THE LOGAN ROCK.
We leave the quiet churchyard and its tragic story to continue our walk around the island. A tramp on the promontory Peninnis, which stretches out southward into the sea, brings to view many fantastic rock formations. Great boulders are left curiously poised upon each other by the action of wind and wave in ages past. Pulpit Rock, composed of huge flat blocks of stone resting on each other and leaning out to sea, is perhaps the most famous, though why it should be called “Pulpit Rock” is more than one can well guess. It looks more like an hundred other things than it does like a pulpit. Most of all it resembles a great gun mounted on the rock to command the sea at this point. We next encounter the Logan Rock (pronounce loggan). Everyone who has read Baedaker’s “Great Britain” knows of the existence of Logan Rock in Cornwall, a rock of sixty-five tons weight so delicately poised that it can be set in motion quite easily. I was not aware before that the phenomenon had repeated itself, but I learned last summer that there was quite a number of these “loggan,” or rolling rocks to be found at different places.
The Logan Rock at St. Mary’s is quite famous and was discovered somewhat recently by accident. A resident of the town, overtaken by the storm, took shelter beneath a huge rock. The wind was blowing fiercely and to his great surprise, if not terror, he discovered that the rock was moving gently to and fro. He could scarcely believe his senses at first, but on further examination, he found it was so poised that it readily responded to his efforts and could be made to sway back and forth. Its estimated weight is three hundred and sixty tons, and while it requires some energetic effort to put it in motion it rocks with ease afterwards.
Hugh Town, the port and principal town of the island of St. Mary’s, and indeed of the entire group of islands, enjoys a very unique situation. On the southwest a promontory juts out into the sea. This is the site of Star Fort, and one can make its circuit in about half an hour. It is joined to the mainland by a narrow isthmus of sand which separates St. Mary’s Pool, the harbor on the north, from Porth Cressa Bay, on the south. On this narrow strip of land, across which a boy can cast a stone, and over which the high tide threatens to leap, Hugh Town is built. There is no pretension to architecture, no striking buildings, none even that have the interest of antiquity to recommend them. The town is practically contained on the narrowest part of the isthmus, though westward, where the strip of land widens, the houses scatter somewhat. Save for its audacious situation, daring, as it does, the rage of the sea from both sides, it is commonplace and uninteresting.
HUGH TOWN.
Too much cannot be said in favor of the islands as a health resort. They are so small in area, and lie so low, that living on them is practically living at sea. One may here take a protracted cruise with no reeling deck beneath him, and no nightmare of mal-de-mer to threaten his dreaming hours.
There are no manufactures of any kind on the island, nor is anything present to vitiate the air. Sea breezes, from the illimitable reaches of the ocean, sweep at will across these tiny bits of land, from every point of the compass, in quick succession. In winter the mean temperature is 45 and in summer it is 58. The rain fall is very moderate and, with fine consideration for the tourist, the rain generally comes at night, a phenomenon noticeable in Cornwall also.
Here is a fine resting place for men and women, physically or mentally weary. The rush of modern business life is wholly unknown; there are no street cars nor elevated trains to catch; there is no congestion of traffic in the streets; no roar of vehicles nor hum of business to disturb the absolute rest that the place suggests or to chide one who is disposed to take life easy. One lies down at night with the murmur of distant waters echoing through his dreams and wakens in the morning to the song of the surf.
The islands are said to be a “haven of refuge for sufferers from chronic bronchitis, phthisis and consumption in all its terrible forms, insomnia, and the strain of overwork; and for children one vast playground with free and open beaches and sands difficult to surpass.”