From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.Bates, Katharine Lee
General
From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.
Bates, Katharine Lee
England -- Description and travel
The people at the inn exchanged glances when we announced our route
and although, setting out at five, we confidently ordered dinner at
seven, the landlady slipped a packet of sandwiches and two bottles of
ginger ale into the carriage. The coachman, thin and dark and vivid of
countenance, like all the rest of this new Cornish world about us,
kindly but firmly refused to include in the drive St. Keyne's Well,
the Cheesewring, a curious pile of granite blocks some thirty feet
high, whose topmost stone is so sensitive that it whirls about three
times whenever _it hears_ a cock crow, and The Hurlers, three
prehistoric stone circles reported by legend, in its later Puritan
garb, to be groups of young Cornishmen thus enchanted for indulging
on a Sunday in the traditional Cornish sport of "hurling." Dozmare
Pool was all that our determined Jehu would undertake, although he
graciously allowed us, in passing, a glimpse of St. Cleer's Well. This
is not as famous as the well of St. Neot the Pigmy, who endowed the
sacred waters with miraculous virtue by standing in them, day after
day, immersed to his neck, while he repeated the entire book of
Psalms, or of various others, but it is a spring of old renown,
covered over by a steep-pitched roof supported on time-worn pillars
and arches. The niches of this little open-air baptistry are now empty
and its pinnacles are broken, but beside it still stands an ancient
cross. The lofty-towered church of St. Cleer was close by, and we
entered to bow our heads for a moment under its vaulted and timbered
roof.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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