George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

Pixies, legends, and philology, however, all took a place in his keen inquiries secondary to authentic recollections of his father’s youth. He makes full notes of two anecdotes related to him. Henry Borrow’s account of the Menheniot Fair affray, as the traveller pencilled it down, is full of delicious filial exultation, which is repeated in another story, narrated to him by Thomas Borrow, of Lamellion, and thus set forth:

“My father.—At one time, at Bodmin Bridge, was a big, bony man six foot high, the terror of everybody at Plymouth and Devonport. My father fought him at Liskeard, just by a butcher’s shop. My father struck him a blow which sent him staggering across the street into a cooper’s shop. He got up and came on again, saying, ‘Where is Borrow?’ ‘Here I am,’ said my father, and struck him another blow which knocked him down, after staggering six yards. He was dreadfully sick, and did not ask for Borrow again.”

There is a pathetic as well as a humorous interest in these explorations of Cornish memory for traces of the father who had died in so much doubt as to the future of this son, and so much well-justified scepticism about the prospect of his maintaining himself on his “Armenian or other acquirements.”

Borrow became increasingly anxious to see the wild country on the rock-bound north coast before he left the Duchy for London. Letters from Mrs. Pollard mention his desire to inspect “King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagell.” On February 1st he left Penquite for Tredinnick, to spend a last day and night with the Borrow family there, and to brood again over the memories of his father which the little old house awoke. It was the only night he had slept at Tredinnick; he had been previously “much affected on being taken upstairs, at the remembrance of his father, and shed tears.” After breakfast the next day he set off for a rough cross-country ride, mounted on a horse named Triumph, and accompanied by his cousin, Nicholas Borrow. By way of the road he had twice traversed with Miss Taylor, past Doniert’s grave, by Redgate, and along the valley of the lonely Dreynes river, they cantered to Bolventor and the Jamaica Inn. The derelict village of Bolventor consists at the present time mainly of a large building set in a square of grass-grown cobbles—the erstwhile famous Jamaica Inn. Now deprived of a licence, and selling mineral waters to casual and disconsolate wayfarers or thirsty cyclists, this hostelry, at the time of Borrow’s visit, was a place of some importance—a coaching house upon the main road between London and Falmouth. Not many years before it had been busy day and night with scenes such as those described in the account of the inn in “The Romany Rye,” where Lavengro acted as hostler and clerk of the stables. The coaches clattered over the cobble-stones, and the square echoed with the cries of jarveys and postilions, and the rattle of harness, and the champing of bits. It was already beginning to decline in 1854; for the railway was building far to the south, and a new line of traffic was being opened up.

The two horsemen; now within sight of the greatest hills of Cornwall, Brown Willy and Rough Tor, left the road and struck across the heath in the direction of the mountainous northern horizon. “We then proceeded,” wrote Borrow, “over moor and moss, till we came to a stream, which we forded. It was rocky and dangerous.” If this was, as I suppose, Hanter Gantick, the great ravine in which the Lanke river roars down between banks composed of huge aggregations of granite boulders, the description was not too bold. Even in his wildest adventure, he could hardly have attempted to get a horse across a worse place. “We then ascended another hill, on the top of which we saw at a distance an inhabited country.” The eminence was probably Rough Tor moor, and the cultivated land the undulating country to the north of the central wild. Whichever of the cluster of hills it was, it could not have failed of interest for Borrow. They provided him with hut circles, with a great Logan stone encrusted with Druidical superstitions, the court or “hall” of King Arthur which he had been discussing at Liskeard with Mr. Jago, and the remains of a chapel to St. Michael, whose gate arch was removed some twenty years before to make a doorway for the Britannia Inn, near Altarnun! Having seen his cousin through the wilderness, and pointed out to him the Pisgah sight of “an inhabited country,” Nicholas Borrow bade him an affectionate farewell, and returned with the horses to Tredinnick, while George set out on foot alone to reach Camelford. “I passed by a place called Carn Long, and, striding forward, found myself at Camelford before I expected. A wilder journey over moss and moor I never made.” The “moss,” by which he betokens the bogs in the neighbourhood of Brown Willy, is a notorious great hindrance to travellers who would otherwise ascend these hills in much larger numbers.

The extraordinary scenery and the romantic associations of the country upon which he was now entering amply repaid him for the toils and pains of his day’s scramble across the backbone of Cornwall. He was in King Arthur’s land. At Camelford he trod a battlefield ten centuries old, for here it was that Egbert the Saxon met the Britons of the West in 823. Borrow did not linger in the quaint old town, but pushed on towards Tintagel by way of Slaughter Bridge already mentioned, which inherited its grisly name from that “last weird battle in the West,” where Mordred fell and Arthur received his mortal hurt. Enthusiastic local authorities, more confident than the general, are able to give the date of the conflict as A.D. 543. “At last I reached Tintagel, about 6.30 p.m., and went to an inn (the Wharncliffe Arms), kept by Symmonds,” to whom he had been recommended from Penquite. After such a day he was glad of its shelter and of the creature comforts it offered to a tired man on a cold February night.

The fascinations of Tintagel are many and oddly mingled. The very air seems full of wraiths; the solid and substantial characters of mediæval history have their ghosts hovering about these rugged hills, no less than the more ethereal spectres of the heroes of Arthurian myth. Tintagel Castle, on the heights to the west, to which Borrow turned next day, is an ancient ruin standing on a wonderful site. It has been familiar to most people for a long time as one of the wildest and most picturesque scenes in England, and the impression may remain the same to-day in the minds of those who are imaginative enough to be able to blot out of the picture the incongruous achievements of the modern hotel-builder. But it was not so well known to any but Cornishmen when Borrow visited it, for that was long before the iron road had reached within thirty miles of it. The fable of Arthur’s birth in the impregnable fortress, Dundagil, whose remains now stand gaunt and silent on their rocky eminence, may be dismissed by a date. The architecture of the original castle was Norman; the rebuilding took place in the thirteenth century. There is now a great gulch 200 feet wide between the cliff where the two principal courts stood and the “island”; it was formerly much narrower, and is reputed to have been spanned by a drawbridge. Yet it is pleasant to dream, as Borrow did and as Tennyson did when he lived at Boscastle a year or two later meditating his Idylls, that this was the veritable scene where the blameless King held court, and the Knights of the Round Table served him. Tennyson has shackled the Arthurian legend to Tintagel with links that can never be broken. And it is also pleasant to recall the more authentic and more historical connections of the place—that twelfth century when the Castle was a great stronghold, when the little chapel of St. Julitta was founded upon the height to the west of the island; those days in the thirteenth century when Tintagel was in such height of glory, when David Prince of Wales, seeking refuge in his struggle with Henry the Third, received the hospitality of its Cornish lord. It is not a far cry across the Bristol Channel, past Lundy, to the coast of Wales, and as he looked northward over the grey sea, Borrow could hardly have resisted the customary emotions that the thought of Wales created in him, with his memories of the procession of the bards from Ab Gwylim by Elis Wyn to Gronwy Owen.

But this was rich ground for him, and he was fully employed in absorbing impressions of men and events, past and present, which he briefly recorded in the two notebooks that were afterwards meant to be expanded into his work on Cornwall. There was the quaint harbour of Boscastle near by; there was Forrabury minster, the “silent tower of Bottreux,” with its bell-legend—the story of the peal of bells which an Earl of Bottreux presented to Forrabury in order that its music might rival that of Tintagel, the wreck of the ship which conveyed them from London just off the shore while Tintagel was sounding the curfew, the warning rung for mariners on that grim lee shore by the buried bells when a storm is approaching from the Atlantic. There was the lovely waterfall of St. Knighton’s Kieve. Borrow had a taste in waterfalls, and was eloquent in describing them, though unscientific, as Dr. Russel Wallace has pointed out. The venerable evolutionist, remarking on the progress of his doctrine, illustrated it by the fact that so great a writer as George Borrow could speak of a waterfall as being in all details as it was “‘since the day of creation, and will probably remain to the day of judgment.’” There were other associations—political in kind—which would not have rejoiced him so exceedingly; he had no great love for politicians, especially of the Whig sort who had controlled most of the forty odd pocket boroughs of Cornwall. Bossiney was one of them, the hamlet close to Tintagel, whose chief claim to utility after it ceased to return two members to Parliament was that it contained a smithy.

On the wild coast to the west, at that time almost inaccessible and unknown—where now the tripper in his thousands hears the music of the Atlantic on Trebarwith Strand—he spent three days, walking long distances and reaching as far west as Pentire Point, which guards the Bay of Padstow. On the return journey he took the inland road, through St. Minver and Egloshayle (“the church by the stream”), where, to avoid the evils of continual tidal bores, a pious fifteenth-century parson got up a subscription to build the noble bridge of seventeen arches that spans the River Camel. At Pengelly, close to the celebrated slate quarries of Delabole, he made the last entry in his Cornish journal. He is sitting in the little parlour of the old Delabole Arms, and sees two prints on the wall with inscriptions in French: “Le Revd. Dr. Amour,” and “A l’Amour il faut se rendre.” “In the latter print,” says he, “quite an angelic petit maître. The March of Gentility has reached Pengelley!”

Having packed up his things at Penquite and said good-bye to his Cornish relations, he turned his face eastwards, and was in London on February 10th.