sailors and fishermen, looking up the gorge of
Boscastle, frequently mistook this tower by
clay for a landmark, by night for a beacon.
Wrecks sometimes happened, and when they
did happen, the monks regretfully shared the
bales, chests, and kegs, and prayed for the
dead men's souls, with special fervour. This
occurred, however, so frequently that the
tower at last got an ill name as a lure to a
dangerous port, and one day a band of angry
wrecked men marched on the abbey, and in
spite of the monks' prayers, pulled down the
tower, some carved stones of which, green with
damp, are still to be found hidden under the
long rank grass of the churchyard.

Further west the crow comes to Padstow
(Petrock's tower), a high-flavoured old fishing
town a mile from the sea. Athelstan, when
he conquered Cornwall and Scilly, and pricked
the Britons back westward with his Saxon
sword, gave the place his name, but it never
adhered, and the Britons soon fell back on their
favourite, Saint Petrock. Padstow must have
been a place of some importance in the middle
ages, for, when Liverpool was still unborn, this little
Cornish sea-port sent two high-sterned
turreted vessels, to aid Edward the Third and
his knights at the siege of Calais. It first
declined in the reign of Henry the Eighth, when
the harbour began to block, and that Dunbar,
now so dangerous, to form, against which
shoal vessels, hurrying in for shelter to the
only place of refuge on that terrible northern
coast of Cornwall, are often driven by eddies
that surge inside the point of the Camel
estuary. These sands, rich in carbonate of
lime (eighty per cent), are in consequence
so invaluable as manure, that nearly one
hundred thousand tons a year are carted
away, so wisely has industry converted the
sailors' burial-place into a mine of wealth.
The east shore of the estuary, a barren waste
of rolling sand hills, gives a wildness to
Padstow in fine blue sky weather, but in
dull grey days the "towans" glow with a
delusive appearance of changeless sunshine
—with such enchantments can imagination
invest even a desert. The devastating sand
cast down here, as if from all the hour–
glasses Time has ever shattered, has choked
up and partly buried the ancient chapel
of St. Enedoc (Sin Kennedy) situated under
the east side of the barren eminence of
Bray Hill, north of Padstow, and at the
opposite side of the harbour. The sand, piled
up to the roof, and scooped away to free the
door, has made a small Cornish Pompeii of it.
On the north-east side of this desert churchyard
a corroded tombstone of 1687 (James the
Second), rises from the yellow sea sand. This
half buried church was built in 1430 (Henry
the Sixth), to replace an ancient oratory of
one of those self-devoted Welsh or Irish saints,
who were the earliest missionaries among the
Pagan tin-miners; traces of it were visible at
Bray Hill, some fifty years ago, during a
temporary shifting of the sand. St. Enedoc's
shows nothing above the surface but a little
crooked spire of slate stone blackened by the
salt spray, and yellow with blotches of lichen.
The old carved seats in the interior were worm–
eaten centuries ago. Streaks of scarlet and
gold still linger on the panels of the roof.
The front is Norman, with a rude cable
moulding. There is service once a fortnight
in this wild place, where the sea choruses
the anthem, and the wind howls its savage
responses. Mrs. Candour, that indefatigable
gossiping friend of Mrs. Grundy, says that
some years ago, before the grass had chained
down the volatile and restless sand, a certain
clergyman, full of zeal to save his fees, was
in the habit of descending into the pulpit
through the opening of a skylight. The
conquering sand of Padstow has been,
however, generally strongly opposed to the
establishment, for St. Michael's, on the western
shore, between Wadebridge and St. Enedoc,
has equally suffered; and on the opposite side
of the estuary, near Trevose Head (half way
between Hartland and St. Ives), the old
church of St. Constantine has been almost
entirely engulfed, and the old annual festival,
with its limpet and star-gazy pies and hurling
matches, has, therefore, for some years been
discontinued. The local legend at Padstow
is that the bar was the result of the curse
of a mermaid, who was shot at whilst sporting
in the sea by a devil-may-care young fellow
who was looking for gulls. She cursed the
town as she sank on her way to a submarine
hospital. The old men still say, "A harbour
of refuge here would be a great blessing, but
nothing will keep the sand out or make the
water deep enough to swim a frigate, unless
the parsons find out the way to take up
the mermaid's curse." St. Petrock's—the fine
"late decorated" church of Padstow, with its
slender pillars, its rich coloured windows, and
strong timbered roofs, is built of grey Caraclew
stone, but looks as cold and chilly as if it had been
paralysed by the Atlantic storms. The old font,
with the Twelve Apostles sentinelled round it,
had once the miraculous power (according to the
belief of the superstitious inhabitants of this
wild country) of preserving all those who were
baptised in it from painful experiences of the
gallows.

The charm was broken and the saints'
blessing lost for ever some fifty years or so ago,
when a Padstow man, named Elliot, robbed the
mail, and was duly hung. Honesty has since
that been found to be a better security against
peculiar complaints of the throat, than even St.
Petrock's font.

In the old house of the Prideaux (1600)—on
high wooded ground above Padstow, where
once St. Petrock's monastery stood till the Danes
burnt it in 981—there are numerous pictures of
that clever self-taught Truro artist Opie, or
Oppy, as he called himself. He painted all
the Prideaux, male and female, all their
servants, and even all the family cats. Opie,
the son of a Truro carpenter, was discovered
by Peter Pindar smearing out portraits with
splashes of house paint. He came to London,