Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

Sir Christopher Hawkins lives here.

  Pentewan’s port was bedevilled by the stream that brought down the silt and waste from the mines and clay workings around St Austell and deposited them on the seashore. Between 1818 and 1826 the new harbour was constructed with a deepened basin, new quays and gates, a breakwater designed to keep the mouth from being silted up and a reservoir upstream to trap the waste. A horse-drawn tramway ran from the harbour to St Austell, and Pentewan itself more than doubled in size.

  Although it never realised Hawkins’ ambition to challenge Fowey and Charlestown, the volume of trade did grow steadily before and after his death in 1829. In the 1850s Pentewan was handling almost a third of Cornwall’s exports of china clay, and a major refurbishment combined with the introduction of steam locomotives kept it in business into the twentieth century. Eventually, however, the accumulation of silt blocked the free passage of vessels; the requisitioning of the locomotives and the track to assist the war effort was another blow, and the port became largely moribund after 1918.

  The agency of its downfall is obvious today. Hawkins’ harbour basin is still there, holding water. The gates – installed as recently as 1945 – sag motionless, the quays are crumbling, the bollards poke rusted heads above shattered concrete. Railway lines emerge from the ground for a few yards, then vanish. The shape and structure of the complex are clear and intact, but between the harbour gates and the sea is a barrier of sand at least a hundred yards wide, a silent reminder of the limitations of human endeavour.

  I had supper, hog’s pudding and mash, in the Ship Inn. It was a Sunday evening, the first weekend of the school holidays, and the place was packed with large men in black tee-shirts exuding noisy bonhomie. Over the fireplace was a colour photograph of a smiling David Cameron, a memento of a flying visit a few years ago when the village was flooded. But most of the pictures around the walls – and in my B & B and in the souvenir shops and cafés – were in black and white and recalled aspects of Pentewan’s more distant past.

  There were fishing boats and grimy cargo vessels heaped with china clay and slabs of stone, fishermen in caps and heavy sweaters, steam trains puffing down the line from St Austell, pilchard girls in long skirts, village dances, donkeys, farmers – a great gallery of images from another world. For centuries the people here fished and farmed, and later worked in the mines and clay pits and at the harbour. They were born and lived and died here and most knew no other place or life. And then the old ways were swept away. The harbour died, fishing diminished to almost nothing, farming much the same. Tourism came and thrived and swallowed up everything.

  The images retreated onto the walls of pubs and into display cabinets in museums. My landlady told me there were just two Cornish families left in Pentewan.

  In the late evening I wandered along the beach into the holiday park. It was laid out in bands: mobile homes and chalets at the back, caravans in the middle, tents at the front. There were lots of fluttering flags: Welsh dragons, skull and crossbones, Wolverhampton Wanderers FC, the inevitable Cross of St George. Every pitch had its own power point and there were notices advising what to do if the satellite signal failed. But in fact hardly anyone was watching TV. They were socialising around barbecues, sauntering along with infants in buggies or on shoulders, the older children running about or playing football in the fading light. A few hardy souls were still in the sea. Lads with fishing rods balanced on the rocks near the harbour, hurling spinners far out into the water.

  Today no one would come to Pentewan in summer in search of tranquillity and unspoiled scenic beauty. A. L. Rowse’s childhood playground is covered by caravans, chalets, tents, 4x4s, kayaks, bikes, windbreaks and assorted clutter, and seethes with a host of ordinary, decent, peaceful families having fun. The great Cornish snob would doubtless have averted his eyes and curled his lip, but I thought the scene was rather heartwarming.

  Hardly had I taken a last lingering look at the caravans of Pentewan than an extremely narrow and twisty lane was carrying me at alarming speed into Mevagissey. Joseph Hammond, who was Vicar of St Austell in the late nineteenth century and wrote an affectionate history of the town and its environs, said of Mevagissey that the county contained few places more thoroughly Cornish and primitive. It was, he said, bizarre, picturesque, smelly and insanitary – ‘the odour of fish which pervades the place has led some profane persons to christen it Fishagissey,’ he records with a clerical chuckle.

  In spite of the advent of electricity and other modern conveniences, Mevagissey remains resolutely fishy. It accommodates yachts and pleasure boats, but declares that it is first and foremost a fishing port. Having survived the familiar peaks and troughs, it is now doing quite nicely, landing around £2 million worth of fish a year, the mainstays being mackerel and the now proud Cornish sardine.

  But they are a curious lot, fishermen. On one side of the harbour I got talking to a thoroughly curmudgeonly mackerel man in a pair of yellow waders extensively stained by blood and fish juices. He’d been out at four and was back at eight thirty with a couple of boxes of fish to pack in ice and send off to market. He had been a trawlerman once, with his dad – ‘I hated it’ – and now went out when he felt like it. I asked him about Mevagissey. ‘Bloody horrible dump. Full of drug addicts and pissheads from Liverpool and Manchester.’ How come? I asked, and he embarked on a lengthy grouse about north-western rejects being offered homes and lavish benefits in the village.

  Dispirited by his want of charity, I cycled around the granite harbour walls to where a sturdy blue fishing boat, Ocean Harvest, was taking on ice for her next trip. She is operated by a father-and-son team; I buttonholed the son, shovel in hand. They were hard at it, out at midnight, fishing for eighteen hours, back in to unload and catch a few hours’ kip, out again. The catches were good: plenty of haddock, lemon sole, Dover sole, premium John Dory and monkfish, some squid, although not as much as there should have been. They were making up for a dreadful late winter, when the persistent freezing-cold easterlies had restricted fishing to six days in six weeks. You had to take it when it was there, he said.

  What about Mevagissey? ‘It’s a great place to live. ’Andsome, as we say. One thing you notice is that Mevagissey people who move away as often as not end up coming back. That tells you something.’ What about all these Mancunian and Liverpudlian cast-offs? He pulled a face. ‘What bollocks.’ And the fishing life? ‘Couldn’t do anything else. Now the catches are good and the prices have stayed up, it’s worth it. I’ll never make a fortune but so what? There’s more to life than that.’

  A 1920s photograph of Portmellon, the next cove to the west, shows a tiny settlement of grey stone cottages huddled at the sea’s edge. The cottages are still there, all smartly whitewashed with brightly painted shutters; what used to be the fields behind are covered in a rash of white and pale-grey bungalows and villas. It was once celebrated for boat-building, but Percy Mitchell’s yard – where generations of sturdy luggers and sleek yachts were handcrafted and launched – closed in the 1980s, and these days Portmellon is as somnolent as Mevagissey is vivacious.

  Up the hill is the handsome farmhouse of Bodrugan Barton, the successor to a much older and grander establishment from which the ancient Cornish family of Bodrugan directed their affairs. The most notorious of them was Sir Henry, who backed the losing side in the Wars of the Roses and was attainted for treason by the winner, Henry Tudor. The story is that he was pursued to Bodrugan by his old foe, Sir Richard Edgcumbe, but managed to slip out of a back door and make his way to the cliff edge at Turbot Point, below which a boat was waiting to take him to France, or possibly Ireland.

  With Sir Richard’s men at his heels, Sir Henry had no time to make his way down to the beach, so he leaped from the top. He landed safely on a patch of soft turf near the water and made his escape, leaving Edgcumbe seething behind. The Cornish poet Charles Causley wrote some stirring lines:

  He rode him down the valley

  He rode him up the steep

&n
bsp; Till white as wood Bodrugan stood

  Above the Cornish deep.

  South from Bodrugan’s Leap, Dodman Point thrusts out into a dangerous stretch of sea. There have been many disasters off the Dodman, the most recent in August 1966 when a Falmouth pleasure boat, the Darlwin, disappeared on the way back from an outing to Fowey. Thirty-one people were drowned, and the cause was never established.

  There is a great granite cross on the summit, 330 feet above the sea. It was put there by the Reverend George Martin, who was Rector of St Michael Caerhays between 1893 and 1898, both as a landmark for mariners and an expression of hope for the Second Coming. Mr Martin was a strange, saintly man who found his true vocation after leaving Cornwall and abandoning his ministry to take a job as a porter at Borough Market in Southwark and devoting himself to helping the poor.

  Dodman Point is a spot to encourage solemn and sublime reflection. Anne Treneer, a schoolteacher whose parents ran the school in nearby Gorran, wrote in one of her books of Cornish memories: ‘Dodman absorbs the blackness of winter . . . something in it subdued us. We never played there.’ It was sombre, even on a warm, sunny July day. The views – east past Looe Island to Rame Head, west to Nare Point with the dim outline of the Lizard beyond – were tremendous. The sea was empty except for a single yacht beating west through the crests of the waves, its sail bulging and as taut as a drum. To the west, headland after headland dropped into the sea, the dark-grey rock edges sharp against the foaming surf.

  I looked again at Mr Martin’s inscription – ‘in the firm hope of the Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ and for the encouragement of those who strive to serve Him.’ The wording seemed short on confidence; there was hope, not expectation, and a need to encourage those who strove to serve rather than served. It felt like a place for faith to be tested.

  *

  The Church of St Michael Caerhays stands beside a road a little way inland, isolated, with no village anywhere near. The road there from Dodman Point passes the sea end of a thickly wooded valley whose little stream was dammed long ago to make a lake and other water features. Looking out to sea, with the woods behind it, is Caerhays Castle, one of the more outlandish creations of that great enthusiast for grand-scale pseudo-Gothic, John Nash.

  As so often with these follies, there was a perfectly respectable mansion there beforehand which had served the Trevanion family well enough since the Middle Ages. But it was not grand enough for an impressionable John Bettesworth, who inherited the estate through his mother at the age of twenty-one. He added the Trevanion to his surname, and required a castle to go with it. Towers and battlements and castellations, chamfered doorways and arches and parapets and other nonsense sprouted in profusion; but when the bills for Nash’s wild fancies poured in, the young squire found himself financially embarrassed.

  Over the years after the completion of the castle in 1810, Squire Trevanion’s debts mounted. His hopes of being bailed out by his enormously wealthy mother-in-law were dashed when his dog bit her footman, and he came to depend heavily on his attorney, Edward Coode of St Austell, to keep him out of the clutches of his creditors. Mr Coode’s office overlooked the yard of the White Hart, where the London coaches stopped, and he kept a sharp eye out for anyone with the look of bailiff about them. On the occasion of his client’s final disgrace, Mr Coode appropriated the fly ordered by the bailiffs and reached Caerhays just in time to persuade the Squire to flee to Brussels.

  By the time he died in Belgium in 1840, the castle had revealed itself to be no match for the Cornish weather. The roof, deprived of its lead, leaked so freely that a visitor found ducks paddling around the floor of the drawing room. All the fixtures and fittings were removed, even the bells and the wiring, and it remained a decayed shell until 1854 when it was bought by a mining and banking magnate, Michael Williams. It remains in the family’s ownership today and the gardens are world famous for magnolias, camellias and rhododendrons.

  Many generations of the Trevanions lie at peace in the churchyard of St Michael’s. The official church history makes no mention of the saintly George Martin, but much of a predecessor as rector, the Reverend William Willimott. He was there for twenty-five years, and was evidently a resourceful and energetic man. When the church was restored soon after his arrival, Willimott carved the screen and the chancel stalls, made the tiles for the chancel floor and produced designs for the stained-glass windows. He brought in a harmonium and introduced Hymns Ancient and Modern, which was considered very High Church and radical.

  He was a great fellow for pets, Mr Willimott, with a menagerie that included a bull terrier called Rock, an otter, a lamb, a white rabbit, two badgers and several peregrine falcons which he trained to take gulls off the cliffs. In old age he wrote down his memories of Caerhays, illustrating them with his own water-colours. ‘What happy days I have had,’ he wrote, ‘rejoicing in God’s good gifts of health, strength, wholesome food, pure air, walks, rides, flowers, birds, pleasant companions, kind neighbours and higher blessings than these.’

  * * *

  At the beginning of February 1914 the German cargo ship Hera, carrying a cargo of Chilean guano, was making her way in thick, dirty weather for the Lizard. At about half-past ten at night the mate reported breakers ahead. The captain ordered the Hera to be put about, but she struck the outer edge of Gull Rock, a notorious hazard a mile or so out from Nare Head. At once she listed steeply to starboard. The order was given for the lifeboats to be launched, but two out of three broke away. All but the captain and three seamen piled into the third, which was swamped by the surging seas. Several men were washed away, but nine managed to cling to the lifeboat mast.

  Distress flares had been fired immediately after the impact. The coastguard at Portscatho alerted the Falmouth lifeboat, which reached the scene at half-past three in the morning. In the darkness the crew could not locate the wreck, but they heard a whistle being blown by one of the survivors clinging to the mast of the half-sunk boat. Five men were rescued. Next day wreckage and bodies were washed ashore between Portloe and Portholland.

  On 3 February Joseph Johns, the sexton at the nearest church, at Veryan, was told to make ready a grave for the victims of the disaster. The result was Veryan’s Long Grave, a continuous burial ground seventy-five feet in length. The next day between six and seven hundred Cornish men and women gathered for the funeral of the twelve Germans whose bodies had been recovered. Later three more were found and added to the grave. Three bodies were never found; that of the captain was returned for burial in Germany. The names of the dead were engraved on the marble headstone, the youngest of them Herbert Bahr, aged sixteen.

  Six months later the two nations represented at this ceremony were at war.

  Gull Rock and Nare Head separate Veryan Bay from its western neighbour, Gerrans Bay. Portscatho is the main village on Gerrans Bay; Gerrans itself is immediately behind, although to the visitor uninformed about ancient local rivalries they compose a single settlement.

  Portscatho is typical of many south-west coastal villages. It consists of a cluster of old cottages and one or two more substantial houses around the harbour, with successive generations of housing spread behind, initially along the roads out of the village and subsequently across the spaces between the roads. The harbour is small, and is protected by a breakwater shaped like a crooked finger. There is a sandy beach flanked by rock.

  Its past – fishing to the front, farming behind, a tightly bonded community between – is clearly written; its present – second homes, tourism, retirement, the servicing thereof – equally so. It has a village store, very much better than the average, and a decent pub, the Plume of Feathers. In holiday time Portscatho brims with life. The rest of the year it is just as pretty but as quiet as an old-fashioned Sunday afternoon. Its history has been chronicled with exemplary love and thoroughness by a local enthusiast, Chris Pollard, and I hope he will forgive me for observing that it is full of character and incident but short on major sensations.

>   Portscatho does, however, have its sea monster. Or had. Or may have.

  In the late evening of 10 July 1985, Sheila Bird, a local historian from Falmouth specialising in books about hauntings and other paranormal happenings, was walking with her brother along the cliffs near Portscatho when they saw a creature close to or on the surface of the sea. She described it as being mottled grey in colour with an elongated neck, a trunk twenty feet or so long and a large tail. ‘It glided swiftly with a swan-like motion,’ she wrote. ‘We watched it for several minutes with two other passers-by and then it submerged like a submarine.’ According to reports in the local newspapers, Mrs Bird consulted ‘two independent palaeontologists’ who told her the monster was ‘probably’ descended from plesiosaurs, which most scientists believe became extinct at least seventy million years ago.

  Mrs Bird expressed irritation with suggestions that the monster may have been an optical illusion, or an invention. There have been other sightings of abnormal sea beasts in the area. A Mr Bosisto wrote to the Royal Cornwall Gazette in April 1876 to report the capture – no mere sighting this! – of a sea serpent by crab fishermen in Gerrans Bay. They had found it coiled around the buoys marking their pots, disabled it with a blow to the head from an oar, dragged it ashore and killed it – and then threw it back in the sea.

  A hundred years later a creature sounding very much like Mrs Bird’s monster made several reported appearances – one off Pendennis Point near Falmouth, one in the Helford River further south, two off Rosemullion Head and at least six others at various locations as far away as the Isles of Scilly. A Falmouth newspaper printed two photographs of the Morgawr (Cornish for sea monster) sent in by a ‘Mary F’ who said it was at least eighteen feet long, long-necked and small-headed, with lumps on its back. Subsequent inquiries into Mary and the provenance of her photographs proved inconclusive.

  That was all in the hot summers of 1975 and 1976. Since then, after Mrs Bird’s sighting, the one reported encounter with the beast was in 1999, when a holidaymaker took a somewhat indistinct image of something dark with what might be a head and neck sticking up while filming his wife swimming off Portscatho. As it happens I have a dear friend who was brought up in Portscatho, and whose parents still live there. Her dad has spent a great deal of time along this stretch of shore in his own and other people’s boats and knows the waters intimately. On my way through I dropped in for a cup of tea and raised the subject of the Portscatho sea monster. Had he ever seen it? No. What did he think it might have been? Reply unprintable. He is a man of strong views forcibly expressed.