by Tom Fort
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One of Ned Baring’s projects was to build a new church in Noss Mayo. It replaced the previous place of worship, a small and ancient slate and stone building inconveniently but very picturesquely perched above the sea at Stoke Beach. It was known as the Church of St Peter the Poor Fisherman, and what is left of it still stands down a steep track from Lord Revelstoke’s carriageway, nestled in a grove of trees, the sea surging around and over the jagged rocks below it.
It remains a highly atmospheric spot, even though its isolation has been mitigated by the proximity of a very discreet caravan park. The rough stone walls are green with moss and darkened by damp. Much of the roof has gone, leaving the stone slabs of the floor spattered with bird droppings. Some of the simple old pews in the south transept have been left for the occasional services that still take place. It is less than whole but much more than a ruin, retaining the feel of sanctity, of a place to seek and find solace.
Outside, leaning at angles in the shade of the trees, are the gravestones. One records the death in infancy of one of Ned Baring’s sons, Rupert. Another son, Maurice Baring, became a novelist and poet of some standing, although he is now pretty much forgotten. He described the church in his autobiography: ‘by the sea shore right down on the rocks, grey and covered in ivy and surrounded by quartz tombstones that seemed to have been scattered haphazard in the thick grass.’ As I left in the rain, the wind pulling at the branches of the oaks, I wondered if all our churches might be like this one day, roofless and abandoned, the cause of questioning as to what they were for.
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The Yealm estuary has two arms, one leading to the stream itself, the other to a creek which has Noss Mayo on one side and the village of Newton Ferrers on the other. The ferry crosses the narrows where the two arms come together, and is summoned by opening a hinged white disc visible from the ferryman’s house. It is a necessarily leisurely business getting across. I was the only passenger and the charge was, I think, £2.50 for me and the bike. The Yealm ferry must be a strong contender for the title of least commercially dynamic transport service in the country.
I was put ashore on the western side and followed a narrow footpath past several gardens which eventually turned into a long and bumpy bridle path, minimally signposted. I kept going and eventually hit the coastal path which took me along the cliffs and down to the Church of Saint Werburgh, standing very bold and defiant on an outcrop over the sea.
Geologists get quite animated about Wembury Bay on account of the great age and interesting formations of the Devonian mudstone and siltstone. Anyone else, however, may find this stretch of coastline somewhat dour. The predominant shade of the rocks and low cliffs is grey, and there are no beaches, only odd patches of gritty shingle. Its appeal is of the rugged and rough kind, as a result of which it is largely undeveloped for holiday use. Curiously enough, though, the ruggedest section – opposite where the Great Mewstone rears its angled crest two hundred feet above the water – was once occupied by the Wembury Holiday Camp, where pleasure-seekers from Plymouth and elsewhere enjoyed seaside fun and games in the 1930s. There is not much sign of the camp now, although right on the shore you can see the concrete walls of the swimming pool poking their broken edges above the waves.
In 1940 a naval gunnery school and radar station were established there, which became HMS Cambridge in the 1950s and remained in MOD hands until it was closed in 2001. An appeal enabled the National Trust to acquire the site, and the Trust began dismantling and clearing away the ugly clutter of shoddy buildings. At the same time it also gained control of the Great Mewstone, which it has subsequently placed out of bounds to humans so that seabirds can roost there in peace.
It seems remarkable, given its extremely exposed position, steepness and bare, windswept profile, that anyone would have chosen to live on the Mewstone. For the first inhabitant, a local felon named Finn, the alternative was transportation to Australia so perhaps his decision was understandable. Finn’s daughter, known as Black Joan, stayed there with her husband and children, until he fell off a rock into the sea and drowned. The last full-time residents were Sam Wakeham and his wife and their brood, who kept pigs and poultry and trapped a proportion of the numerous rabbits for sale, and supplemented their income by ferrying inquisitive visitors over from the mainland and back. The remains of their cottage are still visible on one of the Mewstone’s less precipitous slopes.
The rain had finally worn itself out by the time I got to Wembury Point. Looking back from the shore my eye was taken by a pair of very striking snow-white houses perched high above the bay. They had been built somewhat in the Sandbanks idiom, with much glass and square towers, all sharply defined right angles with terraces raised up on the seaward side. I called at the first of them and found its owner at home. He told me his brother had the other – they were partners in a Plymouth-based building firm. He gestured at the window running the length of the sitting room and I had to agree: the view was simply fabulous. He said he walked the dog six miles or so along the cliffs every day, swam in the sea, fished a bit, looked out from the terrace or the window a lot.
I told him he was a lucky devil. He said he knew it. ‘How could I get tired of this?’ he asked, sweeping his hand across the vista from the Yealm estuary in the east to Rame Head in the west. How indeed? Yet when I looked online a while later, the house was for sale: a 5 bed semi, guide price £1,250,000. Maybe he got short of money.
Around the point towards Plymouth I ran into a group of cheery dog walkers. I asked them where, in their view, the Channel ended and Plymouth Sound began. Their opinion was that it was Channel as far as the Plymouth Breakwater, and Sound after that. I looked at the map again and decided this was clearly nonsense. I drew an imaginary line from Wembury Point across to the wedge-shaped headland with Penlee Point at its eastern edge and decided that would do for me.
21
TWO LOOES
Remember Robert Shaw as Quint in Jaws, grunting out the first line of ‘Spanish Ladies’ in one of the classic displays of celluloid hamming? Had he carried on with the song in its original form – substituting ‘Boston’ for ‘England’ makes a geographical bollocks of it, not that Quint would have cared – he would have arrived in the third verse at ‘Rame Head off Plymouth’, one of the great familiar landmarks for sailors returning to home waters from distant seas.
It stands out from the wedge-shaped headland west of Plymouth Sound rather like the extended head of a tortoise. There is the shell of a very ancient chapel on its summit. Behind and below is the hamlet of Rame, with its church and slim tower and spire, also very old. There is no electricity in the church, but there was no need for it on a brilliant July day, the sun streaming through the low, narrow windows.
There was someone inside rubbing linseed oil into the backs of the pew. I commended him on his community spirit and he disclosed, not modestly, that the church was not even the half of it. He did RNLI, voluntary coast watch, ambulance support, the sailing club and more besides.
‘There’s three kinds of people around here,’ he said, rag in hand. ‘There’s the locals born and bred, who do nothing but moan about everything and get excited about racing their gigs. There’s the immigrants – that’s me. We do everything. If we don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. And then there’s the second-homers. They think they integrate with us and the locals because we’re all in the pub together, but in fact everyone hates them.’
He had come from landlocked Northamptonshire, unwillingly. ‘I had roots there, I had to dig ’em up.’ But his wife came from Cawsand, just around the headland towards Plymouth, and she wanted to go home – ‘only they don’t talk to her because she’s married to an outsider. That’s how they are.’
Cornwall is not like Devon – the hills are slightly less steep, for a start. Devon never had anything much apart from farming and fishing and, latterly, tourism. Cornwall is significantly more detached from the centre of things, and its people are, or were, more distinct. For a l
ong time it had a serious industrial aspect in the mining for tin and copper and the production of china clay, as well as fishing in every littoral community. Now there is some fishing, and a lot of tourism.
A great Cornishman, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch – who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Q’ – addressed the issue a long time ago. He said there had to be a debate about tourism: ‘On the one hand I see Cornwall impoverished by the evil days on which mining has fallen. I see her population diminished and her able-bodied sons forced to emigrate by the thousand. In the presence of destitution one is forced to consider any cure thoughtfully suggested.’ But he saw dangerous side effects in the cure. ‘A people which lays itself out to exploit the tourist runs an appreciable risk of deterioration in manliness and independence. I had rather be poor than subservient.’
His solution was characteristic of him if not as straightforward as it may have sounded at the time: ‘Well then, since we must cater for the stranger, let us do it well and honestly. Let us respect him and our own native land as well.’
W. H. Hudson, an outsider who loved Cornwall and spent long periods there, was struck – as visitors always were – by how unlike the rest of the country it was, both in its landscape and its people. Perhaps ill-advisedly, he attempted an analysis of Cornish character and temper. He found them remarkably and commendably free from the great nineteenth-century working-class vice, drink – except for the tin miners, who were drunk and savage. Hudson noted that the Cornish were friendly and pleasant to strangers but spiteful and vindictive among themselves. They were unreliable, given to sexual immorality and cruel to animals and birds. They went to church but thought there was nothing wrong in plundering a wrecked ship. He thought they lacked humour, and that far from being imaginative, as Celtic peoples are supposed to be, the Cornish people were defective in the creative faculty, had produced very little worthwhile art or literature and were inclined to religious fanaticism.
Hudson, like ‘Q’, was writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. By then the tourist tide was beginning to run strongly. The opening of the railway line to Penzance cut the journey time from London to seven hours. The service was christened the Cornish Riviera; one Great Western Railway poster showed a map on which the Lizard peninsula had been subtly redrawn to resemble Italy, and claimed similarities between the two ‘in shape, climate and natural beauties’. Cornwall was marketed as ‘the land of legend and romance’. It had coves and little beaches of dazzling sand, quaint fishing villages, wild landscapes and seascapes, old ruins and a distinct manufacturing heritage.
In fact Cornwall had everything the increasingly mobile holidaymaker and pleasure-seeker wanted, and post-1945 it became a prime destination. By 1959 the little port of Looe was said by the County Planning Department to have reached ‘saturation point’. The Shell Book of the British Coast, published in 1983, reported Polperro to be ‘so overcooked commercially that much of its original charm has disappeared’. Planners feared that ‘unless carefully guarded, the holiday industry could contribute to the destruction of the very features that attract visitors.’
That clearly has not happened. The flow is running as strongly as ever, bringing seasonal visitors, second-home owners and permanent migrants like my acquaintance from Northamptonshire. Whether Cornwall has managed to retain the manliness and independence so prized by ‘Q’ is another matter.
There is a Celtic cross on the seaward side of Rame Church with an inscription written by Rudyard Kipling, although it does not bear his name:
This was a man who did not seek his ends
In trivial honours but content to be
Himself in all things, never failed his friends
And least of all his lifelong friend, the sea.
The subject of this rather touching tribute was an obscure London stockbroker, Barclay Harper Walton, who advised Kipling on his investments. Walton made his money in the City but his passion was sailing, and the love of his life was his steam yacht, Bantam, which he kept at Cawsand. Kipling joined him several times between 1905 and 1911 to cruise Cornish waters, bringing his only son John, who was to be killed on the Western Front in 1915. They went mackerel fishing off the Eddystone Rocks even though – as Kipling wrote to a friend – ‘I hate yachts and nets of slimy fish flopping about the decks.’ On the last occasion Mrs Kipling and their daughter Elsie came too, and Kipling wrote to Walton that they had had ‘a glorious time and one which the children will never forget’.
After that the friendship lapsed. But when Walton died, unmarried, in 1931, his family approached Kipling for an epitaph. The writer obliged, but was most insistent that his lines should be anonymous, which is how it has remained.
On a clear day the lookout on Rame Head commands a view of a prodigious sweep of sea as far out as the Eddystone Rocks twelve miles away, and of coastline from Bolt Tail in the east to Dodman Point in the west. The curve of shore immediately to the west is Whitsand Bay, which at low tide has a fine stretch of sand very seductive to a perspiring cyclist on a blazing July day. But the slope behind the beach is steep and rough, and apart from a considerable peppering of wooden chalets, has remained undeveloped.
Just beyond Freathy a spur of rock known as Sharrow Point thrusts itself out from the sand. A bizarre labour of love and toil reveals itself as you scramble down. It is an excavation known as Captain Lugger’s Cave (or Grotto), the officer in question having lived up the hill at Tregantle. The story goes that he began chipping it out during the American War of Independence on the advice of his doctor, who thought the exercise might alleviate his chronic gout. By the time Captain Lugger had finished, the pesky colonials had won the day and the cave was fifteen feet deep, seven high and wide enough to accommodate a stone bench on either side.
The Captain then turned to poetry, inscribing his own verses on the walls and ceiling. On the south wall he invited the traveller caught in a storm
To Sharrow’s friendly grot in haste retreat
And find safe shelter and a rocky seat;
Then listen to the ocean’s awful roar
And view the waves dash on its bounded shore.
The north wall offered his reflections on the war – ‘By ill-judged measures Britain see / America no more depends on thee’ – and urged the visitor to ‘the terraqueous hall’ to forget ‘ev’ry jarring passion’. The lines on the ceiling celebrate the health-giving properties of the sea and, by implication, the wisdom of Captain Lugger’s doctor:
To you who now enervated descend
She (the sea) will in time her kind assistance lend:
By this an exercise here oft endured
The gout itself for many years was cured.
Sadly, Captain Lugger’s handiwork has been scurvily treated by the National Trust, which has the care of it. I found the entrance barred by an ugly metal gate, through which quantities of rubbish had been deposited. Far from the traveller being able to find safe shelter in the friendly grot, he was not even able to make out the lines of poetry. Wake up National Trust – Captain Lugger deserves better!
A considerable sample of the youth of Plymouth, in trunks and bikinis, was engaged in leaping from the rocks into the turquoise water. Watching over them was a muscular young man on life-saving duties. He told me he spent the summer looking at people having fun and intervening when they did something stupid – most commonly getting stranded by the tide, banging their heads on rocks, challenging the strength of the currents and losing, or hurting themselves by jumping off a rock at low tide and finding the water two feet deep instead of twelve.
The rest of the year he spent travelling, but he said he knew he was getting to the stage when he should be settling down to something more permanent. ‘Trouble is, I want to stay round here,’ he said mournfully. ‘I went to London once. Didn’t like it. But what is there around here? That’s the problem.’
Charles Harper – now on to the not very catchily titled The Cornish Coast (South) – did not linger long beside Whitsand Bay or its settleme
nts: ‘They are quite recent collections of houses, mostly of an extremely commonplace plastered type, devoted to letting lodgings for the summer . . . their situation has nothing to recommend it for the coastline here is quite bald and uninteresting.’
Looking at Freathy, Downderry and Seaton, it would be hard to challenge his verdict. But little Portwrinkle, with its tiny beach and miniature harbour, is very charming; in fact too charming for its own good, according to its small rump of fulltime residents. More than 60 per cent of the dwellings are second homes – for instance, what used to be the old pilchard cellars, the beating heart of the village’s economy and social life, is now a gated enclave of exceedingly tarted-up holiday lets, shuttered and empty for most of the year.
It is not surprising that the issue of second homes arouses such violent passions. But it is one thing to resent them, quite another to devise a way of addressing the problem. It is a fact that most second homes became so because they were sold by local people keen to get the best price they could. No one compelled them to sell, and had a cap been imposed to make them more ‘affordable’ there would have been howls of protest.
Speaking for myself, I have neither the money nor the desire to have a second home. But I have rented holiday homes, and stayed in friends’ second-homes, and thoroughly enjoyed myself, and am reluctantly compelled to think that the business is a necessary evil. It is also true that, by virtue of their economic circumstances, second-homers tend to put more money into local economies than the locals themselves. They have boats and parties and go to restaurants to eat lobsters and crabs and drink Pinot Grigio, and buy rounds in pubs. Without them the holiday industry would totter, if not collapse altogether.