Brent Tor
There are some places—the Castle of Elsinore, for instance—that seem to have an amazing and incomprehensible gift of resisting civilization. They may be brought up to date, and trimmed, and filled with inappropriate people, and everything else done that should spoil them, but in spite of it all they do not for a moment look as if any modern extraneous objects had a meaning for them. They belong to their own day and its manner, and to no other.
The same sort of feeling hovers about Tavy Cleave, and a great sense of the mystery that here more, there less, broods over the moor. But there is no suggestion as to who it is that the moor has most truly and absolutely belonged to, nor even the region of time: only the feeling that the valley is, in a finer than the usual sense, haunted.
As a valley Tavy Cleave is very beautiful, with its steep sides and clear rushing stream and red granite rocks, half in and half out of the river, that have a charm they entirely lose when once away from the water. Mr Widgery shows how admirable they are in their proper place, with their reflections quivering beneath them. Sometimes a kind of black moss grows upon them, and tiny bits of white lichen, giving together a curious tortoiseshell look. Above, the hill-sides are covered with heather and broom and whortleberries among masses of loose rocks, and now and again there is the vivid green of a patch of bog. The great masses of rocks crowning the separate points on the hill-side, like ruined rock-castles, add to the air of mystery.
Looking to the west from above the Cleave, one sees—as from any distance round one sees—the most characteristic height of Brent Tor, with the tiny church on the top. It is not that the tor is so very high, but in some astonishing way it always seems to appear as a landmark, north, south, east, or west, when one imagines it to be absolutely out of range. The sides are steep and rocky, and the church stands 'full bleak and weather-beaten, all-alone as it were, forsaken, whose churchyard doth hardly afford depth of earth to bury the dead; yet doubtless they rest there as securely as in sumptuous St Peter's until the day of Doom.'
The story told of the church is that a man once almost gave himself up for lost—some say in a storm, others in an impenetrable, unending fog—in the Channel, and vowed that, if he ever came safe to shore, he would build a church on the first bit of land he saw. As Brent Tor is far inland, the fog story sounds the more probable, for there is no saying how mist wreaths may drift. The church is dedicated to St Michael de la Rupe, and here another tradition comes in, for it is popularly supposed that, when the building of the church was begun, the devil pulled away all the day's work in the night. At last St Michael came to the rescue, and hurled such an enormous mass of rock upon the devil that he fled away and hindered no more. The building is very tiny, and a countryman told me that as a child he used to be puzzled by the cryptic warning: 'If you get into the second aisle of Brent Tor Church, you will never get out again.' Of course—there is no second aisle.
The beauty of many of the places on the banks of the Tamar is celebrated. Among the exquisite woods and lawns of Endsleigh—through which one Duke of Bedford cut no less than forty miles in rides—the river twists and winds for a long distance at one point, and curves round almost into a ring. A little farther south are Morwell Rocks, which Mr Norway had the good fortune to see in the spring. 'The trees stretch far away along the river, dense and close to the water's edge, a mountain of gold and sunny green, broken in the midst by a high grey crag, which stands up sheer and grey amid the mass of gorgeous colour. This is the first peak of a great range of limestone cliffs, which for the most part, as the hill sweeps round above the village of Morwellham, are hidden in the woods. But when that tiny cluster of cottages and wharves is left behind, the stream creeps closer to the hill, and it is as if the buried rock stirred and flung the coppice off its shoulders, for the limestone precipices rise vertically out of the water to a vast height. The summits are weathered into most fantastic shapes, pinnacles and towers break the skyline, and wherever a crevice in the rock has allowed the lodging of a little earth, some oak-tree roots itself, or a wild tangle of greenery drops down the scarred surface of the cliff.'
A little farther down, the Tamar and the Tavy join, and with the Cornish Lynher form the Hamoaze—a view of land and water that is very admirable. It is not a scene whose dimly realized charm grows gradually stronger, but one whose triumphant beauty is beyond dispute. The innumerable creeks and inlets, the rich abundance of foliage and pasture, and the sweeping sense of spaciousness from the open sea that comes off Plymouth Sound, help to make the grand effect; and the feelings of few can be quite unstirred by the battleships, or perhaps black sinister destroyers, and the multitude of other shipping lying at anchor in that famous haven, and by the thought of all that they mean to us.