A coastguard path runs along the cliffs from Mullion Cove, descending to the sandy shores of Polurrian, and thence to the smaller, but still sandy, Poldhu Cove. Enterprising builders of hotels have erected large and florid and up-to-date caravanserais here, and golfers have impudently taken possession of the waste-lands. And wireless telegraphy presides visibly over the scene; visibly because, although wireless in one sense, it still has taken, besides the four enormously tall iron and steel towers that stand on Poldhu headland, a vast quantity of interlacing wires to form this chief among the Marconi stations. Those great towers, with their staircases that go winding round and round to the dizzy summits, are an obsession, not only here, but all over the Lizard district. You may see them quite easily, ten miles away.
It is the last touch of modernity; and yet, you know, although these towers are so ugly, they are the visible representatives of an invisible power of communication through the ether that is very much more wonderful than any tales of magic ever told in Cornwall.
For the other modern things in Cornwall—barrack-hotels, golfers, "tinned" bread, and scientific methods of dealing with the milk—there is no excuse. Before these developments, Cornwall—save in the matter of overmuch rain—was near perfection.
The curses of modern Cornwall, from the point of view of any one who prefers honesty, old-fashioned ways, and the continuance of the ancient manners and customs of the delightful country west of the Tamar, are High Churchism, golf, tin bungalows, huge caravanserai hotels, and tinned bread. To these some might add "Riviera" expresses and motor-cars, for they are opening up, between them, the uttermost corners of what was once a difficult land for the tourist; and the more you do thus "open up" Cornwall, the less like the dear delightful old Duchy it ever becomes, and the more closely it approximates to the cockneyfied shores nearer London.
Golf is certainly the prime offender. It is a scourge that has devastated the once beautiful wild sandhills and coastwise heaths, and reduced them to the titivated promenading grounds of the wealthy bounders who generally used to confine their energies to the unhealthy atmosphere of the billiard-room. The newer order of things is better for the bounders, but very bad for the unconventional beauties of the wilds. That desolating game is producing, here as elsewhere, a loafer class of caddies, cockneyfying and undermining the sturdy Cornish character, and changing the uprising rustic youth into a loafing, cigarette-smoking type of wastrel who becomes unemployable and vicious when youth is left behind, having learnt nothing but the vices of the rich, which they have not the means to satisfy, while they have lost, beyond recovery, the habit of industry. It was a bad day for England when golf crossed the Scottish border and invaded our land.
Most of the other curses of Cornwall are the direct and inevitable outcome of better local intercommunication, and of easier travel and the consequent increase of tourists and summer residents. Few ever foresaw, when corrugated, galvanised iron was introduced, how in less than a generation the tin Bungalow and the Simple Life would go hand in hand, and settle on the loneliest spots to be found along our seaboard. I will leave it for future philosophers to determine which invented the other; whether the Bungalow produced the Simple Life, or whether an already existent desire for the simplification of existence produced the Bungalow; with passing references to the Servant difficulty and to that latter-day institution, the Week-end. But it is now a well-understood and greatly practised thing that you may cheaply live in a tin house in the wilderness, without servants, on tinned provisions, and on tinned bread from the nearest machine-bakery, and yet be in the intellectual movement of the time, and without reproach, even though your sanitary arrangements be such that even the old-time cottager might consider scandalous, and although, with the lengthening of your sojourn, your rising zareba of empty tins makes ever more squalid the surroundings.
Machine-made bread is a very real offence and distress to any one who has known Cornwall for a considerable number of years, for it is a comparatively recent introduction. Until quite lately, Cornwall was one of the last strongholds of that admirable lady, the old-fashioned housewife who was proud to make her own bread. She would, dear lady, as soon thought of getting outside help for having the beds made, as purchasing what she would have called, with contemptuous inflection, "Baker's bread." But nowadays not only the resident, but the farmer even, and the veriest cottager, gets his loaf from the baker's cart that has now taken to calling for orders every morning, even in rural districts, as though they were merely London suburbs. And such a perverted taste in bread exists that not merely decent "baker's bread" now prevails in these parts, but a dry, husky, leathery kind, that is baked in tins, which Providence never intended bread to be.
From Poldhu the cliffs die down for an interval and disclose a flat shore. The little church lying down there, on the other side of the sandy cove, its small detached tower half built into the rocky hillside, is that of Gunwalloe. There is no village of Gunwalloe, and the living is held with that of Cury, two miles inland. Scarce removed above high-water mark, and in storms exposed in a large degree to the fury of the waves, the lonely situation of Gunwalloe church excites much wonder. Legends tell with misty vagueness that it was founded here as the result of a vow made by a storm-tossed mariner that, should Providence bring him safe to land, he would build a church where he came ashore. There is not the least reason for doubting the truth of this, and indeed it is the only probable explanation of a church being built on such a spot. The existing building is a late fifteenth-century structure obviously replacing a very early building, of which the bowl of a Norman font is the only relic. The usual mean and skimping restoration and refitting with pitch-pine may be noticed here.
St. Winwaloe, to whom the church is dedicated, died, in A.D. 529, Abbot of Landevenec, in Brittany. His life was written by Abbot Wurdestan of that place, in A.D. 884. "Gunwalloe" is simply a perversion of his name, which is sometimes also written "Guenole." A curious epitaph may be noted, on John Dale, drowned April 1808, in attempting the rescue of a sailor wrecked on Loe Bar.
It is a disastrous sign of the times that at Cury, and here at Gunwalloe, Ritualistic excesses are alienating from the Church of England even those few who have hitherto adhered to it. These doings so angered the people a year or two back that they threw the pictures and candles and other Romish frippery into the sea; but the folly of it goes on, and theatrical parties, wrongly styled religious processions, of clergy proceed occasionally, with pomp of vestments and swinging of incense, to the shore, reciting prayers for those drowned at sea, who, poor souls are quite beyond this sort of thing. Even the bunches of flowers the children are taught to throw into the waves don't help them to salvation.
Among the many wrecks at Gunwalloe, the story of what is called the "Dollar Wreck" stands out most prominently. On a stormy night in 1787 a Spanish vessel struck on the cliffs by the church and became a total loss. She had among her cargo a great quantity of silver dollars, computed at the lowest at seventeen tons weight. Ever since that time the story of the "dollar wreck" has been kept alive, not only by tradition, but by scattered coins being occasionally flung upon the beach by the waves, after some exceptionally heavy storm. Gunwalloe, in fact, reeks with well-authenticated stories of dollars. The earliest among these is that of a wonderful dream by a Mrs. Jose, not long after the wreck. She saw in the vision a heavy bag of dollars lying on the sands, and begged her husband to go and secure it. He laughed the idea to scorn, but she persisted and was so in earnest about it that she got up and dressed; and there, sure enough, lay the bag of dollars. But just as she was rejoicing over the find, a number of wreckers happened along this way and seized the treasure for themselves, quarrelling over it until they resorted to bloodshed.
In 1845 a serious attempt was made to secure the buried dollars. The position of the wreck was located, iron stanchions were fixed in the cliffs, and a stone dam built out to enclose the spot, with the intention of pumping out the water, but when those preparations were on the eve of completion a storm came and utterly abolished all the works. Another party of adventurers tried, about 1865, and sank a shaft into which the sea burst, and in 1872 a further effort was made. The scheme of operations was on this occasion altogether different, the idea being to introduce pipes into the water and by powerful pumps to suck up the sand and incidentally the dollars. But storms made short work of that enterprise also. Attempts are even now in progress for the recovery of the treasure that has been waiting over a hundred and twenty years for the finding.
A mysterious wreck, not, however, so mysterious but that it was quite certainly the result of foul play, happened on Gunwalloe sands on April 21st, 1890. The steamship Brankelow, from Cardiff for Cronstadt, with a cargo of 3,000 tons of coal, ran at full speed ahead at midnight on to the sands. Fortunately it was not rough weather at the time, and the crew were got off safely, although it was stated that they were all drunk. The cause of the vessel being driven directly for the land was found to have been a malicious tampering with the compasses by Trades' Union men at Cardiff, and by violent damage done wilfully to it on the voyage. Two magnets had been inserted at Cardiff, by which the needle was wrong to the extent of five points. The Brankelow eventually became embedded in the sand and was a total loss.
Up out of Gunwalloe the road skirts Halzaphron Cliffs, and thence descends to the sands of Loe Bar. At Halzaphron on November 4th, 1807, the ill-fated Susan and Rebecca transport, homeward-bound from Buenos Aires, was wrecked. Of the 180 on board, forty-one were drowned and buried on the cliff-top. H.M.S. Anson took the sands on Loe Bar, December 28th, 1807, and was wrecked, with the loss of her captain and sixty sailors.
Loe, or properly Looe, Bar is a belt of sand thrown up by the sea, obstructing the outflow of a stream called the Cober, which has too feeble a discharge to clear away the obstruction, causing the valley running two miles and a half inland to Helston to assume the aspect of a lake. In the summer these waters would to some degree percolate through the sand, but in the winter's rains they could not escape so quickly, and consequently the level of Looe Pool would rise by some ten feet or more, a source of some inconvenience. From this arose an ancient custom, by which the corporation of Helston presented the lord of the manor with a leathern purse containing three-halfpence, soliciting permission to cut the sandbar and so permit the water to escape. Permission graciously accorded, workmen were engaged who cut a trench in the sand, and so the stream burst through and regained its summer level. This done, the sea began to choke up the outlet as before, and the process was repeated the next winter.
This quaint old custom is now a thing of the past, it having been of recent years somewhat belatedly realised that a culvert constructed under Looe Bar would effectually drain the waters off, without the periodic cuttings.
But Cornwall being the Cornwall of legends, it was known perfectly well that satanic agency and not natural forces originally produced Looe Bar. Time was, according to these legends, when Helston was a thriving port, with trading vessels sailing up the estuary. It was Tregeagle who did the mischief. Every one in Cornwall has heard of Tregeagle, the dishonest steward, who pervades many legends and lives in many centuries, these stories not being particular in the matter of ten centuries or so. Set to work by St. Petroc at Gunwalloe, his task was to carry sand in sacks across the mouth of the estuary and empty them at Porthleven. Laden with a sack of enormous size, the doomed spirit was wading across when one of the wicked demons, who were always on the watch for him, tripped him up, and the contents of the sack fell into the sea.
Helston is nowadays a quiet, uninteresting town, by no means looking its age. It was in existence at the time of the Norman Conquest, for it appears in Domesday Book as "Henlistone." Of its castle, as likewise of its old-time Parliamentary importance of returning two members, nothing is left; and only once a year does Helston advertise its existence to the world, when its annual Furry, held on May 8th, is duly chronicled in the newspapers. It attracted more attention in 1907, because that was the year of Sir William Treloar, a native of Helston, being Lord Mayor of London; and the sun shone that day on the unwonted spectacle of a Lord Mayor jigging down the principal street of Helston in the Furry Dance:
Such is the chorus of the Furry Song, sung to an immemorially ancient tune. The Furry, which some hold to be a survival of the Roman "Floralia," and is obviously in any case a celebration in honour of spring, is observed with great earnestness and is officially recognised by the Mayor and Corporation of Helston, who take active part in it.
The woods of Penrose descend beautifully to the shares of Looe Pool, and they are exchanged with some regret for the not very interesting cliff-road on to Porthleven, a small harbour town, situated on steep hillsides overlooking a pool. Granite is shipped at the quays, and much yacht- and boat-building is carried on. Inland is Breage, a village lying just off the modern high-road between Helston and Penzance, and suffering from the fact that it has thus been shouldered aside, in the deviation of traffic. You may perceive, in the following lines, the pronunciation of the place-name:
The church is dedicated to a woman-saint, Breaca, one of the band of Irish missionaries who landed at Hayle River. It is a large and fine building. A prominent feature of the interior is a fresco, discovered of late years, representing the Saviour as the benefactor of all callings. The almost nude figure, ten feet high, is crowned. Gouts of blood, like crows' feet or broad-arrow marks in shape, are plentifully distributed over body and limbs, and all around are shown some fifty articles of handicraft, including scythe, rake, saw, trowel, plumber's iron, harp, zither, pitcher, cart, plate, sickle, axe, anchor, anvil, and horseshoe, all connected with the figure by spurts of blood, typifying the blood of Christ crucified sanctifying all callings. The wheel on which the figure stands seems to typify eternity. A similar fresco has already been noted at Poundstock.
The coast from Porthleven offers no exceptional features until after passing Trewavas Head, when the smooth expanse of Praa Sands is seen.
Here the iron barque Noisiel, of Plymouth, was driven ashore in a storm on the night of Friday, August 4th, 1905, and became a total wreck. She was on her way from Cherbourg with 600 tons of armour-plate, and weathered Rinsey Head only to become embayed off Praa Sands. Anchors were let out, but failed to hold on the sandy bottom, and the Noisiel was driven in, broadside on, and the waves speedily broke her back. The crew mostly jumped overboard and struck out for the shore. Two of the nine aboard were drowned. The vessel was a total loss. Some of the armour-plates still remain, half buried in the sand.
A little way onward and a quarter of a mile inland is the fine old embattled tower of Pengersick Castle. It stands in a pleasant meadow, and is now part of a "farm-place." The tower is of comparatively late date, and seems to have been built in the reign of Henry the Eighth under mysterious circumstances, by a person named Millaton. We need not believe the tale that he had committed a murder in some distant shire, and hid himself here, building the tower for defence, in the event of justice nosing him; for the arrival of a stranger and the hasty building of a defensible tower would at once have attracted undesirable curiosity. Moreover, the masonry is of such exquisite fineness that it is quite evident it was only built at leisure and by the most skilled of craftsmen. Millaton is further said to have lived here with his wife an unhappy existence. They hated one another to extinction; but at last he pretended a reconciliation and planned an elaborate dinner to celebrate the event. After dinner he raised his glass, in a toast, and drained it off. She followed suit. Then said she: "Yours was poisoned, and in three minutes you will be a dead man!"
"So was yours," he rejoined, "and you will be a dead woman in five minutes!"
"No matter for that," replied his wife, "for I shall have two minutes left, in which to kick your dead body!"
Germoc lies just inland from this place. Its church, in a hollow beneath the high-road, is dedicated to St. Germoch, another of the Irish saints. "St. Germoe's Chair," a canopied stone building, stands in the churchyard. The corbel-stones of the south porch are carved with figures of monkeys.
Beyond Pengersick comes Hoe Point, and then Prussia Cove.