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CHAPTER III CORNWALL'S CONNEMARA
Aspect of the country—Gilpin on Cornish scenery—The farm-houses—Footpaths and stiles—Cattle and pigs—A friendly sow—Dogs and foxes—Stony fields—Farmers' love of their holdings—An old farmer.
THE coast country at the end or the western extremity of Cornwall presents an aspect wild and rough as any spot in England. The eighty-miles-long county, which some one compares to a malformed knobbly human leg in shape, narrows down near its termination to a neck or ankle of land no more than six or seven miles wide, with St. Ives Bay on one (the north) side, and Mount's Bay on the other, with its group of places of famous or familiar names—Mousehole, Newlyn, Penzance, Marazion and St. Michael's Mount. Then the land broadens again, forming that rounded bit of country, the westernmost part of England, containing seventy-five or eighty square miles of hilly and moorland country, in great part treeless, with a coastline, from bay to bay, of about thirty miles. Following the coast, one does not wish them more: the most enthusiastic lover of an incult nature, who delights in forcing his way over rocky barriers and through thickets of furze, bogs and rills innumerable, will find these thirty miles as satisfying as any sixty elsewhere. And the roughest, therefore most exhilarating, portion of the coast is that between St. Ives and Land's End, a distance of about twenty miles. This strip of country has been called the Connemara of Cornwall. William Gilpin, that grand old seeker after the picturesque at the end of the eighteenth century, once journeyed into Cornwall, but got no further than Bodmin, as he saw nothing but "a barren and naked country, in all respects as uninteresting as can well be conceived," and he was informed that west of Bodmin it was no better. It is, indeed, worse, and one wonders what his feelings would have been had he persevered to the very end—to rough "Connemara" and flat, naked Bolerium! His strictures on the scenery would have amused the present generation. For all that repelled Gilpin and those of his time in nature, the barren or "undecorated," as he would say, the harsh and savage and unsuited to human beings, now most attracts us. And of all places inhabited by man this coast country is the most desert-like and desolate in appearance. The black, frowning, wave-beaten cliffs on the one hand, the hills and moors on the other, treeless, strewn abundantly with granite boulders, rough with heath and furze and bracken, the summits crowned with great masses of rock resembling ancient ruined castles. Midway between the hills and the sea, half a mile or so from the cliffs, are the farms, but the small houses and walled fields on the inhabited strip hardly detract from the rude and savage aspect of the country. Nature will be Nature here, and man, like the other inhabitants of the wilderness, has adapted himself to the conditions. The badgers have their earths, the foxes their caverns in the rocks, and the linnet, yellow-hammer, and magpie hide their nests, big and little, in the dense furze bushes: he in like manner builds his dwelling small and low, sheltering as best he can in any slight depression in the ground, or behind thickets of furze and the rocks he piles up. The small naked stone farm-house, with its little outbuildings, corn-stacks, and wood piles huddling round it, seem like a little flock of goats drawn together for company and shelter in some rough desert place on a cold windy day. Looking from a hill-top on one of the small groups of buildings—and in some instances two or three farms have clubbed their houses together for better protection from the blast—they resemble toy houses, and you have the fancy that you could go down and pick them up and put them in your pocket.
The coast road, running from village to village, winding much, now under now over the hills, comes close to some of the farms and leaves others at a distance; but all these little human centres are united by a footpath across the fields.
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It is very pleasant to follow this slight track, this connecting thread, which brings to mind Richard Carew's account of the poor Cornish farmers of his time, three centuries ago, when he says that "amongst themselves they agree well and company lovingly together." I recall, too, that some social rodents, that live in communities, in collections of burrows or villages, have a track of that kind leading from village to village, worn by the feet of the little animals in visiting their neighbours. The fields being small you have innumerable stiles to cross in a five or a ten miles walk; but they do not want climbing, as they are very nearly all of that Cornish type made with half a dozen or more large slabs of granite placed gridiron-wise almost flush with the ground. You step easily over the stones: but the cattle do not follow, since, owing to their inability to see just where their feet will be set, their legs would come down between the slabs.
Cows are in most of the fields, the dairy being the main thing in these farms; and next to the small Jersey-like cow, the native breed, the pig ranks in importance. It is pleasant to see the pigs in these parts, as they are allowed more liberty in the fields and about the house than they usually get in other places; or, indeed, anywhere on this side of St. George's Channel. If not "the gintleman that pays the rint," the pig contributes a good deal towards it, and short of liberty to walk in at the front door and take his place in the family circle he has every consideration paid him. On going up to a farm-house one is sometimes obliged to get round or step over a pig lying comfortably in the path. One day, going to call on some friends who had taken lodgings at a small farm, I found a portly sow lying in the way a dozen yards or so from the front door. My friends were getting ready for a walk, and when we came out the sow got up and, placing herself at the side of the lady, set out with us. We all tried our best to turn her back, shouting indignantly at her and pushing her away with our sticks and boots, but all in vain—she would come. "I'm to blame," said the lady. "When we first came we had tea out of doors, and when this pig came up to look at us I foolishly gave her a slice of bread and butter and spoke kindly to her, and now I can't get away from her. I give her nothing, and I try to escape her attention, but she watches the door, and when she sees me with my things on she insists on keeping with me even if I walk miles. It is most inconvenient." It certainly was, and we carefully avoided the village for fear of remarks. Fowls, too, are reared in numbers, and it is a great grievance of the farmers that foxes must be religiously preserved along this coast where they cannot be hunted. Here, again, I am reminded of Carew's Survey of Cornwall, in which he writes: "The fox planteth his dwelling in the steep cliffs of the seaside, where he possesseth holds, so many in number, so dangerous of access, and so full of windings, as in a manner it falleth out a matter impossible to disseize him of his ancient inheritance." He still keeps it, and after three centuries is more secure in it than ever, since there is now no stronger law than this unwritten one which gives immunity to the fox.
As a rule, several dogs are kept on the farm; but he cares little for them. His fastness is close by in the cliffs, and between it and the farm there is a wilderness of furze bushes and stone fences, the ins and outs of which he knows better than the dogs. They cannot come near him. At one place the farmer's wife told me the foxes came about the house almost every night and started barking, whereupon the dogs barked in reply, and this would go on, bark fox, bark dog, by the hour, keeping them awake, until at last the dogs, tired of the useless contest, would go to sleep; then the foxes would sneak in to see what they could pick up.
There is very little cultivation—hardly more than is required for the use of the farm, and in many fields even this little is carried on under difficulties on account of the stones. The stones are taken out and piled on to the walls or hedges at the side, and though this process has been going on for centuries many boulders and huge blocks of granite still remain in the little fields. I was amused one day at the sight of a field of only about two acres on which I counted 135 stones appearing like huge mushrooms and toadstools over the ground. Corn had been grown on it, and I asked the farmer how it was managed. He answered that he would laugh to see a man and horses from any other part of the country try to cultivate that field and others like it. Here the men are used to it, and horses know their part so well that if the share touches a stone they stop instantly and wait for the ploughman's word to move on.
This same farmer told me that one day last summer a lady visitor staying in the neighbourhood came to where he was doing some work and burst out in praise of the place, and told him she envied him his home in the dearest, sweetest, loveliest spot on earth. "That's what you think, ma'am," he returned, "because you're here for a week or two in summer when it's fine and the heath in bloom. Now I think it's the poorest, ugliest, horriblest place in the whole world, because I've got to live in it and get my living out of it."
They certainly have to work hard to make the per acre they have to pay for their stony fields. But they are a tough, industrious, frugal people, in many instances little removed from peasants in their way of living, and are strongly attached to their rude homes and rough country. If you tell them that their lot is exceedingly hard, that they pay too high a rent, and so on, enumerating all the drawbacks, they assent eagerly, and will put in many little touches to make the picture darker; but if you then advise them to throw up their farms and migrate to some place you can name, in the Midlands say, where they will pay less for better land, and be out of the everlasting wind which tears every green leaf to shreds and makes their lives a perpetual discomfort, they shake their heads. They cannot endure the thought of leaving their homes. It is only the all but complete ruin of the tin-mining industry that has sent so many Cornishmen into exile in distant lands. But these wanderers are always thinking of home and come back when they can. One meets them every day, young and middle-aged men, back from Africa, Australia, America; not to settle down, since there is nothing for them to do—not just yet at all events; but because they have saved a little and can afford to take that long journey for the joy of seeing the dear old faces again, and the dear familiar land which proved so uninteresting to the reverend author of Forest Scenery.
But farming, unlike the mining and fishing industries, cannot fail utterly, and so long as a living can be made out of it these men will stick to their farms.
One brilliant spring-like day in midwinter I came upon an old man on the footpath at some distance from the nearest house, painfully walking to and fro on a clean piece of ground with the aid of two sticks. An old farmer, past work, I thought. His appearance greatly attracted me, for though his bent shrunken legs could hardly support him, he had a fine head and a broad, deep, powerful-looking chest. His face was of that intensely Irish type so common in West Cornwall, but more shapely, more noble, with a look of strength and resolution not at all common.
Seeing that he was old I supposed he was deaf, and shouted my "Good day," and the remark that it was a very fine day. But there was no need to shout, his senses were very good. "Good day to you," he returned, his stone-grey stern eyes fixed on my face. "Yes, it is a fine day indeed—very, very fine. And no frost, no cold at all, and the winter going on, going on. We are getting on very well indeed." And to this subject he kept in spite of my attempts to lead the talk to something else. The lovely weather, the extraordinary mildness of the season, the comfort of a winter with no frost or cold at all—to that he would come back. And at length, when I said good-bye and left him, the last words I heard him say were, "Yes, the winter is going—very freely, very freely."
For he was old—his age was eighty-seven; he had come to that time of life when the weather becomes strangely important to a man, when winter is a season of apprehension; when he remembers that the days of our age are three-score years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to four-score years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow, so soon passeth it away. I was told that he had farmed the land where I found him taking his constitutional since he was a young man; that some months ago, on account of his infirmities, he had handed the farm over to one of his sons, and that he was still able to help a little in the work. His arms were strong still, and once up on the seat he could drive a cart or trap or reaping machine as well as any one.
He was but one of several grey old men I met with on the farms, and it seemed to me that they were something like their neighbour the badger, that they are as tenacious of their dreary-looking little homesteads and stony fields as that tough beast is of his earth among the rocks.
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CHAPTER IV OLD CORNISH HEDGES
Hedges in England—Plant and animal life—Stone hedges in Cornwall—Effect of wind on trees—How hedges are made—Appearance of stone hedges—An ancient hedge—Woody ivy—Signs of antiquity—An old man's testimony.
EVERY one in England knows what a hedge is—a row of thorn or other hardy bushes originally planted to protect a field, which, when old and unkept, has the appearance and character of a brake or thicket. It consequently comes as a surprise when we first visit the remote and most un-English county of Cornwall to discover that a hedge there may mean something quite different. It puzzled me to read in a book on Cornwall that in some exceedingly rough places near the coast one found it easier to make one's way over the ground by climbing on to a hedge and walking along its top.
The oldest, toughest, closest and most evenly-cut hedge one knows would hardly afford a safe footing for a man; and as to attempting to get upon or walk on a big unkept hedge, such as are common in the south and west counties on this side the Tamar, the very thought of it is painful. In imagination one sees, and seeing feels, oneself stuck fast in a big bramble bush. In Cornwall I discovered that a stone wall was called a hedge—the sort of wall which in Scotland I had been taught to call a dyke. I did not like it so well as the English hedge, that wild disordered tangle of all the most beautiful plants in these islands—black and white thorn; privet with its small grape-like clusters; yew and holly and ivy with late, honeyed blossoms for bees and wasps and hornets; and briar and sweet-briar, bramble and briony; also poisonous black briony and traveller's-joy, a green and silver tapestry; and wayfaring tree, spindle-wood and cornel, with scarlet, purple and orange-coloured berries; and dark deadly-nightshade, pushing its slender stems up through the interlaced branches—all massed together for common protection like a packed herd of wild swine on their defence in some savage solitude, displaying bristling backs and bared gnashing tushes to a hostile world.
They are—these wildings of the hedge—the counterparts in the vegetable world of the creatures called "vermin" in the animal kingdom. In the recesses of their thorny intertwining boughs, and deep down among their tough ancient roots, the vermin, the banned ones, have their home and refuge—the quaint hedgehog and minute long-nosed shrew; black and white magpie and chacking, tail-shaking butcher-bird; adder and snake and slow-worm; blood-sucking stoat and weasel with flat heads and serpentine bodies, and their small quarry, rats and voles and pretty sharpnosed wood-mice with leaf-like ear, and winter sleeping dormice.
It was fortunate that in the long ago, when our progenitors began to take plots of ground for cultivation and pasture, they found out this cheap ready way of marking their boundaries and safeguarding their cattle and corn. We may say they planted better than they knew: they planted once, and many and many a hedge—unnumbered miles and leagues of hedges—that are now great belts of thicket, were first planted by man in the remote past. Nature took over the thin row of thorn seedlings and made it what it is, not only the useful thing it was intended for—a natural barbed-wire entanglement—but a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.
In West Cornwall, where I first came to know the native hedge, they cannot have these belts of thicket, rich in a varied plant and animal life. It is a country of moors and rugged stony hills where nothing flourishes but heath and furze and bracken. The farming folk have succeeded in long time in creating small arable and grass fields in the midst of this desolation, but they cannot grow trees on account of the violent winds charged with salt moisture that blow incessantly from the Atlantic. If the farmer plants a few trees so that he may one day eat an apple of his own growing and sit in the shade, he must build a wall eight or ten feet high to protect them from the salt blast, and he may then die of old age before the apple is ripe or the shade created. Nor can he grow a hedge: the furze, it is true, abounds everywhere, but it is a most intractable plant that will go (or grow) its own wild way, and no man has yet subdued it to his will and made it serve as a hedge. Yet even in this wind-vexed land a few self-planted trees may be seen.
You find them in the strip of farm country between the hills and sea, in hollows and under high banks, or where a mass of rock affords them shelter; and they are mostly hawthorns and blackthorns with a few hardy bush-like trees of other kinds. They are like the trees and bushes on the most exposed coasts in Yorkshire and in other places, growing all one way, lying close to and sometimes actually on the ground, stretching out their branches and every twig towards the inland country. The sight of these wind-tormented, one-sided trees fascinates me and I stay long to look at them.
A bristled tree
With branches cedared by the salten gale,
Stretched back, as if with wings that cannot flee,
is how Gordon Hake describes the appearance, seeing, as I do, the desire and struggle to escape—to fly from that pitiless persecution. But the "wings" I do not see: in summer the foliage is to my sight but a ragged mantle; in winter the human expression is strongest and most pathetic. Held by the feet in the grip of earth, the beaten bush strains to get away; it suggests the figure of a person crawling, or trying to crawl, the knee-like joints on the ground, the body-like trunk thrown forward, the long bare branches and terminal twigs, like the brown, thin naked arms and claw-like opened fingers of a starving scourged slave in the tropics, extended imploringly towards the land.
This being the nature of the country the farmer can but hedge his land and fields with stone: he is in a measure compelled to do so, since the earth is full of it and the land strewn with boulders; to make a field he must remove it and bestow it somewhere. Now after centuries of this process of removing and piling up stones, the farm land has become covered over with a network of these enduring hedges, or fences, intersecting each other at all angles; and viewed from a hill-top the country has the appearance of a patched quilt made of pieces of all sizes and every possible shape, and of all shades of green from darkest gorse to the delicate and vivid greens of the young winter grass.
That half-reclaimed district, especially the strip of coast from St. Ives Bay to Cape Cornwall, was a good winter hunting ground, and I spent many weeks in ranging about the fields and waste or incult places among them. Here you can wander at will, without fear of hurting the farmer's feelings, as in Devonshire, by walking on his land. The cultivation is little, the fields being mostly grass: the small farm-house is out of sight somewhere behind the stone hedges; it is rare to meet with a human being, and the few cows or calves you occasionally come across follow you about as if only too pleased to have a visitor. Climbing over the next hedge into the next field you find nobody there but a pig who stares at you, then welcomes you with a good-humoured grunt; or an old solitary plough-horse; or no semi-human domestic creature at all, only a crowd of busy starlings; or starlings mixed with daws, field-fares, missel-thrushes and a few wagtails; or a couple of magpies, or a small flock of wintering curlews to be found day after day on the same spot. After crossing two or three such fields you come upon an unreclaimed patch, or belt, where grey-lichened rocks are mixed with masses of old furze bushes, and heath and tussocks of pale brome-grass. A lonely, silent, peaceful place, where, albeit a habitation of man for untold centuries, it is wild Nature still.
Here, with eyes and mind occupied with the bird, I did not at first pay much attention to the hedges: I simply got over them, or, in thorny and boggy places, walked on them, but eventually they began to exercise an attraction, and I began to recognise that these, too, like the planted hedges of other districts, were man's creation but in part, since Nature had added much to make them what they are. Human hands first raised them: the process is going on all the time; the labourer, the cow-boy, the farmer himself, when there is nothing else to do, goes out and piles up stones to stop a gap the cattle have made, to add to the height or length of an old hedge, and so on, but the wall once made is taken over by Nature as in the case of the planted hedge. She softens and darkens the crude harsh surface, clothes it in grey and yellow lichens and cushioned green moss, and decorates it with everything that will grow on it, before the time comes for her to ruin and finally to obliterate. But what time is needed here for demolition with such a material as granite to work on, where there are no trees to insinuate their roots into the crevices, slowly to expand the pliant fibres into huge woody wedges to thrust the loose stones apart and finally to pull them down! We can imagine how slow the destructive processes are when we look at innumerable Cornish crosses scattered over the county, showing clearly the lines cut on them in the early days of Christianity in this district. Still more do we see it in the ancient sacred stones—the cromlechs, coits, hurlers and holed stones, moor-stones or "merry maidens," and many others—which have stood and resisted the disintegrating effect of the weather since prehistoric times. The wall built is practically everlasting, but Nature works slowly on it, and the hedges I had about me differed greatly on this account, from the rude walls raised but yesterday or a dozen or twenty years ago to those which must have stood for centuries or for a thousand years or longer. Indeed, it was the appearance of extreme antiquity in one of these hedges, which I often crossed and sometimes walked on, which first excited my interest in the subject. It looked, and probably is, older than the walls of Silchester, which date back 1700 or 1800 years, and are now being gradually pulled down by the trees that have grown upon them. It was the longest of the old hedges I found, beginning among the masses of granite on the edge of the cliff, and winding away inland to lose itself eventually among the rocks and gullies and furze-thickets at the foot of a great boulder-strewn hill. Its sinuosity struck me as a mark of extreme age, as in this it resembled the huge prehistoric walls or earthworks made of chalk on the downs in Southern England, which meander in an extraordinary way. It was also larger than the other hedges, which crossed its winding course at all angles, being in most parts six to seven feet high, and exceedingly broad; moreover, where the stones could be seen they appeared to be more closely fitted together than in other hedges. Most of the stonework was, however, pretty well covered over, in some places with a very thick turf, in others by furze and bracken, rooted in the crevices and in places hiding the wall in a dense thicket.
But of all the plants growing on it the ivy was most remarkable. It is not a plant that flourishes in this district, where it has as hard a struggle as any tree to maintain its existence. It is found only in sheltered situations on this coast, in the villages, and on the landward side of steep banks and large masses of rock. On this old wall there was really no shelter, since the furious blasts from the sea swept both sides of it with the same violence. Yet in places the ivy had got possession of it, but it was an ivy very much altered in character by the unfavourable conditions from that greenest luxuriant plant we know so well. In place of the dark mass of foliage, the leaves were few and small and far apart, so that viewing the wall from a little distance away you would not notice that it had any ivy growing on it, but would see that the more naked portions were covered with a growth of rope-like stems.
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The wonder is that with so few leaves it can grow so much wood! The stems, which are not thick, are smooth and of a pale grey colour and grow in and out of the crevices, and cross and recross one another, fitting into all the inequalities of the stony surface and in places where they cover the wall looking like a numerous brood or tangle of grey serpents.
This snaky appearance of the almost leafless old wall-ivy fascinated me, and I went often to look at it on the same spot and was never tired of the sight.
It struck me as curious that the woody ivy should have this aspect, since the wall itself in some parts distinctly suggested the serpentine form and appearance. Here again I was reminded of some of the long earthworks or walls on the Wiltshire and Dorsetshire downs—the rounded, thickly turfed bank which winds serpent-like over the hills and across the valleys, and which often has a green colour differing slightly from that of the earth it lies across.
The old Cornish hedge had this aspect in places where it was clothed with turf, and, viewed from a distance and seen winding about in great curves across the rough brown heath and furze-grown earth, the serpentine appearance was very marked.
Whether or not the Cornish antiquaries have paid any attention to these ancient hedges I do not know. The only native I came across who had anything to say about them was a peasant farmer whose acquaintance I made at his cottage-like farm, a few miles from the hedge I have described. He was a man of seventy-nine but vigorous still and of a lively mind. When I spoke to him about the old hedge and its ancient appearance, he said he had known it all his life; that he was a native of a small hamlet close to the hedge, and at the age of seven, when he first took to birds'-nesting, he used to hunt along it on every summer day and came to know it as well as he knew the fence round his garden and the walls of the cottage he lived in. It had not, he assured me, changed in the least during the last seventy or seventy-two years: it was to-day exactly what it was in his early boyhood, with thick turf and furze and bracken and woody ivy covering it in the same way in the same old places. This made him think it must be very, very old.
It seemed to me that his life, although a long one, was but a short period to measure by in such a case, that if he could have consulted his father and grandfather and his remoter ancestors back to the time when the last Cornish king was cast out by William the Bastard, they would all have given the same testimony and said that the hedge was very old when they knew it.
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CHAPTER V BOLERIUM: THE END OF ALL THE LAND
Cliff scenery and headlands—The Land's End sentiment—Pilgrims and how they are affected—Wilkie Collins—The child's vision—Books on Cornwall—A Trip to the Far West—Sir Humphry Davy—Wesley—Winter nights at the Land's End—Lighthouses—Associations and speculations—The scene of great tragedies in the past.
EVERY day, even in winter, if the weather be not too bad, but chiefly during the nine months from March to November, pilgrims come to this wind-swept, wave-beaten point to gaze and set their feet upon the little rocky promontory of the Land's End. It is less bold and impressive than many others of the hundred headlands at this western extremity of England between St. Ives and Mount's Bay. From this or that projecting point, commanding a view of the coastline for some distance, one may count a dozen or more of these headlands thrust out aslant like stupendous half-ruined buttresses supporting the granite walls of the cliff. They are of a sullen brown colour and rough harsh aspect, and in places have the appearance of being built up of huge square blocks of granite, and at other points they form stacks of columns as at the Giant's Causeway. The summits of these headlands are often high, resembling ruinous castles placed on projecting points of the cliff; they are confused masses of rocks of many shapes, piled loosely one upon the other, their exposed surfaces clothed over with long coarse grey lichen. Large gulls, daws and cormorants sit or stand here and there on the ledges and prominent points, the herring gulls clamorous at the sight of a human form; the restive daws quitting their stands to wheel about at intervals, rising and falling, soon to settle down again; the cormorants silent and motionless, standing erect with curved, snaky necks, like birds carved in ebony.
Stealing quietly among these hoary masses of rock you may see a very wild rabbit, and on a bright, still, winter day, if you are singularly fortunate, you may catch sight of a beast better worth seeing, a cliff fox, lying fast asleep or lightly dozing, stretched at full length on a ledge, looking intensely red in the sunshine, and very conspicuous against the hoary lichened rock. This is his home and castle, which he shares with the rabbits that know his ways, and the birds that are always just out of his reach. Thus do they live together in one house like one antagonistic family in a strange artificial harmony, and do not mix, but come and go and move about freely, and bask in the warm sunshine, and sit up to rub their long ears and whiskers, and spread out their wings to dry, and preen their feathers. Peace and quiet in their castle, while the great waves roll in to beat on its caverned walls beneath, making the earth tremble with their measured blows, covering the black rocks with dazzling white foam, and sending up a mist of spray to the summit.
At intervals between Bay and Bay, a distance of thirty miles, you come upon headlands of this type—Cape Cornwall, Gurnard's Head, Zennor Cliffs and others, to the north of Land's End, while just south of it you have the noblest rock scenery of this coast, including the stupendous cliffs of Tol-Pedn-Penwith and Treryn Dinas, with its famed Logan Stone. Bolerium itself, the narrow promontory of piled rocks of the Land's End and the flat bit of country adjoining it is, sentiment apart, one of the least interesting points on the coast.
But the sentiment is a very great thing and interesting to observe. And this is easy, since the pilgrims mostly come by way of Penzance, distant about a dozen miles, travelling in batches of twenty-five or thirty or more, packed closely in some public conveyance; so that one has but to join the crowd and, sitting among them, watch their faces out of the corners of his eyes. They are a mixed company of men and women of all conditions, from all parts of the country, with some Americans and Colonials. It is indeed curious to see an identical feeling on faces so unlike, from the very young who do not try to conceal it, to the very aged and almost worn-out globe wanderers, who are now nearly at the end of their life's pilgrimage, and have seen pretty well all that was worth seeing on this wide earth except this one famous spot which by chance has been left to the last.
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And by and by, after travelling half a dozen miles, they find themselves in a land unlike any place they know; inhabited, for there are a few small sad-looking granite cottages and farms and hamlets, but of a rude and desolate aspect, and therefore in harmony with their emotions and preconceived ideas about the place. It is a treeless barren country, hill and moor, with furze and brown heath interspersed with grey boulder stones, the whole dominated by the great desolate hill of Chapel Carn Brea. The travellers look out, straining their eyes to see the end; but before that comes the hilly country is left behind, and at the last it is flat and tame with a sad-looking granite-built village and the grey sea beyond. One has watched the bright eager look that expected so much fade out of the various faces; and by the time the pilgrims get down to scatter along the cliff or to go at once to their luncheon at the hotel it is pretty well all gone. And if you go back to Penzance to join the next lot, and then again, and every day for a week or a month, you will witness the same thing—the collection of unlike faces with the light of the same feeling in the eyes of all, increasing as they advance over that rude moorland country and fading out at the end to that blank look—"Is this the Land's End—is this all!"
What, then, did they expect? Wilkie Collins best answers that question in his pleasant book of rambles written more than half a century ago, when he says that the Land's End is to Cornwall what Jerusalem is to the Holy Land, the great and final object of a journey to the westernmost county of England, its Ultima Thule, where it ceases; a name that strikes us most in childhood when we learnt our geography; which fills the minds of imaginative people with visions of barrenness and solitude and dreams of some lonely promontory, the place where the last man in England will be found waiting for death at the end of the world.
That is indeed the secret of the visitor's expectant feeling and disappointment—the vague vision of a vastness and grandeur and desolateness almost preternatural, conceived in childhood, which all the experience of a long life of disillusionment has been powerless to eradicate from the mind, or to replace with a mental picture more in accord with the reality.
But if this disillusionment is plainly visible to an observer on the faces of many visitors, the books about Cornwall tell a different story; their writers would have us believe that the reality has surpassed their expectations, that their emotions of admiration and astonishment have been deeply moved. When I had been some time in Cornwall and it had taken hold of me, I sat myself down before a formidable array of books descriptive of the duchy, only to find that reading them was an exceedingly wearisome task. By and by I discovered something to entertain and keep me going; this was the grand business of describing the Land's End in a suitable manner, but more or less rhetorically and charged with exalted feeling, which was undertaken in turn by every visitor. This made many a dull book amusing. I experienced a kind of sporting interest in the literary traveller's progress through the county, and looked eagerly forward to his arrival at the famous spot where he would have to pull himself together and launch himself bird-like from the cliffs, as it were, on the void sublime. There was great variety in these utterances, but I think the one that diverted me most was in a book entitled A Trip to the Far West, published in 1840, as the author, one Baker Peter Smith, was evidently an experimenter in words, some of his own making; or we might call him an Early Victorian young man in search of a style.
"I reached the Land's End," he wrote, "and sat down on a protuberant block of granite, close to the precipice, overhanging the multitangular rocks which form an impenetrable barrier against the raging tides of the mighty waters." After lamenting that he had so little time in which to survey the "multicapsular curiosities of the region," he proceeds: "The local sublimity of the Land's End affords a commanding view of scenick expanse; and the colossal columns of rock give an awful effect to the stupendous vision; whilst, added to these grave and elevating sentiments, consequent on so grand a sight, the sense of hearing also acts upon the mind: by the distant roar of the angry sea, ascending from the caverns below, and the screaming of the Cornish chough assailing you from above and every side," and so on. He concludes:—"The entranced spectator has no election, but is engrossed with admiration of that Great Power by the fiat of whose mere volition nature's chaos was thus harmonized and stamped with the glorifying impress of multiplicious beauty."
One is glad that cormorant, book-devouring Time, has spared us Baker Peter Smith.
But there are a few noble passages to be found as well, and I think this one of Humphry Davy, written in youth before the flower of poesy withered in him, pleases me the best:
On the sea
The sunbeams tremble and the purple light
Illumes the dark Bolerium, seat of storms!
Dear are his granite wilds, his schistine rocks
Encircled by the waves, where to the gale
The haggard cormorant shrieks, and, far beyond
Where the great ocean mingles with the sky,
Behold the cloud-like islands, grey in mist.
Another notable utterance was that of John Wesley, when on a Sunday in September, 1743, after preaching to the people at Sennen, he went down to look at the Land's End. "It was an awful sight," he wrote. "But how will this melt away when God ariseth in judgment! The sea beneath doth indeed boil like a pot. One would think the deep to be hoary. But though they swell yet can they not prevail. He shall set their bounds which they cannot pass."
There spoke the founder of Methodism, saturated in Biblical phraseology until it gushed spontaneously from him even as its song or cry from a bird. He had forgotten his own language, as it were, and even in an exalted moment in this grey north land could only express himself in these old Asiatic figures of speech.
To return from this digression. Although the vague image of an imagined Land's End fades from the mind and is perhaps lost when the reality is known, the ancient associations of the place remain, and, if a visit be rightly timed, they may invest it with a sublimity and fascination not its own. I loitered many days near that spot in midwinter, in the worst possible weather, but even when pining for a change to blue skies and genial sunshine I blessed the daily furious winds which served to keep the pilgrims away, and to half blot out the vulgar modern buildings with rain and mist from the Atlantic. At dark I would fight my way against the wind to the cliff, and down by the sloping narrow neck of land to the masses of loosely piled rocks at its extremity. It was a very solitary place at that hour, where one feared not to be intruded on by any other night-wanderer in human shape. The raving of the wind among the rocks; the dark ocean—exceedingly dark except when the flying clouds were broken and the stars shining in the clear spaces touched the big black incoming waves with a steely grey light; the jagged isolated rocks, on which so many ships have been shattered, rising in awful blackness from the spectral foam that appeared and vanished and appeared again; the multitudinous hoarse sounds of the sea, with throbbing and hollow booming noises in the caverns beneath—all together served to bring back something of the old vanished picture or vision of Bolerium as we first imagine it.
The glare from the various lighthouses visible at this point only served to heighten the inexpressibly sombre effect, since shining from a distance they made the gloomy world appear vaster. Down in the south, twenty-five miles away, the low clouds were lit up at short intervals by wide white flashes as of sheet lightning from the Lizard lights, the most powerful of all lights, the reflection of which may be seen at a distance of sixty or seventy miles at sea. In front of the Land's End promontory, within five miles of it, was the angry red glare from the Longships tower, and further away to the left the white revolving light of the Wolf lighthouse.
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.