Chapter III: Staffordshire (6)

Lacking an Excalibur, I cast a stone into the invisible, hoping I might hit Tregeagle, but the hollow splash that came back aroused such uncanny echoes we all three with one accord skurried away and scrabbled back down sandy ruts to the haven of the carriage. As we gratefully munched our sandwiches, we reflected that perhaps the mystical mere was more impressive so than if we had actually beheld that little fresh-water pond, about a mile in circumference and some eight or ten feet deep, lying on its mid-Cornwall tableland with the crest of Brown Gilly rising up behind. Our eyes had told us nothing that we could urge against Malory's geography, with its sea-route from Dozmare to Glastonbury.

"Then Sir Bedivere took the King upon his back, and so went
with him to that water side, and when they were at the water
side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many
fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all
they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when
they saw King Arthur. 'Now put me into the barge,' said the
King; and so he did softly. And there received him three
queens with great mourning, and so they sat them down, and in
one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that
queen said, 'Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long
from me? Alas; this wound on your head hath caught overmuch
cold.' And so then they rowed from the land, and Sir Bedivere
cried, 'Ah, my lord Arthur, what shall become of me, now ye
go from me and leave me here alone among mine enemies?'
'Comfort thyself,' said the King, 'and do as well as thou
mayst, for in me is no trust for to trust in. For I will into
the vale of Avalon to heal me of my grievous wound.'"

But the Cornish mist in which Arthur fought his last "dim, weird battle of the west" was to us no longer a fable.

"A death-white mist slept over sand and sea;
Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew
Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold
With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
And some had visions out of golden youth,
And some beheld the faces of old ghosts
Look in upon the battle."

Now that we had braved Tregeagle and done the deed, that heavy mist thinned away as suddenly as it had gathered, and when, at ten o'clock, we reached our inn, the sky was bright with stars, and a great moon was slowly drifting up from the horizon.

But the paramount Table Round locality in Cornwall is Tintagel on the western coast where Arthur's Castle stands and where, moreover, the hushed tide brought him first from the mystery of "the great deep."

"For there was no man knew from whence he came;
But after tempest, when the long wave broke
All down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss,
There came a day as still as heaven, and then
They found a naked child upon the sands
Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea;
And that was Arthur."

The high, bleak, rugged and desolate tract of Bodwin Moor, at whose heart is Dozmare Pool, lies between the four towns of Liskeard, Bodwin, Launceston and Camelford. This last was our starting-point for Tintagel. We had reached Camelford by a day's journey from Penzance, setting out by train through a country seamed all over with abandoned surface diggings of the tin mines, pierced by shafts and defaced by heaps of mineral refuse to which heather was already bringing the first healing of nature. We had our nooning at Newquay and would have been glad to linger on its broad beach, looking up at the twin barrows where sleep, according to tradition, two kings of long ago,--kings who fought on that open headland a whole day through and fell together at sunset, each slain by the last thrust of the other. But we pressed on by carriage, hardly glancing at the long, low, stately towered church of St. Columb Minor, and cutting short our survey of the curious old panels, so richly carved with sacred emblems--pelicans, crosses, the instruments of the Passion, the pierced hand, a heart within a crown of thorns, the lamb, the wafer and the cup--in the brother church of St. Columb Major. From the depths of our Cornish road shut in by banks and hedges some ten or twelve feet high, we eyed the ripe blackberries hanging well above our reach; we saw a blazing rick on one side and, on the other, a maze of white butterflies circling among the fuchsia trees; we met a group of rustic mourners pushing a bier set on wheels; and just as the hedges began to open here and there, giving us vistas of wheatfield, moor, and sea, we found ourselves at Wadebridge, a little town with a street of ivy-greened houses dignified by a grey church-tower. We crossed a stone bridge of many arches that seemed too big for its river, and took train for Camelford. On our right we had the granite masses of Brown Willy and Rough Tor and presently, on our left, the great gashes of the Delalobe slate quarries.

These held the close attention of a Cornish miner who, after forty years of fortune-seeking in Australia, was coming home to Camelford for a visit. He drove up with us in the rattling wagonette, gazing on ragged hedge and prickly furze as a thirsty soul might gaze on Paradise. The fulness of his heart overflowed in little laughters, though the tears were glistening on his lashes, and in broken words of memory and joy. He kept pointing out to us, mere strangers that we were, not noting and not caring what we were, the stiles and streams and rocks associated with special events of his boyhood and youth. As we went clattering down into the little stone huddle of houses, we had to turn away from the rapture in his eyes. Brothers and sisters were waiting to greet him, with tall children of theirs that had been to him but names, yet the human welcome could hardly penetrate through his dream, through his ecstatic communion with the scene itself. As we were driving out of Camelford early the next morning, we caught sight of our grizzled Cornishman once again, standing in one of those humble doorways with the shining still upon his face.

A man like that would make anybody homesick and, to speak impartially, we thought that Camelford was far less worthy of such emotion than two villages we severally remembered over sea. We fell out of humour with the poor old town, would not hear of it as the Arthurian Camelot,

"a city of shadowy palaces
And stately,"

and disdained the tradition that the blameless king fell at Slaughter Bridge. My athletic comrade, however, to the admiration of a flock of little schoolgirls, swung herself down the riverbank to see his tombstone and reported it as reading:

_Caten hic jacit filius Marconi._

The drive to Tintagel was through a world of slate,--slate everywhere. There were slate walls, slate houses, heaps of slate-refuse, banks of broken slate feathered with gorse and heather, yawning mouths of disused slate quarries. We passed through defiles where slate was piled cliff-high on either side. Slate steps led up to the footpaths that ran along the top of the hedge-banks. By way of this forsaken region we came to a sleeping town. Tintagel Church lay before us, hoary, silent. Not a soul was in the streets,--not the fierce ghosts of Gorlois and of Uther Pendragon, nor the sad ghost of Igraine, nor the loving ghosts of Tristram and Iseult. We left the carriage and climbed by slippery paths to Arthur's Castle, which is no castle, but a colossal confusion of tumbled rocks, some heaped and mortared once by human hands, some grouped in the fantastic architecture of nature. There we sat astonished and dismayed, for the place is like a robber hold, a den of pirates fortified against the land, rather than a court of chivalry. But the scene was superbly beautiful. The ocean on which we looked was a dazzling blue, and far to north and south stood out the stern, dark outlines of the coast. The sunshine that filled the surf with shimmering tints gleamed on the white plumage of a gull enthroned on the summit rock of the castle,--most likely the spirit of Guinevere, for Arthur, when he revisits Tintagel, comes as the Cornish chough,

"Talons and beak all red with blood,"--

a bird which no true Cornishman will shoot.

The monstrous crags and huge fragments of old wall were cleft in a fashion strongly suggestive of

"casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairylands forlorn,"

and we shuddered to imagine with what stupendous force the terrible tides of winter must beat against that naked coast.

We realised what the fury of the sea-winds here must be as we strolled through the churchyard, whose slate slabs are buttressed with masonry and, even so, tip and lean over those graves too old for grief. All is ancient about Tintagel church, and most of all the Norman font whose sculptured faces are worn dim and sleepy with innumerable years, each year bringing its quota of babies for the blessing of the holy water.

We had to leave it,--the mysterious Titanic ruin with its bracken blowing in the wind, the sheep, chained in couples, that prick their silly noses on nettles and furze, the old church, where bells tolled without ringers on the day that Arthur fell, the old wayside cross, the old stone dovecote in the vicarage garden, but not the cliffs and the sea. For we drove up the coast to Boscastle, pausing on the way--and that was our mistake--to see the little church of Forrabury. This is the church that longed for a peal of bells to rival those of Tintagel, but when the vessel that brought the bells was waiting for the tide to take her into the harbour, and the pilot was thanking God for a fair voyage, the captain laughed and swore that it was only their own good seamanship they had to praise, whereupon a mighty billow, far out at sea, swept down upon the ship and overwhelmed her, only the devout pilot escaping with his life. And ever since--so ballad and guide-book assured us--the tower of Forrabury church has stood voiceless, though a muffled knell, when a storm is coming up, is heard beneath the waves. What then was our righteous wrath on finding this venerable edifice all newly done up in pink frescoes,--yes, and with an ornate bell-rope of scarlet twist hanging beneath the tower!

The harbour of Boscastle is a rock-walled inlet somewhat resembling that of Pasajes in the north of Spain. Curving promontories shut in a tidal stream that runs green in the sun and purple in the shadow. Swift lines of creaming foam glint across where the river yields itself up to the strong currents of the sea,--a sea which, as we saw it that brilliant September afternoon, twinkled with myriad points of intolerable light.

How can the pen cease from writing about Cornwall? And yet it must. There is a devil--a printer's devil--that counts our idle words. I may not tell of wind-swept Morwenstow, where Tennyson and Hawker roamed the wave-fretted cliffs together and talked of the Table Round, nor of lofty Launceston, with its ivied Norman keep and great granite church whose outer walls are covered with elaborate carving. The sculptured figure of Mary Magdalen at the east end, lying on her face in an attitude of extreme dejection, is regularly stoned by the boys for luck, and flints and shards were lodged, when we saw her, all over her poor back. I may not tell of Bodwin, either, with its memory of a mayor who took a prominent part in the West Country revolt against the reformed service. As a consequence, when the agitation was over he was called upon to entertain the royal commissioner, who hanged his host after dinner.

It is a pity not to have space to suggest the softer beauties of the south coast. From Truro, after a visit to its new cathedral with its holy memory of Henry Martyn, we drove by way of Sunny Cove to Malpas. The gulls were screaming as they sought their dinner on the flats, and a man, wading through the pools, was gathering up belated little fishes in his hands. We sailed between wooded banks down the Fal to Falmouth, which is watched over by the garrisoned castle looming on Pendennis Head. The old port lies in picturesque disorder along the inlet, while the new town stands handsomely on the height above. Here we saw, in lawns and gardens, a semi-tropical vegetation, yuccas, acacias, bamboos, aloes, palms, and pampas grass. Would that there were time to tell the smuggling scandals of the Killigrews, that witty and graceless family who ought to have learned better from their Quaker neighbours, the Foxes! It was by a Killigrew that Falmouth was founded in the reign of the first Stuart, and Killigrews made merry in Arwenach House, and made free with the merchandise of foreign ships, for many a pleasant year. The time when piracy could be counted an aristocratic amusement has gone by in Falmouth, as well as the bustling days when this port was an important packet station whence coaches and postchaises went speeding up to London. It is now putting on the gentler graces and coming into repute as a winter resort, though it has not yet attained the popularity of Penzance.

On our way from the one to the other we passed through the mining town of Redruth, near which, in the hollow known as Gwennap Pit, Wesley addressed vast audiences. On one occasion the number was reckoned as thirty-two thousand. "I shall scarce see a larger congregation," he wrote, "till we meet in the air." The more mystical doctrines of Fox took little hold on the rough fishermen and miners of Cornwall, but Wesley practically converted the Duchy, turning it from the most lawless corner of England, a lair of smugglers and wreckers, into a sober, well-conducted community. As little flames are said to be seen playing about a converted Cornishman, Wesley's path across the county must have been a veritable Milky Way. In such natural amphitheatres as Gwennap Pit, it may be that the Cornish Miracle Plays, so far excelling the English in freedom of fancy and symbolic suggestion, were given. We looked wistfully from Hayle over to St. Ives, with its long line of fishing boats tied up like horses to a church fence, but since we could follow only one road at once, held on our way to Penzance.

Beautiful for situation, the "Holy Headland" looks out over waters exquisitely coloured toward

"the great Vision of the Guarded Mount,"

St. Michael's Mount, a solemn cone, fortress-crowned, above which a praying hermit, when the setting sun was flooding the skies with splendour, might easily have deemed he saw the guardian wings of the Archangel. As all Cornish children know, this mount was built by the giant Cormoran and rose, in those days when Mount's Bay was a fertile plain of several parishes, from the midst of a forest, "a hoare rock in a wood." It was the scene of the glorious exploit of Jack the Giant-Killer, who was afterwards appointed tutor to King Arthur's eldest son in that special branch of warfare. Cornwall is so fond of its old giants that it sometimes, so folklorists say, confuses their deeds with those of the saints. But it loves its saints, too, who are said to be more numerous than the saints in Paradise. Cornish churches stand open all day long, and old Cornwall's affectionate name for the Virgin was "Aunt Mary."

The view ranges on across Mount's Bay to The Lizard, that peninsula so beautiful with its serpentine cliffs and Cornish heath, the wildest and loneliest part of all wild and lonely Cornwall; but our route lay to its companion point on the southwest. Our driver literally knew every inch of the road and pointed out to us cross after cross, and cromlech after cromlech,--such vague old stones, worn featureless and almost formless, built into walls, half sunken under the turf, embedded in banks, peering at us from across a field, thrusting a grey visage through a hedge,--sometimes a mere time-eaten stump, sometimes a heathen monolith with the afterthought of a crucifix rudely graved upon it, sometimes a complete square cross. These last we often found in churchyards, set up on stone platforms approached by a flight of steps. Such was the one we noted in the churchyard of St. Buryan, another of those long, low, lofty-towered old churches characteristic of Cornwall.

As we neared Penberth Cove, the Atlantic opened out to view, its sparkling turquoise relieved by one white sail. It was in Penberth Cove that there once lived a bedridden old woman, a good old soul, about whose one-roomed cottage the Small People, to divert her, used to sport all day, catching her mice and riding them in and out of holes in the thatch, dancing the dust off the rafters and giving trapeze and tight-rope performances on the cobwebs. The valley runs green to the sea and we left the carriage for a walk across the fields, a walk diversified by stiles of all known species, to Treryn Castle. This monstrous fastness of heaped rock and jagged crag was built by a giant who was such a clever necromancer that all he had to do was to sit in the Giant's Easy-chair, to whose discomfort we can testify, and will the castle to rise out of the sea. For latter-day necromancy, our guide pointed out Porthcurnow Beach, where, he said, six submarine cables land. He was a native of the coast, a fisherman, and gave us eyes to see the gulls rejoicing over their feast of pilchards, and ears to hear the whistle of a young otter. The Lion of Treryn is the Logan Rock, but we first encountered, in our scramble over the crags, Lady Logan, a stumpy personage whose hood and skirt, though recognisable, are of the Stone Age fashion. This granite beauty is so sensitive in her feelings that she trembles at a touch. As we climbed higher among the rocks, in the exhilarating air, we won views ever more wonderful of rolling green billows shattered into clouds of spray upon the shore. The Logan itself is an enormous rocking-stone,--a boulder weighing some seventy tons delicately balanced on cubical masses of rock. It does not, like the rocking-stone in Burma on which a little pagoda has been built, oscillate in the wind, but swings at a sturdy push. It was formerly more easily swayed than now, for a mischievous young Goldsmith, nephew of the poet who was himself so prankishly inclined, undertook in 1824, when commanding a revenue cutter off this coast, to dispel the popular notion that no human force could dislodge Logan Rock. On the eighth of April, though the first would have been more appropriate, he landed with a crew of eight men, meaning to tip the stone over into the sea. But he only succeeded in moving it some four feet to the left and, even so, found his escapade an expensive one, for it cost ten thousand dollars to replace the ponderous mass--as the anger of the people compelled the Admiralty to order him to do--on its original pivot. With all his efforts, he could not hit the perfect poise, and whereas Logan Rock once had the power of healing sick children who were rocked upon it, that spell no longer works. It was not the right hour for us to ascertain whether touching the stone thrice three times would still make a woman a witch. This test should be undertaken at midnight, when a battalion of sympathetic hags, mounted on stems of ragwort, would be hooting encouragement from their favourite rendezvous at the towering crag south of Logan Rock known as Castle Peak.

We returned to our carriage and drove on. The fields of gorse and heather suddenly slipped over foaming reefs and we were at Land's End. Great waves were churning themselves white against the ledges. A few sails glinted on the horizon; a few gulls were perching on the rocks; but we were, at first, aware of nothing save the steep, broken wall of granite and the strange, compelling song of the Atlantic. By degrees we noted light-houses, bays, and a curious cavern, with such wave-eaten arches as we had seen at Biarritz, beneath our very feet. We walked along the edge of the cliffs, green with turf to the sheer plunge. At places, indeed, the heather runs down the rocks to meet the tide. We passed close by gulls that stood unstartled in this their own domain of crags and spray-dashed gorges, eyeing severely the approach of uninvited guests.

The sun was setting and we could distinguish the Scilly Isles like gold cloudlets resting on the sea. Between these islands and Land's End once bloomed the lost Arthurian realm of Lyonesse. But weary of the past and its dim fables, our hearts followed that rippling line of splendour further and further west, far out across the Atlantic to the land of hope and promise, the strong young land that fronts the future, vowed to the great adventure of human brotherhood.

The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.

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Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious printer's errors repaired. Otherwise, unusual spellings and grammar--including hyphenation inconsistencies--were retained as in the original.

P. 253, "Both fine and cleane..."; Although opening quotes usually indicate a new stanza, in this case there was no blank line between this line and the line before it.