The Land's End: a Naturalist's Impressions in West Cornwall, Illustrated

Chapter I Wintering in West Cornwall

England's "observables"--Why I delayed visiting Cornwall--A vision of the Land's End-Flight to St. Ives-Climate-The old town-The fishermen-Their love of children-Drowned babes--The fishing fleet going out at sunset-Old memories suggested-Jackdaws at St. Ives--Feeding the birds--A greedy sheep-dog-Daws show their intelligence--Daws on the roofs--Their morning pastime-Dialogue between two daws.

|KNOW," said wise old Fuller, "most of the rooms of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof. Especially seeing England presents thee with so many observables." But if we were to follow this advice there would be no getting out of the country at all. It is too rich in its way: the rooms are too many and too well-furnished with observables. Take my case. I have been going on rambles about the land for a good many years, and though the West Country had the greatest attraction for me, I never got over the Tamar, nor even so far as Plymouth, simply because I had not the time, albeit my time was my own. Or because there was enough and more than enough to satisfy me on this side of the boundary. It is true that one desires to see and know all places, but is in no hurry to go from a rich to a poor one. I was told by every one of my friends that it was the most interesting county in England, and doubtless it is so to them, but I knew it could not be so to me because of the comparative poverty of the fauna, seeing that the observables which chiefly draw me are the living creatures-the wild life-and not hills and valleys and granite and serpentine cliffs and seas of Mediterranean blue. These are but the setting of the shining living gems, and we know the finest of these, which gave most lustre to the scene, have been taken out and cast away.

Cornwall to me was just the Land's End-"dark Bolerium, seat of storms"-that famous foreland of which a vast but misty picture formed in childhood remains in the mind, and if I ever felt any strong desire to visit Cornwall it was to look upon that scene. Then came a day in November, 1905, when, having settled to go away somewhere for a season, I all at once made up my mind to visit the unknown peninsula and to go straight away to the very end. It almost astonished me when I alighted from my train at St. Ives to think I had travelled three hundred and twenty odd miles with less discomfort and weariness than I usually experience on any journey of a hundred.

It is common, I think, for lovers of walking to dislike the railway. So smoothly had I been carried in this flight to the furthest west that I might have been sailing in a balloon; and as for the time occupied it would surely be no bad progress for a migrating bird, travelling, let us say, from Middlesex to Africa, to cover the distance I had come in a little more than seven hours!

St. Ives is on the north side of the rounded western extremity of Cornwall, and from the little green hill, called the "Island," which rises above and partly shelters the town, you look out upon the wide Atlantic, the sea that has always a trouble on it and that cannot be quiet; and standing there with the great waves breaking on the black granite rocks at your feet, they will tell you that there is no land between you and America. Nevertheless, after London, I wanted no better climate; for though it rained heavily on many days in December and the wind blew with tremendous force, the temperature was singularly mild, with an agreeable softness in the air and sunshine breaking out on the cloudiest days. The weather could be described as "delicate" with tempestuous intervals. On bright, windless days I saw the peacock butterfly abroad and heard that idle song of the corn bunting, associated in our minds with green or yellow fields and sultry weather. I was still more surprised one day late in December at meeting with a lively wheatear, flitting from stone to stone near the Land's End. This one had discovered that it was not necessary to fly all the way to North Africa to find a place to winter in. Early in February I found the adder abroad.

The town, viewed from the outside-the old fishing town, which does not include the numerous villas, terraces, and other modern erections on the neighbouring heights-appears very small indeed. It is small, for when you once master its intricacies you can walk through from end to end in about five or six minutes. But the houses are closely packed, or rather jumbled together with the narrowest and crookedest streets and courts in which to get about or up and down. They have a look of individuality, like a crowd of big rough men pushing and elbowing one another for room, and you can see how this haphazard condition has come about when you stumble by chance on a huge mass of rock thrusting up out of the earth among the houses. There was, in fact, just this little sheltered depression in a stony place to build upon, and the first settlers, no doubt, set their houses just where and how they could among the rocks, and when more room was wanted more rocks were broken down and other houses added until the town as we find it resulted. It is all rude and irregular, as if produced by chance or nature, and altogether reminds one of a rabbit warren or the interior of an ants' nest.

It cannot be nice to live in such a warren or rookery, except to those who were born in it; nevertheless it is curiously attractive, and I, although a disliker of towns or congeries of houses, found a novel pleasure in poking about it, getting into doorways and chance openings to be out of the way of a passing cart which as a rule would take up the whole width of the street. Outside the houses hung the wet oilskins and big sea-boots to dry, and at the doors women with shawls over their heads stand gossiping. When the men are asleep or away and the children at school these appear to be the only inhabitants, except the cats. You find one at every few yards usually occupied with the head of a mackerel or herring. The appearance was perhaps even better by night when the narrow crooked ways are very dark except at some rare spot where a lamp casts a mysterious light on some quaint old corner building and affords a glimpse into a dimly-seen street beyond ending in deep gloom.

In this nest or hive are packed about eight hundred fishermen with their wives and children, their old fathers and mothers, and other members of the community who do not go in the boats. The fishermen are the most interesting in appearance; it is a relief, a positive pleasure to see in England a people clothed not in that ugly dress which is now so universal, but in one suitable to their own life and work--their ponderous sea-boots and short shirt-shaped oilies of many shades of colour from dirty white and pale yellow to deep reds and maroons. In speech and manners they are rough and brusque, and this, too, like their dress and lurching gait, comes, as it were, by nature; for of all occupations, this of wresting a poor and precarious livelihood from the wind-vexed seas under the black night skies in their open boats is assuredly the hardest and most trying to a man's temper. The navvy and the quarryman, the labourer on the land, here where the land is half rock, even the tin-miner deep down in the bowels of the earth, have a less discomfortable and anxious life. That they are not satisfied with it one soon discovers; Canada calls them, and Africa, and other distant lands, and unhappily, as in most places, it is always the best men that go. Possibly this accounts for the change for the worse in the people which some have noted in recent years. Nevertheless they are a good people still, righteous in their own peculiar way, and so independent that in bad times, as when the fishing fails, hunger and cold are more endurable to them than charity. They are a clannish people, and it is consequently not to be wondered at that they have no subscription clubs or friendly societies of any kind to aid them in times of want and sickness such as are now almost universal among the working classes. These benefits of our civilisation will doubtless come to them in time: then their clannishness-the old "One and All" spirit of Cornishmen generally-being no longer needed, will decay. It is after all but another word for solidarity, the strong, natural, or family bond which unites the members of a community which was once, in ruder ages, everywhere, to make social life possible, and has survived here solely because of Cornwall's isolated position. Unfortunately we cannot make any advance-cannot gain anything anywhere without a corresponding loss somewhere. Will it be better for this people when the change comes-when the machine we call "civilisation" has taken the place of the spirit of mutual help in the members of the community? 'Tis an idle question, since we cannot have two systems of life. At present, in our "backward" districts, we have two, but they are in perpetual conflict, and one must overcome the other; and if there be any beautiful growths in the old and unfit, which is passing away, they must undoubtedly perish with it.

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