The Shipwreck Coast In clifftop graveyards and among hidden coves, Jeremy Seal finds traces of the sailors and their vessels who perished on north Cornwall's notorious shoreline. Sunday Telegraph 31/3/2002
From Pentire Point, I watched the monochrome cliffs unspooling to the northeast, a white ruff of surf frothing at their feet. A high limestone rampart, breached only by occasional beaches, ran past Tintagel to the great headland at Cambeak. Beyond Bude, it rose towards 400-foot Henna Cliff at Morwenstow before finishing at Hartland Point in North Devon; 40 miles of Atlantic coastline admired by some for its coastpath walking, wild scenery and quaint fishing ports such as Port Isaac and Boscastle, by others for its surfing and by me as one of Britain’s most stirring shipwreck shores.
I have come to know this coast well, particularly its graveyards, homes and pubs, its shorelines, headlands and clifftops where I have sought remnants – actual objects, literary references and complex echoes – of the Caledonia, a grain brig from Arbroath in Scotland which was lost on the rocks at Morwenstow in 1842. The Caledonia’s figurehead, a Scottish lass in a tam o’shanter, brandishing a cutlass, still stands in Morwenstow’s clifftop graveyard; a siren to the yarn-susceptible if ever there was one. It's a replica that now stands in the graveyard; the restored original has now been retired to the shelter of theThe Caledonia, approaching the end of a year-long voyage that had taken her to Rio and Odessa, was bound for Gloucester, barely two days away, when she ran into a storm off the coast of North Cornwall, one of Britain’s most notorious shores. The Caledonia would have passed Pentire Point, where I was standing, some three hours before her end.
This 200-foot sea crag near Padstow proved an excellent vantage point. The map did not do justice to this coast’s diabolical lines which actually curved to form a pronounced concave – a vicious ship trap in the days of sail, especially when storms blew from the prevailing northwest, and especially devoid of good harbours. In the 1840s, when ships were being lost along the British coast at a rate of two each day, it was estimated that some 200 vessels had been wrecked in living memory along this stretch of coast alone. From Pentire Point to Hartland Light, ran the well-worn cautionary rhyme, A Watery Grave by Day or Night. Other shores may have suffered even more shipwrecks than North Cornwall - Portland, the Scillies and the mouth of the Tyne among them - but nowhere has the coastal carnage of former generations left its mark more poignantly. Britain has many evocative shipwreck museums (see box), but the in situ remnants along this coast add up to an altogether more moving experience; not only Morwenstow’s figurehead but the church’s wreck-commemorating stained-glass window, the other coastal churches with their high square towers that were intended as beacons for passing mariners, and the sea-dead graves and memorials at Tintagel, St Gennys and Hartland ; the local pubs named after wrecks; the rusting wreck jetsam on the rocky shoreline; the homes and barns built from wreck timbers, or from beached cargoes such as the cottages made from pitprops at Millook near Bude; and persistent rumours of wreckers who used false lights to lure ships onto the rocks which have led to the tag ‘The Wreckers’ Coast’.
As little as 70 years ago, wrecks fetched up here so regularly that almost all local fences were made or repaired from ship timbers, and figureheads were common in the graveyards and gardens. The figurehead of the Bencoolen, a barque lost in the rock and sand shallows at Bude in 1862, once stood in the graveyard of St Michael’s Church, Bude. The rot-nibbled half-head of a turbaned moor is now attached to a display board in the town’s museum, the atmosphere of its original setting eventually traded to ensure its partial preservation. Bude would have been the Caledonia’s last chance, perhaps an hour before she grounded at Morwenstow. Today, the tide was out and the drying harbour, with its notorious rock-hemmed entrance, was a vast expanse of golden sand where hardy souls walked their dogs on a gusty spring day. I crossed the foot of Bude’s canal, originally intended back in the 1770s as connecting with the navigable River Tamar and thus Plymouth in order to dispense with the hazardous passage around Cornwall; the shipping losses were such that they inspired the most ambitious schemes. I passed the old Falcon Hotel where Tennyson stayed on visits to Tintagel, and walked into the graveyard of St Michael’s. I found the memorial stone in a corner where the figurehead had once stood, ivy incursions freshly rebuffed by a strimmer. HERE LIE DEPOSITED, it read, The Remains of the Chief Mate and Thirteen Seamen, a portion of the crew of the Bencoolen, which was wrecked at the entrance to this Harbour. October 21st, 1862.
Nor were the Bencoolen crew alone; everywhere, there were headstones to the sea dead including 19-year-old William Folly, drowned at sea in October 1865, and Captain Henry Thomas of Tenby, master of the smack Enterprize, drowned at Bude in 1866. North of Bude, the road kept inland of the high cliffs, pushing through moorland hemmed with thorn bushes which had been permed to cresting waves by the unrelenting west wind. A narrow road swung seawards through fields to remote Morwenstow; pub, church and vicarage, former home of Robert Stephen Hawker. It was this celebrated Victorian vicar and self-appointed guardian of this coast’s sea dead who had caused the Caledonia figurehead to be retrieved from the shore, and had supervised the burial of her dead and the recovery of the one survivor. He was also responsible for the nearby cliff hut which was built entirely from shipwreck timbers – mostly decorative cabin paneling and hull ribs with their protruding rusted pins - where he retreated to compose poetry or indulge his opium habit and once conversed with Tennyson.
I stopped to admire the white-painted figurehead, a ship’s talisman serving out her years as a landbound memorial and evidently deteriorating in the process; the fine old Norman church boasts a memorial window from the early-20th century where the figurehead appears in far better condition. I walked across the fields and took a steep route I knew down the cliffs, securing the rope I had borrowed to help me down; Morwenstow’s Cotton Beach, named after an 1805 wreck cargo, is typical of this coast in that the shore takes some getting to, but repays the effort of the fit and agile as an untrodden repository of shipwreck atmosphere. Mark Myers, a local maritime artist and the curator of Hartland Quay’s excellent little maritime museum, found a 19th century wooden windlass here years ago which may have come from the Caledonia; the intervening years have since buried it in a great depth of grey boulders, each shot through with the characteristic seam of quartz. It was not long, however, before I came across six-foot anchors wedged among the rocks, shackles as large as my elbow and rusting chains, like old bones, protruding from the sand where the Caledonia had been lost 160 years before.
I stayed in the old vicarage. Owner and Hawker enthusiast Jill Welby runs the old vicar’s superbly sited home – views straight down the valley to a sea-filled vee in the cliffs – as a B&B, complete with a burgeoning collection of Hawker memorabilia. This resonant Gothic pile oozes atmosphere, evoking Hawker’s darkly romantic world of prayer and poetry, wrecks and wreckers. ‘Few guests come here having been interested in Hawker,’ Jill explained. ‘But when they leave, most of them are.’ That evening, a northwesterly buffeted the vicarage; just the weather to settle down with Hawker’s splendidly evocative account of the Caledonia’s loss which he had published in 1865, enjoying the particular thrill of reading it in the very house where it was originally written. The account is the main information source on the loss of the Caledonia but, as I had come to realize over the years, it is also full of intriguing discrepancies, even lies.
In the morning, I drove into Devon and took a back road through Welcombe’s deep dells crammed with budding ash trees and bracken-covered hillsides. I passed a ramshackle cottage at Southole which I knew to have been built from wreck timbers back in the 1940s, and Saltburn Cottage at Milford, named after the wrecked ship whose timbers were used in its renovation. In this remote and wild backcountry, where the line between land and sea seemed blurred, wrecks were even now regarded as bonuses, maritime harvests, rather than mere accidents.
The road, seeming to guess at the way my thoughts were headed, led me to Hartland Quay, a huddle of whitewashed cottages and a pub called the Wreckers’ Retreat. Hartland Quay is perched just above the surf a few miles south of the lighthouse at Hartland Point where the Devon coast turns east and the sea tends to soften. The pub’s walls were festooned with wreck maps and photos, and T-shirts proclaiming ‘I got wrecked at Hartland Quay’. No coast is more notorious for wreckers’ tales. Charles Kingsley, who grew up in nearby Clovelly, described the locals as ‘merciless to wrecked vessels which they consider as their own by immemorial usage, or rather right divine’. A freighter, wrecked at Hartland Point, was stripped of all its contents and fittings amid unsavoury scenes as recently as 1982.
Most historians do not accept that wrecking by false lights ever took place along this coast. But this cliffbound shore was not designed for sceptics. I sat outside the Wreckers’ Retreat, a pint of Wreckers’ Ale in my hand, and examined my beer mat which was illustrated by an antique print showing shadowy figures hurrying down a storm beach towards a foundering vessel, apparently intent on plunder. Such are the stories that this wild and resonant coast so effortlessly conjures.
Museums:
Bude and Stratton Museum, Bude, Cornwall. Open daily from Good Friday-September 30th, 11am-5pm. Adult admission 50p.
Hartland Quay Maritime Museum, Hartland Quay, Bideford, Devon. 01288 331353. Open daily from Whitsun to September 30th, 11am-5pm. Adult admission: £1.
Accommodation:
The Old Vicarage, Morwenstow, Bude, Cornwall. 01288 331369. B&B available all year except December, £25 per person or £45 including dinner.
Southole Barns, Southole, Hartland, Devon. 01237 441467 www.accommodation-in-devon.com. S/C 2-bedroom cottages from £182 per week
Britain’s best shipwreck centres.
The Figurehead ‘Valhalla’, Tresco, Isles of Scilly, Cornwall. 01720 422849. Open daily all year between 10am-4pm. Adult admission; £4.Some 30 figureheads and other decorative ships’ carvings collected from Scilly Isles’ wrecks since the 1840s, and housed in Tresco’s Tropical Gardens.
Charlestown Shipwreck and Heritage Centre, Charlestown, St Austell, Cornwall. 01726 69897; www.shipwreckcharlestown.com. Open from 1st March – 31st October from 10am – 5pm and later in high season. Adult admission; £4.95. A rich collection of wreckage and salvaged cargo from over 150 wrecks including 400-year cannons and Nanking porcelain.
Shipwreck Heritage Centre, Rock-A-Nore Road, Hastings, East Sussex. 01424 437452; www.1066country.com. Open all year daily from 11am-4pm, from 10.30am-5pm April – October, and from 10.30am-6pm in August. Admission free, donations welcome. Leading display of historic shipwreck material, near to wreck sites visible at low tide including the ‘Anne’, beached in 1690, and the ‘Amsterdam’ in 1749, with many artifacts from the latter on display at the museum.
East Kent Maritime Museum, Ramsgate, Kent. 01843 587765. www.ekmt.fsnet.co.uk. Open Thursday-Sunday 11am-4pm between February and Easter, no admission. Open Tuesday-Sunday 11am-5pm from Easter-September 30th, adult admission £1.50. Exhibits on the countless wrecks lost on the adjacent Goodwin Sands, notably the ‘Stirling Castle’.
Bembridge Maritime Museum and Shipwreck Centre, Bembridge, Isle of Wight. 01983 872223. www.isle-of-wight.uk.com/shipwrecks/. March-October from 10am-5pm daily. Adult Admission; £2.75. The seabed round the Isle of Wight is littered with shipwrecks, and the museum houses a collection of artifacts locally salvaged by the museum’s owner, including shell cases, U-boat telescopes and brass lamps. This museum has disappeared.
I have come to know this coast well, particularly its graveyards, homes and pubs, its shorelines, headlands and clifftops where I have sought remnants – actual objects, literary references and complex echoes – of the Caledonia, a grain brig from Arbroath in Scotland which was lost on the rocks at Morwenstow in 1842. The Caledonia’s figurehead, a Scottish lass in a tam o’shanter, brandishing a cutlass, still stands in Morwenstow’s clifftop graveyard; a siren to the yarn-susceptible if ever there was one. It's a replica that now stands in the graveyard; the restored original has now been retired to the shelter of theThe Caledonia, approaching the end of a year-long voyage that had taken her to Rio and Odessa, was bound for Gloucester, barely two days away, when she ran into a storm off the coast of North Cornwall, one of Britain’s most notorious shores. The Caledonia would have passed Pentire Point, where I was standing, some three hours before her end.
This 200-foot sea crag near Padstow proved an excellent vantage point. The map did not do justice to this coast’s diabolical lines which actually curved to form a pronounced concave – a vicious ship trap in the days of sail, especially when storms blew from the prevailing northwest, and especially devoid of good harbours. In the 1840s, when ships were being lost along the British coast at a rate of two each day, it was estimated that some 200 vessels had been wrecked in living memory along this stretch of coast alone. From Pentire Point to Hartland Light, ran the well-worn cautionary rhyme, A Watery Grave by Day or Night. Other shores may have suffered even more shipwrecks than North Cornwall - Portland, the Scillies and the mouth of the Tyne among them - but nowhere has the coastal carnage of former generations left its mark more poignantly. Britain has many evocative shipwreck museums (see box), but the in situ remnants along this coast add up to an altogether more moving experience; not only Morwenstow’s figurehead but the church’s wreck-commemorating stained-glass window, the other coastal churches with their high square towers that were intended as beacons for passing mariners, and the sea-dead graves and memorials at Tintagel, St Gennys and Hartland ; the local pubs named after wrecks; the rusting wreck jetsam on the rocky shoreline; the homes and barns built from wreck timbers, or from beached cargoes such as the cottages made from pitprops at Millook near Bude; and persistent rumours of wreckers who used false lights to lure ships onto the rocks which have led to the tag ‘The Wreckers’ Coast’.
As little as 70 years ago, wrecks fetched up here so regularly that almost all local fences were made or repaired from ship timbers, and figureheads were common in the graveyards and gardens. The figurehead of the Bencoolen, a barque lost in the rock and sand shallows at Bude in 1862, once stood in the graveyard of St Michael’s Church, Bude. The rot-nibbled half-head of a turbaned moor is now attached to a display board in the town’s museum, the atmosphere of its original setting eventually traded to ensure its partial preservation. Bude would have been the Caledonia’s last chance, perhaps an hour before she grounded at Morwenstow. Today, the tide was out and the drying harbour, with its notorious rock-hemmed entrance, was a vast expanse of golden sand where hardy souls walked their dogs on a gusty spring day. I crossed the foot of Bude’s canal, originally intended back in the 1770s as connecting with the navigable River Tamar and thus Plymouth in order to dispense with the hazardous passage around Cornwall; the shipping losses were such that they inspired the most ambitious schemes. I passed the old Falcon Hotel where Tennyson stayed on visits to Tintagel, and walked into the graveyard of St Michael’s. I found the memorial stone in a corner where the figurehead had once stood, ivy incursions freshly rebuffed by a strimmer. HERE LIE DEPOSITED, it read, The Remains of the Chief Mate and Thirteen Seamen, a portion of the crew of the Bencoolen, which was wrecked at the entrance to this Harbour. October 21st, 1862.
Nor were the Bencoolen crew alone; everywhere, there were headstones to the sea dead including 19-year-old William Folly, drowned at sea in October 1865, and Captain Henry Thomas of Tenby, master of the smack Enterprize, drowned at Bude in 1866. North of Bude, the road kept inland of the high cliffs, pushing through moorland hemmed with thorn bushes which had been permed to cresting waves by the unrelenting west wind. A narrow road swung seawards through fields to remote Morwenstow; pub, church and vicarage, former home of Robert Stephen Hawker. It was this celebrated Victorian vicar and self-appointed guardian of this coast’s sea dead who had caused the Caledonia figurehead to be retrieved from the shore, and had supervised the burial of her dead and the recovery of the one survivor. He was also responsible for the nearby cliff hut which was built entirely from shipwreck timbers – mostly decorative cabin paneling and hull ribs with their protruding rusted pins - where he retreated to compose poetry or indulge his opium habit and once conversed with Tennyson.
I stopped to admire the white-painted figurehead, a ship’s talisman serving out her years as a landbound memorial and evidently deteriorating in the process; the fine old Norman church boasts a memorial window from the early-20th century where the figurehead appears in far better condition. I walked across the fields and took a steep route I knew down the cliffs, securing the rope I had borrowed to help me down; Morwenstow’s Cotton Beach, named after an 1805 wreck cargo, is typical of this coast in that the shore takes some getting to, but repays the effort of the fit and agile as an untrodden repository of shipwreck atmosphere. Mark Myers, a local maritime artist and the curator of Hartland Quay’s excellent little maritime museum, found a 19th century wooden windlass here years ago which may have come from the Caledonia; the intervening years have since buried it in a great depth of grey boulders, each shot through with the characteristic seam of quartz. It was not long, however, before I came across six-foot anchors wedged among the rocks, shackles as large as my elbow and rusting chains, like old bones, protruding from the sand where the Caledonia had been lost 160 years before.
I stayed in the old vicarage. Owner and Hawker enthusiast Jill Welby runs the old vicar’s superbly sited home – views straight down the valley to a sea-filled vee in the cliffs – as a B&B, complete with a burgeoning collection of Hawker memorabilia. This resonant Gothic pile oozes atmosphere, evoking Hawker’s darkly romantic world of prayer and poetry, wrecks and wreckers. ‘Few guests come here having been interested in Hawker,’ Jill explained. ‘But when they leave, most of them are.’ That evening, a northwesterly buffeted the vicarage; just the weather to settle down with Hawker’s splendidly evocative account of the Caledonia’s loss which he had published in 1865, enjoying the particular thrill of reading it in the very house where it was originally written. The account is the main information source on the loss of the Caledonia but, as I had come to realize over the years, it is also full of intriguing discrepancies, even lies.
In the morning, I drove into Devon and took a back road through Welcombe’s deep dells crammed with budding ash trees and bracken-covered hillsides. I passed a ramshackle cottage at Southole which I knew to have been built from wreck timbers back in the 1940s, and Saltburn Cottage at Milford, named after the wrecked ship whose timbers were used in its renovation. In this remote and wild backcountry, where the line between land and sea seemed blurred, wrecks were even now regarded as bonuses, maritime harvests, rather than mere accidents.
The road, seeming to guess at the way my thoughts were headed, led me to Hartland Quay, a huddle of whitewashed cottages and a pub called the Wreckers’ Retreat. Hartland Quay is perched just above the surf a few miles south of the lighthouse at Hartland Point where the Devon coast turns east and the sea tends to soften. The pub’s walls were festooned with wreck maps and photos, and T-shirts proclaiming ‘I got wrecked at Hartland Quay’. No coast is more notorious for wreckers’ tales. Charles Kingsley, who grew up in nearby Clovelly, described the locals as ‘merciless to wrecked vessels which they consider as their own by immemorial usage, or rather right divine’. A freighter, wrecked at Hartland Point, was stripped of all its contents and fittings amid unsavoury scenes as recently as 1982.
Most historians do not accept that wrecking by false lights ever took place along this coast. But this cliffbound shore was not designed for sceptics. I sat outside the Wreckers’ Retreat, a pint of Wreckers’ Ale in my hand, and examined my beer mat which was illustrated by an antique print showing shadowy figures hurrying down a storm beach towards a foundering vessel, apparently intent on plunder. Such are the stories that this wild and resonant coast so effortlessly conjures.
Museums:
Bude and Stratton Museum, Bude, Cornwall. Open daily from Good Friday-September 30th, 11am-5pm. Adult admission 50p.
Hartland Quay Maritime Museum, Hartland Quay, Bideford, Devon. 01288 331353. Open daily from Whitsun to September 30th, 11am-5pm. Adult admission: £1.
Accommodation:
The Old Vicarage, Morwenstow, Bude, Cornwall. 01288 331369. B&B available all year except December, £25 per person or £45 including dinner.
Southole Barns, Southole, Hartland, Devon. 01237 441467 www.accommodation-in-devon.com. S/C 2-bedroom cottages from £182 per week
Britain’s best shipwreck centres.
The Figurehead ‘Valhalla’, Tresco, Isles of Scilly, Cornwall. 01720 422849. Open daily all year between 10am-4pm. Adult admission; £4.Some 30 figureheads and other decorative ships’ carvings collected from Scilly Isles’ wrecks since the 1840s, and housed in Tresco’s Tropical Gardens.
Charlestown Shipwreck and Heritage Centre, Charlestown, St Austell, Cornwall. 01726 69897; www.shipwreckcharlestown.com. Open from 1st March – 31st October from 10am – 5pm and later in high season. Adult admission; £4.95. A rich collection of wreckage and salvaged cargo from over 150 wrecks including 400-year cannons and Nanking porcelain.
Shipwreck Heritage Centre, Rock-A-Nore Road, Hastings, East Sussex. 01424 437452; www.1066country.com. Open all year daily from 11am-4pm, from 10.30am-5pm April – October, and from 10.30am-6pm in August. Admission free, donations welcome. Leading display of historic shipwreck material, near to wreck sites visible at low tide including the ‘Anne’, beached in 1690, and the ‘Amsterdam’ in 1749, with many artifacts from the latter on display at the museum.
East Kent Maritime Museum, Ramsgate, Kent. 01843 587765. www.ekmt.fsnet.co.uk. Open Thursday-Sunday 11am-4pm between February and Easter, no admission. Open Tuesday-Sunday 11am-5pm from Easter-September 30th, adult admission £1.50. Exhibits on the countless wrecks lost on the adjacent Goodwin Sands, notably the ‘Stirling Castle’.
Bembridge Maritime Museum and Shipwreck Centre, Bembridge, Isle of Wight. 01983 872223. www.isle-of-wight.uk.com/shipwrecks/. March-October from 10am-5pm daily. Adult Admission; £2.75. The seabed round the Isle of Wight is littered with shipwrecks, and the museum houses a collection of artifacts locally salvaged by the museum’s owner, including shell cases, U-boat telescopes and brass lamps. This museum has disappeared.
