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
As we neared Penberth Cove, the Atlantic opened out to view, its
sparkling turquoise relieved by one white sail. It was in Penberth Cove
that there once lived a bedridden old woman, a good old soul, about
whose one-roomed cottage the Small People, to divert her, used to sport
all day, catching her mice and riding them in and out of holes in the
thatch, dancing the dust off the rafters and giving trapeze and
tight-rope performances on the cobwebs. The valley runs green to the
sea and we left the carriage for a walk across the fields, a walk
diversified by stiles of all known species, to Treryn Castle. This
monstrous fastness of heaped rock and jagged crag was built by a giant
who was such a clever necromancer that all he had to do was to sit in
the Giant's Easy-chair, to whose discomfort we can testify, and will
the castle to rise out of the sea. For latter-day necromancy, our guide
pointed out Porthcurnow Beach, where, he said, six submarine cables
land. He was a native of the coast, a fisherman, and gave us eyes to
see the gulls rejoicing over their feast of pilchards, and ears to hear
the whistle of a young otter. The Lion of Treryn is the Logan Rock, but
we first encountered, in our scramble over the crags, Lady Logan, a
stumpy personage whose hood and skirt, though recognisable, are of the
Stone Age fashion. This granite beauty is so sensitive in her feelings
that she trembles at a touch. As we climbed higher among the rocks, in
the exhilarating air, we won views ever more wonderful of rolling green
billows shattered into clouds of spray upon the shore. The Logan
itself is an enormous rocking-stone,--a boulder weighing some seventy
tons delicately balanced on cubical masses of rock. It does not, like
the rocking-stone in Burma on which a little pagoda has been built,
oscillate in the wind, but swings at a sturdy push. It was formerly
more easily swayed than now, for a mischievous young Goldsmith, nephew
of the poet who was himself so prankishly inclined, undertook in 1824,
when commanding a revenue cutter off this coast, to dispel the popular
notion that no human force could dislodge Logan Rock. On the eighth of
April, though the first would have been more appropriate, he landed
with a crew of eight men, meaning to tip the stone over into the sea.
But he only succeeded in moving it some four feet to the left and, even
so, found his escapade an expensive one, for it cost ten thousand
dollars to replace the ponderous mass--as the anger of the people
compelled the Admiralty to order him to do--on its original pivot. With
all his efforts, he could not hit the perfect poise, and whereas Logan
Rock once had the power of healing sick children who were rocked upon
it, that spell no longer works. It was not the right hour for us to
ascertain whether touching the stone thrice three times would still
make a woman a witch. This test should be undertaken at midnight, when
a battalion of sympathetic hags, mounted on stems of ragwort, would be
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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