“Hi wouldn’t recommend it, sir. Last week a gent with a motor tried it and the boat tipped and let the car into the water. Hi went down to ’elp them get it out and you could just see the top sticking out at low tide.”
And so we altered our route to go around the estuary—some fifteen miles—rather than chance repeating the exciting experience of our fellow-motorist of the week before. But this is a digression—I had meant to say that there is little to engage our attention for several miles after crossing at Tor Point. The country is studded with rough hills and our route cuts across some of these, a wide outlook often rewarding the steep climb to the summits. We cautiously follow the sinuous road until it pitches sharply down into the ravinelike coomb occupied by the Looes, East and West, according to their position on the river. These villages cling to the steep hills, rising from either side of the river, which we cross by a lichen-covered bridge hung with a multitude of fishing nets. We see a confused medley of houses elbowing one another out into the roadway until their sagging gables nearly meet in places, built apparently with sublime disregard of the points of the compass and without any preconceived plan. Once it was a famous fishing port, but now the industry is conducted on a small scale only and the Looes have to depend largely on vacationists from Plymouth in summertime. We do not linger here, but after crossing the bridge we enter the narrow road that cuts straight across the hills to Polperro. It is a rough, hilly road and the heavy grades shift the gears more than once; but it carries us to splendid vantage-points where we pause to glance at the landscape. There are wide expanses of wooded hills with lovely intersecting valleys, the predominating green dashed with broad splotches of purple heather—the rankest and most brilliant of any we saw in a land famous for its heather! Over all stretches the mottled sky, reflecting its moods on the varied scenes beneath—here a broad belt of sunlight, yonder a drifting shower, for it is one of those fitful days that alternately smiles and weeps. We descend another long hill and enter the lane which runs down the ravine into the main street of Polperro.
A STREET IN EAST LOOE—CORNWALL
The main street of Polperro! Was there ever another avenue like it?—a cobble-paved, crooked alley scarce a half dozen feet from curb to curb, too narrow for vehicles of any kind to pass. The natives come out and stare in wonderment at our presumption in driving a motor into Polperro—and we become a little doubtful ourselves when a sharp turn bars our progress near the post office. A man, seeing us hesitate, tells us we cannot very well go farther—a suggestion with which we quite agree—and leaving the car surrounded by a group of wondering children we set out on foot to explore the mysteries of Polperro.
I think we can truthfully declare that of all the queer villages we saw in Britain—and it would be a long story to tell of them—no other matched the simple, unpretentious fisher-town of Polperro. No huge hotel with glaring paint, no amusement pier or promenade, none of the earmarks of the conventional resort into which so many fine old towns have—shall I say degenerated?—are to be seen; nothing but the strangest jumble of old stone houses, wedged in the narrow ravinelike valley. So irregularly are they placed, with such a total disregard of straight lines and directions, that it seems, as one writer has remarked, that they might originally have been built on the hillsides at decent distances from each other and by some cataclysm slid down in a solid mass along the river. The streets are little more than footpaths and wind among a hundred odd corners, of which the one shown in our sketch is only typical. We cross the river—at low tide only a shallow stream—by the narrow high-arched bridge, whose odd design and lichen-covered stones are in perfect keeping with the surroundings, and come out on the sea wall that overlooks the tiny harbor. A dozen old salts—dreaming, no doubt, of their active younger days on the blue sea stretching out before them—are roused from their reveries and regard us curiously. Evidently tourists are not an everyday incident in Polperro, and they treat us with the utmost civility, answering our queries in broad Cornish accent that we have to follow closely to understand. A few fishing boats still go out of the town, but its brave old days are past; modern progress, while it has left Polperro quite untouched, has swept away its ancient source of prosperity. Once its harbor was a famous retreat for smugglers, who did a thriving business along the Cornish coast, and it is possible some of these old fellows may have heard their fathers tell thrilling tales of the little craft which slipped into the narrow inlet with contraband cargos; of wrecks and prizes, with spoils of merchandise and gold, so welcome to the needy fisherfolk, and of fierce and often deadly conflicts with the king’s officers.
POLPERRO, CORNWALL—LOOKING TOWARD THE SEA