X Tresco
In old days the island of Tresco was singled out from all the others to be the site of a monastery and its accompanying church, and on this account it acquired a reputation differing from, if not greater than, that of the other islands.
Nearly three hundred years after the departure of the monks, Tresco was again singled out from all the others, this time by Mr. Augustus Smith, the Governor, who made his home there, building a house near the ruins of the old abbey church, and planting round it the gardens which have since become famous far and wide.
Two determining factors were probably common to both decisions—the central and sheltered position of the island, and the abundant supply of fresh water in the large “Abbey” Pond and its smaller neighbour.
Of the Abbey of St. Nicholas, built by the Benedictine monks of Tavistock, no signs are to be seen. Only two pointed arches of reddish stone and about 25 feet of granite wall are left to show us where the abbey church once stood; the monastery itself has entirely disappeared. In point of decoration, these arches are so very plain that it is not easy to date them; but, judging from their proportion, we cannot be far wrong in assuming that they were built during the fourteenth century. At that period the abbey must have reached the zenith of its prosperity, declining again to what Leland calls “a poor celle of monks” before the dissolution of the monasteries.
The church is thought to have been burnt down—perhaps by Cromwell’s forces in the Civil War. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a large piece of a bombshell and some charred timber were found amongst some stones and rubbish at the west end of the ruins, by a man who was clearing the ground to make more room for burying the dead; and cannon-balls have been dug up near by in the gardens from time to time.
As late as 1820 the people of Tresco were still burying their dead by the ivy-covered ruins of the old church, with the idea that its great age gave the neighbouring ground a greater sanctity than the churchyard of their parish church. Troutbeck tells us that in his time the earth upon the old flagstones of the floor was sufficient in depth to dig a reasonable grave.
Flowers now run riot round the tombstones—agapanthus, blue and white; hydrangeas bearing pink and blue blossoms on the same bush; and the sweet-smelling lily-of-the-valley: cluster-roses try to bury once more with their petals the already buried dead, or thrust out their branches and tender young shoots to creep beneath the covering slab, forcing it up by slow degrees, as if they would anticipate the general resurrection.
The gardens which surround the old ruins contain all manner of rare tropical plants, shrubs, and trees, which in this warm corner only of the British Isles will consent to grow and flourish out of doors. I cannot attempt by any description to do justice to these marvels of the vegetable world. The botanist who can recognise at sight a podocarpus andina or a pittisporum tobia will here find himself in paradise; but to the uninitiated the homelier and more familiar growths are more attractive—the blazing masses of rhododendrons and azaleas, the sheets of narcissi under shadowing palm-trees, the tall hydrangeas and camellias, fuchsias and myrtles that border the paths.
And what no one can fail to appreciate is the situation of the gardens, which rise in terraces from very little above the sea-level up to the height of 100 feet. As you mount to the upper terraces and look back, you will catch sight of the sea, through and beyond the masses of flower and leaf; and from the very top you will see spread out beneath you the surrounding islands, showing pearly grey-green or with a tender warmth of colour against the sea, and each with its little rim of white sand at low tide, except where the rocks run down to the water’s edge.
We have come to stay on Tresco, and have landed at the pier beneath Carn Near, with almost as large a boat-load of people as the dinghy of the launch will hold. We have to go and look for lodgings, so we soon part company from the rest, who turn off to the right for the Abbey Gardens, while we keep to the left. We have been recommended to stay at the “Canteen,” in other words, the “New Inn,” but it is enough to call it the Inn, for Tresco boasts no other; and this one combines the advantages of a general shop as well.
It is about a mile’s walk to the Inn—a lovely walk by the sea, and one that we know well, but cannot know too well. It takes us first over sandy downs, covered with long grass, and a little farther on with sheets of the mesembryanthemum edule, whose mass of fleshy green spikes will soon be spangled with large pale yellow blossoms. In the autumn the air is full of a sweet and rather sickly smell (something like American apples) given out by the Hottentot fig, which is the sequel to the yellow blossom. As the fruit ripens, the green spikes around it turn to flaming orange and crimson, so that the plant seems almost to have burst again into bloom. The soft and creamy-coloured fruit, which will readily shell out from its enclosing green case, is in shape very like the sycamore fig. It contains a mass of brown seeds, like the seeds of a fig, held in a thick, sweet, transparent juice.
I may say of it, as Mark Twain said of the tamarinds of Honolulu, that only strangers eat it, and they only eat it once! I always like to speak from experience where possible, so I played the stranger’s part and tasted the sticky mess, but I cannot honestly recommend it!
Our path still follows the coast-line; and soon Cromwell’s Castle comes into view in the distance, and plays bo-peep with us round the headlands for the rest of the way. This old fortress in its beautiful setting seems to have the art of always looking its best. Whether it shows up pearly white in the distance against the blue of sea and sky, or grey-brown in the diffused light of a cloudy day; touched with warm glow by the sunset, or stern and gloomy beneath the thunder-cloud; whether one catches sight of it from above or below, from sea or shore, from Tresco or Bryher, from north, south, east, or west, it always has the same indefinable attraction.
Presently we see before us the harbour of New Grimsby, with houses built round the bay, on the shores of which the Parliamentary forces encamped in 1665. The large fresh-water pond a little farther inland is known as the Abbey Pond. Those old monks might always be trusted to settle near a good supply of water, and the eels and tench it contained would not be despised by them. The reeds which grow round this pond are used by Tresconians for making very high fences to protect their flower-fields from the wind—very like the fences of African villages, so that one could almost imagine Kaffir kraals instead of flowers to be hidden behind them.
The skeleton of an old derelict still hangs together on the shore of the bay. She was a coal-schooner, carrying a cargo of furnace-coal, and was dismasted outside the islands one New Year’s Day about eighteen years ago. The crew were at breakfast when she came to grief, but they hurriedly left their tinned meat and coffee (left also, I regret to say, their dog, which was found on the wreck), took to their small boat, and were picked up by a passing vessel. The derelict was found by men of Bryher, and was afterwards towed into New Grimsby Harbour. Thither came her captain to examine her, but he found her not worth repairing, and sold her as she stood to the Governor. Now her cargo has been used up, and she herself has contributed to the making of fences, etc., and is pretty nearly used up too.
But we are a long time getting to our inn; and when we do at last arrive it is only to find that every room is occupied. Until yesterday they were without visitors, but a recent influx of two ladies has been sufficient to fill all their available space! So we are fain to seek elsewhere.
And it requires some search, for the flower-season is not the best time for getting rooms on the off-islands. Space, as well as time, is much occupied with the flowers; and sometimes every downstairs room is stocked with pots and basins, jars and bottles, full of daffodils and narcissi, while the ordinary furniture is pushed just anywhere to get it out of the way.
We are beginning to lose hope. Every one is very kind, but “no space,” “no time,” or “no food” is always the difficulty. (Provisions, as a rule, are obtained weekly from Penzance.)
Must we retrace our steps to the little post-office, and ignominiously wire to the launch to come and fetch us and our baggage back again to St. Mary’s? But no; at last, in a little four-roomed thatched cottage at the farthest extremity from the beginning of our search, we find a refuge.
We are now on the east side of Tresco, on the shores of “Old Grimsby,” which is almost opposite the harbour of New Grimsby on the west side. From the windows of the little cottage there is a lovely view across the bay. On the headland which shuts it in on the south there are the ruins of an old fortress, called by Troutbeck “The Block-house”; in the distance is St. Martin’s Isle, with other smaller islets—mere barren rocks—dotting the intervening sea. I know not when the view is lovelier—when the fortress stands out dark against a rosy dawn, or when it glows red in the shafts of the setting sun.
All round this part of Tresco, on the waste lands, and at the edges of the sea, grow great bushes of the tree-mallow, or lavatera arborea, covered in summer with purple and mauve blossoms. (Is it as bad to talk of a “mauve mallow” as of a “pink pink” or a “violet violet”?)
When the seed-vessels are formed the rats will run up the woody stems, and eat the green “cheeses,” as we used to call them as children. It is a pity all their tastes are not as innocent, for they are a menace to the young chickens, besides stealing eggs and robbing potato-sacks when they can. But I do not think there are any rats nowadays so voracious as those that Leland describes on Rat Island—rats that would think nothing of eating a live horse!
Here also are fringes of tamarisk, and other low trees, along the shore. St. Martin’s men come over in boats and cut off the branches for making crab and lobster-pots—“trimming our trees for us,” as the Tresconians put it.
Of course every cottager has his patch of flowers. One may see the cut blossoms, in pots and bottles, set outside the cottage doors, or in the windows, to open in the sunshine, before being sent to “England.”
The Tresco flower-fields are, perhaps, on the whole, less picturesque than those on the other islands, on account of the careful way in which they are protected from winds and storms; but you may find many a cluster of narcissi of Nature’s own planting, wayward ones that have preferred to choose their own shelter in the lee of a pile of grey rocks jutting out into the sea, or hidden in a little copse of trees by the shore—trees slender of girth and small of stature, and destined, like Peter Pan, never to grow up.
The northern part of Tresco is wild and rocky and uncultivated, with bare brown downs stretching across from shore to shore.
On the east, where these downs slope more gently towards the sea, there is the beautiful Gimble Bay, facing towards the islands of Menavawr, Round Island, St. Helen’s, and Norwethel; and lying just outside the bay is the long reef known as Golden Ball Bar, over which the waves are ever breaking in flying foam and with the sound of thunder.
On the north the downs end abruptly in a steep and rock-bound coast. Here is a wonderful cavern known as “Piper’s Hole,” which penetrates inland for a distance of above two hundred feet.
To enter it one has first to descend an iron ladder fixed to the rock, and then to clamber, bent double, along a dark passage, over large stone boulders, worn smooth by the action of the waves. At length the passage opens out into a cavern thirty-four feet high—plenty of room to stand upright now! Here there is a large pool of fresh water, on which a boat is kept during the summer, so that one can be ferried across it and land on the smooth beach of white sand at the far end of the cave.
It used to be said that this Piper’s Hole communicated by a passage under the sea with the small and insignificant cave of the same name on St. Mary’s; that men had entered there and never returned; but that dogs had successfully accomplished the journey, and had reappeared safely at Tresco, at the expense of most of their hair!
There are several other caves along the north coast of Tresco, but none so large as Piper’s Hole.
On the western edge of the downs there are the scanty ruins of Charles’s Castle, which is probably the one described by Leland as “a lytle pyle or fortres.”
As we stand by the ruins and look down we can see below us, on a ledge of rocks jutting out into the sea, our old friend Cromwell’s Castle—a strong little tower, with walls twelve feet thick. The flooring and other woodwork of the interior has mostly disappeared, and what remains is green with damp; but the outer walls are just as strong as ever. The flat bomb-proof roof, once armed with a battery, is now overgrown with grass and brambles.
Beyond the Castle, in the midst of New Grimsby Sound, is a pile of rock known as Hangman’s Island, because the Republican officers hanged a batch of mutinous soldiers there. The path from Cromwell’s Castle southwards to New Grimsby lies close to the sea, parting a tangle of bracken and bramble; and there in the autumn may be found the finest blackberries that grow in the islands.
The sands on the east coast of Tresco, between the Block House and Skirt Point, are famous for their shells, especially for “guinea-moneys”—pretty little shells of the cowry shape, which are much sought after by Scillonians for making into necklaces. They are found in considerable numbers along this shore, but are nowhere so plentiful as not to require a careful search.