Читать книгу The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated - W. H. Hudson - Страница 14

Table of Contents

Aspect of the country—Gilpin on Cornish scenery—The farm-houses—Footpaths and stiles—Cattle and pigs—A friendly sow—Dogs and foxes—Stony fields—Farmers' love of their holdings—An old farmer.

THE coast country at the end or the western extremity of Cornwall presents an aspect wild and rough as any spot in England. The eighty-miles-long county, which some one compares to a malformed knobbly human leg in shape, narrows down near its termination to a neck or ankle of land no more than six or seven miles wide, with St. Ives Bay on one (the north) side, and Mount's Bay on the other, with its group of places of famous or familiar names—Mousehole, Newlyn, Penzance, Marazion and St. Michael's Mount. Then the land broadens again, forming that rounded bit of country, the westernmost part of England, containing seventy-five or eighty square miles of hilly and moorland country, in great part treeless, with a coastline, from bay to bay, of about thirty miles. Following the coast, one does not wish them more: the most enthusiastic lover of an incult nature, who delights in forcing his way over rocky barriers and through thickets of furze, bogs and rills innumerable, will find these thirty miles as satisfying as any sixty elsewhere. And the roughest, therefore most exhilarating, portion of the coast is that between St. Ives and Land's End, a distance of about twenty miles. This strip of country has been called the Connemara of Cornwall. William Gilpin, that grand old seeker after the picturesque at the end of the eighteenth century, once journeyed into Cornwall, but got no further than Bodmin, as he saw nothing but "a barren and naked country, in all respects as uninteresting as can well be conceived," and he was informed that west of Bodmin it was no better. It is, indeed, worse, and one wonders what his feelings would have been had he persevered to the very end—to rough "Connemara" and flat, naked Bolerium! His strictures on the scenery would have amused the present generation. For all that repelled Gilpin and those of his time in nature, the barren or "undecorated," as he would say, the harsh and savage and unsuited to human beings, now most attracts us. And of all places inhabited by man this coast country is the most desert-like and desolate in appearance. The black, frowning, wave-beaten cliffs on the one hand, the hills and moors on the other, treeless, strewn abundantly with granite boulders, rough with heath and furze and bracken, the summits crowned with great masses of rock resembling ancient ruined castles. Midway between the hills and the sea, half a mile or so from the cliffs, are the farms, but the small houses and walled fields on the inhabited strip hardly detract from the rude and savage aspect of the country. Nature will be Nature here, and man, like the other inhabitants of the wilderness, has adapted himself to the conditions. The badgers have their earths, the foxes their caverns in the rocks, and the linnet, yellow-hammer, and magpie hide their nests, big and little, in the dense furze bushes: he in like manner builds his dwelling small and low, sheltering as best he can in any slight depression in the ground, or behind thickets of furze and the rocks he piles up. The small naked stone farm-house, with its little outbuildings, corn-stacks, and wood piles huddling round it, seem like a little flock of goats drawn together for company and shelter in some rough desert place on a cold windy day. Looking from a hill-top on one of the small groups of buildings—and in some instances two or three farms have clubbed their houses together for better protection from the blast—they resemble toy houses, and you have the fancy that you could go down and pick them up and put them in your pocket.

The coast road, running from village to village, winding much, now under now over the hills, comes close to some of the farms and leaves others at a distance; but all these little human centres are united by a footpath across the fields.