A book of the west. Volume 2, Cornwall : $b being an introduction to Devon and CornwallBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A book of the west. Volume 2, Cornwall : $b being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Cornwall (England : County)
“As I went down by Hilary’s steeple
I met three people.
They were not men, nor women, nor children.
Who were they then?”
The answer, of course, is one man, one woman, and a single child.
S. Michael’s Mount is a grand upshoot of granite from the sea. As a
rock it is far finer than its corelative in Brittany, but the buildings
crowning the Cornish mount are vastly inferior to the magnificent pile
on Mont Saint Michel. Nevertheless, those that now form the residence
of Lord S. Levan are by no means insignificant or unworthy of their
position. The masses of granite crag, especially to the west, are
singularly bold, and if some of the modern work be poor in design, it
might have been much worse.
Within there is not much to be seen--a chapel of no great interest,
and a dining-hall with good plaster-work representation of a hare hunt
running round it. The drawing-room is new and spacious, and contains
some really noble portraits.
At the foot of the rock is a draw-well, and a little way up is a tank
called the Giant’s Well. S. Michael’s Mount was the habitation of the
famous giant with whom Tom Thumb tried conclusions.
In or about 710, according to William of Worcester, an apparition of S.
Michael the archangel was seen on the _Tumba_ in Cornwall. This Tumba
was also called Hore-rock in the Wood, “and there was formerly grove
and field and tilled land between the Mount and the Scilly Isles, and
there were a hundred and forty churches of parishes between the said
Mount and Scilly that were submerged.... The district was enclosed by a
most vast forest stretching for six miles in from the sea, affording a
most suitable refuge for wild beasts, and in this were formerly found
monks serving the Lord.”
It is quite true that there is a submerged forest in Mount’s Bay, and
that the marshy snipe-ground near Marazion Road Station covers large
timber, a portion of this great forest, but the submergence cannot have
taken place in historic times. That there was, however, an encroachment
of the sea in the middle of the sixth century, we learn from the _Life
of S. Paul_, Bishop of Leon. He came to the bay to visit his sister,
Wulvella, of Gulval, when she complained to him that she was losing
much of her best land by the advance of the sea; and he, who had been
brought up in the Wentloog levels, and taught by his master, S. Iltyd,
how to keep up the dykes against the tides in the Severn, banked out
the sea for her.
This was precisely the time when the district of Gwaelod was
submerged in the Bay of Cardigan. The king of the district was
Gwyddno Longshanks. It was the duty of the warden of the dykes to
ride along the embankments, that had probably been thrown up by the
Roman legionaries, and see that they were in order. Seithenyn was the
Dyke-grave at the time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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