In the Land's End district is the little church-town of Zennor. There is
no village to speak of--a few scattered farms, and here and there a
cluster of cottages. The district is bleak, the soil does not lie deep
over granite that peers through the surface on exposed spots, where the
furious gales from the ocean sweep the land. If trees ever existed
there, they have been swept away by the blast, but the golden furze or
gorse defies all winds, and clothes the moorland with a robe of
splendour, and the heather flushes the slopes with crimson towards the
decline of summer, and mantles them in soft, warm brown in winter, like
the fur of an animal.
In Zennor is a little church, built of granite, rude and simple of
construction, crouching low, to avoid the gales, but with a tower that
has defied the winds and the lashing rains, because wholly devoid of
sculptured detail, which would have afforded the blasts something to lay
hold of and eat away. In Zennor parish is one of the finest cromlechs in
Cornwall, a huge slab of unwrought stone like a table, poised on the
points of standing upright blocks as rude as the mass they sustain.
Near this monument of a hoar and indeed unknown antiquity lived an old
woman by herself, in a small cottage of one story in height, built of
moor stones set in earth, and pointed only with lime. It was thatched
with heather, and possessed but a single chimney that rose but little
above the apex of the roof, and had two slates set on the top to protect
the rising smoke from being blown down the chimney into the cottage
when the wind was from the west or from the east. When, however, it
drove from north or south, then the smoke must take care of itself. On
such occasions it was wont to find its way out of the door, and little
or none went up the chimney.
The only fuel burnt in this cottage was peat--not the solid black peat
from deep bogs, but turf of only a spade graft, taken from the surface,
and composed of undissolved roots. Such fuel gives flame, which the
other does not; but, on the other hand, it does not throw out the same
amount of heat, nor does it last one half the time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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