From John O'Groats to Land's End Part 62

An oak and an elm-tree stand beside, And behind doth an ash-tree grow, And a willow from the bank above Droops to the water below.

St. Keyne introduced the rather remarkable belief that the first of a newly married couple to drink of the water of her well, whether husband or wife, should in future rule the home. We supposed that the happy pair would have a race to the well, and the one who arrived there first would ever afterwards play the first fiddle, if that instrument was in use in the time of St. Keyne. But a story was related of how on one occasion the better-half triumphed. No sooner had the knot been tied than the husband ran off as fast as he could to drink of the water at St. Keyne's Well, leaving his wife in the church. When he got back he found the lady had been before him, for she had brought a bottle of the water from the well with her to church, and while the man was running to the well she had been quietly seated drinking the water in the church porch!

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. KEYNE'S WELL.]

The story was told by the victim to a stranger, and the incident was recorded by Southey in his poem "The Well of St. Keyne":

"You drank of the Well, I warrant, betimes?"

He to the countryman said: But the countryman smiled as the stranger spake, And sheepishly shook his head:

"I hastened as soon as the wedding was done, And left my wife in the porch; But i' faith! she had been wiser than me, For she took a bottle to church."

It was at Liskeard that we first heard of George Borrow, a tramp like ourselves. Although we should have been pleased to have had a talk with him, we should scarcely have been able to accompany him on one of his journeys, for he was 6 feet 3 inches in height against our 5 feet 8 inches, and he would have been able to walk quicker than ourselves. He was born in 1803 and died in 1881, so that he was still alive when we were walking through Cornwall, and was for many years a travelling agent for the British and Foreign Bible Society. In the course of his wanderings, generally on foot, he made a study of gipsy life, and wrote some charming books about the Romany tribes, his _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_ being still widely read. He was a native of Norfolk, but his father was born near Liskeard, to which place he paid a special visit at the end of 1853. On Christmas Day in that year, which was also a Sunday, he walked to St. Cleer and attended service in the church, Mr. Berkeley being the preacher, and although there was no organ, he saw a fiddle in the gallery, so fiddles must have then been in use in Cornwall. He would also see the Well of St. Cleer, which was quite near the church, and must in the time of the Saxons have been covered over with stone, as the old arches and columns were Saxon work. Borrow's father was born at Trethinnick Farm, near St. Cleer, which he also went to see. He left Liskeard in January 1854 on a tramp through Truro and Penzance to Land's End by almost the same route as that we were about to follow ourselves.

As he made many notes during his wanderings in Cornwall, his friends naturally expected him to publish an account of his travels there, after the manner of a book he had published in 1862 ent.i.tled _Wild Wales_, but they were disappointed, for none appeared.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. CLEER'S WELL.]

It was said that Cornwall did not grow wood enough to make a coffin, and the absence of trees enabled us to see a number of huge, mysterious-looking stones: some upright and standing alone, others in circles, or in groups named cists composed of upright stones, forming a cavity between them in the shape of a chest covered at the top, and not intended to be opened again, for they had been used as tombs.

Occasionally the stones stood quite near our road, some in the shape of crosses, while we could see others in fields and on the top of small hills.

There were some remarkable stones near St. Cleer, including the famous "Cheesewring," formed of eight circular stones each resembling a cheese, placed one on top of another and rising to a height of about eight yards; but the strange part about this curious erection was that the four larger and heavier stones were at the top and the four smaller ones at the bottom. It was a mystery how in such remote times the builders could have got those immense stones to the top of the others and there balanced them so exactly as to withstand the storms of so many years.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHEESEWRING]

Near this supposed Druidical erection was a rough cave known as "Daniel Gumb's House," formerly inhabited by a man of that name who came there to study astrology and astronomy, and who was said to have had his family with him. He left his record by cutting his name at the entrance to the cave, "D. Gumb 1735," and by inscribing a figure on the roof representing the famous 47th proposition in the First Book of Euclid.

The Trethevy Menhir, a cromlech or "House of the Dead," which George Borrow went to see, consisted of seven great hewn slabs which formed a chamber inside about the height of a man; over the top was an enormous flat stone of such great weight as to make one wonder how it could have been placed there so many centuries ago. At one corner of the great stone, which was in a slanting position, there was a hole the use of which puzzled antiquarians; but George Borrow was said to have contrived to get on the top of it and, putting his hand through the hole, shouted, "Success to old Cornwall," a sentiment which we were fully prepared to endorse, for we thought the people we saw at the two extremes of our journey--say in Shetland, Orkney, and the extreme north of Scotland, and those in Devon and Cornwall in the South of England--were the most homely and sociable people with whom we came in contact.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "DANIEL GUMB'S HOUSE," LISKEARD.]

Some of the legends attached to the stones in Cornwall were of a religious character, one example being the three stone circles named the "Hurlers"; eleven in one circle, fourteen in another, and twelve in a third--thirty-seven in all; but only about one-half of them remained standing. Here indeed might be read a "sermon in stone," and one of them might have been preached from these circles, as the stones were said to represent men who were hurling a ball one Sunday instead of attending church, when they and the two pipers who were playing for them were all turned into stone for thus desecrating the Sabbath Day.

We crossed the country to visit St. Neot, and as the village was away from the main roads and situated on the fringe of Bodmin Moor, we were surprised to find such a fine church there. We were informed that St.

Neot was the second largest parish in Cornwall, and that the moor beyond had been much more thickly populated in former times. We had pa.s.sed through a place of the same name in Huntingdons.h.i.+re in the previous year, when walking home from London, and had been puzzled as to how to p.r.o.nounce the name; when we appealed to a gentleman we met on the road outside the town, he told us that the gentry called it St. Netts and the common people St. Noots, but here it was p.r.o.nounced as spelt, with just a slight stress on the first syllable--St. Ne-ot, the letter "s" not being sounded officially.

St. Neot, supposed to have been related to King Alfred, being either a brother or an uncle, came here from Glas...o...b..ry and built a hermitage near his well, in which he would stand for hours immersed up to his neck in the water in order "to mortify his flesh and cultivate his memory,"

while he recited portions of the Psalter, the whole of which he could repeat from memory. Though a dwarf, he was said to be able to rescue beasts from the hunters and oxen from the thieves, and to live on two miraculous fishes, which, though he ate them continually, were always to be seen sporting in the water of his well!

St. Neot was the original burial-place of the saint, and in the church there was a curious stone casket or reliquary which formerly contained his remains; but when they were carried off to enrich Eynesbury Abbey at the Huntingdon St. Neots, all that was left here was a bone from one of his arms. This incident established the connection between the two places so far apart.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TRETHEVY STONES, LISKEARD.]

The church had a beautiful Decorated tower and a finely carved sixteenth-century roof, but its great glory consisted in its famous stained-gla.s.s windows, which were fifteen in number, and to each of which had been given a special name, such as the Young Women's Window, the Wives' Window, and so on, while St. Neot's window in its twelve panels represented incidents in the life of that saint. It was supposed that these fine windows were second to none in all England, except those at Fairford church in Gloucesters.h.i.+re, which we had already seen, and which were undoubtedly the finest range of mediaeval windows in the country. They were more in number, and had the great advantage of being perfect, for in the time of the Civil War they had been taken away and hidden in a place of safety, and not replaced in the church until the country had resumed its normal condition.

The gla.s.s in the lower panels of the windows in the Church of St.

Neot's, Cornwall, had at that time been broken, but had been restored, the subjects represented being the same as before. Those windows named after the young women and the wives had been presented to the church in the sixteenth century by the maids and mothers of the parish.

On our way from here to Lostwithiel, which my brother thought might have been a suitable name for the place where we went astray last night, we pa.s.sed along Braddock or Broad-oak Moor, where in 1643, during the Civil War, a battle was fought, in which Sir Ralph Hopton defeated the Parliamentary Army and captured more than a thousand prisoners. Poetry seemed to be rather at a discount in Cornwall, but we copied the following lines relating to this preliminary battle:

When gallant Grenville stoutly stood And stopped the gap up with his blood, When Hopton led his Cornish band Where the sly conqueror durst not stand.

We knew the Queen was nigh at hand.

We must confess we did not understand this; it could not have been Spenser's "Faerie Queene," so we walked on to the Fairy Cross without seeing either the Queen or the Fairy, although we were fortunate to find what might be described as a Fairy Glen and to reach the old Castle of Restormel, which had thus been heralded:

To the Loiterer, the Tourist, or the Antiquary: the ivy-covered ruins of Restormel Castle will amply repay a visit, inasmuch as the remains of its former grandeur must, by the very nature of things, induce feelings of the highest and most dignified kind; they must force contemplative thought, and compel respect for the works of our forefathers and reverence for the work of the Creator's hand through centuries of time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RESTORMEL CASTLE.]

It was therefore with some such thoughts as these that we walked along the lonely road leading up to the old castle, and rambled amongst the venerable ruins. The last of the summer visitors had long since departed, and the only sound we could hear was that made by the wind, as it whistled and moaned among the ivy-covered ruins, and in the trees which partly surrounded them, reminding us that the harvest was past and the summer was ended, while indications of approaching winter were not wanting.

The castle was circular in form, and we walked round the outside of it on the border of the moat which had formerly been filled with water, but now was quite dry and covered with luxuriant gra.s.s. It was 60 feet wide and 30 feet deep, being formerly crossed by a drawbridge, not now required. The ruins have thus been described by a modern poet:

And now I reach the moat's broad marge, And at each pace more fair and large The antique pile grows on my sight, Though sullen Time's resistless might, Stronger than storms or bolts of heaven, Through wall and b.u.t.tress rents have riven; And wider gaps had there been seen But for the ivy's buckler green, With stems like stalwart arms sustained; Here else had little now remained But heaps of stones, or mounds o'ergrown With nettles, or with hemlock sown.

Under the mouldering gate I pa.s.s, And, as upon the thick rank gra.s.s With m.u.f.fled sound my footsteps falls, Waking no echo from the walls, I feel as one who chanced to tread The solemn precincts of the dead.

The mound on which the castle stood was originally of Celtic construction, but was afterwards converted into one of the fortresses which the Normans built in the eastern part of Cornwall as rallying-points in case of any sudden insurrection among the "West Welshmen." The occupation of the fortress by the Normans was the immediate cause of the foundation of the town of Lostwithiel, to which a charter was granted in 1196 by Robert de Cardinan, the then owner of the castle and the surrounding country.

An exchequer deed showed how the castle and town of Lostwithiel came into the possession of the Dukes of Cornwall:

Know ye present and to come that I, Isolda-de-Tracey, daughter and heir of Andrew de Cardinan, have granted to Lord Richard, King of the Romans, my whole Manor of Tewington.... Moreover I have given and granted to the aforesaid Lord the King, Castle of Restormell and the villeinage in demesne, wood and meadows, and the whole Town of Lostwithiel, and water of Fowey, with the fishery, with all liberties, and free customs to the said water, town, and castle, belonging. Whereof the water of Fowey shall answer for two and a half knights fees (a "knight's fee" being equal to 600 acres of land).

In the year 1225 Henry III gave the whole county of Cornwall, in fee, to his brother Richard, who was created Earl of Cornwall by charter dated August 12th, 1231, and from that time Restormel became the property of the Earls of Cornwall. Afterwards, in 1338, when the Earldom was raised to a Dukedom, the charter of creation settled on the Duchy, with other manors, the castle and manor of Restormel, with the park and other appurtenances in the county of Cornwall, together with the town of Lostwithiel: and it was on record that the park then contained 300 deer.

Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans, caused extensive alterations and improvements in the castle at Restormel, and often made it his residence, and kept his Court there. He was elected King of the Romans or Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at Frankfort on January 13th, 1256, and crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle, November 27th, 1257. Edward the Black Prince, upon whom the Dukedom was confirmed when only seven years old, paid two visits to Restormel. The first of these was in 1354, possibly while his expedition to France was being prepared at Plymouth, and the second in 1363.

In the time of the Civil War the commanding position of the castle caused it to be repaired and held by the Parliamentarians; but after the disastrous defeat of their army under the Earl of Ess.e.x in 1644 it was garrisoned by Sir Richard Grenville for the King. In recent times it was again visited by royalty, for on Tuesday, September 8th, 1846, the royal yacht _Victoria and Albert_ sailed into Fowey and landed a royal party, who drove to Restormel Castle. It revived old memories to read the names of the party who came here on that occasion, for in addition to Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, there were the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales, Lady Jocelyn, Miss Kerr, Mdlle.

Geuner, Lord Spencer, Lord Palmerston, Sir James Clark, Mr. Anson, and Col. Grey.

The castle was not a very large one, and we were more impressed by the loneliness of its situation than by the ruin itself, for there was a long approach to it without a cottage or a friendly native in sight, nor did we see any one in the lonely road of quite a mile along which we pa.s.sed afterwards to the town of Lostwithiel. But this road was quite pleasant, following the tree-covered course of the River Fowey, and lined with ferns and the usual flower-bearing plants all the way to that town.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LOSTWITHIEL ANCIENT BRIDGE AND LANDING PLACE.]

Here we rejoined the Liskcard highway, which crossed the river by an ancient bridge said to date from the fourteenth century. At this point the river had long ago been artificially widened so as to form a basin and landing-place for the small boats which then pa.s.sed to and fro between Fowey and Lostwithiel.

The derivation of the last place-name was somewhat doubtful, but the general interpretation seemed to be that its original form was Lis-guythiel, meaning the "Palace in the Wood," which might be correct, since great trees still shut in the range of old buildings representing the remains of the old Palace or Duchy House. The buildings, which were by no means lofty, were devoted to purposes of an unimportant character, but they had a decidedly dungeon-like appearance, and my brother, who claimed to be an authority on Shakespeare because he had once committed to memory two pa.s.sages from the great bard's writings, a.s.sured me that if these old walls were gifted with speech, like the ghost that appeared to Hamlet, they "could a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up our souls; freeze our young blood; make our eyes, like stars, start from their spheres; our knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine"; but fortunately "this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood," and so we hurried away up the town.

Lostwithiel, one of the Stannary towns, was at one time the only coinage town in Cornwall, and traces of the old Mint and Stannary Court could yet be seen. The town had formerly the honour of being represented in Parliament by the famous writer, statesman, and poet, Joseph Addison.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LOSTWITHIEL CHURCH, SOUTH PORCH AND CROSS]

The church was dedicated to St. Bartholomew, and was described as "a perfect example of the Decorated period" and the "glory of Cornwall." It possessed a lantern spire "of a kind unexampled elsewhere in the West of England"; but as our standard was high, since we had seen so many churches, we failed to appreciate these features, and, generally speaking, there were no very fine churches in Cornwall compared with those in other counties. This church, however, had pa.s.sed through some lively scenes in the Civil War, when the Royalist army was driving that of the Parliament towards the sea-coast, where it was afterwards cornered and captured. A Provost named Marshall commanded the detachment of the Parliamentary forces at Lostwithiel, and to show their contempt for the religion of the Church of England, they desecrated the church by leading one of their horses to the font and christening him Charles "in contempt of his most sacred Majesty the King." Meanwhile two Cavaliers, supporters of the King, and gentlemen of some repute in the county, had hidden themselves in the church tower and drawn the ladder up after them. When they saw the Provost preparing to depart, for he was now in a hurry to get away from the approaching Royalist soldiers, they jeered at him through a window in the tower. He called to them, "I'll fetch you down," and sent men with some "mulch and hay" to set fire to the tower into which the Cavaliers had climbed, but they only jeered at him the more, which caused him to try gunpowder, intending, as he could not smoke them out, to blow them out; but he only succeeded in blowing a few tiles off the roof of the church. The font was a fine one, octagonal in form, and carved on all the eight panels, though some of the figures had been mutilated; but it was still possible to discern a horrible-looking face covered with a wreath of snakes, a mitred head of a bishop, a figure of a knight with a hawk, horn, and hound, and other animals scarcely suitable, we thought, for a font.

The army of the Parliament was gradually driven to Fowey, where 6,000 of them were taken prisoner, while their commander, the Earl of Ess.e.x, escaped by sea. Fowey was only about six miles away from Lostwithiel, and situated at the mouth of the River Fowey. It was at one time the greatest port on the coast of Cornwall, and the abode of some of the fiercest fighting men in the British Isles. From that port vessels sailed to the Crusades, and when Edward III wanted s.h.i.+ps and men for the siege of Calais, Fowey responded n.o.bly to the call, furnis.h.i.+ng 47 s.h.i.+ps manned by 770 men. The men of Fowey were the great terror of the French coast, but in 1447 the French landed in the night and burnt the town.

After this two forts were built, one on each side of the entrance to the river, after the manner of those at Dartmouth, a stout iron chain being dropped between them at nightfall. Fowey men were in great favour with Edward IV because of their continued activity against the French; but when he sent them a message, "I am at peace with my brother of France,"

the Fowey men replied that they were at war with him! As this was likely to create friction between the two countries, and as none of his men dared go to Fowey owing to the warlike character of its inhabitants, the King decided to resort to strategy, but of a rather mean character. He despatched men to Lostwithiel, who sent a deputation to Fowey to say they wished to consult the Fowey men about some new design upon France.

The latter, not suspecting any treachery, came over, and were immediately seized and their leader hanged; while men were sent by sea from Dartmouth to remove their harbour chain and take away their s.h.i.+ps.

Possibly the s.h.i.+ps might afterwards have been restored to them upon certain conditions, but it was quite an effectual way of preventing their depredations on the coast of France.

They seem to have been a turbulent race of people at Fowey, for they once actually became dissatisfied with their patron saint, the Irish St.

Finbar, and when they rebuilt their church in 1336 they dismissed him and adopted St. Nicholas to guide their future destinies. Perhaps it was because St. Nicholas was the patron saint of all sailors, as he allayed a great storm when on a voyage to the Holy Land. What is now named Drake's Island, off Plymouth, was formerly named St. Nicholas. It would not be difficult to find many other churches dedicated to St.