Cornwall: Padstow to Pengirt Cove 12/7/2000**

 

Spring squill     Common lizard     Cheirodonta pallescens

From Padstow we took the ferry across the Camel, a short distance as the crow flies but a circuitous route for the boat to avoid the wide sandbanks visible at low tide.  Gulls and cormorants shared the banks with a heron.  We landed on the beach below Rock and walked straight down to the mouth of the estuary.  There was a short length of low cliff with tall slender yellowwort growing on the sheer face, plus a little Portland spurge.  This was followed by a large area of dune with sand couch, marram, sea rocket, sea bindweed, sea spurge and large-flowered evening-primrose.  A hummingbird hawk moth fed on the flowers of red valerian.  Much of the dune area is a golf course, where the longer grass had pyramidal orchid and long-stalked cranesbill.  The beach was fine sand with wind-blown shell fragments and a good variety of small whole shells, most notably Cheirodonta pallescens (rare, SW only).  The dunes ended at a prominent knoll, Brea Hill, where the cliffs re-emerged before another short section of dune above Daymer Beach where holidaymakers were flying kites. The beach became rocky and we were forced to leave it for the cliff path above, which was wide and easy, with lots of other walkers.  This led down to Hayle Bay where hundreds of surfers dotted the sea, while other people played games on the long smooth beach.  Steps at the far end led back to the cliff-top and over Pentire Point, a wilder landscape of cliff heath grassland with spring squill, rough and haresfoot clovers, dyers greenweed, hairy birdsfoot trefoil and common birdsfoot.  The Point overlooks a small island.  Further on, a narrow isthmus led to a wide promontory called The Rumps, twin hills with a valley between, which used to house a prehistoric settlement defended by ditches across the isthmus, although little of this now remains to view.  Near here we saw a well-grown lizard.  We then found ourselves at Pengirt Cove, and a short footpath gave access to the Old Lead Mine car-park, where musk thistles were abundant and sea storksbill was growing through the tarmac.  We walked back to the ferry from here, but the tide was in and we kept to the other side of Brea Hill, coming close to the medieval St. Enodoc Church.  This had at one time been engulfed by the sands, so the vicar had to enter through the skylight!  A slate tombstone, simple and elegant, marks the grave of John Betjeman. St Enodoc Church John Betjeman’s grave

 

Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc Church, Cornwall                                      John Betjeman

 

Come on! Come on! This hillock hides the spire,

Now that one and now none. As winds about

The burnished path through lady’s finger, thyme

And bright varieties of saxifrage,

So grows the tinny tenor faint or loud

And all things draw towards St Enodoc.

 

Come on! Come on! And it is five to three.

 

Paths, unfamiliar to golfers’ brogues,

Cross the eleventh fairway broadside on

And leave the fourteenth tee for thirteenth green,

Ignoring Royal and Ancient, bound for God.

Come on! Come on! No longer bar of foot,

The sole grows hot in London shoes again.

Jack Lambourne in his Sunday navy-blue

Wears tie and collar, all from Selfridge’s.

There’s Enid with a silly parasol,

And Graham in gray flannel with a crease

Across the middle of his coat which lay

Pressed ‘neath the box of his Meccano set,

Sunday to Sunday.

Still, come on! Come on!

The tinny tenor. Hover-flies remain

More than a moment on the ragwort bunch,

And people’s passing shadows don’t disturb

Red Admirals basking with their wings apart.

A mile of sunny, empty sand away,

A mile of shallow pools and lugworm casts,

Safe, faint and surfy, laps the lowest tide.

Even the villas have a Sunday look.

The Ransom mower’s locked into the shed.

“I have a splitting headache from the sun,”

And bedroom windows flutter cheerful chintz

Where, double-aspirined, a mother sleeps;

While father in the loggia reads a book,

Large, desultory, birthday-present size,

Published with coloured plates by Country Life,

A Bernard Darwin on The English Links

Or Braid and Taylor on The Mashie Shot.

Come on! Come on! He thinks of Monday’s round –

Come on! Come on! That interlocking grip!

Come on! Come on! He drops into a doze –

Come on! Come on! More far and far away

The children climb a final stile to church;

Electoral Roll still flapping in the porch –

Then the cool silence of St Enodoc.

 

My eyes, recovering in the sudden shade,

Discern the long-known little things within –

A map of France in damp above my pew,

Grey-blue of granite in the small arcade

(Late Perp: and not a Parker specimen

But roughly hewn on windy Bodmin Moor).

The modest windows palely glazed with green,

The smooth slate floor, the rounded wooden roof,

The Norman arch, the cable-moulded font –

All have a humble and West Country look.

Oh “drastic restoration” of the guide!

Oh three-light window by a Plymouth firm!

Absurd truncated screen! Oh sticky pews!

Embroidered altar-cloth! Untended lamps!

So soaked in worship you are loved too well

For that dispassionate and critic stare

That I would use beyond the parish bounds

Biking in high-banked lanes from tower to tower

On sunny, antiquarian afternoons.

 

Come on! Come on! A final pull. Tom Blake

Stalks over from the bell-rope to his pew

Just as he slopes about the windy cliffs

Looking for wreckage in a likely tide,

Nor gives the Holy Table glance or nod.

A rattle as red baize is drawn aside,

Miss Rhoda Poulden pulls the tremolo,

The oboe, flute and vox humana stops;

A Village Voluntary fills the air

And ceases suddenly as it began,

As slow the weary clergyman subsides

Tired from his bike-ride from the parish church.

He runs his hands once, twice, across his face

“Dearly beloved ...” and a bumble-bee

Zooms itself free into the churchyard sun

And so my thoughts this happy Sabbathtide.

Where deep cliffs loom enormous, where cascade

Mesembryanthemum and stone-crop down,

Where the gull looks no larger than a lark

Hung midway twixt the cliff-top and the sand,

Sun-shadowed valleys roll along the sea,

Forced by the backwash, see the nearest wave

Rise to a wall of huge translucent green

And crumble into spray along the top

Blown seaward by the land-breeze. Now she breaks

And in an arch of thunder plunges down

To burst and tumble, foam on top of foam,

Criss-crossing, baffled, sucked and shot again,

A waterfall of whiteness, down a rock,

Without a source but roller’s furthest reach:

And tufts of sea-pink, high and dry for years,

Are flooded out of ledges, boulders seem

No bigger than a pebble washed about

In this tremendous tide. Oh kindly slate!

To give me shelter in this crevice dry.

These shivering stalks of bent-grass, lucky plant,

Have better chance than I to last the storm.

Oh kindly slate of these unaltered cliffs,

Firm, barren substrate of our windy fields!

Oh lichened slate in walls, they knew your worth

Who raised you up to make this House of God

What faith was his, that dim, that Cornish saint,

Small rushlight of a long-forgotten church,

Who lived with God on this unfriendly shore,

Who knew He made the Atlantic and the stones

And destined seamen here to end their lives

Dashed on a rock, rolled over in the surf,

And not one hair forgotten. Now they lie

In centuries of sand beside the church.

Less pitiable are they than the corpse

Of a large golfer only four weeks dead,

This sunlit and sea-distant afternoon.

“Praise ye the Lord!” and in another key

The Lord’s name by harmonium be praised.

“The Second Evening and the Fourteenth Psalm.”