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From John O'Groats to Land's End by Robert Naylor and John Naylor

R >> Robert Naylor and John Naylor >> From John O\'Groats to Land\'s End




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.

[Illustration: 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-glass 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 Gloucestershire, 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 glass 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
passed 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.

[Illustration: 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 grass. 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 buttress 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 pass,
And, as upon the thick rank grass
With muffled 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 Essex 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
passed 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.

[Illustration: 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 passed 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 passages from the great bard's writings, assured 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.

[Illustration: 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 passed 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 Essex,
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 ships and men for the
siege of Calais, Fowey responded nobly to the call, furnishing 47 ships
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 ships.
Possibly the ships 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.
Nicholas on the sea-coast from there to the north, and we remembered he
was the patron saint at Aberdeen.

St. Nicholas is also the patron saint of the Russians, some of the Czars
of that mighty Empire having been named after him. While St. Catherine
is the patron saint of the girls, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of
the boys, and strange to relate is also the patron saint of parish
clerks, who were formerly called "scholars."

When pictured in Christian art this saint is dressed in the robe of a
bishop, with three purses, or three golden balls, or three children. The
three purses represent those given by him to three sisters to enable
them to marry; but we did not know the meaning of the three golden
balls, unless it was that they represented the money the purses
contained. My brother suggested they might have some connection with the
three golden balls hanging outside the pawnbrokers' shops. Afterwards we
found St. Nicholas was the patron saint of that body. But the three
children were all boys, who once lived in the East, and being sent to a
school at Athens, were told to call on St. Nicholas on their way for his
benediction. They stopped for the night at a place called Myra, where
the innkeeper murdered them for their money and baggage, and placed
their mangled bodies in a pickling-tub, intending to sell them as pork.
St. Nicholas, however, saw the tragedy in a vision, and went to the inn,
where the man confessed the crime, whilst St. Nicholas, by a miracle,
raised the murdered boys to life again!

Sometimes he had been nicknamed "Nick," or "Old Nick," and then he
became a demon, or the Devil, or the "Evil spirit of the North." In
Scandinavia he was always associated with water either in sea or lake,
river or waterfall, his picture being changed to that of a
horrid-looking creature, half-child and half-horse, the horse's feet
being shown the wrong way about. Sometimes, again, he was shown as an
old black man like an imp, sitting on a rock and wringing the dripping
water from his long black hair!

On our way towards St. Austell we passed some very interesting places to
the right and left of our road, and had some fine views of the sea.
Presently we arrived at a considerable village inhabited by miners, the
name of which we did not know until my brother, who was walking with a
miner in the rear, suddenly called to me, and pointing to a name on a
board, said: "See where we've got to!" When my brother called out the
name of the place, I heard a man shout from across the road in a
triumphant tone of voice, "Yes, you're in it now, sir!" and sure enough
we had arrived at St. Blazey, a rather queer name, we thought, for a
place called after a saint! But, unlike the people of Fowey, the
inhabitants seemed quite satisfied with their saint, and indeed rather
proud of him than otherwise. Asked where we could get some coffee and
something to eat, the quarryman to whom my brother had been talking
directed us to a temperance house near at hand, where we were well
served. We were rather surprised at the number of people who came in
after us at intervals, but it appeared afterwards that my brother had
incidentally told the man with whom he was walking about our long
journey, and that we had walked about 1,300 miles. The news had
circulated rapidly about the village, and we eventually found ourselves
the centre of a crowd anxious to see us, and ask questions. They seemed
quite a homely, steady class of men, and gave us a Cornish welcome and a
Cornish cheer as we left the village.

[Illustration: SARCOPHAGUS OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON IN THE CRYPT OF ST.
PAUL'S CATHEDRAL.]

Just before reaching St. Blazey, however, we walked a short distance up
a very charming little valley, which has been described as a paradise of
ferns, wooden glades, and granite boulders, and possesses some of the
finest landscapes in the district, with the ground in springtime azure
with wild hyacinths. Some of the finest ferns grew in profusion in this
glen, including the "Osmunda regalis" and the graceful lady fern; but,
fortunately for the ferns, much of the valley passed through private
grounds, and the pretty Carmears waterfall could only be seen on certain
days.

The parish church of Luxulyan, after which village the valley was named,
stood at the head of the glen, and as the people of Cornwall had so many
saints, they had been able to spare two of them for Luxulyan, so that
the church was dedicated conjointly to St. Cyricus and St. Julitta,
while the name of a third was said to be concealed in the modern name of
the village, St. Suhan, a saint who also appeared in Wales and Brittany.
The name of the village well was St. Cyricus, which probably accounted
for the name appearing the first in the dedication of the church. The
church tower at one time contained the Cornish Stannary Records, but in
the time of the Civil War they had been removed for greater safety to
Lostwithiel, where they were unfortunately destroyed. There were many
ancient and disused tin workings in the parish of Luxulyan, but a
particularly fine kind of granite was quarried there, for use in
buildings where durability was necessary--the lighthouse and beacon on
Plymouth Breakwater having both been built with granite obtained from
these quarries. There was also a very hard variety of granite much used
by sculptors called porphyry, a very hard and variegated rock of a mixed
purple-and-white colour. When the Duke of Wellington died, the Continent
was searched for the most durable stone for his sepulchre, sufficiently
grand and durable to cover his remains, but none could be found to excel
that at Luxulyan. A huge boulder of porphyry, nearly all of it above
ground, lying in a field where it had lain from time immemorial, was
selected. It was estimated to weigh over seventy tons, and was wrought
and polished near the spot where it was found. When complete it was
conveyed thence to St. Paul's Cathedral, and now forms the sarcophagus
of the famous Iron Duke. The total cost was about L1,100.

We had now to walk all the way to Land's End through a tin-mining
country, which really extended farther than that, as some of the mines
were under the sea. But the industry was showing signs of decay, for
Cornwall had no coal and very little peat, and the native-grown timber
had been practically exhausted. She had therefore to depend on the coal
from South Wales to smelt the ore, and it was becoming a question
whether it was cheaper to take the ore to the coal or the coal to the
ore, the cost being about equal in either case. Meantime many miners had
left the country, and others were thinking of following them to Africa
and America, while many of the more expensive mines to work had been
closed down. The origin of tin mining in Cornwall was of remote
antiquity, and the earliest method of raising the metal was that
practiced in the time of Diodorus by streaming--a method more like
modern gold-digging, since the ore in the bed of the streams, having
been already washed there for centuries, was much purer than that found
in the lodes. Diodorus Siculus, about the beginning of the Christian
Era, mentioned the inhabitants of Belerium as miners and smelters of
tin, and wrote: "After beating it up into knucklebone shapes, they carry
it to a certain island lying off Britain named Ictis (probably the Isle
of Wight), and thence the merchants buy it from the inhabitants and
carry it over to Gaul, and lastly, travelling by land through Gaul about
thirty days, they bring down the loads on horses to the mouth of the
Rhine."

There was no doubt in our own minds that the mining of tin in Cornwall
was the most ancient industry known in Britain, and had existed there in
the time of prehistoric man. We often found ourselves speculating about
the age, and the ages of man. The age of man was said to be seventy, and
might be divided thus:

At ten a child, at twenty wild,
At thirty strong, if ever!
At forty wise, at fifty rich,
At sixty good, or never!

There were some curious Celtic lines which described the age of animals
compared with that of man:

Thrice the age of a dog is that of a horse;
Thrice the age of a horse is that of a man;
Thrice the age of a man is that of a deer;
Thrice the age of a deer is that of an eagle.

The ages of man were divided into three by Lucretius as:

(1) "The Stone Age," when celts or implements of stone were employed.
(2) "The Bronze Age," when implements were made of copper and brass.
(3) "The Iron Age," when implements were made of iron, as in the present
day.

This being the order of antiquity and materials employed in making the
implements, it was therefore safe to conclude that the mining of tin
must have dated back as far as the Bronze Age, for there could have been
no bronze made without tin, since bronze is produced by the mixing of
copper and tin.

Appliances for crushing and smelting the ore were already in existence
in very early times, as well as blowing-houses and moulds in which to
run the molten metal. The ingots of tin were in the form of an astragal,
and an ancient ingot of large size dredged up in Falmouth Harbour,
weighing 150 lbs., resembled the letter H in form. This was the most
convenient shape for carriage, either in a boat or slung across the back
of a horse, and horses were employed in that way to convey the tin along
the steep and narrow roads from the mines to the sea-coast.

The Romans made use of the Cornish mines, for an ingot of tin bearing a
Roman stamp and inscription was preserved in the Truro Museum, and Roman
coins had been found in the mines.

With St. Austell's Bay to our left, we soon came in sight of the town of
St. Austell, behind which were the Hensbarrow Downs, rising over 1,000
feet above sea-level. From the beacon on the top the whole of Cornwall
can be seen on a clear day, bounded by the Bristol Channel on one side
and the English Channel on the other; on the lower reaches, and quite
near St. Austell, were the great tin mines of Carclaze, some of the
largest and most ancient in Cornwall.

Another great industry was also being carried on, as in the year 1768 W.
Cookworthy, a Plymouth Quaker, had discovered an enormous bed of white
clay, which had since been so extensively excavated that the workings
now resembled the crater of an extinct volcano. This clay, of the finest
quality, was named China clay, because it was exactly similar to that
used in China, where porcelain was made many centuries before it was
made in England, the process of its manufacture being kept a profound
secret by the Chinese, whose country was closed to Europeans.

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