Then that year there’ll be a soak;
But, should the oak precede the ash,
Why then expect a rainy splash.
The moist air from the ocean condenses over the land, and envelops it in fine fog or rain. But when the sky is clear, with only floating clouds drifting along it, the sunlight and shadows that fall over the landscape through the vaporous air are exquisite in their delicacy of colour; the sun-gleams soft as primrose, the shadows pure cobalt, tenderly laid on as the bloom on the cheek of a plum.
As the tall cliffs on this wild coast lose themselves in mist, so does history, which attaches itself to many a spot along it, stand indistinct and weird in its veil of legend. Kings and saints of whom little authentic is known, whose very dates are uncertain, have given their names to castle and crag and church.
Tintagel Rock is crowned with the ruins of the stronghold of Duke Gorlois, whose wife became the mother of the renowned Arthur, by Uther Pendragon. We have the tale in Geoffry of Monmouth. There, in the home of the shrieking sea-mews, Arthur uttered his first feeble cries. It is a scene well suited to be the cradle of the hero of British myth—a tremendous crag standing out of the sea, which has bored a tunnel through it, and races in and clashes in subterranean passages under the crumbling walls which sheltered Arthur.
The crag is cut off from the mainland by a chasm once spanned by a drawbridge, but now widened by storm so as to threaten to convert Tintagel into an island.
Near Boscastle rises Pentargon, “Arthur’s Head,” a noble black sheer precipice, forming one horn of a little bay into which a waterfall plunges from a green combe.
But there are other names besides those of Arthur, Uther Pendragon, Morwenna, Juliot and Nectan, which are associated with this coast.
At Stowe, in the parish of Kilkhampton, adjoining Morwenstow, lived Sir Bevil Grenville, the Bayard of old Cornwall, “sans peur et sans reproche,” who fought and conquered at Stratton, and fell at Lansdown. Sir Bevil nearly ruined himself for the cause of his king, Charles I.