HOLIDAYS IN CORNWALL
FOLLOWING the example of other trunk lines, the Great Western Railway is doing its best to convince the public that there is nothing like the districts to which it ministers, and that Cornwall in particular ought to be one of the playgrounds of England. The appeal is mainly based on the mildness of the climate, which fairly justifies for the South Cornish coast the name of the British Riviera. But the beauty and freshness of this region of the West are such that they only need to be better known. What the holiday-making public mainly seek is a complete change of ideas and surroundings ; and in the present mood of Englishmen they find this most easily where Nature has been least disturbed. A narrow penin- sula, with cliffs of the primeval rocks, opposing the strength of granite and of serpentine to the forces of the deep Atlantic, guarantees a niaximurn of coast-line, much of which approaches the sublime as nearly SR any natural feature in these islands. Nowhere is the sea so translucent or of such an azure blue, and the gigantic waves which surge upon its rocks are the foam fringe from the swell, not of the Channel or the narrow seas, but of the heaving bosom of the wide Atlantic.
The play of natural forces along this coast is on a scale rarely seen in any latitude. On the brows of cliffs with two hundred feet of vertical descent the turf is embrowned and rusted far inland bithe fall of spray, and after a storm the hollows behind the lower crags for a hundred yards inland are, piled with deep masses of yeasty foam. Where church and cottage alike are built of serpentine or granite, the element of permanence in habitation seems almost to match the age of the sea-cliffs themselves ; and the visitor who cares for such things finds himself surrounded by unbroken traditions and survivals of an historical past of a kind more actual and more active than in the more distant islands of the West of Scotland or the scantily peopled glens of the wilder Scotch Highlands. The activities, religion, and language of the old Celtic Cornwall have left their mark on every side; for while the people have by consent adopted English, almost every field and rock and natural object retains its old name. Mr. R. B. Harvey, the Vicar of Mullion, says that the famous Dolly Pentreath, of Mousehole, was not, "as Mr. Daines Barrington said in 1768, the last person who spoke Cornish fluently.' There is still extant a letter written in Cornish by a Mousehole fisherman in 1776, who says in it that he learnt the language as a boy ; and that when at sea with his father and others he did not hear a word of English for a week together In 1790, according to Puce, Cornish was still spoken in the West, and the Matthews of Newlyn, one of whom died in 1800, are known to have spoken it more fluently than Dolly Pentreath. It lingers even now in a multitude of words spoken bY our labourers and fishermen. I remember as a child myself having been taught by tradition, orally of course, to count, and say the Lord's Prayer in Cornish, and I dare say there is many a youngster in Newlyn at the present moment who can score in Cornish as readily as he can in English."
It is common experience that though the picturesque needs teaching, what may be termed the classic beauties of Nature seem instantly and for ever to impress those who live among them, and to find expression in the names given to them by consent at unknown distances of time. The translations of Celtic names for mountains, glens, and lakes are often poetical and descriptive; and it is said that the Zulus, and even the Central African tribes, have shown great feeling in their names for scenery. In much of England the drums and trampling,s of successive conquests have dulled these echoes of the past, or the names have been changed. In Cornwall they survive in multitudes, and as a rule the meaning is remem- bered. In the Cornish Chersonese, for example, as the Lizard Peninsula has been aptly called, the names of pools, springs, fields, and rocks are poetical and descriptive. The Pool of the Britons, the Down of the Horses (or wild ponies), Redan- nick (or "the Place of Ferns "), Mor Ros (" the Sea Valley"), the Rock-Spring Field, the Cairn by the Sea, the Beloved Field, the Bright Cairn, the Silver Well, the Bald Field, " Tre Spridiou " (the spirits' home), Vyvyan's Well, the Black Pool (Poldhu), Ogo Dour, the Water Cavern, "An Ors," the name of a rock, not "the Horse," as this and other like rocks are called in maps, both there and elsewhere, i.e., off Culver Cliff, but the Bear (Ursa).
The Cornish names derived from animals are very numerous. " Calebdu " or " Calenia," the wood-pigeons' field; " Vraddan or Braddn," the choughs' abode; " Tre-gwengn," the bees' home; " Cog-y-ros," the cuckoo valley; " Parc an scalli," the bats' field; " Sethar," the gulls' (rock). Perhaps the " neatest " of old Cornish names was that for a weathercock, " Alguin" or " All winds." The general names for objects, such as the famous " Tre, pol, and pen" (House, pool, and hill); "men," a stone; " wheal," a field; " eglos," a church ; " hal," a moor; "dour," water; "goon," a down; and " ros," a valley, are found all over the county, and when in combination are very expressive. Thus the pretty old town of Egloshayle is clearly the Moor church. The corrupted " Manacles" is "Men Eglos," Church Rock, and Men an Vaur, corrupted into "Man of War," is the "big rock." Polurrian, well known to visitors to the Lizard, is said to be the Polyrbian, the Boundary Pool. May it not be the Pool of St. Urban? The Cornish race never seems to have tired of celebrating the names of the agents of its somewhat late conversion, and St. Urian's memory has been obscured by far odder corruptions elsewhere. Thus near Brading, in the Isle of Wight, St. Urian's Copse is locally known as Centurion's Copse, and credited to the Romans.
The play of the West Atlantic winds never seems to check the growth of the, flowers and ferns of the West, though it
limits the tree growth to the top levels of the tiny combos which open to the sea. In certain valleys woodcocks are shot ' out of osmunda, a fern as high as bracken, and the very faces of the cliffs are hung with the cactus-like mesembryanthemam in sheets of green, fleshy leaves and rosy flowers. The flora of the cliffs is beautiful beyond belief: There the wild blue squill grows, the sea-pink, and sea-campion clinging to the tiniest fragments of soil in the precipices, like green mats covered with stars. The rare Cornish heath is among the curiosities of the Litard moors, where it forms a connecting 'link with the flora of Spain. The higher ground is as a rule the wildest moorland, having for chief vegetation furze and stunted heather, and dotted with great cairns, grey rooks, and remains of a human past of such hoary antiquity that of the greater part of it no record is left but the silent memorials of cromlech and Druidical circle, cave dwelling and Cyclopean wall. The legend of Arthur and his knights, and the more constant tradition of the conversion of the Cornishmen from heathendom, churches, ruined shrines, wayside crosses, sanctuaries, holy, wells, and ancient burial grounds appeal to sentiment from many sides. In spite of their mixed race, for those cast up by the sea have been ever adding new blood to the coast-dwellers, since men sailed tho sea in ships. to the first tin mines, local tradition has ever been true to the early Christian relics. Their. "later conversion" by Wesley does not seem in any way to have diminished this respect. The remains of old chapels, fonts,. or baptisteries half demolished or almost hidden in the walls of farmhouses or ruined dwellings are pointed out by any villager, and the site of what was once consecrated as a graveyard, perhaps five centuries ago, is remembered with almost the same fidelity as in Ireland, but with this difference, that in the latter sacred rites or burials are still associated with these spots by men following the same form of religion as those who first used them. , The Cornish, for the most part, have undergone a double change in this respect, first at the Reformation, and later, to a great degree, after Wesley's teaching.
A very pleasant reminder of the little change which old- fashioned Cornish sport and natural history have undergone will be found in Mr. J. C. Tregarthen's " Wild Life at the Land's End" (London : John Murray, 102. 6d. net). The writer deals chiefly with particular incidents in hunting the fox, the otter, the badger, the seal, and that scarce animal, the Cornish hare. Though these, except the seals, are by no means rare elsewhere, the wild country in which they are found, and the nature of their hunts among cairns and caves, lend to TiG. Tregarthen's pages much freshness and originality. The Cornish dialect (as now spoken) is reproduced to the life, and his characters will be recognised by many as being no less truly drawn. The desperate attempts to dig out an albino badger from Kenidzhek cairn, and the surprise of the seals in the cavern by night, are so well told that the reader feels as though he were there; and the curious unquestioned' importance attaching to genuine sport, however humble, is taken for granted. No one of the actors has the slightest misgiving that the game is not worth the candle. The book is well illustrated also with typical Cornish scenes Df many kinds—cliffs, cairns, holy wells, shrines, Druidical remains —and birds and beasts of the moor and crag.
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