Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  I didn’t see it either as I cycled along the eastern prong of the Roseland peninsula towards Falmouth. The conditions were reasonable for monster-spotting, calm and clear, and I kept an eye out for the Morgawr whenever the sea was in view, although I accepted that the odds against it surfacing when I happened to be passing were remote. It was a lovely ride through a rolling patchwork of fields and woods, with the odd farmhouse or hamlet nestled in the folds and the open sea never far away. The lane turned into a track which took me past the gates of Rosteague, an Elizabethan house whose formal gardens have been lovingly restored by its owners after many years of neglect.

  A little way beyond Rosteague is a path which leads to one of the treasures of Roseland, Towan Beach. The Cornish writer Winston Graham, creator of the Poldark stories, remembered it as ‘a lovely small rock and sand beach where there is no surf but endless brilliant rock pools full of tiny fishes and shells . . . one of the few places in Cornwall where cowries can be found.’ To his dismay he witnessed the arrival there of caravans, and did not return for several years. When he did, he was astonished to find that it had not been blighted by development; instead, the National Trust had got it. There were no caravans, and people were outnumbered by cows. ‘What we in England, and people in Cornwall especially, owe to the National Trust is beyond computation,’ Graham reflected gratefully.

  Towan Beach is quintessential National Trust. There are no facilities, but there are rock pools and rocks and sea and sand. On a summer’s day there are dogs, and dads in shorts and polo shirts and mums in sensible swimming costumes carrying picnic boxes and fold-up chairs and children with buckets and spades and bodyboards.

  The scene highlights the unmistakable class division between the family that takes a cottage in Roseland and uses Towan Beach, and the family that takes a caravan at, say, Pentewan. The Pentewans do not care to tramp considerable distances through gorse and brambles to reach a beach devoid of any diversion not provided by nature. If they go somewhere they like to drive and be able to leave the car in a car park close enough to permit the transport of much clobber. They do not mind being cheek by jowl with other families, smile tolerantly if someone has a radio going, like a café to get a bacon sandwich and an ice cream. They need a phone signal, are happy with throwaway barbecues and bought burgers. On wet days they have no inhibitions about staying inside watching TV. They are not members of the National Trust.

  The Towans are all members of the National Trust – in fact they are the National Trust. They rent stone cottages with low ceilings and crooked staircases. On wet days they play board games and put on waterproofs to walk the dog. They do not go to amusement arcades. If they camp, it is likely to be somewhere rustic with teepees around. They do not care for caravan parks. They talk a great deal about their children’s education and are well-informed about which parts of the country have retained grammar schools. The Towans are just as fond of their children as the Pentewans, but not so demonstratively. They ration sweets and never swear in front of them.

  The Towans like to shop in local butchers and greengrocers and buy artisan bread if they can find it. They are delighted to buy fresh fish direct from a real fisherman, although they are sometimes slightly taken aback by how much goes in gutting, beheading and filleting. They would regard Dexter cattle as more appropriate to the landscape and ‘better for the environment’ than fat-uddered Holsteins. They would consider buying a second home, while regarding it as a serious moral issue.

  I confess that, by inclination, I am more a Towan than a Pentewan. But I hope very much that I do not consider myself superior for that. We need both, and diversity is good.

  There is a very different National Trust attraction at the tip of the Roseland peninsula, a reminder of distant times when we looked across the sea for our enemies. The battery at St Anthony Head was installed in 1897. It and the batteries at Castle Point near St Mawes and at Pendennis Castle on the far side of Falmouth Bay were designed to guard the entrance to the vital deep-water anchorage at Falmouth itself. Subsequently the armaments at St Anthony Head were upgraded and the battery was enlarged to include a camp, officers’ quarters, storerooms and workshops. It remained in commission until 1952, when the nation’s Coast Defence was given up.

  St Mawes

  The National Trust acquired the site in 1959. By then much of the network of underground chambers and emplacements had been filled in, in the belief that an era in our history was over and no one would be interested again. How wrong! They did not reckon with the heritage hunger. Over the years volunteers have excavated and cleared the subterranean warren constructed of cheap brick and utilitarian concrete with as much loving care as if it had been the Tomb of the Kings at Paphos. Visitors may now peer into the rusted hatch through which the shells were lowered, stroke the remains of the tubular range finder, descend into one of the emplacements and inspect the racks on which the firing-pins were stored. It’s even possible to book a holiday in what was the officers’ accommodation block.

  The Channel shore is peppered with these abandoned installations left over from ancient conflicts and invasion scares. The Martello Towers are the most obvious relics, but the coast of Cornwall – never a prime target for would-be invaders – is dotted with castles, forts, fortresses and batteries established over the course of a thousand years to keep our enemies out. When the panic over Napoleon’s ambitions was at its height the defences overlooking Plymouth Sound were massively expanded, and batteries were either newly constructed or greatly strengthened at (west to east) Mousehole, Penzance, St Michael’s Mount, Falmouth, Mevagissey, Charlestown, Fowey and Looe. Many of these were maintained until the 1939–45 war, while others – such as the St Anthony Head battery – were added.

  How infinitely remote those anxieties seem to us now. We cannot enter into the minds of those who saw – rather than imagined – close and present danger from over the sea. In that sense, of the sea as our prime protector, it no longer matters. The notion of the island race, separated from neighbours by the Channel and other seas, is redundant. Our encirclement by water has long since ceased to be of any strategic significance. Our enemies, whoever they may be, are within, or so far away as to seem faintly unreal. Sentimentally we may still call ourselves – even to a degree think of ourselves – as an island people, defended and defined by our seas. But over time, surely, the place of the sea in our self-image will fade until it disappears altogether.

  In the meantime the battery at St Anthony Head – which of itself is no more than an unsightly clutter of storage facilities and useless holes in the ground – becomes a heritage asset, a monument to times and conditions that our parents or grandparents knew and that we cannot.

  24

  GABBRO AND SERPENTINE

  I arrived that evening at Mawnan Smith, with a puncture. The village is well inland and has a rather boring late nineteenth-century church. A much older and more interesting church is some distance away, overlooking the sea. It was locked when I got there the next morning, so I had a sit-down beside the granite slab placed inside the lychgate for coffins to be rested on. There is a legend in Cornish over the gate that is translated as ‘It is good for me to draw nigh unto God’.

  A lady arrived to clean the church. She told me she had spent most of her adult life abroad, and had come to this out-of-the-way corner of Cornwall thirteen years before. ‘I needed to be near the sea,’ she said, in the manner of someone stating the blindingly obvious. She walked beside it every day, but had never seen the Portscatho sea monster and was clearly sceptical about it.

  When Charles Harper steered his trusty bicycle down here a century and more ago, he found the church ‘lavishly decorated in texts and admonitions in the old Cornish language’ which, he snorted derisively, had become extinct so long ago that ‘nobody outside the ranks of scholars has the least recollection of it.’ He was further displeased by a notice advertising something called The Society of King Charles the Martyr, and concluded his considerable rant thus:
‘We say Charles was absolutely untrustworthy and a danger to the nation and that he deserved his fate.’

  I could find no trace of the texts and admonitions, and nothing about Charles I. Nor did I get even a fleeting glance of the resident cryptid – meaning creature unrecognised by science – known in crypto-zoological circles as the Mawnan Owlman. This winged beast was first spotted in the summer of that highly paranormal year, 1976, flying around the church tower. It was later described as being five feet tall with black feet and glowing eyes. Paranormal researchers speculated that it might be a manifestation of ‘earth energy’. Sceptics pointed out that most of the evidence for its existence had been collated by a Falmouth paranormalist and self-confessed hoaxer also involved in the stories about the Portscatho sea monster.

  The student who piloted me across the Helford River had at least heard of the sea monster, although I did not get the impression she believed in its existence. The Helford River is not a river at all, but another of the many rias – flooded river valleys – that interrupt the cyclist’s progress along the coast of Devon and Cornwall. It is one of the largest, reaching far inland to Gweek, and with its many associated creeks and absence of bridges has kept the bulge of land between it and Falmouth to the north largely unblighted by holiday invaders.

  Helford itself is remarkably insignificant considering it is a ferry port. I made my way inland through glorious countryside up to Manaccan and then down to the sea at Porthallow. The situation of the cove there is appealing; curved, sheltered, with a gently shelving beach flanked by rocky headlands. But the once golden sand of Porthallow has long been overlaid by a thick layer of grey grit washed along from the neighbouring quarry at Porthkerris. On a grey, overcast day the blending of grey beach, grey sky and sea, and dark-grey cliff faces created a deeply sombre effect. There were a few small fishing boats pulled up on the beach, but no sign of fishing activity, and it was too early for the pub, the Five Pilchards, to be open.

  But there was life in the little arts-and-crafts shop close to the seafront. It was run by a potter and former art teacher who had migrated from Cambridge. She told me she had always yearned for a pottery by the sea, which I suppose is understandable if you live in Fenland. She liked Porthallow because it was not – not yet – a fully fledged holiday village. ‘It’s not especially pretty,’ she said, ‘but it is friendly, which matters a lot more.’ I asked how many Cornish families were left. ‘Not many. They tend to sell to incomers and then moan about them.’

  A slab of stone on the sea wall marks the halfway point on the South-West Coast Path. From Porthallow it is 315 miles to Poole and 315 miles to Minehead. One side of the slab is inscribed with a kind of communal poem under the title ‘Fading Voices’, listing the names of boats and wrecks and reefs and rocks and long-departed fishermen and other aspects of the history of Pralla – the local contraction of Porthallow. It ends: ‘That’s How It Was / That’s How We’re Like We Are’, but there are precious few Prallians or Porthallowians left to remember how it was.

  A mile north of Porthallow is Nare Head, another jagged hazard to shipping named with a muttered curse by mariners of old. On that dreadful March night of 1891 that saw the SS Marana and the Dryad come to grief off Start Point, the SS Bay of Panama – a four-mast square-rigger carrying Indian jute bound for Dundee – was in trouble further down the Channel. She had been driven far off course by the pitiless, snow-laded easterly gale and in the early hours of the morning was smashed onto the rocks just off Nare Head. Her lifeboats were swept away and as she sank the crew dragged themselves into the ice-encrusted rigging. Several froze to death before the rescue boats arrived. Others had to be prised off and were carried down still hunched and bent in the positions they had taken against that terrible wind.

  South of Porthallow, just out from its coastal neighbour Porthoustock, are the Manacles, perhaps the greediest ship-swallower along the whole Channel shore. The name applies to a reef of saw-toothed rocks spread over an area of one-and-a-half square miles, some exposed at low tide, some just hidden, all potential killers. The roll call of wrecks is enormous, and takes no account of the many vessels that were shattered and lost before records were compiled.

  One of the most infamous of all shipping disasters occurred here in May 1855. The John was a Plymouth-based barque chartered for the transport of impoverished families from Devon and Cornwall seeking a new life in Canada. She had left her home port for Quebec with 154 adult passengers on board, 114 children and infants, and a crew of nineteen. She weathered Rame Head and the Dodman, steering for the Lizard, but on the night of 8 May the mate reported to Captain Rawle that he could not see the Lizard lighthouse and that he thought they were too close to land.

  According to the evidence given at the subsequent inquiry, Captain Rawle, whose family owned the John, ‘pooh-poohed’ the notion. Shortly afterwards the barque struck the outer ring of the Manacles under full sail. Her momentum carried her through, and although fatally holed, she carried on until she struck again, settled and began to break up. Of the four lifeboats only one was usable. The captain and several members of the crew appropriated it, but Rawle returned to the vessel when it was discovered that the boat had no plug. A passenger took his place and ingeniously thrust his pipe into the hole, enabling the one lifeboat to make it to shore at Coverack.

  In the meantime the crew left on the John – most of them drunk – ignored the passengers and scrambled high into the rigging as the ship sank in a rising tide. Most of the passengers were washed off the decks before the coastguard rescue boats could reach them. Altogether 193 of them were drowned, and the bodies of a hundred children and babies were laid out on the beach at Porthoustock to be identified. Captain Rawle was tried for manslaughter and acquitted, although he served a short prison sentence for incompetence. Two locals were also jailed for robbing a corpse of ten sovereigns. It was a bleak, shameful episode.

  Porthoustock is even more deeply grey than Porthallow. On one side of the cove is a stark concrete mill built for crushing quarry stone into aggregates, now disused. On the other side is a wharf where barges and bulk carriers take on the hard greenish diorite extracted from the quarry next door, used – among other things – for road-building and sea defences. In between, the beach is smothered in a layer of gabbro spoil.

  The lane out of the village led to another lane and then another, until I found myself crossing Main Dale, a wild tract of heather and gorse with lumps of gabbro scattered all around, and descending into Coverack. The sun had come out and the cove, its sand undefiled by quarry waste, looked distinctly picture-book. Flotillas of kayaks were scudding about and a handful of brave swimmers were breasting the waves. The village looked very neat, the slopes thickly covered with whitewashed bungalows and villas. The village noticeboard advertised a range of wholesome activities – beach clean day, RNLI day, the Coverack regatta, the Coverack Singers performing Anything Goes, a sale of unframed pictures at the Arts Club.

  A constant fear and intermittent menace along this whole coast in distant times were the predations of the Barbary pirates – often referred to in contemporary accounts as ‘Turks’ although they mostly came from North Africa. During the seventeenth century hundreds of fishing boats and other vessels were ambushed by the dreaded xebecs and galleys, and thousands of fishermen and seamen were captured and sold into slavery in Tunisia, Morocco and especially Algeria. Most were never seen again.

  The chronicles of the village of St Keverne refer to repeated incidents of boats fishing off the Manacles being seized and emptied of their crews ‘to the sorrowful complaint and lamentable tears of their womenfolk’. Witnesses deposed that ‘these Turks daily show themselves . . . and the poor fishermen are fearful not only to go to sea but likewise lest these Turks should come on shore and take them out of their houses.’

  They were right to be fearful. A petition smuggled from Algiers in 1640 and delivered to Charles I said there were five thousand English slaves in ‘miserable captivity undergoing m
ost insufferable labours . . . suffering much hunger and many blows to their bare bodies by which cruelty many have been forced to turn Mohammedans.’ It’s estimated that between 1580 and 1680 as many as a million Europeans were enslaved in North Africa, the great majority from fishing communities too poor to pay ransoms. The slaving raids continued throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. In 1816 a naval force led, on his final command, by that great Cornishman Edward Pellew – by then ennobled as Lord Exmouth – put Algiers to flames and forced its Bey to renounce the enslavement of Christians.

  * * *

  Every slog has its champagne and foie gras – or ale and pork scratchings – moments. I had one when I first laid eyes on Kennack Sands. I had bumped down a long track to a farm, Trevenwith, with the sun in my face. The path went through the farmyard and down the side of two sloping meadows. I stopped at a gate where the path was squeezed between banks of hawthorn.

  To the west the glittering sea was roughly edged by one headland after another. The Lizard was the last, shaped like a reptile’s head lain flat on the sea, its tongue the white foam breaking on the rocks. Long breakers rolled slowly against the twin hemispheres of Kennack Sands, divided by the Caerverracks, a broken jumble of black rocks reaching out into the sea. The sand was pale and ribbed, gently inclining into water so clear that every stone and dab of weed was visible. A gang of kids was messing around with bodyboards where the waves crashed down. Further out two or three more serious surfers bobbed about biding their time until a significant crest showed itself.