It is a curious fact that little flotsam and jetsam comes up on the isles. The Atlantic tides divide and run up on each side of the tides that course along the shores of the islands.
Formerly Scilly was a favourite breeding-place for birds, but now they no longer employ it for this purpose, or do so to a very minor degree.
There are traces of streaming for tin in some of the isles, but no mineral veins are now known to run through the Scilly granite. Ferns abound, but the islands are a little disappointing to the botanist, though to a florist they are a paradise.
To give a true idea of Scilly I must quote from Armorel, for such as have not the book:—
“The visitor who comes by one boat and goes away by the next thinks he has seen this archipelago. As well stand inside a cathedral for half an hour and then go away thinking you have seen all. It takes many days to see these fragments of Lyonesse and to get a true sense of the place.”
By the way, the idea that Scilly represents the peaks of a submerged realm of Lyonesse is altogether baseless. Lyonesse is the realm of Leon in Brittany, so-called because founded by colonists from Caerleon, who fled from the swords of the Saxons. It remained a little independent principality till at the close of the sixth century it became incorporated with the principality of Domnonia, in Brittany.
“Everywhere in Scilly there are the same features: here a hill strewn with boulders; there a little down with fern and gorse and heath; here a bay in which the water, on such days as it can be approached, peacefully laps a smooth white beach; here dark caves and holes in which the water always, even in the calmest days of summer, grumbles and groans, and, when the least sea rises, begins to roar and bellow—in time of storm it shrieks and howls.... All round the rocks at low tide hangs the long seaweed, undisturbed since the days when they manufactured kelp, like the rank growth of a tropical creeper: at high tide it stands up erect, rocking to and fro in the wash and sway of the water like the tree-tops of the forest in the breeze. Everywhere, except in the rare places where men come and go, the wild sea-birds make their nests; the shags stand on the ledges of the highest rocks in silent rows gazing upon the water below; the sea-gulls fly, shrieking in sea-gullic rapture—there is surely no life quite so joyous as the sea-gull’s; the curlews call; the herons sail across the sky; and in spring millions of puffins swim and dive and fly about the rocks and lay their eggs in the hollow places of these wild and lonely islands.”
Is not that beautiful writing? But it is not fanciful; it is beautiful because true, absolutely true. Go and see if it be not so.
Have you ever made acquaintance with the horrors of Lowestoft, a flat insipid shore, where the sea is always charged with mud and no breakers thunder, where the land scene is as dull and insipid as is the sea-scape? I was there last summer. It was a dismal place, made the more dismal by being invaded and pervaded, spread out, exposed, devoted to the “tripper.” And I fled to the west coast to see the Atlantic, with the water crystal clear, through which you look down into infinity, and to the glorious cliffs about which that transparent water tosses, shakes its silver mane, curls its waves blue and iridescent as a peacock’s neck, and I wondered that any should ever visit the east coast of England.
“All the islands, except the bare rocks, are covered with down and moorland, bounded in every direction by rocky headlands and slopes covered with granite boulders. And always, day after day, they came continually upon unexpected places: strange places, beautiful places: beaches of dazzling white; wildly-heaped earns; here a cromlech, a logan stone, a barrow; a new view of sea and sky and white-footed rock. I believe that there does not live any single man who has actually explored all the isles of Scilly, stood upon every rock, climbed every hill, and searched on every island for its treasures of ancient barrows, plants, birds, cairns, and headlands. Once there was a worthy person who came here as chaplain to S. Martin’s. He started with the excellent intention of seeing everything. Alas! he never saw a single island properly: he never walked round one exhaustively. He wrote a book about them, to be sure; but he saw only half.”