Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/484

474[April 17, 1869] two streams join the inlet of the sea, that here comes to fetch them. The Earls of Cornwall (dearest Regan was wife to Cornwall) had a castle here, which stood on a scarped mound at the left top of Pydar-street. Everywhere the crow sees paper mills, iron foundries, or smelting houses, for Truro was one of the old coinage towns for tin, and in the old coinage hall, now pulled down, the vice-warden of the Stannary's held his rugged court, as he now does in the handsome Italian town hall, whenever questions occur in Wheal Rose, Wheal Garras, Ding-Dong, or even the great Botallac.

Truro is the birthplace of that heartless satirist and utterly unsatisfactory man Foote, of Polwhele, the Cornish historian, and of Richard and John Lander, Clapperton's servants, and the earliest explorers of the river Niger. Two great missionaries were also natives of Truro; Henry Martyn, the son of a miner, who spread Christianity in so many parts of India and who died of the plague in Persia in 1812, and Dr. Harreis, the founder of the London Missionary Society. But the chief lion of Truro, to the crow's taste, is Perranzabuloe, the church of St. Piran in the Sand. St. Piran, worthy soul, takes us back to those days when St. Patrick drove out all the vermin of Ireland except the middlemen and the agitators, and the Culdees taught Christianity at Iona. At the end of the fourth century St. Patrick visited Cornwall to preach against the Druids, and being successful in discomfiting the gods of the oak tree and the thunder, returned to Ireland, consecrated a batch of twelve bishops, and started them off to complete the good work. St. Piran, more zealous and eager than the rest, pushed off, first crossed the sea on a milestone, landed at St. Ives, walked eighteen miles to stretch his legs, and then founded an oratory at Piran among the miners of St. Agnes, who still consider him their guardian, and annually fête him on the 5th of March. The Piran church was built over the dead body of the miners' saint. The church, used for the prayer and praise of two centuries, was submerged by sand before the Saxons overran Cornwall. The second church was in all probability then built, and protected from the devouring sand by a stream of water which arrested its advance as if by enchantment. In 1420 (Henry the Fifth) the church was rebuilt and continued safe till some miners diverted the stream, and the sand again pressed on so rapidly that the porch was buried in a single night. The building was removed in 1803 to a place two miles off. The tradition of the primeval church was still flickering in men's memories, when in 1855 the great region of sand suddenly shifted, disclosed glimpses of stone work, and at last gave birth to the old oratory, with its little baptistry. After a quiet doze of ten centuries the church awoke again, and opened its eyes, like Rip van Winkle, to find the outer world somewhat altered. The rude masonry of granite blocks embedded not in lime, but china clay, the few windows, the peculiar curve of the doorway arch, the absence of a font, are all proofs of Celtic origin and great antiquity. It was built, says Mr. Haslam, evidently by persons who had seen Roman work without understanding it, and seen lime without knowing how to make it. The altar was taken down in 1855, and the headless body of the worthy saint found beneath it. Thirty years of travellers' visits have done more to ruin this early relic of Christianity, than did all the harmless ten centuries of its interment. The south and east walls have partly fallen, the sand is again closing over the victim that once escaped it. In the winter, the spring of St. Piran, the course being choked with sand, forms a large pool, and overflows the persecuted building of the missionary who first taught the miners to work tin, to the height of six feet. To the south of this mine a solitary moorstone cross, pierced with cruciform holes, marks the site of the second church. The sand around it is partially fixed with grass, but it still covers the floor of the ruin to the depth of nineteen feet. North and south, sand can be seen blowing over the hills in whirling clouds. Around both churches the desert soil is white with human bones, the heaving graves having from time to time given up their dead. When the west wind blows on this coast, as Mr. Redding observes, the sand can be seen advancing in small waves. All the sand that destroyed Perranzabuloe was blown in through a small crevice in the cliff. A few yards of shore wall built in time would have saved the whole district. In this paradise of rabbits, the arundo arenaria, planted to bind the desultory mass, sometimes a species of convolvulus, and a starveling mossy vegetation in the hollows, are the only signs of life.

About a mile and a half from this strange spot, the crow alights on Perran Round, an equally interesting place, but with very different associations. It is the old open-air theatre, where the Cornish miracle plays used to be performed. There is an amphitheatre at St. Just with stone seats, but this is of turf. It is calculated that the seven rows of benches here held about two thousand two hundred persons, standing. In the Bodleian there are still preserved four of these Cornish religious interludes, the subjects—the Creation, the Passion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. One of these is of the time of James the First; another is supposed to be as old as Richard the Third. In the Creation there were fifty-six characters. The play ends with the building of Solomon's Temple, the king's workmen being rewarded by a bishop with Cornish estates. In the (James the First) Creation, Adam and Eve appear dressed in white leather. The serpent had a woman's face, with yellow hair, and entered a tree and sang. In one scene the good and evil angels fought with swords, and in the last act Lamech shoots Cain in mistake for a wild beast, and devils appear and carry off the first murderer. The stage directions require an ark to be built, and a rainbow to appear. At these plays—which almost exactly resembled those miracle plays still performed in the Tyrol, and one of which was