The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 3 (of 4)
History
The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 3 (of 4)
Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Geology -- England -- Cornwall (County)
Stow, who wrote his History of England about the year 1580, notices
the great tide of 1099, when he says, The sea brake in over the banks
of the Thames and other ryvers, drowning many towns, and much people,
with innumerable numbers of oxen and sheepe; at which time the lands
in Kent, that sometime belonged to Duke Godwyne, Earle of Kent, were
covered with sandes and drowned, which are to this day called Godwyne
Sandes. On the slender foundation of these alluvial catastrophies,
Florence of Worcester either invented, or with more than monkish
credulity, received the tale of a whole district being ingulphed; not
at some remote geological period, but in what may be considered as the
recent times of authentic history, after the existence of systematic
registers and records; a district, covered as he states, by a city,
and by a hundred and forty churches, with their accompanying villages,
farms, &c. an event that must have shaken the whole of Europe: and, to
increase the wonder, a gentleman accidentally on horseback, is carried
by this animal to the neighbouring shore of Whitsend Bay, or twenty
miles further off, to Perran, through a sea which had swallowed an
entire country, and from which the largest of modern vessels could not
by possibility have escaped. This idle tale, related by one writer
after another, has almost reached our own times. The editor remembers
a female relation of a former vicar of St. Erth, who, instructed by a
dream, prepared decoctions of various herbs, and repairing to the
Land’s End, poured them into the sea, with certain incantations,
expecting to see the Lionesse country rise immediately out of the
water, having all its inhabitants alive, notwithstanding their long
submersion. But
Perchance some form was unobserved,
Perchance in prayer or faith she swerved;
――no country appeared, and, although the love of marvellous events and
of tales exciting the passions, seems not to have diminished in recent
times, yet the editor is unaware of any subsequent attempt having been
made to rescue those unfortunate people from their protracted state of
suspended animation.
Perran Uthnow has to boast of but one modern addition to its
residences. About the year 1775, the late Mr. John Shakspeare of
Pendarves, built a house similar to the one previously erected by Mr.
Stephens at Tregorne, and gave it the name of the family with which he
was connected by his marriage.
About half a mile beyond this house, called Acton Castle, Cudden Point
projects into the sea, entirely covered with rock, and affording, in
many respects, the most pleasing view of any spot in the whole Bay.
From St. Michael’s Mount itself, the feature transcendent above all
others is lost; but from Cudden all the western objects are seen,
without including the long flat land of the Lizard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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