The weekend after Easter, we drove down to the church of St Juliot on the single track lane that leads from the Boscastle road, off the main coast road, the A39. The roads were almost empty, the sky a luminous blue. A sunny April must be one of the most pleasant times of year for a visit to North Cornwall, I thought. We trundled down the little track with the sun slanting over the ancient hedgerows and through the wind-sculpted trees that had been allowed to grow from them.
St Juliot is perched in a hollow in the hillside, its gravestones leaning under trees that were not yet in leaf, so that we could see the square Norman tower and the picturesque conical “ears” at each corner of the square tower that were added to Norman church towers in North Cornwall in the nineteenth century.
The longest side of its little graveyard overlooks a wide green valley, sheep and horses grazing across on the far side. What we already knew about St Juliot’s was that it is one of the oldest churches in the area and that Thomas Hardy’s first wife was from the parish. She is buried in her family’s plot in St. Juliot’s Church.
Emma met Thomas Hardy when he was in charge of the restoration of St Juliot’s church. She was the churchwarden’s daughter and they fell in love and married. She is buried with her family there and Hardy is buried in Westminster Abbey, but a plaque commemorates his link to the church. A beautiful engraved glass window is dedicated to Hardy. There are also copies of drawings that Hardy made of the church.
Donall was enraptured by the details of the ancient stones and their inscriptions and took charge of the camera to take pictures of everything, inside and out.
Too late, we realised that we should have recharged the camera’s battery overnight, but before it totally ran down we explored the possibilities quite thoroughly.
We drove back to Lower Tresmourn Farm, our B&B, to put the camera battery on charge. Lunch at the Wainhouse Inn, on the A39 about a mile away, was an unexpected success. The restaurant has recently changed hands and it was bright and welcoming, the service was friendly and quick and the food was really delicious. We had baked haddock on a bed of potatoes, spinach and chorizo – absolutely perfect.
With the battery charged up, we set off again, this time to see the church of St Genny’s, a hamlet near Crackington Haven. Tresmourn's address is Crackington Haven, though it stands outside the village itself, high on the cliff above.
St Genny’s is on a lane leading northwards along the cliff, only a mile or two away by road. The church stands on the top of the cliff, separated from its edge by a broad field and the churchyard wall, with a steep incline to one side of the churchyard. Below the church, in the dip, is the rectory. The sea was a blue mist to the horizon.
Originally the focus for Christian worship here was the Holy Well which can still be seen near the gate to the churchyard, a spring of pure water that still supplied domestic water for the village up to the 19th century.
In 650AD the Augustine monks would baptise and preach there, in the open air, a stone cross set up nearby. There may have been a Saxon church built here in the late 900’s, of which nothing substantial remains.
In Henry I’s reign, between 1100 and 1135, the “new” Norman church was begun. Originally the square tower had a pyramidical tower, but in 1910 this was replaced by the present upper storey, with the characteristic four “ears" at the corners.
We placed £3.50 in the trust-box inside the church, for the excellent little account of the history of St Genny’s church by a local historian, Christopher Berry, from which I’ve gathered the snippets of information I’m including here.
St Genny’s name seems to derive from a saint local to Llandough, in Glamorgan, Wales, from where Augustine monks travelled by boat to found the Holy Well on the present site. When the Normans recorded their possessions in the Domesday Book after 1066, the saint was not recognised by the Holy Roman establishment and the name was ascribed to St Genesius of Arles instead. The modern name is the Celtic, St Genny’s.
Inside the church we found evidence of the rich creative life of the modern parish and a nave flanked by a Norman arcade of Polyphant Stone, a soft stone which allows rich carving. (Polyphant is a village near Launceston, further inland). This northern aisle was added to the earlier Norman building in 1350, when the parish was owned by the diocese of Launceston, about fifteen miles away.
This is the Baptismal Holy Stoop (the font) inside the church, which was removed from the church in about 1500 and only only rediscovered and replaced here in 1906 when the Church Warden found it on a stone heap about three miles from the church. He brought it back and had it examined by an architect who thought it was Norman. Plaster was removed from the northeast corner of the church and the font was found to fit the gap exactly!
For the rest of St. Genny’s chequered architectural, social and ecclesiastical history (for instance its active role in the rise of Wesleyanism in the area) I’d thoroughly recommend Christopher Berry’s little book, which was published in 2002 by the St Genny’s Gazette. Its ISBN is: 0 9536919 1 8.
The gravestones in and outside the church record the families who are the players in the colourful past of St Genny’s. Crackington Haven with its jagged black rocks and cliffs and fierce Atlantic storms was frequently the setting for shipwrecks – there are traditional tales of evil men luring cargo ships on to the rocks with lights, to salvage their cargoes.
One family of scoundrels that Berry records from his research were William, Simon and Thomas de Gennys who on 27th December 1357 burst into Poundstock Church, while Mass was being held, and “with swords and cudgels brutally slew William Penfound clerk” [that is, the local priest}. This seems to have been part of an ongoing feud, because in 1350 Roland Penfound had been pardoned for the murder of a member of the St Gennys “gang”, Nicholas de Beer. The de Gennys seem to have been involved in piracy and wrecking activities in 1342 and 1346. They also vandalised the lands of the Black Prince at nearby Swannacote in 1348. Yet this same William de Gennys was also Collector of the King’s Subsidies in 1349!
The oldest gravestone in the church is that of Benet Mill who died in 1593. Benet’s son-in-law, Christopher Bligh, is also buried here, at his own request. He died in 1605, the wealthiest man in the parish. Berry speculates that Bligh may have been the ancestor of Captain Bligh of the Bounty, who came from St Tudy, not far away. Tales of heroism are recorded among the tombstones of the church. On January 11th 1894, the Swedish brigantine “William” was wrecked at Crackington Haven and only one crew member, the mate. was rescued, by the bravery of local men, Mr Jewell, Mr Brendon and Mr Hugill among others, who “in blinding showers of hail and rain searched the cliffs and beach for some distance in hope of others of the crew.” (Devon & Cornish Post, 3rd February 1894, quoted by Berry on page 78 of the second printing). Seven more bodies were later washed up. A cross in St Genny’s churchyard records the incident.
Berry also reproduces a photograph which is probably of the figurehead of the “William” set up over the grave of Captain Richardson and his crew, originally published in “Sea Breezes” magazine in 1929, which may have been taken by Thomas Hardy at the turn of the 20th Century and is captioned, “A curious custom of Cornwall graveyards was the setting up of the Figurehead of a wrecked vessel over the grave of her drowned sailors. Photo by Thomas Hardy”. Berry speculates that this picture may have been taken thirty years before, by the writer, who was then living nearby at St Juliot.
The tombstones record other tragedies – for example, the deaths of a family of young children, in 1693, recorded on a stone plaque on the wall of St Gregory’s chapel (now half hidden by the recently installed organ). A stone cross stands in the churchyard over the bodies of sailors washed up after the wreck of the SS City of Vienna in November 1900.
We were only in Cornwall for a couple of full days but we got to know the area better than I ever had before. We had three meals at the Cobweb Inn in Boscastle, including their excellent Sunday lunchtime carvery, where we overate at very little cost. We optimistically entered the pub’s Grand National sweepstake – even went back next evening to check if we had won (we hadn’t and nor had any of the pub customers, there are so many runners in that race.)
Boscastle, the site of the devastating flood in 2003, enchanted Donall – it would have done so even without its restored Witchcraft Museum. The village is a sparkling little place, its fishing cottages newly painted and the fishing boats at the quayside unbelievably picturesque. I sat for a while in the sunshine and drew the view of the quay from the cliff, while Donall set off up the other side of the steep cliff-path with the camera. Then at the quayside I watched a fishing boat, the Industrious, unloading lobster pots, and drew the scene as fast as I could – the boat left before I’d got much done, but Donall took some good photos of the same lobster pots.
We tried the beach at Crackington Haven but the weather, though bright, had turned breezy and cool. Even in Bude, where the beach offers more shelter in the lee of the rocks, it was too cold for the sunning we’d hoped for.We went back to St Genny’s for a few hours, the morning we left Cornwall - I wanted to try a drawing of the church and its setting in the hillside, so Donall took the camera while I sat on a flat gravestone and tried to draw the long nave and the eared tower, the ancient salt-worn tombstones and the primrose- strewn bank which half hid the building. My attempt was so inept that I shall not post it here. Donall’s record of the place is enough. Like any dedicated photojournalist, he risked life and limb to capture some of his best shots and was injured by a thorny branch that he’d pushed aside to angle his lens up to the lichen-rough cross over the porch.
We ended up at Stratton Hospital outpatients’ department, seeing a very kind and efficient nurse, my namesake, Jan, who applied salves and antibiotics to the eye – happily there was no lasting damage done and we drove the 230 miles back to Surrey with no further adventures......
PS ....... Before we left Tresmorn Farm, where we’d had a very comfortable three nights (and three excellent breakfasts too) I decided to leave Rachel and Chris Crocker a memento of our stay there – a painting that I made a few years ago of Hartland Quay, further up the coast in North Devon. We spotted a perfect place for it, where another picture had fallen down and not yet been replaced. So there it hangs...
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