First and Last Loves

Cornwall, are fixed on to the outside walls.The main streets are, thank goodness, little altered.There’s not much grand architecture in Padstow.It is all humble unobtrusive houses, three storeys high.Yet as soon as one of them is taken down, the look of the town suffers.I take one of the many narrow roads that lead up the hill.And as I reach the upper air near the church, I realise what a lot of gardens and houses there are in Padstow, though the place looks all slate from the waterside.For here one can look down at the roofs of the houses, on palms and ilex trees and bushes of hydrangeas peeping above slate walls.Narrow public passages pass right through houses under stone arches and lead past high garden walls, down steps under another house to a further street.And I begin to notice that this slate is not grey, as we are inclined to think is all Cornish slate, but a beautiful pale green, streaked here and there with reddish-brown.This is all hewn locally from the cliffs.Slate roofs grouted over with cement and then lime-washed, slate walls, slate paving stones and, as I near the churchyard gate, slate hedges as high as a house on either side of me, stuffed with ferns and pennywort. I saw the little purple flowers of ivy-leaved toadflax on these hedges blooming as late as November last. Above these stone hedges are holly bushes and beyond the holly the circling belt of Cornish elms. A wrought-iron gate opens into the churchyard. In tree-shaded grass are slate headstones with deep-cut lettering of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and cherubs with ploughboy faces, Victorian marble stones to sailors with carved anchors and cables. The parish church of St. Petroc is built of a brown-grey slate and its large fifteenth-century windows are crisply carved out of that dark blue-black Cataclewse stone, a most beautiful hard stone for carving which lasts the centuries. The church is unusually large and lofty inside for a Cornish building. It was pleasantly restored in the last century. A huge monument with kneeling figures painted in reds and whites and yellows and blacks commemorates Sir Nicholas Prideaux, 1627, and leads me to Padstow’s great house, Prideaux Place.

It stands on a grass clearing among elms, firs and many ilex trees, that specially west country tree, not far from the church, near the higher part of the town where late Georgian houses with ilex and palm-shaded gardens and glass-houses with geraniums and grapes in them, suggest the land agent, the doctor, retired tradesmen and old sea captains. A sign saying “No through road” encourages me to walk through, and I come to a low castellated slate wall in a toy-fort Gothic style, with a genuine Gothic door of dark-blue Cataclewse stone let into it. Behind this, in full view of the road, is the E-shaped manor house. The eastern front looks over the road to its little-planted park and on to the distant low sand hills across the estuary. The feathery slate walls are battlemented on top. Over the entrance porch, in the wings, and in the spaces between them, are noble granite windows. Even the old lead rain-water heads are there, with the Prideaux crest and initials on them.A large magnolia shelters in one fold of the house and a Georgian semi-circular bay is just seen on the south wing, looking across another part of the park. The inside of the house is said to be full of panelling and wood carving and plaster-work and fine furniture.

All this is Elizabethan and seventeenth century. And the church and the houses in the town are medieval or Georgian. They seem comparatively new. What becomes apparent about Padstow is that it is even older than its oldest buildings. When the River Camel was narrower and when woods waved in the estuary which are now covered with sand, thirteen hundred years ago, St. Petroc, Servant of God and son of a Welsh king, crossed the sea from Ireland in a coracle and landed at Trebetherick on the other side of the water. And then he crossed the river and founded a monastery which was known as Petrocstow—that is to say Petroc’s church—which we now pronounce Padstow. Many miracles are recorded of him, tales of his kindness to animals, his long prayers standing in a stream on Bodmin moor where to this day his little beehive cell, made of turf and granite, survives. He raised the dead, cured the sick, tamed a savage, serpent-eating monster. A medieval life of St. Petroc was discovered recently which ended thus:

“A woman, feeling thirsty one night, drank water out of a water-jug and swallowed a small serpent (in consequence of which) she was for many years in bad health. As no physicians benefited her, she was brought to the holy man. He made a mixture of water and earth which he gave the sick woman to drink, and immediately she had swallowed it she vomited a serpent three feet long, but dead, and the same hour she recovered her health and gave thanks to god.

“After these and many such like miracles, Blessed Petroc, continually longing for heavenly things, after afflicting his body with much rigour, full of days departed to God, on the day before the nones of June.The sacred body, therefore, worn out with fastings and vigils, is committed to the dust, and the bosom of Abraham receives his spirit, the angels singing to welcome it. At his tomb miracles frequently take place and his bones, albeit dry, retain the power of his virtues. May his glorious merits intercede for us with Christ, Who with the Father liveth and reigneth world without end.AMEN.”

I do not know whether St. Petroc’s day, the 4th of June, is still kept in Padstow church; it is in Bodmin parish church and in most of the other thirty or forty churches in Wales, Devon and Cornwall which are dedicated to him. His cult has survived too in Brittany and at Loperec