There is little in Fowey for the landsman. Its chief delights are upon the water: boating or sailing on the river, or yachting out to sea. Yachtsmen are familiar figures, both at the inns and hotels of the actual town, and at the new hotel outside, overlooking the Channel from Point Neptune. A thirsty yachtsman, asking for some "Cornish cider," revealed by accident one article at any rate which Cornish local patriotism does not approve. The Cornishman, it appeared, although believing in most things Cornish, drew the line there, and Devonshire cider was offered instead, with the admission that, although there was Cornish cider, no one who could possibly help themselves would drink it.
The coast round past Point Neptune and by the wooded groves of Menabilly, on to Polkerris, a queer little fisher-village, is much better made the subject of a trip by sailing-boat than a tramp along those rugged ways; and then, returning, the direct road from Fowey to Par may be taken, past the lodge-gates of Menabilly, at Castle Dour.
The name originated in "Castell Dwr"—i.e., the "Castle by the Water"—an ancient granite post, or cross, known as the "Longstone." It is seen standing on a plot of grass in the road. This is the tombstone of a Romanised Briton, and formerly bore the inscription, "CIRVSIVS HIC IACIT CVNOMORI FILIVS," plainly. It is not now so easily read.
Soon the way leads almost continuously down hill to Par. On the hedge-bank to the right is a striking modern wayside cross, bearing the inscription, "I thank Thee, O Lord, in the name of Jesus, for all Thy mercies. J. R., May 13, 1845, 1887, 1905." It was erected by the late Jonathan Rashleigh, of Menabilly.
At the foot of the hill is Par. The name of the place means, in the Cornish language, a marsh, or swamp, and Par certainly lies almost on a level with the sea, where a little stream wanders out of the Luxulyan Valley on to the sands of a small bay, opening to the larger bay of Tywardreath. The original character of this once marshy spot is very greatly hidden by the many engineering and other works established here by J. T. Treffry. Here his Cornwall Minerals Railway, running across country to the north coast at Newquay, comes to his harbour; and his mines, canal, and smelting works make a strange industrial medley, through whose midst runs the main line of the Great Western Railway.
The great enterprises of that remarkable man have long since suffered change. His railway is now the Newquay branch of the Great Western, his mines and canal have fallen upon less prosperous days, and the great chimney of the smelting-works, 235 feet high—"Par stack," as it is called—no longer smokes. The pleasant humour of the neighbourhood long since likened silk hats, the "toppers" of everyday speech, to the big chimney, and he who wore one was said to be wearing a "Par stack."
There is no gain in the scenic way by following the coast from Par to Charlestown. Nothing of any outstanding character appears along those coastwise paths, which are long and obscure. This is not to say that the road inland is in any way delightful. It is, in fact, a plaguey ill-favoured road, for when you have left the various railway bridges and junctions of Par behind, you come to a very Gehenna of a place; a sterile plain through whose midst the highway proceeds bumpily. Many years ago the miners turned the land at this point inside out, in search of copper, and now that they have long left it, the place remains the abomination of desolation, where nothing will grow amid the mundic and heaps and hollows of tailings. South of the road at Biscovey, past this desolate region, stood an ancient granite cross, minus its head, but still seven feet eight inches high, known as the "Biscovey Stone," and serving the humble office of a gatepost. It was in 1896 removed to Biscovey churchyard. Its original function was that of a monument to one Alroron, and it bears on its two broad sides, amid curiously interlaced decorative patterns, the inscription "—Alroron Ullici Filivs—."
The dusty road leads through Holmbush, a suburb of Charlestown, which took its name from the wayside "Holly Bush" inn. Charlestown itself is more curious than beautiful. It is, in fact, the port of St. Austell, of which it is really an extension, and was formerly called Polmear. Charlestown is a place with one small, but very busy and crowded dock; and the dock and the quays, and all the roads into and out of the place are a study in black and white, and barrels. The stranger to Cornwall, proceeding westward for the first time, is apt to be puzzled by these strange evidences. He has come, unaware, upon the first signs of the great and prosperous Cornish china-clay industry. The whiteness of everything that is not black is caused by the leakage of the china-clay, and the blackness of everything that is not white is the result of coal-dust.
China-clay is a substance greatly resembling chalk, and varying from a putty-like consistency to a powdery brittleness. A little of it is inevitably dropped in the cartage down from Carclaze, inland, where it is got, through St. Austell, and down to the port, and a little more is spread about in loading the vessels that take it abroad; and so, as "mony a mickle makes a muckle," there is generally a good deal of china-clay pervading the place. The mountains of clean new barrels, just fresh from the cooper's, are for packing the clay for export. Charlestown also does an import trade in coal, hence the alternative to Charlestown's sanctified whiteness, but when it rains, as it not infrequently does in Cornwall, the result here is a grey and greasy misery, compact of these two substances.
China-clay is decomposed granite, rotted by the action of water during uncounted thousands of years. Up at Carclaze and further inland, at St. Stephen's-in-Brannel, it is dug out of quarries that were once open workings for tin. The deposits are of great depth and extent. Although so easily dug out, the white clay in its natural state is mixed with hard and gritty particles of quartz, and has therefore to be subjected to a refining process, to separate that undesirable element. The method of separation is very simple, the clay being subjected to a washing by which the heavy, useless particles remain, and the soft material is carried down into a series of tanks. There it is left to settle, and the water is then drawn off. The clay is then allowed to dry, and is finally dug out and packed in barrels. Modern improvements in the preparation of china-clay have been chiefly directed to the quick-drying of the masses in these tanks, and minutes are now taken instead of the months formerly occupied in natural evaporation. China-clay, it may be added, is used for many other purposes than the manufacture of porcelain, and, although the Staffordshire and foreign potteries use it largely, it is extensively employed in loading calico, and in giving inferior cottons a specious and illusory excellence. It enters also into the composition of the heavier and more highly glazed printing papers, chiefly those used for printing illustrations.
St. Austell and Carclaze owe their prosperity, in the origination of all these things, to William Cookworthy, who first discovered china-clay in England. He has his memorial in Plymouth, where he lived for many years, for one of the fine series of modern stained-glass windows in Plymouth Guildhall shows him as chemist and porcelain-maker; but the landowners of Carclaze and the people of St. Austell have certainly fallen short of their duty by failing to set up a statue of him in some prominent place.
William Cookworthy, a native of Kingsbridge, in South Devon, was born in 1705, one of the seven children of another William Cookworthy, a weaver, who died early and left his widow and family with very narrow means. They owed their sustenance, and the children owed their education, to the Quakers of Kingsbridge. William was apprenticed to a chemist and druggist, and eventually established himself in the same way of business, wholesale, at Plymouth. The firm of Bevan & Cookworthy prospered early, and Cookworthy at thirty-one years of age very largely freed himself from its cares and devoted himself to preaching. Ten years later, in 1745, he became interested in kaolin, or china-clay, which until 1708 had been found only in China, giving that country the entire output of porcelain, which from the land of its origin obtained its very name of "china." Cookworthy, in common with several other of his contemporaries, wished to produce "china," and when news came in 1745 that china-clay had been found in Virginia, he commissioned a Quaker friend to obtain some for him. Travelling much in Cornwall, he himself discovered a coarse variety of it on Tregoning Hill, in Germoe, and a little later found the great deposits at Carclaze, in the parish of St. Stephens, behind St. Austell.
In that year, 1758, he began experimentally making porcelain at Plymouth. Already, in 1709, Dresden china was being made from the kaolin found in Saxony, and a little later than his own beginning the Sèvres porcelain factory was using a deposit found at Limoges. He was joined by Lord Camelford, and a patent for making china was obtained in 1768, but the Plymouth factory was not at any time remunerative, and the works were removed to Bristol and eventually into Staffordshire. Cookworthy died in 1780, not in any way advantaged by his discovery.
The town of St. Austell—"Storsel," locally—does not in the least know how it came by that name. An altogether uncertain "Augustulus" has been presumed, while others think they find glimmerings of a hermit "St. Austolus." It is a town of narrow, crowded streets, with little of interest apart from the fine parish church, chiefly of the early part of the fifteenth century. The font, however, is Norman, of the very marked Cornish type, consisting of a bowl supported on four legs ending in grotesque faces. The fine Perpendicular tower and the south aisle, richly carved in the stubborn granite with numerous shields and devices bearing the emblems of the Passion and Crucifixion, are among the most ornate in Cornwall.
A mysterious inscription, whose meaning is still hotly debated, is found above the west door, immediately surmounting a sculptured group representing the "pelican in her piety." The old story of the pelican wounding her breast—"vulning herself," ancient writers call it—for the sustenance of her young, is here thought to typify the sacrifice made by our Blessed Lord and Saviour for our sakes; and in this light the inscription above may be read. The rudely sculptured letters of it form the words and initials—
The original view was that RY DU was the correct rendering, signifying in the Cornish language "God is King." Of the meaning of INRI there can, of course, be no question; it is "Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judæorum." It is now sometimes held that, as the lower line is Latin, the upper is Greek, and is a contraction for Kyrius Christus, i.e., "Christ is Lord." Yet other attempts take us into the Syro-Phœnician and Hebrew tongues, and read the meanings, "Dearly Beloved," or, "He gave us His blood." But no one will ever definitely put the question to rest.
There is but one other really interesting object in St. Austell. That is the famous, but mysterious, Mengu, or Menagu, stone, removed of late from the Market Place to the spot known universally in St. Austell (but not officially named), as "Fool's Corner." It is placed, or was placed, it is said, where the boundaries of the three manors of Trenance—Austell, Treverbyn, and Towington—met. A brass plate fixed upon it in 1892 gives a certain modicum of information respecting this slab, but it is little enough, and to this day the words written by Walter White, in his "Londoner's Walk to the Land's End," of 1854, hold good. "Enquire," he says, "for anything remarkable in the town, and you will hardly fail to be told of the Mengu Stone, regarded with some veneration by its possessors because no one knows anything about it." But is not that precisely the reason why so many things are venerated? There is something of the sublime in the mere vague importance of this stone, from which proclamations and announcements of local public events have from time immemorial been made, and it is as important to St. Austell as the famous stone of Destiny from Scone, now in the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey; the stone on which the ancient Scottish kings were, and our own monarchs now are, crowned.
Returning to the coast, at Charlestown, Porthpean is reached; apparently a small holiday-resort of the burgesses of St. Austell. You see from this sketch exactly what it is: a little sandy bay with a few row-boats and sailing-vessels, a few bathing-machines, and a refreshment-house or two. More or less steep and obscure paths lead from it round Black Head, and so down hill into Pentewan, a very busy little port with railway-sidings and docks, and vessels waiting cargoes of tin-ore and china-clay.
Mevagissey, three miles or more, by Pennare and the cliffs, is two staggeringly steep miles distant by road, ending in a murderous crooked descent. At the same time, it is all nonsense to say that cycling is not possible in Cornwall. Work, courage, and good, reliable brakes are requisite, it is true; but although a good deal of hard work and much walking uphill (and some down) are necessary, cycling, after all, saves effort, here as elsewhere. In the far from bracing climate of Cornwall, the exertion of carrying one's own body is often more tiring than even pedalling hard uphill. Even on the shocking coastwise bye-roads, apt often to be mere cascades of loose stones, and full of sharp turns, it is often better to have a cycle than to be without one. Even so, letting the machine go down these dubious ways, I murmur, as did the pious knights of old, travelling the haunted valleys and the darkling woods, 'In manus tuas, Domine,' and brave the unknown perils that lurk behind hairpin corners and down steep gradients.
Mevagissey is said to derive its name from Saints Mewan and Issey, to whom its church is dedicated. It is a little town as crowded together as Polperro, but not by any means so picturesque. Also it faces more directly upon the sea, and although it offers no sands for the visitor and has a very fishy, smelly little harbour, it has in many ways been modernised. Take it for all in all, Mevagissey looks its best from the sea. Perhaps Mevagissey has been frightened into modern ways, for it had an unexampled experience among Cornish villages in 1849, when cholera was so rampant that it was deserted until a thorough cleansing was effected.
If we may trust a satirical saying of Fowey and St. Austell, the Mevagissey people are not, or were not used to be, given to acknowledging authority. One man they considered to be as good as another, and thus the old local by-word may yet be heard in the district: "Like the Mevagissey volunteers; all officers and no privates." But the allusion is over a century old, and belongs to that volunteering epoch when Napoleon was threatening to invade England; so let us hope things have altered since then.
There are sands of some small extent at Portmellin, up out of Mevagissey and then steeply down, half a mile distant, to where the land begins to trend abruptly out towards Chapel Point, and a few bungalows have, in consequence, been lately built in what was until recently a lonely hollow. Looking backwards for many miles, the china-clay works on the distant hills about St. Stephen-in-Brannel shine white, like the glorious camp of some heavenly host.
Always steeply up, the road goes on to Gorran, a mile inland, with Gorran Haven, a little crabbers' and shrimpers' village, as a kind of seashore annexe. The Dodman, a desolate headland, shuts out everything to the westward and forms the eastward horn of Veryan Bay. On its cliffs, of three hundred feet and more, a coastguard station looks out upon many empty leagues of troubled waters.
St. Michael Caerhayes lies snugly in a little bay within the greater bay of Veryan. The road, curving a little way inland, out of sight of the sea, descends steeply through overhanging trees and suddenly emerges upon a level strand, where the sea comes rolling in, over sands that afford a foothold as unyielding as the floor of a room. On either side of the inlet rise picturesque rocks, those on the western side the bolder of the two, and draped, moreover, with luxuriant vegetation, and further crested with larch and pine. Whether you look out to sea, or, standing on those yellow sands, face inland, the scene is of the most romantic description and worthy of the great Skelt himself, of the famous "Skelt's Juvenile Drama." Indeed, those massed and jagged rocks, with darkling fissures, on whose summits the pine-trees seem to cling desperately, might well have served as models for the set scenes of Skelt's thrilling stage, in "The Red Rover," or "The Smuggler," or other of his melodramas. Out to sea, in the "offing," ships hover; inland, under the lee of the wooded rocks, rises a castle. The place is instinct with drama, and it has a name of the strangest—St. Michael Caerhayes—but it is quiet enough for all that, and there is no village.
The castle looks sufficiently thrilling, and might, with its surrounding fitly set the stage in Ruddigore, but the inevitable guide-book spoils the thrill it gives, by letting us into the secret of its being built in 1808, when country mansions took the form of "castles" only for "picturesque" reasons. No bad baronet resides there, only the worthy commoner family of Williams; and any one who is afraid of a person called Williams, who lives in a sham castle, must be a poor creature, even though the castellan does display threatening notice-boards, setting forth what trespassers may expect to suffer. St. Michael Caerhayes was anciently the seat of the famous Trevanion family, extinct a century or more ago, and their old house demolished to make way for the present building. There are many place-names in Brittany parallel with those in Cornwall, and St. Michael Carhaix is one of them. Not only so, but a justification of Cornwall and of the Breton "Cornouaille" calling cousins is further shown by a singular occurrence which happened during our wars with France towards the close of the eighteenth century. Among the French (or rather Bretons, for Brittany is not France to a Breton, any more than Cornwall to a Cornishman is England), among the Breton prisoners, therefore, landed at Falmouth, was one Jean Trevanion de Carhaix.
In Mevagissey the people talk strangely about the seclusion sought for at St. Michael Caerhayes, and tell weird tales of photographers and artists prevented from taking views of this lovely spot. So it was, perhaps, not altogether without trepidation that the sketch for the accompanying illustration was taken, from the seashore. No angry Williams, no brutal bailiff, appeared; and so perhaps the Mevagissey folk exaggerate. And since then a report of the visit of an antiquarian society to the dread castle itself has appeared, by which it seems that the owner had not lured the party into his stronghold with a view to casting them into noisome dungeons, or having them flung from the battlements, or anything else in that full-flavoured way. He simply welcomed them, as any civilised being would have done, and the only outstanding feature of the day seems to have been his remark that, except the collections of different kinds in the house, there was really nothing of antiquity left; not even the stone sculptured with arms, of the time of Henry the Eighth, which the guide-books declare to be here, but is not.
The Church of St. Michael Caerhayes stands high, somewhat inland. One comes to it through a wan and sorry avenue of spindly sycamores, past the lodge-gates of the "castle"; and then it is seen standing in a bald, exposed situation beside the road. The last vestiges of the olden Trevanions are seen in the church. An alien fowl has nested on the site of their ancient home, but still the church houses the rusty helmets of their funeral armour, and a sword, said to be the identical falchion wielded by Sir Hugh Trevanion at Bosworth, August 21st, 1485, hangs among them. The last Trevanions, whether pure-blooded, or merely Bettesford-Trevanions, would seem, according to the evidence of the monumental inscriptions of a century or so ago, their natural force abated, to have slid early and gratefully out of an existence of pain and suffering.
But the most interesting object in the church, interesting because of its mystery, is a black-painted, life-sized statue, in Coade-ware, dated 1812, of a naval officer, with a real sword. The singular thing is that, although the antiquity of the thing is of the slightest, nobody knows who is represented by it. It is thought to be one of the Bettesford-Trevanions. Yet, although we have lost count of this recent statue's identity, the mummified Pharaohs of thousands of years ago are identified with certainty.
Veryan, the village that gives a name to the bay, does not lie upon the seashore. You come to it round the majestically romantic cliffs past Port Holland, a small fisher-hamlet perched upon the rocky outlet of a quite solitary valley, and thence a little way inland, and presently out again and very steeply and lengthily down, so that you wonder when you will reach the bottom, to Port Loe, a gloomy inlet amid dark overhanging cliffs. Down there is the poor fishing village, in a primitive state, absolutely untouched by pleasure-seekers, and apparently not thriving in its fishery. But its situation down there, below the echoing cliffs reverberating to the mocking cries of the sea gulls, is magnificent.
Veryan, on the other hand, is a picture of inland prosperity. It is a long, scattered village, beginning on a hill and continuing down through a wooded valley, with the church at the bottom, and ending on another hilltop. And at either end, the road is flanked by two strange old thatched round-houses, with a cross on the roof of each. The local story is that they were built by "Parson Trust," to keep the Devil out of the village; but the identity of "Parson Trust" has not been established. The simplicity which not only believes in a personal Devil, but assumes that he must of necessity come by road, is essentially and delightfully Cornish.
The road out of Veryan leads directly to Gerrans Bay, passing under the shoulder of the strikingly sudden hill known as Carn Beacon. It is a hill upon a hill, a sepulchral barrow heaped up upon a height overlooking the sea; placed in this commanding position by way of doing greater honour to the ancient chieftain buried there. This was, traditionally, the sixth-century Cornish King and Saint, Geraint, or Gerennius, who died in A.D. 596, from whom the village and the bay of Gerrans are named. He is not to be confused with the Arthurian Geraint, who died in battle. Tradition has been often proved true, but the gorgeous story which told how the King had been buried here, in a golden boat with silver oars, and with his sword and crown, has been disproved, flatly enough, for the barrow was opened in 1855, and only a stone chest containing the ashes of Geraint, or another, was found. "Sold again!" as Smith Minor of the Lower Fourth might say.
The village of Gerrans calls for little remark. It stands high, some distance back from the sea, and therefore suffers considerably from the severe competition of its offshoot, Portscatho, down below, a thriving seaside place on Gerrans Bay.
Three miles along a narrowing peninsula bring one to St. Anthony-in-Roseland, where a charming little Early English church, with stone spire, stands in the grounds of Place, a handsome mansion belonging to the Spry family. In front of it rest the calm waters of St. Mawes Creek, looking across to Polvarth and Porthcueil. The extremity of the peninsula is occupied by St. Anthony's lighthouse, lighting the entrance to Falmouth Harbour, over against Pendennis, where the channel is one mile wide.