A Guide to the Mount's Bay and the Land's End: Comprehending the topography, botany, agriculture, fisheries, antiquities, mining, mineralogy and geology of West CornwallParis, John Ayrton
History
A Guide to the Mount's Bay and the Land's End: Comprehending the topography, botany, agriculture, fisheries, antiquities, mining, mineralogy and geology of West Cornwall
Paris, John Ayrton
Cornwall (England : County) -- Guidebooks
The broken and refuse fish are sold at about 10d per bushel, for
manure, and are used throughout the county with excellent effects,
especially for raising all green crops; they are usually mixed with
sand, or soil, and sometimes with sea weed, to prevent them from
raising too luxuriant a crop, arising from a too rapid decomposition;
thus employed their effects are very permanent, and there is a popular
belief that a single pilchard will fertilize a foot square of land for
several years; and certain it is, that after the apparent exhaustion
of this manure, its powers may be again excited by ploughing in a
small proportion of _quick lime_, which will produce a still further
decomposition of the animal matter, and develope a fresh succession
of those elements which are essential to the growth of vegetable
substances.
The Herring fishery is also carried on to a great extent at Saint
Ives; this fish appears after the pilchard has quitted the shores,
and is much smaller than that which is caught on the northern coasts
of Britain; which corroborates the general opinion, that the farther
it migrates to the south, the more it decreases in size. It is also
worthy of remark that, notwithstanding the great abundance of this
fish in the Bristol Channel, it very seldom passes the Land's End, and
is consequently rarely caught in the Mount's Bay, or on the southern
shores of Cornwall.
But let us return from this digression, and proceed with our
excursion.--
Quitting Saint Ives by the eastern road, we are conducted along an
elevated cliff, which affords a complete command of every object in
the bay; in our route we pass _Tregenna Castle_, the seat of Samuel
Stephens, Esq. and on the summit of a lofty hill, about a mile from
this mansion, stands a pyramid, which immediately attracts the notice
of the traveller, as well on account of the singular wildness of its
situation, as the complete absence of every shrub, or rural ornament,
with which such objects are usually associated. It was erected by the
late eccentric John Knill, Esq., a bencher of Gray's Inn, and some
time collector of the Port of Saint Ives, it having been intended as
a Mausoleum for the reception of his remains, although he afterwards
revoked this intention, and ordered his body to be given to an
anatomist in London, for dissection. On one side of this pyramid is
inscribed, "_Johannes Knill_," on another, "_Resurgam_," and on a
third, "_I know that my Redeemer liveth_." He directed in his will,
that at the end of every five years, a Matron and ten girls, dressed in
white, should walk in procession, with music, from the market house at
Saint Ives, to this pyramid, around which they should dance, singing
the hundredth Psalm!
----"Pueri circum innuptæque puellæ
Sacra canunt."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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