England's legend-laden peninsula

Author: By William A. Davis, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 30, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

The Penwith Peninsula, the toe of the boot-shaped county, is Cornwall in microcosm. Snug fishing villages, surf-battered headlands, sandy sheltered coves, prehistoric standing stones and ceremonial circles, old tin-mining villages, windswept moors, and gardens of almost tropical lushness -- all are to be found in a day's drive around it.

You can also discover the unexpected, such as St. Michael's Mount. Known locally as ``the jewel in Cornwall's crown,'' St. Michael's Mount rises dramatically like a mirage out of Mount's Bay on the south coast of the peninsula. Two thirds of the time, the mount -- a 200-foot-high granite crag topped by the ancient walls and towers of a former monastery -- is an island. But for four hours twice a day, during low tide, it's linked to the small fishing village of Marazion by a cobblestoned causeway.

The mount got it's name in the fifth century, the story goes, when a local fisherman had a vision of St. Michael standing on its summit. The Normans, who conquered Britain in 1066, were struck by the resemblance to Mont St. Michel in Normandy -- also a tidal island dedicated to St. Michael -- and established an important Benedictine monastery on the mount.

After the Reformation, when the English monasteries were dissolved, the mount became a military garrison. In the mid-17th century, it was acquired by the aristocratic St. Aubyn family, who, over the next three centuries, enlarged and remodeled the medieval buildings to create one of the finest, and certainly most romantic, stately homes in England.

The mount is now operated by the National Trust and open to the public but is still the residence of Lord St. Levan, head of the St. Aubyn family. At high tide St. Michael's Mount is accessible by water taxi from Marazion. However, to get the full effect, it's best to wait for low tide and walk the causeway, approaching the looming mount on foot and climbing the steep and stony path to the top, much as a medieval pilgrim would have done.

Except for one private wing reserved for the lord of the manor, visitors can roam freely around the mount. You can walk the walls (which have a wonderful view of the rocky coastline) and inspect the armory, library, banquet hall (originally the monks' refractory), kitchen and drawing rooms. All the rooms have original furnishings, paintings, and mementos acquired by generations of St. Aubyns. Probably the oddest piece of bric-a-brac is a scale model of the mount, made by one of the family's butlers -- out of champagne corks.

The old priory church, a small jewel of a medieval chapel, stands at the highest point of the mount, where St. Michael appeared to the fisherman. It is still the parish church of a small community of fishermen and their families who live at the base of the mount.

Just west of Marazion on the main road (the A394) is Penzance, the best-known town in Cornwall, thanks to the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta ``The Pirates of Penzance.'' There actually is a pirate in Penzance, a wooden one permanently perched looking out to sea with a spyglass on the roof of the Admiral Benbow Inn on Chapel Street, built in 1696 and once a smugglers' hangout. On the same street is the flamboyantly un-Cornish Egyptian House, built as a geological museum in 1835 in the style of a temple in Luxor.

Penzance is known for its beach, laidback atmosphere, and views of Mount's Bay and St. Michael's Mount. There is some artsy-craftsy shopping, but mostly Penzance feels and looks like the kind of Regency resort where Jane Austen characters went to take the sea air. A few miles north of Penzance, on the edge of a bleakly beautiful moor, is another kind of old town: Chysauster, an excavated farming village dating back to the second century, when the Romans ruled England.

Farther down the coast is Mousehole (pronounced MOU-zel), a charmer of a seaside village of small stone cottages so tightly packed together that the streets between them are little more than sandy footpaths. Smuggling, much romanticized in novels such as ``Frenchman's Creek'' by Daphne du Maurier, was a lucrative Cornish activity in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Mousehole apparently was named for a cave where local smugglers stored their contraband.

A plaque on one Mousehole cottage identifies it as the home of Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1777 and was the last native speaker of Cornish, a Celtic tongue akin to Breton and Welsh. Although no longer spoken, the ancient language lives on in Cornwall's many exotic-sounding place names such as Zennor, Lostwithiel, Perranzabuloe, Kelynack, and Porthcurno.

Land's End is the farthermost point in Cornwall, the end of the road and of Britain. A high, windswept headland where waves crash and foam against the base of granite cliffs and the sea stretches to the horizon on three sides, it really feels more like the end of the world. Land's End is an intrinsically awesome place, and even the presence of a rather tacky, small theme park, The Land's End Experience, can't diminish it.

The drive from Land's End back down the north coast of the Penwith Peninsula is considered one of the most scenic in England. The coast road runs beside steep cliffs and across a timeless Celtic landscape of boulder-strewn moorland and isolated farmsteads with fields that are brilliantly green in the reflected sunlight and bordered by lichen-speckled stone walls.

The landscape here appears not to have changed much in modern memory. Neither have places like St. Just, an old tin-mining town still centered around the grassy amphitheater where miracle plays were performed in the Middle Ages. Tin ore is found in only a few places in Europe, and mining it was for centuries the basis of Cornwall's prosperity, but only a few working mines remain. The Wayside Museum in the nearby village of Zennor exhibits antique tin-mining tools and equipment as well as a collection of Stone Age knives, axes, and other artifacts found in the immediate vicinity.

``Cornwall isn't England, it's bare and elemental,'' wrote novelist D.H. Lawrence. ``It is a most beautiful place.'' Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda, lived in Zennor for 18 months during World War I. Lawrence wrote ``Women in Love'' in a clifftop cottage still standing on the outskirts of the village.

Unfortunately, Frieda's maiden name was Von Richthoven, and she was a cousin of the German flying ace Manfred Von Richthoven, ``The Red Baron.'' Falsely accused by neighbors of signaling to German submarines from the windows of their cottage, the couple was ordered by the police to leave Cornwall and move inland.

Zennor's snug and atmospheric pub, The Tinner's Arms, is one of the oldest in Cornwall. It's a good place to stop for a pint of Cornwall's own St. Austell ale and a Cornish pasty. Supposedly invented by tin miners so they could carry a hearty lunch in their pockets, the pasty is a kind of turnover stuffed with meat, potatoes, and onions -- and very filling.

The medieval parish church of Zennor is dedicated to St. Senara, who, like most Cornish saints, is unknown outside Cornwall. There is a legend, depicted in a carving in the church, about a mermaid who fell in love with a handsome local fisherman. To win his love, so the legend goes, she came to the church one Sunday and sang so sweetly in the choir that the young man happily followed her back beneath the waves.

A path leads from beside the church to Zennor Head, one of the most spectacularly scenic spots along the 268-mile-long coastal footpath that encircles Cornwall. The stretch of coast between Zennor and St. Ives at the eastern end of the peninsula fits Lawrence's description perfectly: bare, elemental, and beautiful. The Stone Age is a real presence here, and Neolithic circles, burial cairns, and standing stones are more numerous than anywhere else in Cornwall.

The Cornish equivalent of Provincetown, St. Ives has been attracting artists since 1811. That's when the great landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, drawn by the luminous light and the mild weather that make this stretch of coast ``The English Riviera,'' first set up his easel. Other artists (including James McNeill Whistler) followed, and many tourists have come since. However, St.Ives is still as much working fishing port as artist colony and tourist resort, and a pleasant, characterful town to wander around in.

Five years ago, London's Tate Gallery opened a satellite gallery on the beachfront as a showcase for modern art, particularly the British avant garde school associated with St. Ives. A gleaming white building built around a glass-fronted rotunda looking out on the harbor, the Tate Gallery is itself an artistic statement.

The artist most closely identified with St. Ives in modern times is a sculptor, the late Barbara Hepworth, who drew inspiration from what she described as: ``The remarkable pagan landscape which lies between St. Ives, Penzance and Land's End.'' Now open to the public, her studio includes a high-walled garden that is a lush oasis in the busy town. The sculpture garden is filled with bronze and stone abstract pieces by Hepworth, all inspired by the ancient, haunting menhirs and ceremonial stones of the Penwith Peninsula.

I wanted to see something of Britain's West Country but had limited time to spend in Cornwall. So, I compromised and took the train as far as Exeter in Devon, a two-hour trip.

In Exeter, an old cathedral town worth lingering in, I picked up a rental car. I had arranged for a car through Auto Europe (800-223-5555), a Portland, Maine-based, budget, car-rental company with agents all over Great Britain. In this case, the Auto Europe agency was conveniently located in an office park just off the A30.

Although it skirts the coastline, the A30 offers good views of the Cornish countryside and crosses Bodmin Moor, a former haunt of smugglers and highwaymen that was the background for the romantic novel ``Jamaica Inn'' by Daphne du Maurier. The book is fiction but the inn, an authentic old highwaymen's haunt, is real, and signposted from the motorway.

For information about Cornwall, write to the British Tourist Authority, 551 Fifth Ave., 7th Floor, New York, NY 10176; or call (800) 462-2748.