The cannon ball which caused the death of Mr. Keigwyn, the principal inhabitant of the place, is still preserved; and to within these few years an implacable hatred was entertained against the very name of a Spaniard.
There is said to have been a chapel at Mousehole; and another, on the island dedicated to St. Clement, served probably for St. Michael’s Mount, as the island is understood to remain an appendage to that place.
No satisfactory account has ever been given of the change of name from Porth Enys to the ludicrous one now in use; there is indeed a cavern at some distance beyond, spacious, lofty, and strewed with large rocks, therefore as unlikely to suggest the name as any thing that can well be imagined. It most likely arose from some trifling circumstance now forgotten.
Newlyn is somewhat larger than Mousehole, having annexed to it a collection of houses called by a mixture of English and Cornish, “Street Nowan,” the New street.
Both the towns are provided with a pier capable of sheltering small vessels, and above all of protecting the immense assemblage of boats employed in the seine fishery, and in driving for pilchards, mackarel, and herrings; from which large supplies, especially of mackarel, are sent in the spring to London, and pilchards exported to the amount of several thousand hogsheads.
The principal family of this parish in early times was probably Keigwin. To Mr. John Keigwin, born in 1641, we are indebted for the Translations of Mount Calvary, and of the Creation of the World with Noah’s Flood, both of which have been printed by the Editor of this Work, with the original Cornish on the opposite pages; he died about the year 1710. The affairs of the Keigwins got entangled in family disputes, accompanied by protracted litigation in the Court of Chancery, which occasioned their estates to be sold in parcels, and thus gave rise to the extraordinary number of freeholders in the parish of Paul.
Mr. Lysons gives the history of several manors, but they do not contain any thing curious.
The younger branch of the Godolphins, which settled at Treworveneth, having acquired it by a marriage with the daughter and heiress of John Cowling of that place, became extinct by the death of Col. William Godolphin in 1689.
Trungle was the seat of Mr. Hitchens, and afterwards became the residence of Capt. Clutterbuck, a gentleman
from Kent, who came into Cornwall as commandant of the garrison at Scilly. He married a Cornish lady, and settled there. His son practised the law at Marazion.