Chapter 64

So there we stood on a pitch-dark night, leaning over a gate in an unknown country, and on a by-road, listening to the rush of the water beyond, wishing that some one might come that way to direct us; but it was hopeless. When we struck a match and lit a piece of paper, we discovered that there was no road beyond the gate, the lane having made an abrupt turning towards the left upon reaching it. We walked along carefully, striking a match occasionally, and at length came to a finger-post, green with age; we could not, however, distinguish the lettering on the arms at the top, so I knew that my turn had now come, as when there was any climbing to be done during our journey, I had to do it. I "swarmed up" the post to the arms at the top, while my brother lighted a piece of newspaper below; but it was of no use, as the names were partly obscured. Still I could see that Liskeard was not one of them, so I dropped down again, nearly knocking my brother over, as the ground was not level at the foot of the post and the light had gone out. We had to stop a minute or two, for the glare of the light from the burning paper had made the darkness more impenetrable than before; but the narrowness of the road was an advantage to us, as we knew we could not get far astray. Coming to a good hard road, we arrived at a bridge where there were a few houses, and soon we were walking quickly again on the right way to Liskeard; but how we blessed that countryman who with the best of intentions had directed us the nearer way! In a few miles we saw a light ahead, and found it came from a small inn by the roadside where one road crossed another, and here we called to inquire our way, and were informed we had arrived at St. Eve, which we thought must be the name of some doubtful Cornish saint; but that impression was removed when we found it was the local pronunciation for St. Ive. We could just discern the outline of a small church to the right of our road, and as there were so few houses we did not confound it with the much larger place in Cornwall, St. Ives, nor, needless to say, with another place named St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, which we passed through on our walk from London the previous year.

It was getting unpleasantly near "closing time" when we reached Liskeard, but we were just in time to be well entertained and housed for the night.

(_Distance walked thirty-six miles_.)

_Thursday, November 16th._

Liskeard was visited in 1757 by John Wesley, who described it as "one of the largest and pleasantest towns in Cornwall," a description with which we agreed, but we were inclined to add the words, "and of no occupation," for there was no outward or visible sign of any staple industry. As in other similar places we had visited, the first question that suggested itself to us was, "How do the people live?" Their appearance, however, caused us no anxiety, as every one we saw looked both well and happy. They had made a clean sweep of their old castle, which was said to have been built in the thirteenth century by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and King of the Romans, the brother of Henry III; the site they had formed into a public park, in which stood the old grammar school where Dr. Wolcot was educated, who wrote a number of satirical odes, letters, and ballads, under the name of "Peter Pindar," in the time of George III, many of his satires being levelled at the king himself. Eventually he sold his works for an annuity of £250.

Liskeard was remarkable for the spring of water round which the town had been built, and which was described by Leland in his _Itinerary_ as "a good conduit in the middle of the Town very plentiful of water to serve the Town." Four pipes originally conveyed the water to different points, and the street where the well existed was known as Pipewell Street.

The wells of Cornwall were famous, being named after the different saints who had settled beside them in ancient times, appreciating the value of the pure water they contained. We had often tested the water of the wells and springs we had come to in the course of our long walk, and the conviction had grown upon us that we owed much of our continued good health to drinking water. We naturally perspired a good deal, especially when we walked quickly, which of course created thirst; and the different strata of the various rock-formations we had crossed must have influenced the water and ourselves to some extent. We had come to the conclusion that people who went on holidays and attributed the benefit derived solely to "the change of air" might have equally benefited by the change of water!

In one part of Cheshire, formerly in possession of the Romans, there was a rather remarkable spring of water known as the "Roman Well," over which appeared the following Latin inscription, difficult to translate, but which had been interpreted thus:

_Sanitate Sacrum_: Sacred to Health! _Obstructum reserat_, It removes obstruction. _Durum terit_, It crushes the hard, _Humida siecat_, It dries the moist, _Debile fortificat_, It strengthens the weak, _Si tamen arte bibis_. Provided thou drinkest with knowledge.

The water rises from some subterranean source in the sandstone rock and enters with considerable force into the receptacle prepared for it, which is about five feet deep. The water was always beautifully clear and cool, and visitors often amused themselves by throwing halfpennies into the bath and watching them apparently being transformed into shillings as they reached the bottom--a fact attributed to the presence of lime in the water.

In striking contrast to this was the water afterwards brought through the district from a watershed on the distant Welsh hills, which depended for its supply almost entirely on the downfall from the clouds. The difference between that and the water from the Roman well was very marked, for while the rainwater was very soft, the other that contained the lime was very hard, and therefore considered more conducive to the growth of the bones in children. Our personal experiences also with the water at Inverness, and in the neighbourhood of Buxton in the previous year, which affected us in a similar way, convinced us that water affected human beings very markedly; and then we had passed by Harrogate and Leamington, where people were supposed to go purposely to drink the waters. Even the water of the tin-mining district through which we were now passing might contain properties that were absent elsewhere, and the special virtues attributed to some of the Saints' Wells in Cornwall in olden times might not have been altogether mythical.

Besides the four Stannary towns in Devon there were originally four in Cornwall, including Liskeard, where all tin mined in their respective districts had to be weighed and stamped. Probably on that account Liskeard returned two members to Parliament, the first members being returned in 1294; amongst the M.P.'s who had represented the town were two famous men--Sir Edward Coke, elected in 1620, and Edward Gibbon, in 1774.

Sir Edward Coke was a great lawyer and author of the legal classic _Coke upon Littleton_. He became Speaker of the House of Commons, Attorney-General, and afterwards Chief Justice, and was the merciless prosecutor of Sir Walter Raleigh, and also of the persons concerned in the Gunpowder Plot; while his great speech against Buckingham towards the close of the career of that ill-fated royal favourite is famous.

Edward Gibbon was the celebrated historian and author of that great work _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. The history of his Parliamentary connection with Liskeard was rather curious. One morning in 1774, when in London, he was asked if he would like to enter the House of Commons, and when he consented, the "free and independent electors" of Liskeard were duly "instructed" to return him. But it was very doubtful whether he ever saw any of the electors, or had any dealings with the Constituency whatever, although he acted as one of their members for about eight years. Possibly, as there were two members, the other M.P. might have been the "acting partner."

Liskeard church was the second largest in Cornwall, and in it we saw a "Lepers' squint" and also a turret at the corner of the aisle from which the priest could preach to the lepers without coming in contact with them, for the disease was very infectious--so much so that the hospital built for them was a mile or two from the town. "Lepers' squints" had been common in some parts of England, and as the disease is often mentioned in the Bible, we considered it must have been imported from the East, perhaps from Palestine by the Crusaders. We had not seen or heard of any cases of leprosy on our journey, and we concluded that the disease could not have been natural to our colder climate, and had therefore died out as a result of more cleanly habits. The pulpit was dated 1632, the carving on it being the work of a local sculptor, whose remuneration, we were told, was at the rate of one penny per hour, which appeared to us to be a very small amount for that description of work. Possibly he considered he was working for the cause of religion, and hoped for his further reward in a future life; or was it a silver penny?

The houses in Liskeard were built of stone, and the finest perhaps was that known as Stuart House, so named because King Charles I stayed there for about a week in 1644. This was of course in the time of the Civil War, when Cornwall, as it practically belonged to the King or his son, did not consider itself as an ordinary county, but as a duchy, and was consequently always loyal to the reigning sovereign. It was also a difficult county for an invading army to approach, and the army of the Parliament under the Earl of Essex met with a disastrous defeat there.

But we must not forget the Holy Wells, as the villages and towns took their names from the saints who presided at the wells. That of St. Keyne, quite near Liskeard, is described by Southey:

A Well there is in the West Country, And a clearer one never was seen; There is not a wife in the West Country But has heard of the Well of St. Keyne.

An oak and an elm-tree stand beside, And behind doth an ash-tree grow, And a willow from the bank above Droops to the water below.

St. Keyne introduced the rather remarkable belief that the first of a newly married couple to drink of the water of her well, whether husband or wife, should in future rule the home. We supposed that the happy pair would have a race to the well, and the one who arrived there first would ever afterwards play the first fiddle, if that instrument was in use in the time of St. Keyne. But a story was related of how on one occasion the better-half triumphed. No sooner had the knot been tied than the husband ran off as fast as he could to drink of the water at St. Keyne's Well, leaving his wife in the church. When he got back he found the lady had been before him, for she had brought a bottle of the water from the well with her to church, and while the man was running to the well she had been quietly seated drinking the water in the church porch!

The story was told by the victim to a stranger, and the incident was recorded by Southey in his poem "The Well of St. Keyne":

"You drank of the Well, I warrant, betimes?" He to the countryman said: But the countryman smiled as the stranger spake, And sheepishly shook his head:

"I hastened as soon as the wedding was done, And left my wife in the porch; But i' faith! she had been wiser than me, For she took a bottle to church."

It was at Liskeard that we first heard of George Borrow, a tramp like ourselves. Although we should have been pleased to have had a talk with him, we should scarcely have been able to accompany him on one of his journeys, for he was 6 feet 3 inches in height against our 5 feet 8 inches, and he would have been able to walk quicker than ourselves. He was born in 1803 and died in 1881, so that he was still alive when we were walking through Cornwall, and was for many years a travelling agent for the British and Foreign Bible Society. In the course of his wanderings, generally on foot, he made a study of gipsy life, and wrote some charming books about the Romany tribes, his _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_ being still widely read. He was a native of Norfolk, but his father was born near Liskeard, to which place he paid a special visit at the end of 1853. On Christmas Day in that year, which was also a Sunday, he walked to St. Cleer and attended service in the church, Mr. Berkeley being the preacher, and although there was no organ, he saw a fiddle in the gallery, so fiddles must have then been in use in Cornwall. He would also see the Well of St. Cleer, which was quite near the church, and must in the time of the Saxons have been covered over with stone, as the old arches and columns were Saxon work. Borrow's father was born at Trethinnick Farm, near St. Cleer, which he also went to see. He left Liskeard in January 1854 on a tramp through Truro and Penzance to Land's End by almost the same route as that we were about to follow ourselves. As he made many notes during his wanderings in Cornwall, his friends naturally expected him to publish an account of his travels there, after the manner of a book he had published in 1862 entitled _Wild Wales_, but they were disappointed, for none appeared.

It was said that Cornwall did not grow wood enough to make a coffin, and the absence of trees enabled us to see a number of huge, mysterious-looking stones: some upright and standing alone, others in circles, or in groups named cists composed of upright stones, forming a cavity between them in the shape of a chest covered at the top, and not intended to be opened again, for they had been used as tombs. Occasionally the stones stood quite near our road, some in the shape of crosses, while we could see others in fields and on the top of small hills.

There were some remarkable stones near St. Cleer, including the famous "Cheesewring," formed of eight circular stones each resembling a cheese, placed one on top of another and rising to a height of about eight yards; but the strange part about this curious erection was that the four larger and heavier stones were at the top and the four smaller ones at the bottom. It was a mystery how in such remote times the builders could have got those immense stones to the top of the others and there balanced them so exactly as to withstand the storms of so many years.

Near this supposed Druidical erection was a rough cave known as "Daniel Gumb's House," formerly inhabited by a man of that name who came there to study astrology and astronomy, and who was said to have had his family with him. He left his record by cutting his name at the entrance to the cave, "D. Gumb 1735," and by inscribing a figure on the roof representing the famous 47th proposition in the First Book of Euclid.

The Trethevy Menhir, a cromlech or "House of the Dead," which George Borrow went to see, consisted of seven great hewn slabs which formed a chamber inside about the height of a man; over the top was an enormous flat stone of such great weight as to make one wonder how it could have been placed there so many centuries ago. At one corner of the great stone, which was in a slanting position, there was a hole the use of which puzzled antiquarians; but George Borrow was said to have contrived to get on the top of it and, putting his hand through the hole, shouted, "Success to old Cornwall," a sentiment which we were fully prepared to endorse, for we thought the people we saw at the two extremes of our journey--say in Shetland, Orkney, and the extreme north of Scotland, and those in Devon and Cornwall in the South of England--were the most homely and sociable people with whom we came in contact.

Some of the legends attached to the stones in Cornwall were of a religious character, one example being the three stone circles named the "Hurlers"; eleven in one circle, fourteen in another, and twelve in a third--thirty-seven in all; but only about one-half of them remained standing. Here indeed might be read a "sermon in stone," and one of them might have been preached from these circles, as the stones were said to represent men who were hurling a ball one Sunday instead of attending church, when they and the two pipers who were playing for them were all turned into stone for thus desecrating the Sabbath Day.

We crossed the country to visit St. Neot, and as the village was away from the main roads and situated on the fringe of Bodmin Moor, we were surprised to find such a fine church there. We were informed that St. Neot was the second largest parish in Cornwall, and that the moor beyond had been much more thickly populated in former times. We had passed through a place of the same name in Huntingdonshire in the previous year, when walking home from London, and had been puzzled as to how to pronounce the name; when we appealed to a gentleman we met on the road outside the town, he told us that the gentry called it St. Netts and the common people St. Noots, but here it was pronounced as spelt, with just a slight stress on the first syllable--St. Ne-ot, the letter "s" not being sounded officially.

St. Neot, supposed to have been related to King Alfred, being either a brother or an uncle, came here from Glastonbury and built a hermitage near his well, in which he would stand for hours immersed up to his neck in the water in order "to mortify his flesh and cultivate his memory," while he recited portions of the Psalter, the whole of which he could repeat from memory. Though a dwarf, he was said to be able to rescue beasts from the hunters and oxen from the thieves, and to live on two miraculous fishes, which, though he ate them continually, were always to be seen sporting in the water of his well!

St. Neot was the original burial-place of the saint, and in the church there was a curious stone casket or reliquary which formerly contained his remains; but when they were carried off to enrich Eynesbury Abbey at the Huntingdon St. Neots, all that was left here was a bone from one of his arms. This incident established the connection between the two places so far apart.

The church had a beautiful Decorated tower and a finely carved sixteenth-century roof, but its great glory consisted in its famous stained-glass windows, which were fifteen in number, and to each of which had been given a special name, such as the Young Women's Window, the Wives' Window, and so on, while St. Neot's window in its twelve panels represented incidents in the life of that saint. It was supposed that these fine windows were second to none in all England, except those at Fairford church in Gloucestershire, which we had already seen, and which were undoubtedly the finest range of mediæval windows in the country. They were more in number, and had the great advantage of being perfect, for in the time of the Civil War they had been taken away and hidden in a place of safety, and not replaced in the church until the country had resumed its normal condition.

The glass in the lower panels of the windows in the Church of St. Neot's, Cornwall, had at that time been broken, but had been restored, the subjects represented being the same as before. Those windows named after the young women and the wives had been presented to the church in the sixteenth century by the maids and mothers of the parish.

On our way from here to Lostwithiel, which my brother thought might have been a suitable name for the place where we went astray last night, we passed along Braddock or Broad-oak Moor, where in 1643, during the Civil War, a battle was fought, in which Sir Ralph Hopton defeated the Parliamentary Army and captured more than a thousand prisoners. Poetry seemed to be rather at a discount in Cornwall, but we copied the following lines relating to this preliminary battle:

When gallant Grenville stoutly stood And stopped the gap up with his blood, When Hopton led his Cornish band Where the sly conqueror durst not stand. We knew the Queen was nigh at hand.

We must confess we did not understand this; it could not have been Spenser's "Faerie Queene," so we walked on to the Fairy Cross without seeing either the Queen or the Fairy, although we were fortunate to find what might be described as a Fairy Glen and to reach the old Castle of Restormel, which had thus been heralded:

To the Loiterer, the Tourist, or the Antiquary: the ivy-covered ruins of Restormel Castle will amply repay a visit, inasmuch as the remains of its former grandeur must, by the very nature of things, induce feelings of the highest and most dignified kind; they must force contemplative thought, and compel respect for the works of our forefathers and reverence for the work of the Creator's hand through centuries of time.

It was therefore with some such thoughts as these that we walked along the lonely road leading up to the old castle, and rambled amongst the venerable ruins. The last of the summer visitors had long since departed, and the only sound we could hear was that made by the wind, as it whistled and moaned among the ivy-covered ruins, and in the trees which partly surrounded them, reminding us that the harvest was past and the summer was ended, while indications of approaching winter were not wanting.

The castle was circular in form, and we walked round the outside of it on the border of the moat which had formerly been filled with water, but now was quite dry and covered with luxuriant grass. It was 60 feet wide and 30 feet deep, being formerly crossed by a drawbridge, not now required. The ruins have thus been described by a modern poet:

And now I reach the moat's broad marge, And at each pace more fair and large The antique pile grows on my sight, Though sullen Time's resistless might, Stronger than storms or bolts of heaven, Through wall and buttress rents have riven; And wider gaps had there been seen But for the ivy's buckler green, With stems like stalwart arms sustained; Here else had little now remained But heaps of stones, or mounds o'ergrown With nettles, or with hemlock sown. Under the mouldering gate I pass, And, as upon the thick rank grass With muffled sound my footsteps falls, Waking no echo from the walls, I feel as one who chanced to tread The solemn precincts of the dead.

The mound on which the castle stood was originally of Celtic construction, but was afterwards converted into one of the fortresses which the Normans built in the eastern part of Cornwall as rallying-points in case of any sudden insurrection among the "West Welshmen." The occupation of the fortress by the Normans was the immediate cause of the foundation of the town of Lostwithiel, to which a charter was granted in 1196 by Robert de Cardinan, the then owner of the castle and the surrounding country.

An exchequer deed showed how the castle and town of Lostwithiel came into the possession of the Dukes of Cornwall: