Creepy Cornwall: Marvellous Churches «

Creepy Cornwall: Marvellous Churches

Saturday 12th November 2016

The Churches are marvellous: St Enodoc the best, where Betj is buried. It’s on the sand dunes near the sea. But you have to cross a golf course to get to it. There’s no road. Some other trippers shouted at the Gay Mother and I across the fairway, as I believe it’s called: ‘Were you thinking of waiting?’ But we couldn’t see, because of a bush, that some players were about to ‘drive off’. Lucky though, for we might have been hit. I said to those others who had shouted, when at last we did cross, ‘Shall we move their balls?’ for they’d landed right there in our path. Didn’t go down well. I’ve no patience with Golf and those who play it.

But St Enodoc was heaven. So ancient and knarled somehow, with its primitive spire. You could feel the past there even if it had gone from the hotel. Tiny little hutch, for two generations buried beneath the sand, even now in a pit. The vicar had to be let in through a hole in the roof when it was buried to keep in going as sacred with a service once a year. To think that Debo and all the others would have been in there for Betj’s ral.

St Endellion is a smarter church not well positioned – dreary site. It’s given to festivals and that kind of thing. But gloriously flat and spreading with no coloured glass and many windows not high up. Airy, light and old – crooked pillars, craggy floor, ancient wood, white walls. Our final church was St Merryn. That had steps down into it. More creamy and vaulted than St Endellion, it had the same first class horizontal energy, low clear windows and simple plain stone and painted wall contrast.

We went to Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant, the top one of his rack of places at Padstow. So London re-styled at vast expense to give a light fishing-village feel. The apple pudding was the best – an apple done in lurid green jelly with actual apple inside. Quel art! We went to Trerice – enchanting National Trust home – Elizabethan. Incredibly manoir like a toy. In the shop there was a book, ‘Great Families of Cornwall.’ We know them all, of course. I was at school with the present Sir Rashleigh – they’ve got Menabilly back now from Daphne du Maurier and live there, you know. The Carew-Poles, the Bolithos, the Foxes – all known.

Back at the hotel, the Gay Mother talked in the dining room about the pheasant menace and other estate matters. Really it is us who are the past now. All around white, not quite Express-reading Britain dined. Girls in private school, not the best, 4×4 in car park not a BMW. They were all getting ahead in a modest way, having sprung from suburban streets and little conversation at ‘meals’. No genteel ladies on full-pension, no military, no evident battery of solicitors, doctors and stock-brokers. The only abiding feature – no black faces.

Cornwall is marvellous but I don’t like it. I’ve said it before: it’s creepy. Maybe it’s all the pirates and the smuggling and the Celtic past and always being out on a peninsula cut off from everything: and then the strange disembodied, shiftless sea-side holiday existence. The names are odd. People in Cornwall – well, you always feel they might be arranging a curse. It’s a relief to get back across the border into our own dear county.