The whole of the St. Columb district is rich in large tracts of wild and picturesque country, which include such heights as Denzell Downs, St. Issey Beacon, and St. Breock Downs, near which last stand the "Naw Mean", or, in modern English, the Nine Maidens. At the present time there are but eight of these upright stones, which tradition asserts were originally maidens who were turned into stone for dancing on Sunday to the strains of a fiddler, who shared the same fate, as witness a tall pillar of rock near by called the "Fiddler".
On the drive from Newquay to Bedruthan Steps no one should fail to make a halt at Mawgan, or, to be strictly accurate, St. Mawgan in Pydar, either on the outward or the return journey. The village is a pretty one that lies in the centre of the beautiful Vale of Mawgan, or Lanherne, which stretches from St. Columb to the porth, or cove on the coast. Mawgan possesses an ancient parish church and a Roman Catholic convent and chapel. The church is a very fine Perpendicular building with a tower 70 feet in height. The building was restored by Butterfield, but contains some interesting old screenwork and a number of well-carved bench ends. The brasses include that of a priest, circa 1420; Cecily Arundell, 1578; a civilian, circa 1580; and Jane, daughter of Sir John Arundell, circa 1580. This last is a palimpsest, made up of portions of two Flemish brasses, circa 1375. The churchyard contains a beautifully sculptured fourteenth-century lantern cross, of mediæval date, in the form of an octagonal shaft. Under four niches at the summit are sculptured representations of: God the Father with the Dove bearing a crucifix; an Abbot; an Abbess; and a King and Queen. The height of the cross is 5 feet 2 inches, the breadth of the head being 1 foot 1 inch.
The convent, the "lone manse" of Lanherne, was originally the manor house of the Arundells, which was, in the last years of the eighteenth century, presented by a Lord Arundell of Wardour to a sisterhood of Carmelite nuns who had fled from Antwerp in 1794. One or two of the pictures in the convent chapel are attributed to Rubens. Strangers may attend service in the chapel, but the nuns, like those of the order of St. Bridget at Syon Abbey, Chudleigh, are recluses of the strictest kind.
While at Mawgan a stroll should be taken through the groves of Carnanton, the old-time abode of William Noye, the "crabbed" Attorney-General to Charles I, whose heart, we are told by his biographers, was found at his death to have become shrivelled up into the form of a leather purse.
A mile beyond Mawgan Porth are the far-famed Bedruthan Steps seven miles from Newquay. Here the visitor will find a fine stretch of cliff scenery, with a succession of sandy beaches strewn with confused and broken masses of rock, and some large caverns that are well worth exploring should the state of the tide permit. The largest of these caverns is of vast extent and is said to be unrivalled in this respect along the whole of the Cornish seaboard. At low tide the great spurs of rock embedded in the sand have a fantastic beauty, while one of the largest of them bears a more than fancied resemblance to Queen Elizabeth, and is named after her. Another is known as the Good Samaritan, as against these jagged points an East Indiaman of this name once came to grief, when the local women folk are said to have replenished their wardrobes with a quantity of fine silks and satins.
The coast beyond Bedruthan, by Trevose and Pentire Heads, Padstow, Tintagel, Boscastle, Bude, and Morwenstowe, although abounding in wild and rugged scenery, and full of romantic and literary associations, is beyond our present limits. This being so we may conclude with the words of J. D. Blight, one of the most learned of the older school of Cornish antiquaries:
"Those who wish to behold nature in her grandest aspect, those who love the sea breezes, and the flowers which grow by the cliffs, the cairns and monumental rocks, all hoary and bearded with moss, those who are fond of the legends and traditions of old, and desire to tread on ground sacred to the peculiar rites and warlike deeds of remote ages, should visit the land of Old Cornwall."