Читать книгу The Cornish Coast (South) , and the Isles of Scilly - Charles G. Harper - Страница 4

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The name "Saltash" simply means "salt water"—the "ash" having originally been the Celtic "esc." Salt water is found, as a matter of fact, as far up river as Calstock, but here it is, by all manner of authorities, that the river Tamar, the "taw mawr," or "great water," joins that broad and often extremely rough and choppy estuary, the Hamoaze: "Hem-uisc," the border water.

PLYMOUTH SOUND, THE HAMOAZE, AND THE TAMAR.

Saltash is a borough-town of an antiquity transcending that of Plymouth, and the rhyme

"Saltash wer' a borough town,

When Plymouth wer' a vuzzy down,"

is equally proud and true. It was once also a Parliamentary borough, but that glory has faded away. Yet once more, it is in Cornwall, and that, according to any true Cornishman, is far better than being in Devonshire. So Saltash is amply blest. And if to these dignities we add the material advantage of possessing jurisdiction over Hamoaze, down even to Plymouth Sound, and over all its creeks, we shall see that Saltash does right to be proud. It was by virtue of the borough authority over those waterways that Saltash was enabled to be so splendidly patriotic in the time of good Queen Bess. At that period the harbour dues were one shilling for an English ship, and two shillings for a foreigner. After the Armada Saltash levied an extra discriminatory five shillings upon Spanish vessels. Among the Corporation regalia is a silver oar, typifying this jurisdiction.

SALTASH BRIDGE.

It is perhaps a little grievous, after all these noble and impressive things, to learn that Saltash church, which crests the hill on whose steep sides the town is built, is really, although very ancient, not a church, but a chapelry of St. Stephen's, a quite humble village inland, on the way to Trematon. And there is one other thing: Saltash cannot see its own picturesqueness, any more than one can see the crown of one's head, except for artificial aid. The mirror by which Saltash is enabled to see itself is the Devonshire shore, and across the quarter of a mile to it the steam-ferry, that plies every half-hour or less, will take you for one penny. From that point of view, not only Saltash, but also the best picture of Saltash Bridge is to be had: that giant viaduct which carries the Great Western Railway across from Devon to Cornwall in single track, at a height of 100 feet above the water. Saltash Bridge—no one calls it by its official name, the "Royal Albert Bridge"—has in all nineteen spans, and is 2,240 feet long; but its great spectacular feature is provided by the two central spans of 455 feet each. Twelve years were occupied in building, and it was opened in 1859. The name of I. K. Brunel, the daring engineer, is boldly inscribed on it. There is a story told of some one asking Brunel how long it would last.

"A hundred years," said he.

"And then?"

"Then it will no longer be needed."

There is a good deal more work in Saltash Bridge than is visible to the eye, the stone base of the central pier going down through seventy feet of water and a further twenty feet of sand and gravel, to the solid rock. The cost of the bridge is said to have been £230,000.

Great ships may easily pass under the giant building, and old wooden men-o'-war lie near at hand, giving scale to it, including the Mount Edgcumbe training-ship, the Implacable, and an old French hulk.

This way came the Romans into Cornwall, their post, Statio Tamara, established on the Devonshire side at what is now King's Tamerton. And this way came the Normans, building a strong fortress nearly two miles west of Saltash, at Trematon, on a creek of the Lynher river. They are "proper rough roads" and steep that lead to Trematon Castle. You come to it by way of the hamlet of Burraton Combe and the village of St. Stephen's-by-Saltash. At Burraton some old cottages are seen with a half-defaced tablet on them, once covered over with plaster. Most of the plaster has now fallen off, revealing this inscription, which some one, long ago, was evidently at some pains to conceal:

"This almshouse is the gift of James Buller of Shillingham, Esq., deceased, whose glorious memory as well as illustrious honours ought not to be forgotten but kept, as 'tis to be hoped they will, in euerlasting remembrance, decem^r. y^e 6 in y^e yeare of our Lord 1726."

A shield, displaying four spread eagles, surmounts these praises to the illustrious Buller, whose honours and glorious memory are indeed clean forgot.

Trematon Castle stands on the summit of a mighty steep hill, rising from a creek branching out of a creek. At the head of this remote tongue of water, where the salt tide idly laps, stands the hamlet of Forder. Turner painted Trematon Castle, and in his day the crenellated walls of that amazing strong place could easily be seen from the creek. In these latter days the trees of the Castle hill have grown so tall and dense that little of the ancient stronghold can be glimpsed. A carriage-road winds up the hill, for a residence—not in the least pretending to be a castle, one is happy to say—stands in midst of the fortress precincts.

TREMATON CASTLE.

It is a peculiar castle, the "keep" crowning a lofty mound, difficult of access, heaped upon the highest point of the hill, resembling that of Totnes and some two or three others in the West country, which exhibit vast circular battlemented walls, evidently never roofed nor intended to be roofed. Below this keep is a wide grassy space now occupied by the mansion and its beautiful rose and other gardens. Entrance to this court was formerly obtained by a strong gateway tower still remaining, but not now forming the approach; and around this court ran another massive battlemented wall, most of it existing to this day, and enclosed the castle. Such was the ancient hold of the Valletorts, afterwards the property of the Duchy of Cornwall. Carew finely describes the "ivy-tapissed walls"—it is a pretty expression, thus likening the ivy to tapestry—and tells us how the Cornish rebels of 1549, standing out for the old religion, treacherously invited the governor, Sir Richard Grenville, outside, on pretence of a parley, and then captured the castle and plundered at will. Then "the seely gentlewomen, without regard of sex or shame, were stripped from their apparel to their very smocks, and some of their fingers broken, to pluck away their rings."

Just below Trematon Castle, passing under a viaduct of the Great Western Railway, the creek opens out upon the broad and placid Lynher river, exactly resembling a lake, as its name implies. Here are the four or five cottages of Antony Passage, including a primitive inn. Antony is nearly half a mile across the ferry, but the Lynher, or "St. Germans River," as it is sometimes called, should certainly be explored by boat for its length of four miles to St. Germans, the prettily situated village where the ancient bishopric of Cornwall was seated from its beginning in A.D. 909 until its transference to Exeter in 1046; and where Port Eliot, the park and mansion of the Earl of St. Germans, is placed. Ince Castle, a curious brick-built sixteenth-century building, peers from the wooded shores on the way. An Earl of Devon built it, and the Killigrews held it for a time. The house has a tower at each of its four corners, and according to legend, one of the Killigrews, a kind of double-barrelled bigamist, kept a wife in each tower, ignorant of the others' existence.

ST. GERMANS.

St. Germans, from being a borough, has declined to the condition of a village, and a very beautiful and aristocratic-looking village it is. The parish church stands on the site of the cathedral of the ancient See of Cornwall, and, although practically nothing is left of the original building, the great size and the unusual design of the existing church in a great degree carry on the traditional importance of the place. You perceive, glancing even casually at the weird exterior, with its two strange western towers, square as to their lower stages and octagonal above, that this has a story more important than that of a mere parish church. The dedication is to St. Germanus of Auxerre, a missionary to Britain in the fifth century. The importance of the building is due to its having been collegiate. The noble, if strange, west front is largely Norman, the upper stages of the towers Early English and Perpendicular. The interior is Norman and Perpendicular. It will at once be noticed that there is no north aisle. It was demolished towards the close of the eighteenth century, in the usual wanton eighteenth-century way. The only remaining fragment of the ancient collegiate stalls is a mutilated miserere seat worked up into the form of a chair. It is carved with a hunting-scene; a sportsman carrying a hare over his shoulder, with animals resembling a singular compromise between pigs and dogs, in front, and huge hell-hounds with eyes like hard-boiled eggs, following.

St. Germans church is practically a mortuary chapel of the Eliot family, and it stands, too, in the grounds of their seat, Port Eliot, with the mansion adjoining.

MISERERE, ST. GERMANS.

It was in 1565 that the Eliots first settled here. The Augustinian Priory and its lands had been granted at the Dissolution to the Champernownes, who exchanged it with the Eliots, who came from Coteland, in Devon. The greatest of the Eliot race, Sir John, Vice-Admiral in the West, and patriot Member of Parliament in resistance to the arbitrary rule of Charles the First, paid the penalty of his patriotism by death in the Tower of London in 1632, after four-and-a-half years' captivity. His body does not lie here. "Let him be buried in the parish in which he died," wrote the implacable king; and he lies in the church of St. Peter-ad-Vincula, on Tower Green, instead of at St. Germans, where his own people would have laid him.

Many monuments to Eliots stud the walls, and hatchments gloom in black and heraldic colours, bearing their inspiring motto, Præcedentibus insta, i.e., "Urge your way among the leaders," suggested, no doubt, by the career of their great ancestor; but the inspiration has never been keen enough to produce another great man from among them, and since the Earldom of St. Germans was conferred in 1815 the Eliots have been respectably obscured.

The Lynher river ends just beyond St. Germans at the village of Polbathick. Other creeks branch out on either hand, like fingers; beautifully wooded hillsides running down to them. At low water they are mostly mud flats, with the gulls busily feasting in the ooze, but when the tide flows they become still lakes, solitary except for a few "farm-places" along their course. On a knoll, high above the Lynher, the spire of Sheviock church peeps out. It is simply bathed in stucco. Carew gives an amusing legend relating to the building of the church, and tells how one of the Dawney family built it, while at the same time his wife was engaged in building a barn. The cost of the barn was supposed to have exceeded that of the church by three-halfpence; "and so it might well fall out, for it is a great barn and a very little church." It is a quaint legend, but there is no satisfaction to be got in visiting the church, for it is not a "very little church," and the barn with which it was compared is not now in existence.

Below Sheviock comes Antony, sometimes called "Antony-in-the-East," to distinguish it from the two other Antonys, or Anthonys, in Cornwall. Antony village stands high up on the hillside, and the park and mansion of the same name, seat of the Pole-Carew family, are nearly two miles away, down by Antony Passage, where the Lynher makes ready to join Hamoaze. The park of Thanckes adjoins.

Antony church is approached by long flights of steps. It contains a monument to Richard Carew, of Antony, author of the "Survey of Cornwall," published in 1602, a work of mingled quaintness and grace. He died in 1620, as his epitaph shows. The part of it in Latin was written by his friend, Camden; the English verses are his own.

Antony lies directly upon the old coach road from Plymouth to Liskeard and Falmouth, three miles from Torpoint, to which a steam-ferry, plying every half-hour, brings the traveller from Devonport. Turner is said to have greatly admired the view from the churchyard, but it is greatly obscured in our own times by trees. The grandest of all views is the astonishingly noble panoramic view of Plymouth and the Hamoaze, from the summit of the road to Tregantle Fort. There the whole geography of the district is seen unfolded, mile upon mile, with the three towns of Plymouth, Devonport, and Stonehouse—to say nothing of Stoke Damerel, Ford, Morice Town, and St. Budeaux—looking like some city of the Blest, which we know not to be the case, and the great railway bridge of Saltash resembling an airy gossamer. It is a view of views. Incidentally, the panorama explains the existence here of Tregantle Fort, and of that of Scraesdon, down by Antony. This elevated neck of land commands Plymouth, which, with the arsenals and dockyards of Devonport and Keyham, could be either taken in the rear or bombarded by an enemy who could effect a landing in Whitesand Bay. Tregantle Fort, mounting many heavy guns, therefore stands on the ridge, to prevent such a landing, and a fine military road runs between it and Rame, a distance of three miles, skirting the cliffs of Whitesand Bay. From the hillsides you see the soldiers firing at targets in the sea—and never hitting them. The way to Rame, along this military road, crosses lonely downs, with the tempting sands of Whitesand Bay down below. The dangers of this treacherous shore, often pointed out by guide-books, are made manifest by an obelisk beside the road, on the brink of the low cliffs, bearing an inscription to "Reginald Spender, aged 44, and his sons Reginald and Sidney, aged 13 and 11, who were drowned while bathing, Whit Sunday, June 9th, 1878."

At the end of the military road and its numerous five-barred gates, the village of Rame, consisting of a small cluster of a church and some farms screened by elms, stands in a sheltered fold of the hills. The church, with needle spire, is an almost exact replica of that of Sheviock, and, like it, has been covered with rough-cast plaster, as thoroughly as a twelfth-cake is faced with sugar. It contains a poor-box pillar, dated 1633. The lighting arrangements are in the primitive form of paraffin candles on wooden staves. Rame Head, almost islanded from the mainland, is the western point of the bold promontory that encloses the Cornish side of Plymouth Sound. Penlee Point is the eastern. "When Rame and Dodman meet" is a West-country way of mentioning the impossible. The two headlands are twenty-seven miles apart, in a straight line. Fuller, who dearly loved a conceit of this kind, tells us that the meeting did actually come to pass when Sir Piers Edgcumbe, who owned Rame, married a lady who brought him the land including the Dodman. The small chapel of St. Michael on Rame Head, long in ruins, has been restored by Lord Mount Edgcumbe.

Penlee Point looks directly upon the Sound: an inspiring sight in the Imperial sort. It is indeed an epic of Empire, that broad waterway, three miles across, with the great Breakwater straddling in its midst, and shipping busily coming and going, and forts on land and battleships on sea. And I wish the walking were not so rough, and the near contact with the forts a little more martial and not so domestic. It resembles tricks upon travellers to find that the signals flying from Picklecombe Fort are not really, you know, signals when seen close at hand, but shirts hung out to dry.

And so presently round to Cawsand Bay. First you come to Cawsand and then Kingsand, villages not easily to be distinguished from one another. Notorious in the eighteenth century for being a nest of daring smugglers, these places nowadays form excursion resorts for afternoon trippers from Plymouth, and almost every house supplies teas and refreshments. But in spite of the crowds that resort to Cawsand and Kingsand, they are sorry places, with a slipshod, poverty-stricken air. Only the splendid views make them at all endurable.

Mount Edgcumbe is one of the great attractions for the people of Plymouth. It is, of course, the private park of the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, but the Plymouth people have by long use come to look upon the usual free access to it very much as a right, and the excursion steamers from Plymouth to Cremyll would receive a severe blow if the permission to wander here at large were withdrawn. The Duke of Medina-Sidonia, Admiral commanding the Spanish Armada, is said to have selected Mount Edgcumbe as his share of the spoil, when England should be conquered. Contrary from all reasonable expectations, there was no conquest, and consequently no spoils.

Maker church, on the heights above Mount Edgcumbe, commands panoramic views over Hamoaze, and its tower was used in the old semaphore signalling days, in connection with Mount Wise at Devonport and the fleets at sea.

The proper local pronunciation of "Hamoaze" is shown in the ode written by a parish clerk of Maker:

"Mount Edgcumbe is a pleasant place,

It looketh on Hamoaze,

And on it are some batteries

To guard us from our foes."

Equally fine, and more pictorially manageable views are those from the "ruined chapel" down below. The "ruin" is indeed a sham ruin, and was simply built for effect, but a fine effective foreground it makes, with all Plymouth massed over yonder, and the Hoe with Smeaton's old Eddystone tower prominent, and in the middle distance the fortified rock of Drake's Island.

PLYMOUTH AND DRAKE'S ISLAND, FROM MOUNT EDGCUMBE.

A deep inlet runs inland past Cremyll to Southdown and Millbrook, whither frequent ferries also ply, at astonishing penny fares. At Millbrook, too, every other house supplies teas to hungry and thirsty crowds. You would not say the waters of Millbrook creek were altogether salubrious, and the steamers' paddles stir them up sometimes with desolating effect upon the nose, but the mackerel do not seem to be adversely affected. Indeed, they appear rather to affect these turbid and odorous waters, and may often be seen from the steamers leaping up into the air. There are few more beautiful sights than those on the return from Millbrook to Plymouth on a summer evening, when the moon peers over the wooded shores and the mackerel leap and glitter in her silver light.