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MORWENSTOW1

THERE

HERE cannot be a scene more graphic in itself, or more illustrative in its history of the gradual growth and striking development of the Church in Keltic and Western England, than the parish of St Morwenna. It occupies the upper and northern nook of the county of Cornwall; shut in and bounded on the one hand by the Severn Sea, and on the other by the offspring of its own. bosom, the Tamar river, which gushes, with its sister stream the Torridge, from a rushy knoll on the eastern wilds of Morwenstow. Once, and in the first period of our history, it was one wide wild stretch of rocky moorland, broken with masses of dunstone and the sullen curve of the warrior's barrow, and flashing here and

1 The foundations of this article first appeared in Mr Blight's 'Ancient Cornish Crosses,' Penzance, 1850; in an article entitled "A Cornish Churchyard," in 'Chambers's Journal,' 1852; also, as the " Legend of Morwenstow," in 'Willis's Current Notes,' 1856; and in its present extended form, in 'Footprints of Former Men in Far-Cornwall,' 1870, embodying the author's latest corrections and impressions.

2 Willey Moor.

A

there with a bright rill of water or a solitary well. Neither landmarks nor fences nor walls bounded or severed the bold, free, untravelled Cornish domain. Wheel-tracks in old Cornwall there were none; but strange and narrow paths gleamed across the moorlands, which the forefathers said, in their simplicity, were first traced by angels' feet. These, in truth, were trodden and worn by religious men-by the pilgrim as he paced his way toward his chosen and votive bourn, or by the palmer, whose listless footsteps had neither a fixed keblah nor a future abode. Dimly visible by the darker hue of the crushed grass, these straight and narrow roads led the traveller along from chapelry to cell, or to some distant and solitary cave. On the one hand, in this scenery of the past, they would guide us to the "Chapel-piece of St Morwenna," a grassy glade along the gorse-clad cliff, where to this very day neither will bramble cling nor heather grow; and, on the other, to the walls and roof and the grooved stone for the waterflow, which still survive, half-way down a headlong precipice, as the relics of St Morwenna's Well. But what was the wanderer's guidance along the bleak, unpeopled surface of these Cornish moors? The wayside cross. Such were the crosses of St James and St John, which even yet give name to their ancient sites in Morwenstow, and proclaim to the traveller that, or ever a church was reared or an altar hallowed here, the trophy of old Syria stood in solemn stone, a beacon to the wayfaring man, and that the soldiers of God's army had won their honours among the unbaptised and barbarous people!

Here, then, let us stand and scenery of pagan Morwenstow.

survey the earliest

Before us lies a

breadth of wild and rocky land; it is bounded by the

billowy Atlantic, with its arm of waters, and by the slow lapse of that gliding stream of which the Keltic proverb said, before King Arthur's day,

"Let Uter Pendragon do what he can,

The Tamar water will run as it ran."

Barrows curve above the dead; a stony cross stands by a mossed and lichened well; here and there glides a shorn and vested monk, whose function it was, often at peril of life and limb, to sprinkle the brow of some hard-won votary, and to breathe the Gospel of the Trinity on the startled ear of the Keltic barbarian. Let us close this theme of thought with a few faint echoes from the River of the West:

"Fount of a rushing river! wild flowers wreathe
The home where thy first waters sunlight claim,
The lark sits hushed beside thee while I breathe,
Sweet Tamar spring, the music of thy name!
On! through thy goodly channel, to the sea:
Pass amid heathery vale, tall rock, fair bough,
But never more with footstep pure and free,
Or face so meek with happiness as now!

Fair is the future scenery of thy days,

Thy course domestic, and thy paths of pride;
Depths that give back the soft-eyed violet's gaze—
Shores where tall navies march to meet the tide !

Thine, leafy Tetcott, and those neighbouring walls,
Noble Northumberland's embowered domain :
Thine, Cartha Martha, Morwell's rocky falls,
Storied Cotehele, and ocean's loveliest plain.

Yet false the vision, and untrue the dream,
That lures thee from our native wilds to stray:
A thousand griefs will mingle with that stream,
Unnumbered hearts shall sigh those waves away.

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