Hartland Quay to Morwenstow
A cliff walk with breathtaking views to a village renowned for graves of drowned sailors and one of the most charming tea gardens anywhere.
The route, day 36
All day on the South-West Coast Path. 8.4 miles/13.5 km, 605 metres ascent.
Hartland Quay
Hartland Quay to Marsland Mouth
The Writing Hut
The poet and playwright Ronald Duncan (1914–1982) wrote in this hut.
The Coast from Marsland Mouth to Morwenstow
Morwenstow
The hamlet of Morwenstow, its church, vicarage and cliff coast, are associated with a remarkable man, the Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker (1803–75).
Hawker is notable for several reasons.
Firstly: He showed commitment and courage in rescuing the bodies of drowned sailors to give them a Christian burial in his church, at a time when the corpses were usually buried where they were found on the beach or left in the sea. In The Remembrances of a Cornish Vicar he wrote vivid and moving descriptions of shipwrecks (see the extract below).
Secondly: He was a fine writer. I don't necessarily expect to enjoy Victorian prose, but Hawker's is powerful. He was also an admired poet, best-known for The Song of the Western Men, which was described in 1881 at the foundation ceremony for Truro Cathedral as "the national anthem of our dear Cornwall". It was set to music and is sung today as "The Trevelyan Shout" (see below). We sang it at school when I was 12 years old, and I can still remember the tune and Hawker's words more than 50 years later.
Thirdly: He is credited with inventing the harvest festival, held in English churches in early autumn. On 1 October 1843 he celebrated a good harvest, following a year of hunger in 1842, breaking communion bread that was made from the first corn that had been reaped that year.
Fourthly: He was a famous eccentric who dressed colourfully, produced an interesting design for his vicarage, and had an unusual married life. At the age of 19, still an undergraduate at Oxford, he married a woman 22 years old than himself. After her death 40 years later, he remarried. His second bride was 20 years old, Hawker was 60, and they had three daughters.
Morwenstow Vicarage
The Old Vicarage was built by Robert Hawker. The chimneys are designed in the shape of church towers, said to be towers that Hawker knew: those at Magdalen College in Oxford, the parish churches of Welcombe and Tamerton near Morwenstow, and the Morwenstow church itself. The chimney in the centre of the photo below left does indeed resemble the tower at Morwenstow (photo above), and a double chimney at the east end of the house (not visible here) looks like the square tower at Welcombe. However, none of the chimneys comes close to the slender grace of the tower at Magdalen College.
Shipwrecks
Robert Hawker described the coast at Morwenstow as "So stern and pitiless … that within the memory of one man upwards of eighty wrecks have been counted within a reach of fifteen miles, with only here and there the rescue of a living man." He retrieved from the shore and buried in the churchyard at Morwenstow some 40 drowned sailors, including nine crew members of the Caledonia, a Scottish ship that sank in 1842 on its return voyage from Odessa. The figurehead of the Caledonia, showing a Scottish warrior with kilt, sporran, sword and shield, has been mounted on the wall inside the church (photo right), and a replica (photo left) marks the spot in the churchyard where the sailors' bodies lie.
Hawker describes a shipwreck:
About daybreak of an autumn day I was aroused by a knock at my bedroom-door; … “Oh, sir, there are dead men on vicarage rocks!” In a moment I was up, and in my dressing-gown and slippers rushed out. There stood my lad, weeping bitterly, and holding out to me in his trembling hands a tortoise alive. I found afterwards that he had grasped it on the beach, and brought it in his hand as a strange and marvellous arrival from the waves … I ran to the cliffs, and down a frightful descent of three hundred feet to the beach. It was indeed a scene to be looked on once only in a human life. On a ridge of rock, just left bare by the falling tide, stood a man, my own servant; he had … found the awful wreck. There he stood, with two dead sailors at his feet, whom he had just drawn out of the water stiff and stark. The bay was tossing and seething with a tangled mass of rigging, sails, and broken fragments of a ship; the billows rolled up yellow with corn, for the cargo of the vessel had been foreign wheat; and ever and anon there came up out of the water, as though stretched out with life, a human hand and arm. It was the corpse of another sailor drifting out to sea.
(Text retrieved from The Project Gutenberg eBook of Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall at www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/45316/pg45316-images.html
Inside the Church at Morwenstow
Left: They're watching you! The Norman zigzag pattern on the arches below these faces was likened by Hawker to the waves on the Sea of Galilee.
Right: The font, with its cable moulding like a twisted ship's rope, may be over 1,000 years old.
A stained-glass window in the church at Morwenstow commemorates Robert Stephen Hawker.
The Trelawny Shout – Sing for Cornwall!
Here are the first three verses of Hawker's Song of the Western Men, which rings out in Cornish pubs on 5 March, the feast of St Piran, the patron saint of Cornwall (see https://trelawnyshout.co.uk/). Hawker's lyrics relate to Bishop Trelawny of Bristol, a Cornishman who was imprisoned in the Tower of London by James II in 1688, one of six bishops who defied James's wish to allow religious tolerance for Roman Catholics. Bishop Trelawny's grandfather, too, was imprisoned in the Tower of London 60 years earlier. In sober historical fact, no army of 20,000 Cornishmen marched to London for either of the imprisoned Trelawnys.
A good sword and a trusty hand!
A merry heart and true!
King James's men shall understand
What Cornish lads can do!
And have they fixed the where and when?
And shall Trelawny die?
Here's twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why!
Out spake their Captain brave and bold:
A merry wight was he:
Though London Tower were Michael's hold,
We'll set Trelawny free!
Rectory tea rooms, Morwenstow.
John Sykes was here, 25 June 2024.
