It was perhaps on some tempestuous winter night at the Land's End that the fancy, told as a legend or superstitious belief in J. H. Pearce's Cornish Drolls, occurred to him or to some one, that the Wolf Rock was the habitation of a great black dog, a terrible supernatural beast that preys on the souls of the dead. For the rock lies directly in the route of those who die on the mainland and journey over the sea to their ultimate abode, the Scilly Isles: and when the wind blows hard against them and they are beaten down like migrating birds and fly close to the surface, he is able as they come over the rock to capture and devour them.
During these vigils, when I was in a sense the "last man" in that most solitary place, its associations, historical and mythical, exercised a strange power over me. Here, because of its isolation, or remoteness, from Saxon England, because it is the very end of the land, "the westeste point of the land of Cornewalle," the ancient wild Spirit of the people remained longest unchanged, and retained much of its distinctive character down to within recent times. It was a Celtic people with an Iberian strain, even as in Wales and Ireland and Scotland. Now, either because of a different proportion of the dark aboriginal blood, or of the infusion of Scandinavian and other racial elements, or some other cause, these four Celtic families differ very widely, as we know; but we think, or at all events are accustomed to say, that they are an imaginative, a poetic people. Doubtless in Cornwall this spirit was always weakest, since it never succeeded in expressing itself in any permanent form; but albeit feeble it probably did exist, and in this very district, this end of all the land, it must have lingered longest. If this be so it is strange to think that it was perhaps finally extinguished by the Wesley brothers—one with the poetry of the Hebrews ever on his lips, the other with his own lyrical gift!
It may be said that in the middle of the eighteenth century the light must have been so feeble that it would have soon expired of itself if Methodism had not trampled out the last faint sparks; and it may also be said that the Cornish people did not lose much, seeing that this root had never flowered; that they had never sung and never said anything worth remembering; while on the other hand their gain was a substantial one, for though it imposed an ugly form of religion and ugly houses of worship, it changed them (so the Methodists say) from brutality and vice to what they are—a temperate, law-abiding people. But I shall have something more to say on this subject in a later chapter.
Here among the rocks by night I think less of these moral changes, and of other events within historical times, than of those which came before, of which we have no certain knowledge. We can only assume that in the successive invasions during the Bronze Age this was invariably the last place conquered and last refuge of a beaten fugitive people.
I recall here a strange phenomenon in wild-bird life occasionally witnessed in this district. Cornwall has a singularly mild and equable climate, but great frosts do at long intervals invade it and reach to the very extremity of the land: and when a cold wave, like that of the winter of 1906-7, travels west, the birds flying for life before it advance along the Cornish country until they come to a point beyond which they cannot go, for the affrighting ocean is before them and they are spent with hunger and cold. They come in a continuous stream, to congregate in tens of thousands, covering the cliffs and fields and stone hedges; and the villagers turn out with guns and nets and sticks and stones to get their fill of killing.
So in the dreadful past, whenever a wave of Celtic conquest swept west, the unhappy people were driven further and further from the Tamar along that tongue of land, their last refuge, but where there were no rivers and mountains to stay the pursuers, nor forests and marshes in which to hide, until they could go no further, for the salt sea was in front of them. They too, like the frost-afflicted birds, gathered in thousands and sat crowded in every headland and promontory and every stony hill summit, ever turning their worn dusty faces and glazed eyes to the east to watch for the coming of the foe—the strong, fiendish, broadfaced, blue-eyed men with metal weapons in their hands, spear and sword and battle-axe.
These are the people I think about on dark tempestuous evenings in this solitary place; Bolerium is haunted by the vast ghostly multitude.
