Bodmin stands almost in the middle of the Duchy with two long fingers, that of the inlet of Fowey on the south and that of the inlet of the River Camel on the north, pointing directly at it. It is a very quiet little town but has somehow managed to preserve its charm. The fine old parish church, almost worthy to take rank as a cathedral, is in the midst, easily to be seen. The church is the largest in Cornwall and parts of it date from 1125. It once had a very striking spire, destroyed by lightning in 1699. Bodmin means the Monks' Town, and even though it has the enormous barracks built in the usual style, just outside, it still keeps something of the monkish atmosphere. Bodmin scorns Truro's claims of long descent, turning to Athelstan as its founder. Athelstan, who founded here in 926 a Benedictine Priory of which some traces even now remain. The town is in a beautiful and well-wooded neighbourhood, and anyone taking the trouble to climb Beacon Hill just outside will be rewarded. It was at Bodmin in 1498 that Perkin Warbeck, who had disembarked near Land's End, gathered 3,000 men together and started his disastrous campaign by launching himself against Exeter. In Bodmin meet, or rather "meet with a gap between," the two rival railways--the Great Western and London and South Western; the latter station is a terminus, and the line running northward connects the town with Wadebridge and Padstow. The former comes from Bodmin Road where it joins the main line, and continues also to Wadebridge. [Illustration: THE BANKS OF THE FAL, FALMOUTH] Between Bodmin and Launceston stretches the wild tract of country known as Bodmin Moor. A more desolate region it would be hard to find or one more covered with relics of primitive man. Norden has said in writing of Cornwall, "The rockes are high, huge, ragged and craggy not only upon the sea-coaste ... but also the inland mountayns are so crowned with mightie rockes as he that passing through the country beholding some of the rockes afar off may suppose them to be greate cyties planted on the hills, wherin prima facie ther appeareth the resemblance of towres, howses, chimnies and such like." Though he flatters the Cornish highlands in calling them mountains, yet it is true enough that the tors out-cropping in this region do take on most curious shapes. The most remarkable of all is the unstable-looking Cheesewring, southwest of Launceston, and rather difficult of access. Here stones are piled one on the top of the other, each larger than the last, till the effect is that of a gigantic and misshapen mushroom. But it was not built deliberately, it just happened so. How--no one knows, but the suggestion is that the mass was once banked in by earth, which was washed away, leaving the bare pinnacle of stone. In the midst of the moor Brown Willy and Rough Tor rise with considerable picturesqueness, and their surfaces are strewn with the old beehive huts of a people whose history is lost.