Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/463

Charles Dickens] sailors and fishermen, looking up the gorge of Boscastle, frequently mistook this tower by day for a landmark, by night for a beacon. Wrecks sometimes happened, and when they did happen, the monks regretfully shared the bales, chests, and kegs, and prayed for the dead men's souls, with special fervour. This occurred, however, so frequently that the tower at last got an ill name as a lure to a dangerous port, and one day a band of angry wrecked men marched on the abbey, and in spite of the monks' prayers, pulled down the tower, some carved stones of which, green with damp, are still to be found hidden under the long rank grass of the churchyard.

Further west the crow comes to Padstow (Petrock's tower), a high-flavoured old fishing town a mile from the sea. Athelstan, when he conquered Cornwall and Scilly, and pricked the Britons back westward with his Saxon sword, gave the place his name, but it never adhered, and the Britons soon fell back on their favourite, Saint Petrock. Padstow must have been a place of some importance in the middle ages, for, when Liverpool was still unborn, this little Cornish sea-port sent two high-sterned turreted vessels, to aid Edward the Third and his knights at the siege of Calais. It first declined in the reign of Henry the Eighth, when the harbour began to block, and that Dunbar, now so dangerous, to form, against which shoal vessels, hurrying in for shelter to the only place of refuge on that terrible northern coast of Cornwall, are often driven by eddies that surge inside the point of the Camel estuary. These sands, rich in carbonate of lime (eighty per cent), are in consequence so invaluable as manure, that nearly one hundred thousand tons a year are carted away, so wisely has industry converted the sailors' burial-place into a mine of wealth. The east shore of the estuary, a barren waste of rolling sand hills, gives a wildness to Padstow in fine blue sky weather, but in dull grey days the "towans" glow with a delusive appearance of changeless sunshine—with such enchantments can imagination invest even a desert. The devastating sand cast down here, as if from all the hour-glasses Time has ever shattered, has choked up and partly buried the ancient chapel of St. Enedoc (Sin Kennedy) situated under the east side of the barren eminence of Bray Hill, north of Padstow, and at the opposite side of the harbour. The sand, piled up to the roof, and scooped away to free the door, has made a small Cornish Pompeii of it. On the north-east side of this desert churchyard a corroded tombstone of 1687 (James the Second), rises from the yellow sea sand. This half buried church was built in 1430 (Henry the Sixth), to replace an ancient oratory of one of those self-devoted Welsh or Irish saints, who were the earliest missionaries among the Pagan tin-miners; traces of it were visible at Bray Hill, some fifty years ago, during a temporary shifting of the sand. St. Enedoc's shows nothing above the surface but a little crooked spire of slate stone blackened by the salt spray, and yellow with blotches of lichen. The old carved seats in the interior were worm-eaten centuries ago. Streaks of scarlet and gold still linger on the panels of the roof. The front is Norman, with a rude cable moulding. There is service once a fortnight in this wild place, where the sea choruses the anthem, and the wind howls its savage responses. Mrs. Candour, that indefatigable gossiping friend of Mrs. Grundy, says that some years ago, before the grass had chained down the volatile and restless sand, a certain clergyman, full of zeal to save his fees, was in the habit of descending into the pulpit through the opening of a skylight. The conquering sand of Padstow has been, however, generally strongly opposed to the establishment, for St. Michael's, on the western shore, between Wadebridge and St. Enedoc, has equally suffered; and on the opposite side of the estuary, near Trevose Head (half way between Hartland and St. Ives), the old church of St. Constantine has been almost entirely engulfed, and the old annual festival, with its limpet and star-gazy pies and hurling matches, has, therefore, for some years been discontinued. The local legend at Padstow is that the bar was the result of the curse of a mermaid, who was shot at whilst sporting in the sea by a devil-may-care young fellow who was looking for gulls. She cursed the town as she sank on her way to a submarine hospital. The old men still say, "A harbour of refuge here would be a great blessing, but nothing will keep the sand out or make the water deep enough to swim a frigate, unless the parsons find out the way to take up the mermaid's curse." St. Petrock's—the fine "late decorated" church of Padstow, with its slender pillars, its rich coloured windows, and strong timbered roofs, is built of grey Caraclew stone, but looks as cold and chilly as if it had been paralysed by the Atlantic storms. The old font, with the Twelve Apostles sentinelled round it, had once the miraculous power (according to the belief of the superstitious inhabitants of this wild country) of preserving all those who were baptised in it from painful experiences of the gallows.

The charm was broken and the saints' blessing lost for ever some fifty years or so ago, when a Padstow man, named Elliot, robbed the mail, and was duly hung. Honesty has since that been found to be a better security against peculiar complaints of the throat, than even St. Petrock's font.

In the old house of the Prideaux (1600)—on high wooded ground above Padstow, where once St. Petrock's monastery stood till the Danes burnt it in 981—there are numerous pictures of that clever self-taught Truro artist Opie, or Oppy, as he called himself. He painted all the Prideaux, male and female, all their servants, and even all the family cats. Opie, the son of a Truro carpenter, was discovered by Peter Pindar smearing out portraits with splashes of house paint. He came to London,