When I first came into Looe by road I was disappointed.I could hardly see the two old towns, and the long Victorian stone bridge which joins them—I could hardly see the houses for motor cars. Motor coaches from Manchester, new private cars like sleek sausages (priority for Government officials), battered pre-war motors belonging to failed literary gents like me, there they stretched along the quays in thousands. Wherever there was a space in either Looe for a car park there was a car park. And it was full. You could hardly hear the wail of seagulls above the dance music relayed from wireless sets in the new motor cars. Wasps gnawed at synthetic cakes in cafés. The fizzy lemonade that we drank with our fish and chips was warm. We could hardly move in the quaint old main streets of East Looe, for the thousands gazing into windows of Ye Olde Gifte Shoppes; chain stores jammed their flashy fronts into old houses. No guide books to Looe were available in any of the shops. And where, oh where was the sea?But the way to see the towns is by water.
As I put out the noise fell away. There were just the chug-chug of an outboard engine, the wail of gulls, the old and silvery wharves of Looe slipping past us as we headed up-stream for Trenant woods and those great lakes of dark green water I had seen as we entered the town. It is easy to see how the towns grew. First the ancient fishing ports either side of the water. They had their Mayors and Corporations, and sent Members to Parliament—the old rotten borough of pre-progressive days; birth-places of famous sailors, brave Elizabethans. Then a few Georgian houses were built inland, among these great enfolding woods where the two rivers divide and wind to nothingness deep in inland Cornwall. Then came the railway down the valley from Liskeard, in the wake of the new town hall and the ugly Victorian church of East Looe—the old parish church of St. Martin’s, a splendid building, is more than a mile away up among the hills—and the town had started to change from fishing port to watering place. We turned the boat round and slid fast with the tide back along the quays. All up the cliffs above the town were perched the boarding houses, Plymouth-style in grey cement or cream, drain pipes and bay window frames painted green, the name of the boarding house writ large on a board above the second floor windows. Most houses have a view above the old towns and out to cliffs and open sea. And here we were sliding past the Banjo pier and the tiny sand beach behind it, and out to open sea ourselves. We went round Looe island with its three houses and woodland belt of elder bushes. We saw the sloping cliffs by Talland church. We saw the cliffs stretch east to Downderry and Rame. They are not the great rocky heights of the north coast. They are greener, earthier, more sloping cliffs—but equally impressive. Looe was out of sight behind its headlands. Only modern bungalows beyond West Looe—with those detestable red roofs which look so ugly in the slate and granite of old Cornwall—only the bungalows remind us that we are not back in the ancient marine kingdom of Cornwall. St. Endellion
Saint Endellion! Saint Endellion! The name is like a ring of bells. I travelled late one summer evening to Cornwall in a motor car. The road was growing familiar, Delabole with its slate quarry passed, then Pendogget. Gateways in the high fern-stuffed hedges showed sudden glimpses of the sea. Port Isaac Bay with its sweep of shadowy cliffs stretched all along to Tintagel. The wrinkled Atlantic Ocean had the evening light upon it. The stone and granite manor house of Tresungers with its tower and battlements was tucked away out of the wind on the slope of a valley and there on the top of the hill was the old church of St. Endellion. It looked, and still looks, just like a hare. The ears are the pinnacles of the tower and the rest of the hare, the church, crouches among wind-slashed firs.
On that evening the light bells with their sweet tone were being rung for practice.There’s a Ringer’s rhyme in the tower, painted on a board.It shows Georgian ringers in knee breeches and underneath is written a rhyme which ends with these fine four lines:
Let’s all in love and Friendship hither come
Whilst the shrill treble calls to thundering Tom
And since bells are for modest recreation
Let’s rise and ring and fall to admiration.
They were ringing rounds on all six bells. But as we drew near the tower—a grand, granite, fifteenth-century tower looking across half Cornwall—as we climed the hill the bells sounded louder even than the car. “St. Endellion! St. Endellion!” they seemed to say. “St. Endellion” their music was scattered from the rough lichened openings over foxgloves, over grey slate roofs, lonely farms and feathery tamarisks, down to that cluster of whitewashed houses known as Trelights, the only village in the parish, and to Roscarrock and Trehaverock and Trefreock, heard perhaps, if the wind was right, where lanes run steep and narrow to that ruined, forgotten fishing place of Port Quin, “St. Endellion!’. It was a welcome to Cornwall and in front of us the sun was setting over Gulland and making the Atlantic at Polzeath and Pentire glow like a copper shield.
Ora pro nobis Sancta Endelienta! The words are carved in strangely effective lettering on two of the new oak benches in the church. Incidentally, those carved benches,
