beauty, if it does not quite reach the glory of, its namesake Mont St. Michel on the coast of Normandy. Borrow went with Burney by boat from Mousehole, and observed with curiosity the points of greatest interest on the island and about the buildings—the bastion by which the Parliamentarians were said to have entered when they attacked the place during the Civil War, the chapel within the castle, and the stone vault underneath it in which a skeleton was found. Full of his scheme for the book on Cornwall, he made his memoranda as he went in order that the impressions might be quite fresh. Just as he set down old William Borlase’s superstitions “on the top of the sacrificial rock” at Carn Brea, so he records that his notes on St. Michael’s Mount were written in the vault.