It is half a mile from the stony hamlet of Trereen to the Logan Rock, which stands up against the skyline towards the seaward extremity of that magnificently rugged headland, Trereen Dinas. The narrow neck of this peninsula is deeply scored across with a ditch and heaped with a parallel wall of stones and earth, the defensive works of a long-forgotten people, but it is not so much to see these vestiges of insecure prehistoric times, nor even to view the fine scenery, that a continual stream of visitors comes hither all the summer. It is the Logan Rock that attracts them. This rock, one of the many "logans" in Cornwall which are so balanced or pivoted by the natural weathering of ages that they "log," or oscillate slightly, to a vigorous push, is the most famous of its kind, both for its own self and for the circumstances of its later history. It is an irregular cube of granite weighing sixty tons, some say ninety, poised upon a great mass of fantastic rocks, curiously jointed, and overlooking the sea from a height of about two hundred feet. Borlase, writing in his "Antiquities of Cornwall," 1754, declared it to be "morally impossible that any lever, or indeed force, however employed in a mechanical way, can remove it from its present situation." The same view was held by the country people, and so worked upon Lieutenant Goldsmith of H.M.S. cutter Nimble, cruising off-shore on the look-out for smugglers, that he determined to overthrow the stone and thus prove himself a fellow clever beyond all expectation. So, on April 8th, 1824 (it would have been more appropriately done on the 1st), he landed with a boat's crew of nine men, and with handspikes and much personal exertion did succeed in performing that which Borlase and the united voice of the countryside had declared to be impossible. He overthrew the Logan Rock, and had it not become lodged in a cleft, it must have descended into the sea and been lost for ever. He did, incidentally, a great deal more. The wanton act of folly rightly aroused Cornwall to furious indignation, and he went in great personal danger for awhile. If such an ass as he had been lynched it would have been a salutary warning to others. The Admiralty could not ignore the anger that had been aroused, and speedily intimated to Lieutenant Goldsmith that he must either replace the rock or lose his commission. The tackle for the purpose was lent to him from the dockyard at Devonport, and after much preparation and the construction of elaborate staging, the rock was returned to its place on November 2nd, in the presence of a vast crowd assembled to witness it. The work was costly beyond the means of a lieutenant, and was carried through by subscription. Goldsmith's career was ruined by this act of folly, and he died in 1841, without promotion. The "logging" of the rock was quite destroyed and, although it appears still to be delicately poised, it requires great exertion to induce even the suspicion of a tremor.
There is an excellent good climb for the young and active and the reckless down from this grim granite promontory of Trereen Dinas to an exquisitely secluded sandy cove, and thence up again, and over more tumbled hummocks of the all-pervading granite, to the sandy and shelly shore of Porthcurno, properly Porth Kernow, the "Port of Cornwall."
But halt awhile! secluded, did I say that sandy cove to be? So it may seem at certain hours of the day, when the young barbarians of the Eastern Telegraph Company are in office, at work; but even then, when this yellow strand under Trereen Dinas is indeed solitary, the observant explorer, who thinks himself one of the very few who ever scale these rocks and pace these selvedges of the sea, will be startled, even as was Robinson Crusoe on a memorable occasion, by the imprint of a human foot. A human foot? Nay, dozens of them, for this is, in short, one of the favourite bathing-coves of the ninety or so telegraphist probationers of the Eastern Telegraph Company at Porthcurno. For at Porthcurno the cable lands from Gibraltar and all the wide world, including the Cocos Islands and places of unpronounceable name in tropic climes, where white men sweat and fume far from their kind and dwell lovingly on the good time coming, when they shall be home and in London again, living instead of existing.
At Banjoewangi (which is a real place on the Telegraph Company's system, somewhere back even of Back of Beyond, and not what it looks like, a nigger-minstrels' kingdom-come), London, you know, seems a very desirable place.
Well, here is the E. T. C. telegraph station, up inland a quarter of a mile from the cove; a square white building with a flat, bomb-proof roof, and here in various quarters are the officials, and here too are some ninety probationers of sixteen to eighteen years of age, or thereabouts, all learning telegraphese, the punching of dots and dashes on endless tapelike strips of paper and the reading of the same: a sufficiently beastly business, so what wonder if these ninety in their off-hours be somewhat untamable!
All these things are late developments. A few years ago Porthcurno was a wild little place, and quite behind the age. Now it is perhaps even a little in advance of it. An almost typically suburban street runs up inland, and on the elegantly thin iron telegraph-poles that carry the land-lines of the E. T. C. are incandescent electric globes with white shades, which light the road at night. And on the cliffs the Telegraph Company is trying a wireless installation of its own, of which the visible evidence is a very tall and very groggy-looking pole, stayed and tied elaborately. Such is Porthcurno, the "PK" of telegraphists.
From Porthcurno, to reach the church of St. Levan, you take the church path, avoiding the hideous houses on the headland, plastered and of a dismal neutral tint, that have recently been built there. Through three fields runs the church-path, and then the sea, with distant horizon, opens out between the flanks of a combe, the four pinnacles of St. Levan church-tower suddenly rising before you, scarce above your line of vision. The church, in fact, is built in a hollow—once a solitary hollow—giving upon the sea, a place where few strangers ever came in those distant fifth-century days when St. Levan lived the hermit life. We know very little of that saint, except the tale of the disastrous entertainment he offered his sister when she came to visit him here. It seems that he subsisted entirely upon the fish he caught, and thinking he would spread a dainty meal before his visitors, he went out and caught a chad. The fish that came to his line he did not consider good enough, so he threw it back. Not before the identical fish had been caught three times did he accept the inevitable, and he cooked it accordingly; but at the first bite the child was choked. St. Levan was illogical enough—and I think blasphemous enough—to consider this a judgment of Providence upon himself for refusing what had been sent him. The chad was long called locally "chack-cheeld." "St. Levan's Path" to the rocks where he used to fish is still pointed out.
The place teems with legends. Thus, the great granite rock in the churchyard, called "St. Levan's Stone," with a grass-grown gap in it, is the subject of a local rhyme, which tells us that when this slowly widening fissure has grown large enough for the passage of a packhorse, the Day of Judgment will be at hand. Personal observation and judicious enquiries justify me in assuring trembling sinners that, if this be indeed a guide, that day is yet far off.
I have said St. Levan was solitary. The immediate neighbourhood of the church is even now not very densely populated, for the visible buildings are only the rectory and a cottage; and it can, I conceive, scarcely be called cheerful; for the bell-buoy on that submerged rock, the Rundlestone, out to sea, is for ever heard tolling, sometimes like a funeral knell and at others like some harsh gong, calling lost mariners to dinner down there in weedy caves with the mermaids.
The little church of St. Levan is rich in old bench-ends, displaying his fishes, a palmer with cockle-shells in his hat, knights, ladies, and jesters; while the chancel-screen is enriched with the eagle of St. John, the lily of the Virgin, the sacred monogram, and the spear, nails, and hammer of the Crucifixion. The Virgin herself is rendered, with round silly face and coif and fifteenth-century ruff. There has been a great deal of restoration effected here of late years.
A sundial in the churchyard displays a solemn motto: Sicut umbra transeunt dies, and a memorial to one of the Telegraph Company's probationers, drowned while bathing at Porthcurno, stands near by the grave of Captain Henry Rothery and the twenty-two others lost in the wreck of the Khyber at Porthloe in the storm of March 15th, 1905.
The narrow cliff-path from St. Levan presently leads to the small and rocky fishing-cove of Porth Gwarra, the foreshore roughly paved with granite blocks in between the projecting rocks, which are here hollowed into caverns, where the few boats and lobster-pots are stored. A yellow snapdragon grows profusely in the cliffs here, and ivy richly mantles some of the crags along the coast towards Land's End; while a curious plant with fleshy leaves, curved like giant talons, and red and yellow flowers, called the "ice-plant," thickly drapes many of the rough walls enclosing fields.
The cliffs here rise to their grandest in the magnificent piles of granite blocks towering up at the crested promontory of Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the "Holed Headland in Penwith." The cliff-top walk has here broadened out to an expanse of short moss-like grass interspersed with rabbit-burrows, knobs of lichened rock and tufts of thrift or sea-pink. It is good going for the pedestrian, but the grass is apt to be slippery. A stranger wandering here alone suddenly finds the chasm that gives Tol Pedn its name, directly in his path.
There are few places on the coasts of Cornwall really dangerous, unless you go out of your way to court danger, but this abrupt hole in the cliff-top is really a deadly place. That no one appears ever to have fallen down it and broken his neck seems to be because strangers who walk these cliffs generally do so with a very proper sense of the perils which lie in the way of those who do not exercise due caution. Any one who walked here in one of the frequent sea-fogs would stand an excellent chance of walking right over the edge of this hole in the headland, and so falling an inevitable one hundred feet to his death. This great circular gap, the "Funnel," as some call it, is about thirty feet across, and is a real startler. It was formed just in the same manner as the "Lion's Den," near the Lizard, and the "Devil's Frying Pan," near Cadgwith, by the falling-in of the roof of a cave; and the beach down below communicates with the sea. Adjoining it, from the cliffs' edge, rises the impressive pile of granite rock called "Chair Ladder," tinted all hues by weathering and by lichens, from black and grey to green, red, and a vivid orange. It is not difficult to climb down into the black depths below Chair Ladder, or to the beach, but it requires rather more energy to return. To style Chair Ladder and the other rocky spires neighbouring it piles of rock is by no means straining language, for they have exactly the appearance of having been heaped one upon another by some superhuman energy, the granite cubes being jointed like so many blocks of rude cyclopean masonry. The coast here indeed displays some of the most curious imitative forms in natural architecture, and every point and every little porth has its old Cornish name.
The point of Carn Guethensbras, the "Great Carn," juts out beyond Chair Ladder, and encloses Porthloe, the "Lake Port." It was here that the homeward-bound sailing ship Khyber, from Australia, was cast away in March 1905, and twenty-three of the twenty-six aboard were drowned. An Admiralty signalling station has since been established on the cliffs.
I was walking here in August 1909, and two men came hurrying out of the signal-station.
"Are you a doctor, sir," they asked.
I felt unreasonably ashamed that I was not.
"What's the matter?"
"Why, 'zno, a man, one of a party camping tu Porth Gwarra, runnen along th' cliffs, has fell'd down a hunner 'an twenty feet, an' scat's head all to bits, an' we'm most at our wits' end what to du."
It seemed, hearing a report like this, that there was really nothing to do but hold an inquest; but doctors had been telegraphed for to Penzance, and when at last they arrived, the man was not dead. It was a marvellous escape. Falling down the jagged rocks, into a place difficult of access, from which the coastguard only brought him up on a stretcher after great exertion, he was not killed outright; and indeed, according to later advices, eventually recovered.
A lovely nook opens out beyond Pendower Cove, at Nanjizel, or Mill Bay, where there is a natural archway and a tall rifted cavern in the headland of Carn-les-Boel, known as the "Song of the Sea," perhaps the most entirely beautiful and romantic cave in Cornwall.
Past this, the point of Carn Voel is reached, with the "Lion's Den" cavern. Ahead, the heights of Pardenick Point rise in columnar majesty, the point whence Turner painted his view of the Land's End, that extraordinarily fantastic and darkling composition, in which the rocks on the hillsides look more like sheep than rocks.
There stretch the stacked rocks of Bolerium, the Land's End, in Cornish "Pedn-an-Laaz," and in Welsh, "Pen-Gwaed," the Headland of Blood; in effect not remotely resembling bundles of cigars set on end.