Next evening was to be given “The Vampire’s Feast; or, The Rifled Tomb.” The tragedy was followed by Allingham’s play, “Fortune’s Frolick” (1799), adapted to the narrow capacities of the company. It was performed in broad Cornish, and interspersed with some rather good and, I fancy, original songs. But surely nowhere else but at Looe could such a reminiscence of the old strolling company-show of fifty or sixty years ago be seen.
But this is not all. A stranger having seen something I wrote about puppet-shows in a paper, wherein I said that the last I had sat through was sixty years ago, wrote to me:—
“At West Looe, far more recently, at the annual fair, which commences on the 6th May, I saw a show in which the figures were all moved by strings manipulated from above. I regret that I am unable to remember the subject of the play, but the droll antics of the puppets, the rapidity of their movements, and the cleverness of the whole thing, remains distinctly impressed on my mind.”
I believe that venerable amusements we old folks saw in our childhood are “resurrected” at West Looe at that 6th May fair. Therefore, if you want to see funny things, go there. The place is still out of the world, but will not long be so, as a London company has bought the cliffs, and is blasting a road in them to make promenade, hotel, and bring the world and the twentieth century to Looe and rumple up the old place.
East Looe is properly in S. Martin’s parish, and the church was a chapel-of-ease to it. At S. Martin’s are a Norman doorway and an early font.
West Looe has a little church, dedicated to S. Nicholas, that long served as town hall and as a theatre for strolling players. Here also are some quaint old slated houses; the “valleys” are not leaded, but the slates are so worked as to fold over the angles very ingeniously and picturesquely, and admirably answering the object in view of carrying off the water.
Off the coast lies Looe Island. This was for many years the dwelling-place of a man named Fyn and his sister, “Black Joan.” They were son and daughter of an outlaw, who had spent his life since his outlawry on the Mewstone off Gara Point, at the entrance of Plymouth Sound. Here he and his wife lived a wild life like sea-mews, and there reared their young, who grew up without any religious, moral, or intellectual training. The outlaw died on the Mewstone, and Fyn and his sister, accustomed from infancy to an island life, could not endure the thought of going to the mainland for the rest of their days, and so they settled on Looe Island. Here they were joined by a negro, and by their united efforts honeycombed the ground under their hovel and the large barn adjoining for the accommodation of smuggled goods. Their only associates were these free-traders.
One day the black man vanished, and it was never known what had become of him, whether he had left or been murdered by Fyn and his sister. There were naturally no witnesses; nothing could be proved against them. Recently a skull has been dug up near the house, and is kept in a box in the dwelling, but it is not that of a negro. Actually there is a layer of human remains about two feet below the surface of the turf, exposed on the east side of the island, where wind and spray are gnawing away the cliff, and any number of teeth and bones may be picked out. Whether these are the remains of an early Christian monastic cemetery, or of shipwrecked sailors buried on the cliffs, cannot be told, as no investigation has been made to discover the approximate period to which this layer of dead men’s bones belongs.
Formerly there was a chapel on the summit of the island, but only its foundations remain. The island belonged to the monastery of Lamana (lan-manachau, the church of the monks) on the mainland.
But to return to the Fyns.