Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  Doyle also explored the area and – as was his way – soon found a place for his famous detective in it. In The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot Holmes and Watson take a holiday in a cottage near Poldhu, but Holmes is diverted from his burgeoning interest in the possible links between the Cornish language and the arrival of Phoenician traders by a tangled tale centred on the vicarage in the nearby hamlet of Cury. The tale – of murder, jealousy, greed, thwarted love and the ingenious use of poison vapour from the root Radix pedis diaboli – is untangled, of course, and the murderer allowed to go free on the grounds that his victim richly deserved his fate.

  The Mullion course rolls up and down and around the clifftops between Poldhu Cove and Church Cove. Close to the eleventh tee and almost on the beach of Church Cove is a minute church dedicated to Winwaloe, a Breton saint who is said to have worn goatskins and a hair shirt every day of his adult life, and to have subsisted on a diet of barley bread mixed with ash. The church appears to be half buried in the sand; the visible part dates from the fifteenth century, although it has been necessarily much repaired and restored.

  One night in 1787 a Spanish ship was wrecked at the foot of the cliffs beside the Church of St Winwaloe. The fate of the crew was not recorded, but stories that she was carrying an enormous weight of silver dollars continued to stir greedy interest long afterwards. There were several attempts at salvage, one of which involved a gang of tin miners being hired to dig a shaft under the wreck; they had got ten yards when the roof fell in. Small quantities of silver coins continued to turn up, and in 1872 a team attempted to use an industrial mining pump driven by an agricultural threshing machine to suck the treasure from the hold, but all they recovered was sand and more sand.

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  LEGENDS OF MOUNT’S BAY

  St Winwaloe’s is the church of Gunwalloe, a parish consisting for the most part of a treeless tract of reclaimed moor and heathland. The settlement of Gunwalloe itself is at the northern end and is so inconsequential that even at cycling speed you may blink and miss it. It stands just back from the eastern end of the Loe Bar, a great sickle blade of pale, flinty grit which at its centre holds back the waters of Cornwall’s largest natural lake, Loe Pool.

  The coastal path runs along the top of the bar, sea to one side, freshwater to the other. It is a lovely place, and often lonely. On a calm sunny day it looks like a perfect deserted beach, and those who do not know it may wonder at the absence of car and caravan parks and cafés. But the bar is deadly. The seaward slope is steep, and if you look closely you can see the undertow working where the waves break. There are no boats, and no sensible swimmers; as recently as New Year’s Eve 2013 a young man who went in up to his knees was plucked away and drowned.

  It is also not a good place to steer a ship. In December 1807 HMS Anson, a frigate with orders to join the blockade of the French Channel ports, was crossing Mount’s Bay when she was caught in a typical south-westerly gale and driven towards the bar. Captain Charles Lydiard tried to anchor her but the ropes parted. He saw the pale, apparently unobstructed stretch of sand in front and steered for it, but struck a hidden reef close in. The Anson turned sideways and went over, her mainmast almost reaching the shore. Some of the crew scrambled along it and reached safety, urged on by their captain from the wheel. When his turn came he stopped to try to help a terrified midshipman and was swept away. Altogether sixty men were drowned that night.

  Nearly three hundred years earlier, in January 1526, the same reef accounted for a Portuguese ship, the San Antonio, setting off one of Cornwall’s most protracted treasure-hunting sagas. According to documents stored at the Public Record Office, she was carrying silver bullion, precious stones, gold and silver ornaments, musical instruments, a suit of armour intended for the King of Portugal and much else – the most startling items being two thousand barber’s basins. The depositions state that three leading local clan leaders – Thomas St Aubyn of Clowance, John Milliton of Pengersick and William Godolphin of Godolphin – arrived with their retainers and seized most of the treasure. St Aubyn denied the accusation, maintaining that he and his fellow squires had tried to help and that the treasure was lost with the ship. No charge was ever proved.

  For a long time the wreck was believed to be close to St Winwaloe’s Church. It was not until 1981 that the correct site was identified after a copper ingot was recovered. More copper ingots were found, as well as a silver one weighing seventeen pounds. Other items, including copper candlesticks, can be seen in local museums. The wreck became a protected site, to be explored only under licence. Over the years more copper and lead artefacts have been found, but no more silver, suggesting that St Aubyn and his cronies probably did help themselves, although the fate of the barber’s basins remains a mystery.

  Geomorphologically Loe Pool has much in common with Slapton Ley, but it is even more lovely and mysterious. It is formed of two branches, one reaching towards Helston and the other, Carminoe Creek, deviating east to nowhere in particular. Woods spill down to its margins with farmland behind, and there are only isolated houses beside it. Historically Loe Pool was noted for its fat and delicious trout. A sixteenth-century source referred to it breeding ‘a peculiar kind of bastard trout in bigness and goodness exceeding such as live in freshwater’ – which was nonsense, as it is fresh water and they were ordinary brown trout grown fat on an abundant diet.

  The development of mining around Helston during the nineteenth century turned Loe Pool red and killed off much of the plant growth. More recently it suffered badly from sewage being flushed down from Helston, and the enthusiastic use of chemical fertilisers by farmers, leading to severe eutrophication. The land around is now managed by the National Trust and water quality is improved, although whether the trout are still there I have no way of telling, since no one seems to fish it any more.

  The path leads up from Loe Bar to a lodge perched on the cliff edge commanding amazing views of the Lizard, Loe Pool and the whole of Mount’s Bay. Half a mile further on are the first bungalows and ‘executive-style’ houses of Porthleven. The old town is gathered around the eastern side of the harbour, which was built of great granite blocks between1810 and 1820. For much of the nineteenth century Porthleven did well enough on fishing, boat-building, net-making, exports of china clay and imports of coal and timber for the mines but subsequently the familiar slide took hold.

  These days it retains a residual small-scale fishery but – as elsewhere – tourism has become the insecure mainstay of a shaky local economy. A report carried out in 2009 for a Cornish charity revealed that 14 per cent of the population of 3100 were classified as ‘economically deprived’ – i.e. poor. A fifth had no car and a fifth of homes had no central heating. To add to Porthleven’s problems, the harbour and seafront took a tremendous battering in the storms of February 2014, leaving boats smashed and sunk and a repair bill exceeding £100,000.

  The Lizard peninsula ends at Porthleven, but the character of the coastline – harsh fissured cliffs tumbling into a surging sea – continues as before as far as Praa Sands. The hinterland of this wide expanse of safe, gently shelving beach is now annexed by car parks, caravan and camp sites, clusters of chalets and rows of bungalows and holiday apartments. Behind all that are the remains of Pengersick Castle, which is not a castle at all and never was, but a fortified manor house of which the castellated tower remains.

  Assorted paranormalist cranks and charlatans have been keen to promote Pengersick as a gathering place of ghosts and demons. Absurd tales of devil-worship, monk murder, phantoms of drowned sailors, a wandering woman in white, alchemy, a demon hound and so on have been peddled online and even on television, much to the disgust of scholarly supernaturalists who complain that their own serious research into Pengersick’s attested top-class spirit energy has been brought into disrepute.

  To be honest, I am not that fascinated by ghost stories. Nor, at this stage in my journey, was I gripped any more by tales of smugglers and smuggling. I had passed uncountable S
mugglers’ Lanes, Smugglers’ Cottages, Smugglers’ Retreats and Smugglers’ Haunts and more than enough Smugglers’ Inns and Smugglers’ Arms. I had been buffeted on all sides by stories of whiskered, warm-hearted seafarers dodging flint-hearted excisemen, of torches on moonlit beaches and boats nudging into deserted coves, of the rolling of kegs and the creaking of carts on stony paths, of the parson turning a blind eye to the goings-on in his belfry.

  In the hands of the heritage people, the clichés have been heaped one on another until whatever the hard reality once was is buried in a flabby heap of bogus romanticism. Inconvenient facts – that many of these men were squalid and violent criminals, that, then as now, the collection of tax was essential for effective government – have been lost in a flood of sentimental make-believe.

  It is therefore dutifully rather than with great enthusiasm that I record that Prussia Cove – which is tucked into the eastern side of Cudden Point – was the headquarters of the most famous of all Cornish smuggling enterprises. Suffice to say that it was run jointly by three of the eight sons of a local farmer, John, Charles and Harry Carter; that the leader was John, the self-styled King of Prussia, who built himself a stone residence on the cliffs above the cove from which he directed operations; that Harry became the gang’s agent across the Channel in Roscoff and in 1809 wrote or dictated a memoir giving a colourfully sanitised account of his own and his brothers’ activities.

  Charles Harper was as bad as anyone when it came to romanticising the exploits of the smugglers and obscuring their more vicious crimes. He wrote a whole book on the subject whose full title – The Smugglers: Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient Craft – gives his game away. When he arrived at Prussia Cove on his Cornish trip, John Carter’s house had just been pulled down to make way for a road. Harper was affronted by what he called ‘the barbed-wire squalor’ and by his encounter with ‘a good-looking man with a beard and an undefinable air of being a retired officer of the Royal Navy’ who was raking stones and declared himself to be the owner of the road and the land and the destroyer of the King of Prussia’s palace.

  Harper identifies him as ‘the locally famous Mr Behrens’ who – far from being a retired naval officer – was in fact a rich German coffee dealer of pronounced Anglophile tendencies. He and his English wife, Emily, née Tunstall, had fallen in love with the cove – then known as King’s Cove – and bought it in order to settle there. The ‘uninviting residence’ referred to by Harper must have been the first version of Porth-en-Alls, which was subsequently remodelled by Philip Tilden (designer of the never-built Hengistbury Castle in Dorset) into a rather lovely stone and reinforced concrete house in the English vernacular revival style. Replete with dormer windows, gable ends, courtyards, balconies, arcades, moulded doorways and any number of arts-and-crafts touches, Porth-en-Alls fits snugly against the steep rocky slope, its amazing garden reaching down to the edge of the rocks above the limpid blue water.

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  St Michael’s Mount

  Looking west from Cudden Point, the eye is pulled irresistibly to the extraordinary spectacle of St Michael’s Mount. A local history of 1820 said, quite correctly: ‘It is one of those rare and singular objects which impress the mind with sensations of veneration, pleasure and astonishment the instant it is seen.’ The modern history of the Mount dates from the late eleventh century, when it was donated to the Benedictine monks of Mont St Michel in Normandy to serve as their priory. It was much fought over in subsequent centuries, and during the Civil War was held for the King until its surrender to Parliamentary forces in 1646. Colonel John St Aubyn was appointed its governor, and some years later he bought it. His descendants still inhabit the castle, although the National Trust administers the Mount as a whole.

  Our friend Harper – in common with Sherlock Holmes and a hatful of other incurable romantics – was much attracted by the notion of the ancient Phoenicians (from present-day Lebanon and Syria) arriving in Cornwall to obtain tin and using the Mount as their trading post. In the absence of any supporting evidence of any kind, Charles Harper merely asserted their presence – ‘that foreigners in times long before the Romans came to Britain were accustomed to resort to this neighbourhood has directly been shown – and that they were Phoenicians is certain.’ They weren’t; at least no reputable modern scholar thinks they were. Trade in tin there was, between Cornwall and Gaul, but the Phoenicians went to Spain for theirs.

  Another tale about St Michael’s Mount – more recent, but on the face of it equally fanciful – is that Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had earmarked it as his official residence once Germany had conquered Britain. As ambassador to London in the 1930s, Ribbentrop came on holiday to Cornwall with his family and became fond of its distinctly un-Teutonic wildness. According to the contemporary Cornish artist Andrew Lanyon, he boasted that Hitler had promised him the county as a reward for his loyalty, and that he would live on St Michael’s Mount. Fortunately for almost everyone concerned, Germany lost, Ribbentrop was executed as a war criminal and St Michael’s Mount remained in English hands.

  It is the fate of Marazion to be regarded, and always to have been regarded, primarily as the stepping-off point for the Mount. It is very old and was once a market town and fishing port of some importance. But it was long ago eclipsed commercially by the development of Penzance and spiritually by St Michael’s Mount. When I was there it was heaving with cars and swarming with people filling in time before they could get across the causeway to the Mount, or just filling in time. I left on the cycle path that runs between the railway line and the beach to Penzance Station, and made good speed, encouraged by an early sighting of my train at the platform emitting plumes of blue diesel smoke indicative of an imminent departure.

  Penzance has, or should have, so much going for it. Its position, looking towards St Michael’s Mount and the Lizard across the great sweep of Mount’s Bay, is superb. It has its railway station, five-and-a-half hours from London. It has its harbour and docks and beach. It has some fine public buildings and many delightful town houses and cottages arranged in terraces along little streets and around squares enclosing gardens. It has a splendid promenade and a more than splendid lido, the Jubilee Pool, whose triangular walls are washed by the sea. It has an excellent public library as well as the beautiful Morrab Library, the great depository of Cornish culture and literature.

  The local history of 1820 sang Penzance’s praises to the skies: ‘The temperature of the atmosphere, the mildness of the seasons, the beauty of the prospect and the exhilarating purity of the gentle breezes that play upon the bosom of the waters and scatter health upon the shores, have conferred on Penzance and its vicinity a degree of celebrity which few persons who have visited this neighbourhood will think injudiciously bestowed.’ Steady on there! W. H. Hudson, a regular visitor ninety or so years later, was not so smitten. He found the streets ‘mean and commonplace’ and the market ‘curiously mean’. But he was favourably struck by the sobriety of the people and ‘their singularly happy disposition, lively and sociable, with a very intense love of their families and homes.’

  Of late Penzance has become something of a byword for social deprivation, drunkenness, drug addiction, yobbishness, crime and disorder, generational unemployment and general hopelessness. Its people are said to smoke more, drink more, inject more heroin, abuse each other more, work less and have less to spend than almost anywhere else in the land. The retail heart of the town – particularly along Market Jew Street – has an air of struggle about it, with an abundance of charity shops and empty premises. The harbour is in acute need of investment to keep the ferry link with the Isles of Scilly going, and the helicopter service has ended because of heavy losses. The wonderful Jubilee Pool has been starved of public money and shows it, and took a fearsome mauling from the storms of early 2014.

  But those who care about Penzance are doing their utmost to bring it round. Compared with so many soulless town centres, it has a wealth of inde
pendent shops which are fighting hard to stay alive and prosper. The local chamber of commerce has got itself organised, and campaigners have managed to prise £2 million from central government to rescue the Jubilee Pool from years of penny-pinching neglect. And on a fine summer’s day it is a pleasure to linger in Penzance. The seafront and the old part of town are utterly delightful – nowhere more so than the sub-tropical Morrab Gardens, with its quaint bandstand, its luxuriant banks of berberis, camellias and azaleas, its acacia trees and Japanese quinces.

  Penzance has few literary sons and daughters to boast of. One was a most wretched young man, John Thomas Blight, who worked for a while as an assistant at the library. Blight was a precociously gifted artist, as seen from the illustrations for his book A Week at the Land’s End, which – despite having been published 150 years ago – remains an essential guide. He was twenty-five when it appeared; a few years later he had a severe mental breakdown and became obsessed with the belief that the ancient Druids had infiltrated the Church of England and were intent on reintroducing their savage pagan rites. In the end the poor fellow was confined in the lunatic asylum at Bodmin, where he died as late as 1911.

  Perhaps there was something in the Penzance air. Another writer hailed as a genius and subsequently forgotten came to a ghastly end there. For a time in the 1890s, the Glasgow-born John Davidson was a bright light in the London literary scene, crossing swords with the young Yeats, consorting with Swinburne, being lauded by Shaw. He wrote abundantly: plays, novels, poetry, philosophy, much of it inspired by his desire to ‘aid in the overthrow of the rotten financial investment called Christianity’. A brief flowering of celebrity and success gave way to critical hostility and public indifference, particularly to his great labour, a dramatic verse epic called God and Mammon.