A Book of Cornwall

by S. Baring-Gould

There are three lighthouses--that of S. Agnes, a revolving light; that on an outlying rock, the Bishop, fixed; and that on Round Island, with a red light.

The heights in Scilly are not great; the highest point attained is one hundred and twenty-eight feet. There are some small fresh-water tarns.

The islands take their name from the old Silurian inhabitants, to whom they served as a last refuge where they could maintain their independence, just as the Arran Isles answered the same purpose to their kindred, the Firbolgs, in Ireland. But the general notion is that they take their designation from the conger eels, locally called selli. It is remarkable that they must at one time have contained a much larger population than at present, as the remains of hedges and houses in ruins indicate.

In 993 Olaf Trygvason, of Norway, with Sweyn Forkbeard, of Denmark, together with a fleet of ninety-three ships, came a-harrying the coasts of England. They sailed up the Thames and attacked London, but the citizens behaved with great valour, and beat them off. Then they ravaged the east coast of England, took and burnt Sandwich and Ipswich; next they entered the Blackwater and attacked Maldon. There a great fight ensued. The Saxons were under the command of the eorlderman Britnoth. The Norsemen gained the day, and Britnoth was slain. It is with this battle that one of the earliest remains of Anglo-Saxon poetry deals. It is, unhappily, but a fragment. After recording the fall of the eorlderman, the poet concludes:--

"I am old of age, hence will I not stir;

I will sit by the side of my dead master;

I think to lay me down and die by him I loved."

On the doors of some of the churches in the East of England were formerly "Danes' skins" and the remains of these still exist. When the Anglo-Saxons did succeed in killing a Norseman they flayed him, and nailed his tanned skin against the church door.

Olaf stormed the Castle of Bamborough, then harried the Scottish coast, the Western Isles and the Isle of Man, then Ireland, where "he burned far and wide, wherever inhabited."

Not yet content with blood and flame, he crossed to Wales and ravaged there, then sailed to France to do there what mischief he could. After a while he turned back, and sighted the Scilly Isles, and then ran his fleet into the harbour of S. Mary's, the largest of the isles. Here Olaf heard tell of a hermit who lived in a cell among the granite crags, and who was believed to have the gift of prophecy.