CHAPTER X
COVERACK COVE—POLTESCO—RUAN MINOR—CADGWITH COVE—THE "DEVIL'S FRYING-PAN"—DOLOR HUGO—CHURCH COVE—LANDEWEDNACK—LIZARD TOWN—RUAN MAJOR—THE LIZARD LIGHTHOUSE.

Striking inland from St. Keverne for Coverack Cove, something of the stony character of the Meneage and Lizard districts is seen, together with a good deal of the widespread lack of signposts common to all Cornwall, but particularly distressing here. Wherever it is possible for a stranger to lose his way—and that is very often here—be very sure that the County Council has forgotten to place a sign-post; and furthermore, be equally certain that, at those points where no one is likely to go wrong, there will be very informative ones: exercises in the obvious. But there is a deeper depth than this. A fork of roads may be duly sign-posted, but it often leads to another, and a much more puzzling and quite lonely fork, a long way ahead, where not the least indication is vouchsafed. You are lucky if you do not at last find yourself in the yard of some "farm-place," and have to return a mile or more. Sorrow's crown of sorrow is, however, attained when a signpost is seen in the distance. You hurry up; it points the way to, let us say, the "Hotel Parvenu," one of the several up-to-date barrack hotels that have of late risen upon desirable view-points. I want to know why these things should be; not the hotels—we know the reason of them—but why they should be allowed to play these dirty tricks on travellers. We cannot all be guests; nor, perhaps, would very many who could. Why, then, should the County Council permit the existence of these purely commercial notices?

Coverack village, down upon the Cove, was the scene of the Dispatch transport wreck in January 1809. A monument in St. Keverne church narrates how over sixty were lost on that occasion, including Major-General Cavendish. They were fresh from the blood-soaked fields of Spain and the retreat upon Coruña.

Those who originally named Black Head, beyond Coverack, could scarce have had any choice in the matter, for it is a lowering, sullen-looking point. But the rock is rather a dark green in its original tone, when closely examined. It is, in fact, the famed "serpentine" rock that extends all the way from this place, past the Lizard, to Mullion.

The way round by the cliffs to the next headland, Pedn Boar, and beyond it to Caraclowse Point, where there is a "cliff castle," is wearying in its ups and downs with a stream to cross in one rugged valley, without being exceptionally fine; but the paths or ragged grasslands on the way to Kennack Sands give easier going. Kennack Sands form the only available sandy foreshore for many miles along this rugged coast, where the savage cliffs descend as a rule sheer to the water, and the jealous sea generally leaves but a narrow sandy selvedge at the ebb. Small wonder, then, that bungalows for summer bathers have appeared here.

But the trivial urbanities of Kennack soon fail him who fares by the cliffs on to Caerleon Cove and Poltesco. Brambles clutch at his clothes and bid him stay; stones, loose and knobbly, and tripsome, lie along the path the coastguards seem to patrol all too seldom, and presently the small cove of Caerleon appears, with a stream running down to it and the derelict works of an abandoned serpentine factory on the shore. Up inland, past a cottage, with a notice declaring that trespassers will be prosecuted (which of course the wise pedestrian treats with contempt), and then past a tree-surrounded farmhouse, displaying the more hospitable intimation of new milk being sold, the watery valley of Poltesco is reached, where a great mill-wheel, amid a paradise of ferns, is worked by the spattering stream. I should think Poltesco might be a very tedious place on a wet November day, and not good for rheumatism; but, as an American girl tourist remarked, in summer it is "just heavenly."

Abandoning the coast at this point, and content with seeing Ynys Head in the distance, I walked the half-mile uphill to Ruan Minor, a pretty little village with a very small but very perfect little Perpendicular church, whose pinnacled tower, although well-proportioned, is not higher than the roofs of the village houses.

The half-mile hence to Cadgwith Cove is a zigzagging and steep descent. Deep down lies the village, with a street clinging to the sides of the descent and thatched cottages at the bottom, facing the sea; one or two in front of their fellows standing on a rocky projection called "The Rodden." The sea comes hissing in upon a pebbly beach, alongside tall, sheer cliffs.

It is even steeper up out of Cadgwith on the coastguard path to the Lizard than on the other side; an obscure path leading up to scrubby fields and a modern villa called "White Heather," facing the sea in what seems a not altogether permanently safe position, considering that the "Devil's Frying Pan" is in front of it. This is a chasm formed in the cliffs by the falling in of the roof of a cave, leaving a huge pit-like opening in the cliff-top, with a neck of land forming a natural arch on the edge of the cliffs. Down below, the sea comes foaming and hissing at high tide among the scattered boulders in a way that suggested to some imaginative person the idea of a frying-pan. A not very safe path leads round the landward edge of this place; but the best and most impressive view is from the sea. It is a very short boating trip from Cadgwith to the Devil's Frying Pan.

A boating trip is certainly the best method of seeing the coast between Cadgwith and the Lizard. You see more, and to better advantage, than by tramping round the interminable headlands and down one not very interesting valley, up to the next hill, conscious all the while that the real beauty of the coast lies under your feet, in the sea-fretted caverns that the waves never leave. The finest of these is Dolor Hugo: ogof, the old Cornish word for "cave." This is a magnificent cavern in the dark but richly variegated serpentine rock. The archway rises high overhead, admitting boats easily in calm weather, but the roof soon descends and exploration cannot be pushed far. The Lizard boatmen, too, are very alive to the dangers of the place. The solemn beauty of it and the heavy ground-swell impress the stranger with a full sense of the risks incurred in visiting Dolor Hugo, except in the calmest weather.

At Cambarrow, the next headland, is the cavern of Ravens' Hugo, a narrower fissure, the entrance hung with wild growths. Then comes the sheer cliff called "The Balk," where serpentine quarries may be observed, and round its precipitous adamantine wall the deeply cleft little Church Cove, known also as Perranvose, Parnvoose, or Lizard Cove.

Church Cove itself is an almost solitary place, a narrow strip of beach between sheer rocks; but the cottages along the tree-shaded lane that runs up to Landewednack are as homely and sheltered, and as richly embowered in roses, fuchsias, honeysuckle, and hydrangeas, as any place in the West. All around is the level, treeless, windswept heath of the Lizard district, but down in this sheltered hollow one is in the atmosphere of a conservatory. Perhaps one person among every hundred of those who come to Lizard Town discovers Church Cove and the village of Landewednack, which is the mother-village whence Lizard Town, half a mile away, has sprung; and the ninety and nine return home, having just caught a glimpse of the lighthouse, and think, vainly, they have seen all there is to be seen.

I have quite a budget of curious facts concerning Landewednack and its church. To begin with, it is the parish church of that odd collection of houses—the very negation of architecture—"Lizard Town," which occupies the plateau just beyond this dell. That a place should elect to style itself "Lizard Town," when it might be, and properly is, Landewednack, is an odd study in perversity. Landewednack church is also the most southerly church in England, and in it was preached in 1674 the last sermon in the Cornish language. A few years later, 1683, died the Rev. Thomas Cole, stated in the register to have been 120 years of age. In the churchyard lie a number of persons who died of the plague in 1645, but the spot where they were laid is unmarked.

Furthermore, the stranger will not fail to observe that the huge stones of which the tower is built are partly grey granite and partly of local serpentine, giving a curiously irregular chessboard kind of appearance. The dedication of the church is said to be to St. Winwaloe. The place-name has its fellow in Brittany—that other Cornwall—in Landevenec.

The church of Landewednack consists of nave, north aisle, and a south transept, which has a low side-window at the angle formed by its eastern wall and the wall of the nave. The font, dating from about 1404, is mounted on four modern pillars of polished serpentine. The bowl bears an inscription including the name of the rector at that period, "I.H.C. D. Ric. Bolham me fecit."

And now we come to Lizard Town. No one ever planned Lizard Town, any more than its houses were designed. They were merely built, and the "town," which is a simple collection of cottages and a hotel or two of sorts, is much smaller than many villages. Its population, including Landewednack, is only 683. Lizard Town simply grew at haphazard, on the extremity of the level, heather-clad waste of the Lizard promontory, and with so little directing hand or purposeful mind that its component houses form hardly any recognisable lines of streets, running in any definite directions. They may be fitly likened to a flock of sheep huddled together, facing all ways, to escape a tempest raging from all quarters at once. The population appears to a casual observer to consist wholly of families of Jose and Roberts, all inter-related, like the Cadgwith people, who are all either Janes or Stevenses. And they are nearly all workers in serpentine, whose little workrooms and shops are all of one peculiar pattern, with a small show-window closed at night by a hinged shutter. In every one of these shanties a lathe is at work shaping the rough serpentine rock down, and then turning it into one or other of the many ornamental articles exposed for sale in the windows: paper-weights, candlesticks, pen-trays, models of the Eddystone lighthouse and of Cornish crosses, and so forth; beautifully polished. "Serpentine" gets its name from the coloured streaks and patches it displays.

The "Lizard district" is the name given to all that boldly projecting peninsula south of the Helford River: the district that is properly "Meneage," the "stony district," but "Lizard" is only rightly applied to the actual headland. It has nothing to do with the reptile lizards, but is equal to the Welsh "Llidiart," indicating a rocky height. There is a Weston-under-Lizard in Staffordshire. The peninsula forms the most southerly projection of England, and the Lizard Point by day or the Lizard Light by night is the first glimpse homeward-bound voyagers obtain of old England from the decks of the great steamships passing up Channel. It is a wild, but scarcely picturesque land, consisting of a high, but level, plateau of heaths and moors. Goonhilly Downs, in its centre, in spite of their name, are not hilly, nor are they what we generally understand to be downs, but just gently undulating, or even flat, stretches of uncultivated and uncultivable land that by some are styled "dreary." But the justness or otherwise of that expression entirely depends upon the circumstances of the moment. Given bad weather, Goonhilly Downs and the whole Lizard peninsula are, indeed, dreary to the traveller, for shelter along the exposed roads, for the most part treeless, lonely, and quite innocent of hedges, is unobtainable for many miles; but in fine weather the purple heather, the occasional wooded hollows and the innumerable grey boulders scattered in these wilds, make a pleasant holiday jaunt. From a cycling point of view, the roads are perfection, and although dreariness is again the word when a cyclist strives along them in the teeth of a gale, to be blown mile after mile on a cycle with the wind is exhilarating. There are few villages here. Inland from Lizard Town you see the church-tower of Grade peering across the flats, but it is a village only of "farm-places." Grade church takes its name from St. Grada, Crida, or Credanus, a more or less mythical companion of St. Petroc, but it has been re-dedicated to Holy Cross.

Even less of a village is Ruan Major, whose church is seen amid a cluster of trees on the right of the road to Helston. Ruan Major is a paradoxical place, much smaller than Ruan Minor, consisting as it does of a church and a farmhouse. St. Ruan, or Rumon, its godfather, was a sixth-century Irish hermit who resided here—if that mode of living may be called residence—both before and after he went to Brittany, where he was not altogether favourably received. That he was much better thought of in Cornwall and Devonshire seems evident in the places named after him, and in the great honour paid to his relics at Tavistock Abbey. The farm at Ruan Major and the little woodland distinguishing the place from the surrounding open heaths perhaps represent the "nymet," or sacred enclosure made by St. Ruan around his hermitage.

Such then, with an occasional old manor-house and park like Trelowarren, Bochyn, and Bonython, the last near Cury, formerly seat of the old family of Bonython, is the wide district at the back of Lizard Town. Strangers simply hurry over it, by motor-car or Great Western motor-omnibus, all anxious to reach the Lizard itself, and to explore Kynance Cove and be off again.

The Lizard lighthouse is three-quarters of a mile distant from Lizard Town. It occupies the extremity of the point, the Ocrinum of Ptolemy, and is the successor of a lighthouse first erected in 1619 by Sir John Killigrew. That early light was only established in the teeth of the strongest discouragement by the Trinity House, which in those times adopted what seems to us an extraordinary policy, directed against the increase of lighthouses. Sir John Killigrew proposed to set up a light here at his own expense and to gather voluntary contributions from ship-owners towards the cost of it, but he found it necessary to first obtain a licence to do so, and therefore petitioned James the First to that effect. He would pay twenty nobles a year for leave to collect voluntary sums for a term of thirty years. This proposition, submitted to the Trinity House, produced the criticism that a light was not required upon the Lizard, and that in fact any such light would be dangerous, for it would serve as a beacon for pirates and foreign enemies. But the King, really in this instance the Solomon his flatterers pretended him to be, disregarded the unfavourable report, and granted the petition, with the only proviso that the light should be extinguished in time of war, when the approach of an enemy was suspected. Killigrew thereupon began and soon completed his lighthouse, much to the anger of the coastwise people. "The inabytants neer by," wrote Killigrew, "think they suffer by this erection. They affirme I take away God's grace from them. Their English meaning is that now they shall receve no more benefitt by shipwreck, for this will prevent yt. They have been so long used to repe profitt by the calamyties of the ruin of shipping that they clayme it heredytarye, and heavely complayne on me."

A year's working, including the cost of building, cost Sir John Killigrew £500. The light displayed was a brazier of coal, and this alone cost ten shillings a night. As for the "voluntary contributions" expected, they were simply nonexistent, and in consequence Killigrew petitioned for, and obtained, the right to levy dues of one halfpenny a ton on all passing vessels. Even then, he took nothing but a loss out of his enterprise, for shipowners, backed by the Trinity House, refused to pay, and in the end the lighthouse was pulled down.

The existing lighthouse dates from 1748, when a Captain Farrish proposed a building that should display four lights. This was a wholly commercial speculation. Farrish proposed to pay a yearly sum of £80 to the Trinity House for leave to build, and obtained a lease of sixty-one years; but the lease was taken over and the lighthouse actually built by Thomas Fonnereau. The lights were first displayed on August 22nd, 1752, in the presence of a great assemblage of people, who had come long distances to honour the event. Two lights appear to have been substituted for the four in 1792, but not until 1813 did the coal braziers give place to oil, and oil was replaced by the electric light in 1878. About 1902 the lights were reduced to one powerful revolving electric beam, the strongest in the world, visible for twenty-three miles, and showing once in every three seconds. It is aided in foggy weather by the most dismal of foghorns.

Hard by the lighthouse stands a notice-board of the National Lifeboat Institution, giving a plain record of the doings of the successive lifeboats that have been established down below, in Polpear Cove.

The Lizard lifeboats have rendered noble service, as shown by the board telling the doings of them:

The bald, unvarnished statement in this list under date of March 17th to 18th, 1907, giving the list of saved from the Suevic, hides the very narrow escape of the passengers and crew of that White Star liner. She was homeward-bound from Australia, and had on board between three and four hundred passengers, and a cargo of frozen meat. In the middle of the night she struck upon the Brandies Rocks, immediately under the Lizard lighthouse; thus affording another extraordinary instance of the fatal attraction this, the most salient southerly point of land in England, has for vessels, in spite of the lighthouse exhibiting the most powerful light in the world. The Lizard, Cadgwith and Mullion lifeboats put out, on hearing the news, and landed many of the passengers, and one hundred and forty were taken off by the tug Triton of Falmouth. Fortunately the weather was moderate. The hull was severed by dynamite about a week later, and towed round to Falmouth.

Scattered reefs stretch out beyond Lizard Point, and form the special dangers of the place. They are known in general as "The Stags." A vessel, wrecked on the Stags about 1845, was driven on to the island rock of Crenval, where the crew refuged all night, while the good ship was being reduced to matchwood by the waves. The next morning they were brought ashore, and were greeted by their own cat, which had either swum to land, or had been carried on the wreckage. Its tail had somehow been nipped off in the process. The cat was sold to an innkeeper in Lizard Town, and was long looked upon as very much of a hero.

Immediately to the eastward of the lighthouse is the funnel formed in the cliffs by the falling in of the roof of a cave known as Daws' Hugo. This subsidence happened on February 19th, 1847, and the hollow thus produced was immediately given the name of "Lion's Den." Beyond it is Housel Bay, with a hotel on the cliffs. The rugged Penolver Head comes next, and then the amphitheatrical Belidden Cove, with Beast, or Bass Point, enclosing it. Lloyd's signalling station, displaying the word LLOYD'S in gigantic letters on its sea-front, stands on Beast Point. Hence inward and outward-bound ships are telegraphed to London as having "passed the Lizard." Beyond Hot Point, the next headland, the coast comes to Kilcobbin Cove and again to Church Cove.

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