The approach to Padstow I like most of all is the one I have made ever since I was a child. It is by ferry from the other side of the estuary. It was best in a bit of a sea with a stiff breeze against an incoming tide, puffs of white foam bursting up below the great head of distant Pentire and round the unapproachable cliffs of the rocky island of Newland which seems, from the ferry boat, to stand half-way between Pentire and Stepper Point at the mouth of the river. We would dip our hands in the water and pretend to feel seasick with each heave of the boat and then the town would spread out before us, its slate roofs climbing up the hillside from the wooden wharves of the harbour till they reached the old church tower and the semi-circle of wind-slashed elms which run as a dark belt right around the top of the town, as though to strap the town in more securely still against those south-west gales. Sometimes we would return on a fine, still evening, laden with the week’s shopping, and see that familiar view lessen away from the ferry boat while the Padstow Bells, always well rung, would pour their music across the water, reminding me of Parson Hawker’s lines—
Come to thy God in time!
Thus saith their pealing chime
Youth, Manhood, Old Age past!
Come to thy God at last!
Padstow is a fishing port and a shopping centre. There is an ice factory, an attractive Georgian Customs House, a hideous post office, an electric light company founded in 1911, and a gas works founded in 1868, this last, beside sad and peeling Public Rooms of yellow stucco dated 1840.
Vast numbers of service people pour in today from a desert that has been made in the neighbouring parishes of St. Eval and St. Merryn—a form of desert known as an aerodrome.
But the chief fact about modern Padstow to interest fact-maniacs, starts with a mermaid. She was combing her hair and singing in the estuary, when a Padstow youth went walking along the cliffs towards the open sea. He shot at her and in her rage she plunged down below the water and picked up a handful of sand which she threw towards Padstow, and that was the start of the Doom Bar. This bar is a bank of sand which for centuries has been slowly silting up the estuary.
In 1948 at a Town Council meeting a letter was read from a Yarmouth firm of ship owners: “We have always been in the habit of sending our boats to Padstow, as we did last year, and we intend to do so again in 1949 during February, March and April. Like everyone else, we are concerned about the silting up of the estuary, making it extremely difficult to manœuvre our ships in and out of port, and if action is not taken very soon we shall be unable to use the port at all, to our mutual detriment.” So there are hundreds of thousands of tons of agricultural silver sand, increasing and increasing. I can well remember how as a child I could see the hulks of ships which had been wrecked on the Doom Bar sticking up black out of the yellow sand. These are now all covered over. Who will take the sand away? And how will they do it. Miracles are always happening. In Padstow they are easier to believe in than in most places, because it is so ancient a town. So probably the port of Padstow will be saved, even if it is a Government Department that performs the miracle.
Slate-hung houses are built in a semi-circle round the harbour. Here and there the silver-blue tiled buildings are diversified by an old rose-coloured brick house and near me is a building called The Abbey House, with granite fifteenth-century quoins.A boy standing up in a dinghy propels her backwards across the calm, oily water by working an oar to and fro in the stern.I turn into the quiet square of the Ship Hotel and notice that Miss Tonkin’s boot shop is no longer there, though her house with its ferns in the window and lace curtains, its lush, enclosed front and back gardens, still stands.I see that a jeweller’s shop has been transformed into a souvenir haunt of tourists and new diamond-leaded panes look odd in the windows, and wooden beams, unknown in
