Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/109

 Rh owns Loe-pool, and asks for permission to cut a passage through the bar to the sea.) Another of Tregeagle's tasks is to make and carry away a truss of sand bound with a rope of sand from Gwenvor (the cove at Whitsand Bay) near the Land's End. But his unquiet spirit finds no rest, for whilst he is trying to do his never-ending work the devil hunts him from place to place, until he hides for refuge in a hermit's ruined chapel on St. Roche's rocks (East Cornwall).

"When the sea roars before a storm people in the Land's End district say "Tregeagle is calling," and often, too, his voice may be heard lamenting around Loe-pool.

The substance of the following I had from a Penzance man (H. R. C), to whom I must own I am indebted for much information about Cornish folk-lore. All his life he has in his business mingled with the peasantry of West Cornwall, and, unlike myself, he comes from a long line of Cornishmen.

"You know Gwenvor Sands, in Whitesand Bay, at the Land's End, and have heard of the unresting spirit of Tregeagle, by whom that spot is haunted. He foretells storms, and calls before the wind reaches home. I have often heard him howling before a westerly hurricane in the still of midnight at my house in Penzance, a distance of ten miles."

Tradition tells that on these sands, many centuries ago, some foreigners landed, and fought a great battle with the inhabitants, under King Arthur, on Vellan-drucher Moor. "Where Madron, Gulval, and Zennor meet, there is a flat stone where Prince Arthur and four British kings dined, and the four kings collected the native Cornish who fought under them at the battle of Yellan Drucher."—(Bottrell.) This was long before the Spaniards (pronounced Spanyers) in 1595 came ashore at the same place from a galley "high by day" (in broad daylight), and burnt Vellan-dreath, a mill close by.

These foreigners are popularly supposed to be red-haired Danes, and they stayed so long "that the birds built in the rigging of their ships." In all the western parishes of Cornwall there has existed time out of mind a great antipathy to certain red-haired families,