Even if you are no sailor, the smell of fish tells you the chief business of the port. And your eyes will tell you too. For the little houses (the oldest are sixteenth century), though so huddled together and so steeply hung on to cliffs, are like all fishermen’s houses, wonderfully clean and polished. Sparkling quartz, known as Cornish Diamond, is cemented into garden walls, figs and fuchsia bushes grow in tiny gardens, big shells from the Orient rest on window sills, brass and paint of front doors shine, carpentry is excellent, and all windows that can look out to sea, so that even as they die the old fishermen of Port Isaac may watch the tides. I expect the old people will all soon be moved to some very ugly council houses being built on the windy hilltop in those hideous grey cement things called “Cornish blocks.”
Across stupendous cliffs, as full of flowers as a rock garden, is another little fishing port—Port Quin, an empty Port Isaac, mournful and still. For here the old cottages are nearly all ruins; the harbour is deserted, the gardens, once so trim, are grown over with elder and ash saplings, honeysuckle and fennel. The salting sheds are in ruins too. The story is that the whole fishing fleet of the village went down in a gale, and thirty-two women were left widows.
And beyond Port Quin what caves, what rocks, what shuddering heights of striped slate, what hidden beaches and barnacled boulders, what pools where seals bask, there are between here and Pentire Point. All picturesque and grand, as blazing with colour as are the strange rock pools themselves on a summer day. The colours are brighter than the tropics. The veined rock, in which the warm salt water lies, is purple with white lines and then green, then purple again. Warm forests of red seaweed grow there, and green seaweed which looks like elm trees. If there is sand on the bottom of the pool, and the red weed waving, you may see a huge prawn gliding and shooting backwards, and the sudden dash of a small fish, too quick for the eye to see more than the sudden cloud of sand it raises. Or the rock pool may be one with shells and shingle at the bottom and perhaps those rose-tinted cowries, the pearls of this coast, and a huge starfish, magnified by the water in all its pink and grey and purple colouring. Never was such colour, never is the wonder of God’s creation more brought home to me than when I see the strange, merciless bright-coloured world of these Cornish rock pools. But in a storm or in a mist how infinitely horrible and mysterious this coast can be, as the rollers smash and suck, the blowholes thunder, and caves syphon out fountains of sea water a hundred feet and more into the air.
’Tis harsh to hear from ledge or peak
The cruel cormorants’ tuneless shriek
Fierce songs they chant, in pool or cave
Dark wanderers of the Western wave.
So wrote Hawker the parson poet of Morwenstowe, not many miles higher up the coast. He knew that the sea is an army fighting the land, as do the men of Port Isaac. But I like to stand in summer by the bit of wall in Fore Street, and lean over to look down at the harbour and inland at the little town below me. It is evening, harvest festival time.The small Victorian church has been hung with lobster pots and dressed with crabs and seaweed—a harvest festival of the sea. Church is over, but Chapel is still on. As I stand on this view-point above the town, the sea gulls are crying and wheeling, the flowery cliffs take the evening sun, the silvery slates of the old town turn pale gold. Above the lap of the harbour water, the wail of gulls and thunder of the sea beyond the headlands, comes the final hymn from the Methodist Chapel across the green and gently rolling harbour flood. Padstow
Some think of the farthest away places as Spitzbergen or Honolulu. But give me Padstow, though I can reach it any day from Waterloo without crossing the sea. For Padstow is in Cornwall and Cornwall is another country. And Padstow is farther away in spirit even than Land’s End. It is less touristy than other fishing towns like Polperro and St. Ives: less dramatic than Boscastle or Tintagel: only just not a village, for it has more than two thousand inhabitants. It is an ancient unobvious place, hidden away from the south-west gales below a hill on the sandy estuary of the River Camel. It does not look at the open sea but across the tidal water to the sand-dunes of rock and the famous St. Enodoc Golf Course. There is no beach, only an oily harbour and remarkably large prawns may be netted where the town drains pour into the Camel.
Green Southern Railway engines came right into the brown and cream Great Western district of Cornwall, to reach Padstow. Launceston, Egloskerry, Otterham, Tresmeer, Camelford—and so on, down that windy single line. I know the stations by heart, the slate and granite-built waiting rooms, the oil
