Produced by Chris Curnow, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) TREVETHLAN: A Cornish Story. BY WILLIAM DAVY WATSON, ESQ. BARRISTER-AT-LAW. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 1848. London: Printed by STEWART and MURRAY, Old Bailey. TREVETHLAN. CHAPTER I. _Menenius._ What work's, my countrymen, in hand? Where go you with bats and clubs? The matter? Speak, I pray you. _Citizen._ Our business is not unknown to the senate; they have had inkling, this fortnight, what we intend to do, which now we'll show 'em in deeds. They say poor suitors have strong breath: they shall know we have strong arms too. Shakspeare. Among the most striking features of the scenery of West Cornwall, are the fantastic piles of bare granite which rise occasionally from the summit of an upland, and to a distant spectator present the exact semblance of a castle, with towers, turrets, and outworks. So a stranger, standing on Cape Cornwall and looking towards the Land's End, might imagine he there beheld the fortress whose sanguinary sieges obtained for that promontory its ancient name of the Headland of Blood. Or again, reclining on the moorland, near the cromlech of Morvah, while the sun was sinking behind Carnyorth, he might fancy that at the red-edged battlements on the ridge, the original inhabitants of the country made their last stand against the invaders from the German Ocean. Approach soon destroys the illusion. And it is superfluous to observe that the warriors of those times had no notion of the structures which these caprices of nature mimic--the castles of our Plantagenets and Tudors. Their real fortresses still exist to afford employment to the antiquary, and inspiration to the poet; and to one of them we now invite the reader to accompany us. Castle Dinas occupies the crest of the highest ground between the picturesque village of Gulvall and the pilchard-perfumed town of St. Ives, and commands an uninterrupted view both of Mount's Bay and of the Irish Sea. Two concentric ramparts of unhewn stones, flung together more rudely than a Parisian barricade, exhibiting the science of fortification in its very infancy, inclose a circular area of considerable extent. From it the ground slopes, not very rapidly, on all sides; and as there are no screens, an occupant of the camp can see an approaching friend or enemy some time before he arrives. Within the inner circle some prosaic favourer of picnics has erected a square _folly_, with a turret at each angle, not harmonizing very well with local associations, but convenient in case of a shower of rain.