Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  A band of heather, gorse and hawthorn, littered with pale, lichen-spotted rocks, stretched behind the beach, with green meadows beyond. Everything glowed in the sun, beneath a soft blue sky.

  A slim, blonde woman in beach gear came up the path towards me. She was on her way back to Trevenwith, where she lived, leaving her sons and friends on the beach. I asked her about the farm. More of a smallholding, she said. They did beef cattle and some sheep, not enough to make a living, so she worked in Penzance for social services, helping ‘problem families’. There was no shortage of families or problems: generational unemployment, abundant drugs coming through the port at Newlyn, crime, hopelessness. She said it was the end-of-the-line syndrome. People just washed up in Penzance with no further to go.

  ‘Then I come back to this,’ she said looking back at Kennack Sands. ‘It’s a paradise. I’m so lucky.’

  Coming out onto the beach my peripheral vision registered a change in the texture of the light to the west. I looked that way, initially puzzled as to why the fields should look different. Then I realised: it was the gleam off the roofs of caravans, massed ranks of them in wavering lines, crescents and triangular blocks across the downslope of the western flank of the valley. In all there are four holiday parks, shoulder to shoulder. A lane crept down from the nearest to a car park close to the beach. The car park was full and the lane was lined with cars. There was a café awash with families chomping and slurping. The sand was thickly peopled.

  From the café I looked back to where the roof of Trevenwith Farm peeped above the trees. The fields behind were spotted with livestock, noses down in the rich grass. Paradise was a restricted area.

  Close to Kennack but entirely hidden from it is Carleon Cove, a dark, rock-strewn refuge overshadowed by beetling cliffs. Next to the beach is a roofless round stone building which housed the capstan used to haul the pilchard boats up from the sea. Behind it, considerably restored by the National Trust, is a warehouse – the one substantial relic of what was the thriving heart of the Lizard Serpentine Company a century-and-a-half ago.

  Serpentine – or serpentinite, to give it its full geological dignity – is found in significant deposits on the Lizard and nowhere else in Britain. It is deep, dark green in colour, veined with white, red and yellow; soft enough to be worked easily into vases, candlesticks, lampstands, paperweights and a host of other decorative objects. In 1846 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert sailed into Mount’s Bay in the royal yacht – rather unimaginatively named Victoria and Albert – and were taken on a tour of Penzance, where the Prince was much taken by a display of serpentine in the museum. A selection of objects was then ordered for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, which set off a boom in Cornish serpentine production led by an enterprising Londoner, Jabez Druitt.

  Druitt acquired several serpentine quarries and established workshops and a showroom at Poltesco, just above Carleon Cove. The little stream was fitted with a water wheel to power circular saws to cut the stone into manageable blocks. A wharf was constructed in the cove for the finished articles to be barged away for export. For a time Druitt’s enterprise prospered. Mrs Dinah Craik, an eager tourist of the 1880s, included a detailed description in her An Unsentimental Journey Through Cornwall. She noted the ‘monotonous hum of the machinery’ which ‘mingled oddly with the murmur of the stream’. The appearance of some of the vases she considered ‘quite Pompeian’, while in the faces of the workers she detected neither stupidity nor servility, ‘but a sort of dignified independence’.

  Jabez Druitt watched over his little empire from Carleon House, a sturdy residence up the path which now houses National Trust volunteers. The artefacts were dispatched as far away as India and even Australia, and the company maintained showrooms in the Strand. The Bank of England had pillars of serpentine, serpentine mantelpieces were installed at Hampton Court and Chatsworth, and churches all over the place acquired fonts and lecterns of the green stone. But it had a fatal flaw. It was fine for smallish objects, useless for architectural features. Over time the water in the veins caused it to crack, or if the water dried out, to crumble. Demand waned, profits slumped, and the Poltesco works closed in 1893.

  25

  LIZARD TALES

  A while back BBC Two showed a series about the fishermen of Cadgwith, which featured and was presented by an amiable, hulking ex-Royal Marine, Monty Halls. If you ask me, most BBC Two is tosh, but this was not, mainly thanks to the personality and charm of its presenter. He did not try and lord it over the locals and was commendably unafraid of making a bit of an ass of himself. I did not catch all the episodes, but there was a memorable one in which Monty forsook his own inshore crabbing boat for the big trawler for a day out in heavy seas. Monty went green, he went grey, he spattered the deck and the sea with vomit, and ended up prone on the deck while the skipper, grinning evilly, speculated as to whether he would survive at all.

  The series succeeded in teasing out something of a necessarily closed society: the rivalries, the interdependence, the slyness, the jealousies, the prickliness, the subtle distinctions in rank, the suspicion of outsiders. It also captured the extreme hardness of the life, too much at times for tough guy Monty Halls. His declared intent at the start was to pay his way, to show that it was possible for someone not bred to the life to learn it and make a living from it. It wasn’t; much easier, he discovered, to make TV.

  Cadgwith is a working fishing village in a way Coverack no longer is, although tourism still dominates its economy. Its beach is divided by an outcrop of rock known as the Todden, with the fishing boats occupying the eastern part. Behind is the old village: low-roofed cottages with thick walls and tiny windows, smartly thatched and whitewashed these days, converted pilchard cellars, boathouses, pub. The usual mix of modern bungalow and villa creeps up the slopes behind.

  One of the most absurdly picturesque of the ancient dwellings is Dolphin Cottage, which sits at right angles to the sea behind what was the customs watch house. Its well-groomed thatch descends to head height, nestling over a white porch embraced by climbing roses with a tiny, scent-heavy cottage garden in front. Inevitably it is now a holiday let, but in the 1950s, it is said to have been the home of the pianist Harriet Cohen.

  She was a great star in her day, although she is now pretty much forgotten, except by vintage recording enthusiasts. She was much admired as a performer and equally celebrated for her beauty and her personal life. Cohen was tall, slender, ravenhaired, statuesque. She never married, but for many years was the mistress of the composer Arnold Bax. Other composers and artists were stirred by her looks and magnetism, among them Vaughan Williams, William Walton and D. H. Lawrence. Ramsay MacDonald and Lord Beaverbrook were mesmerised by her. She counted Elgar, Arnold Bennett and Einstein among her close friends.

  Reading about this extraordinary woman, I was amazed by the range of her repertoire. Harriet Cohen had small hands, which precluded her from playing much of the nineteenth-century virtuoso classics. She adored Bach and championed early English keyboard masters such as Purcell and Gibbons when no one else was much interested in them. She was an equally passionate advocate of contemporary piano music. She gave the premier of Vaughan Williams’ piano concerto, played de Falla and Turina, travelled to Moscow to perform Shostakovich and Kabalevsky, and introduced the music of Bartók, Honegger and Kodály to London audiences.

  Her career waned after a mysterious accident involving a tray of glasses left an artery in her right wrist severed, although she continued to give recitals well into the 1950s. One wonders how they managed to squeeze a piano through the door and into the tiny cottage in Cadgwith, but it is pleasant to think of the rough-handed, weather-beaten Cadgwith fishermen tending their nets and sorting their catch with the strains of a Bach Prelude and Fugue, or perhaps the farruca from Turina’s Danzas Fantasticas, wafting over their heads.

  The Lizard and its lighthouse

  Lizard Point is the southernmost extremity of the British mainland. It follows that Landewednack
Church, half a mile or so inland, is the southernmost place of worship. The church is at one with the landscape: rugged, forceful, devoid of elegance, its curiously chequerboard granite and serpentine tower standing four-square against the tempests, its graveyard filled with salty seafarers and wind-blasted farmers. According to one of Cornwall’s historians, Sir William Borlase, the last sermon in the Cornish language was delivered at Landewednack in the 1670s, although it should be recorded that at least two other Cornish churches claim that distinction.

  The road past the church leads in one direction to Church Cove, once a great place for pilchard landings, and in the other to the settlement known variously as Lizard, The Lizard, Lizard Village or even Lizard Town. Charles Harper was scornful of its urban pretensions, noting that the combined population of it and Landewednack was 683. It is bigger now, but retains a distinctly haphazard feel about it, as if it had been allowed to follow its inclinations by growing away from the village green like ivy or bindweed.

  The light was fading when I got to Lizard Point. The sea surged and moaned and roared in a restless, hungry fashion like a tiger awaiting feeding time, the noise blending with the cry of gulls in a desolate duet. The rocks, black, ancient gneiss, raised jagged serrations into the foam lines as if seeking prey. I peered down in wonder at the old lifeboat station at the bottom of the cliff, which was closed off because of a recent rock fall.

  When it was first established in 1859, the boathouse was at the top of the cliff and the boat was run down a track with a hairpin bend in the middle and a sheer drop to the sea at the end. In severe gales the lifeboatmen had to crawl down on hands and knees for fear of being blown away. Later the boathouse was repositioned with a slipway down to the water, where it did duty until 1961, when a new station was opened around the head to the east at Kilcobben Cove.

  The Lizard lifeboatmen were busy volunteers. Among the many wrecks, one stands out – that of the White Star liner Suevic, which was homeward bound from Australia when she struck off the Lizard in March 1907. The Lizard lifeboat was quickly on the scene, followed by those from Cadgwith, Coverack and Porthleven. Over the next sixteen hours all the 524 passengers and crew were rescued, making it numerically the most successful rescue in RNLI history.

  The Lizard lighthouse is just along the point to the east. The light, from a single 400-watt bulb, is visible twenty-five miles away in clear weather, and when the cloud and mist roll in, it is backed up by a foghorn blast every thirty seconds. The first lighthouse there was originally proposed to James I by Sir John Killigrew of Falmouth, and strongly opposed by the locals, on the grounds that it would affect their proceeds from plundering wrecks. Trinity House, supposedly the protectors of the nation’s shipping, also objected on the interesting grounds that a lighthouse would attract pirates and was anyway unnecessary because there was a sea wide enough for careful mariners to avoid the Lizard if they kept their wits about them.

  Sir John persisted and built the tower. His agreement with the government stipulated that the cost of the coal for the light and for manning the tower would be defrayed by a charge of a halfpenny a ton on shipping passing it. But most of the ship owners simply refused to pay. The maintenance of the light became haphazard, and Sir John bombarded the King’s advisors with letters of protest and supplication to no avail. Eventually his losses became intolerable and the light was extinguished for good and the tower demolished.

  Cycling back up Lighthouse Road in near darkness, I followed a badger for a time, which trotted along without any evident care in the world before disappearing into a bramble patch. Murk and mist were closing in, and by the time I went to bed in my B & B the lighthouse foghorn was sending forth its mournful caution. It kept it up all night and was still sounding when I left early and breakfastless in the morning.

  I headed for the most famous beauty spot on the Lizard peninsula, Kynance Cove. Many feet more eminent than mine have trod its shelf of pale-yellow sand, and eyes more far-seeing marvelled at its singular rock formations and the play of sunlight on the blues and greens and purples streaked through the pinnacles and stacks of serpentine. Tennyson’s for one, George Bernard Shaw’s for another, Wilkie Collins’ for a third. It was bad luck for me that the tide was in over the sand and the shroud of mist was so thick that I could hardly tell where land ended and sea began.

  Returning the way I had come I passed a filthy Land Rover close to a marquee standing incongruously in a field. There was a hefty young man inside the vehicle, talking on his phone. When he’d finished I asked him about the marquee. Party, he said. Bit out of the way, isn’t it? I said. That’s the way they wanted it, he replied, suggesting heights and depths of wildness and depravity.

  It turned out he was the local farmer, Lizard born and bred. He worked entirely on his own – ‘can’t afford to pay no one, can I?’ He had beef cattle grazing a wide area of extremely poor-quality land, courtesy of Natural England which paid him something to keep it all pristine. The serpentine that underlies the plateau is pretty much devoid of nutrients, making the thin layer of soil capable of sustaining nothing more than heather, gorse and scrubby grass, and tiny orchids and other undemanding wild flowers.

  The farmer had spent his whole life hereabouts. A generation ago there had been thirty farms around the village. Now there were two. He loved the life, he said, wouldn’t have any other, but he didn’t think it would suit everyone. He asked me where I was heading. The answer was actually Penzance, but that seemed a long way off. Mullion, I said, and asked if the footpath could be cycled. He looked doubtful. There were several tracks into the heath, all of which were soon swallowed by the mist. One of them might get you there, he said cheerily.

  I went back to the one main road and pedalled vigorously north, thinking of breakfast. As a result I missed the long, wriggling, highly indented stretch of coastline between Kynance and Mullion Head; without much regret, as my appetite for savage cliffs and surging seas had been amply satisfied for the time being. I reached Mullion within the breakfast time zone, with just enough slack, I judged, to have a look at Mullion Cove first. It was a long, swift descent which made me think of the long, slow ascent that must follow. I parked my bike and walked down to the wall of the little harbour with my right trouser leg still tucked into my sock. A voice inquired as to whether I was a Freemason, and we fell into conversation.

  He was a Mullion man but had been away a long time. I asked him why he had come back. ‘I ask myself that. I knew I would have to sometime, when I was ready. I need something to wonder at, you know, which for me is being able to see as far as I can. You can’t get that anywhere else.’ He took his hand from his pocket and extended his arm towards France. ‘There’s no end to your world here. Does that make sense?’

  It did. He had an inshore boat for crabbing but had a mind to get something bigger. ‘The fish are out there,’ he said. ‘Dover sole, lemon sole, turbot, the lot. Last winter off Newlyn the boats were finding big herring. I mean, big. So why not give it a go?’ He pointed out his partner, Barry, who was attending to pots in the open boat. ‘Barry looks after the crabs. I like diving. Had some luck, too.’ He gave me a crafty look. ‘A hoard of Portuguese gold coins. 1743. Not half a mile from here. I’ve only managed to recover half of ’em.’ I asked him what he’d done with them. ‘That’s my pension. Under the bed, so to speak.’ And the rest? ‘Barry knows where they are.’ What about your wife? He laughed uproariously. ‘Tell her? She might go off with some other bloke.’ I wondered if he’d made the whole story up.

  I got to the Old Inn in Mullion at ten past nine, legs trembling from the strain of the ascent from the harbour, stomach begging for sustenance. They said they stopped serving breakfast at nine. There must have been something in the look on my face, or maybe it was my howl of despair, that melted the landlady’s heart. Opening hours were extended, the chef went to work, eggs and bacon and black pudding and mushrooms and toast and coffee were produced, and the smile was firmly replaced on my day.

  W
hat a superb pub! And it has long been so, according to the records. In Queen Victoria’s day the landlady was Mary Mundy, and her fame extended far beyond Mullion. Kilvert stayed there and found her to be ‘a genuine Cornish Celt, impulsive, warm-hearted, demonstrative, imaginative and eloquent.’ Mrs Dinah Craik described her as ‘a bright brown-faced little woman with the reddest of cheeks and blackest of eyes.’ The immensely eminent Greek scholar and Scottish nationalist, Professor John Stuart Blackie, left a tribute to her in verse in the visitors’ book running to fourteen stanzas, of which this is a sufficient sample:

  ’Twas on Saturday afternoon

  That I was trudging, a weary loon,

  To spend at the Lizard my Sunday,

  When thro’ the corner of my eye

  A happy sign did I espy

  OLD INN by MARY MUNDY

  When Charles Harper came to the village, Mary and her brother were no longer running the pub. He refers to them being ‘jockeyed’ out of their house and being ‘old and poor’. But rather annoyingly he gives no why or wherefore, saying darkly ‘they will tell it in Mullion.’

  One of Harper’s many powerful prejudices was against golf. ‘It is a scourge,’ he thundered, ‘that has devastated the once beautiful wild sandhills and heaths and reduced them to the titivated promenading grounds of the wealthy bounders who generally used to confine their energies to the billiard room.’ Whether John Betjeman could be classified as a wealthy bounder is doubtful, but he certainly loved what Harper disdained as ‘that desolate game’. It is claimed that after playing the Mullion course, Betjeman coined the term ‘mullion’ to mean a duff shot caused by the distraction of the sea view. Among others to have mullioned or been mullioned there was Arthur Conan Doyle, who in 1901 played the course regularly while on holiday with his wife at what was then the Poldhu Hotel.