Five Million Tides E-Book

Christian Boulton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 479

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Five Million Tides is the story of Cornwall's Helford River from the Stone Age to the dawning of the twenty-first century. From prehistoric pioneers and their megalithic successors, this account goes on to expose a remarkable truth: the Helford became one of Europe's most significant waterways during the Iron Age and Roman periods. Despite being mainland Britain's southernmost safe haven, it has not always been a place of good fortune – once a thriving seat of Celtic Christianity the river would ultimately become more synonymous with lawless seafarers. Nor could it be relied upon for sanctuary from every storm, as the graves of mariners in its village churchyards attest. Although now overshadowed by its more famous sibling estuaries, the Helford is an enigmatic beauty of the family whose rich past deserves wider knowledge.

Leseprobe

First published 2019

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Christian Boulton, 2019

The right of Christian Boulton to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9166 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Sir Tim Rice

Preface

Introduction

1 Rise

2 Waves

3 Ancient Mariners

4 Holy Waters

5 Dark Currents

6 Ebb

Acknowledgements

Notes

Plates

A 1779 chart of the Helford River. (Courtesy of David Barnicoat)

FOREWORD

I am phenomenally lucky in that I own a house that overlooks the Helford River estuary. For the past thirty years I have never ceased to be captivated by its ever-changing beauty. The dramatic tides, the boats, the crazy variety of weather throughout what seems like many more than four seasons, the human and animal activity (and no doubt the piscatorial action beneath the water) are never constant except in their physical and emotional impact.

And now at last Christian Boulton has come up with a book that captures the magic, history and geography of this idyllic stretch of water and its surroundings. Part of me would like to keep all this information a secret, but on balance I believe we Helford admirers have a duty to spread the word, which Christian has done with skill, panache, enthusiasm and authenticity.

Sir Tim Rice

PREFACE

In the introduction to his exhaustive History of the Parish of Constantine in Cornwall, the great Charles Henderson opined that ‘no place in the parish has been rendered famous as the scene of some great episode in the history of Britain, and no native of Constantine has left his mark upon the history of the nation’.1 While this work, published shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, is an invaluable source of information without which this particular book would have been all the poorer, this sentence is to be disputed. Such an assertion could be casually applied to any of the little rural parishes around the Helford’s shores, but to do so would be to apply a measure of worth in entirely the wrong way. The author thankfully went on to qualify his statement in so much as historical study ‘does not need to be fed upon material of this sort’, but this is not the point. In contrast to Charles Henderson’s reasonable representation of a humble place, this book contests that there were times when the Helford River was actually one of the most important waterways in the British Isles. Furthermore, there are countless cities, towns and villages that are today celebrated for their historic significance that were still 1,000 years or more away from foundation when the Helford flourished.

Placing the river in the context of the wider world is central to this book, and that ‘wider world’ most certainly does not end in Britain or England, let alone Cornwall. Perhaps for that reason it is to be hoped that Five Million Tides is welcomed as much by readers with little or no connection to the Helford as those fortunate enough to live close to its shores. As such, it is strongly recommended that those unfamiliar with the river overcome the customary urge to neglect the introduction as the detail contained therein will make that which follows far more accessible.

Admittedly, the Helford river has already been the subject of published study, both academic and popular. It has been a backdrop and inspiration for poetry and prose, biography and fiction. And yet the story is incomplete. In order to do justice to its remarkable life any account must not only rely upon hard documentary evidence, but also advocate theories where established facts are in short supply. There are too many silences to do otherwise. All that can be said in defence of this approach is that quietly contemplating a painting by Caravaggio, Gainsborough or Vermeer is far more rewarding than a cursory glance and guidebook interpretation.

However, this book does not set out to answer every question and nor could it achieve such an objective in any case. There is no great denouement at its conclusion. This is nothing to be disheartened by, not least as it would be a tragedy were all the river’s mysteries accounted for. Some things are best left unexplained. As it is, we can be sure that no matter how many revelations about its history are uncovered in future, it will remain a beautiful and arcane sliver of water. Instead, Five Million Tides is a celebration of place, an unashamed eulogy to one of the most exquisite geographical entities in the world. It merely seeks to draw wider attention to a remarkable past that has been overlooked for too long.

It should be noted from the outset that this book seeks to place as much emphasis as possible on the Helford’s ancient history. Why this should be so is due to the fundamental fact that not only did human beings interact with the river for a far greater length of time before written records began than they have since, but because that same interaction was so very intense compared to elsewhere in the British Isles during particular periods. Certainly, its post-medieval era was remarkably colourful and has left a great many relics, but that which preceded it was more extraordinary by far. John Burns, the early twentieth-century London MP, famously described the Thames as ‘liquid history’, but so too is the Helford.

Another disclosure that ought to be made in this preface is that this book is not overly concerned with the shifting fortunes of distinguished families and estates associated with the river, even though mention of notable individuals is required at times. There are several reasons for this, of which far better accounts of such matters already being in existence is the least important. Instead, the true protagonists are those who relied upon the river to survive. They are largely nameless, as the relatively poor of history always seem to be, but they have left the greater imprint upon it.

Although it is accepted that Five Million Tides may not pass muster with either the intractable historian or transient tourist in search of a pleasant place to take in a sea view, it is to be hoped that all in between discover something that alters their relationship with the river. It should never be taken for granted, nor assumed that it is immune from change. And to those who might wonder if the following chapters have anything to offer – to make them pause and reflect – then the author’s own personal enlightenment in writing them should be of reassurance.

Lastly, I dedicate this book to my beautiful children, Alex and Kate. I sincerely hope that you treasure your future time upon the river as much as I have in the past. May you never forget our hours drifting upon the incoming tide, and warm evenings well spent crabbing from its many quays. I love you.

INTRODUCTION

The Helford has many siblings. All were born and developed during the age of rapid sea level rise that began around 11,000 years ago and which continues to this day. But as with all brothers and sisters, these drowned river valleys of Britain’s far south-west are very individual in looks and character while evidently being of the same stock.

Some, like the Fal and Tamar estuaries, are larger and more imposing than the others. It is they that bear the scars of industrial activity and human endeavour more than most, although neither lacks splendour. Meanwhile, those of lesser proportions, such as the Dart and Fowey, have held on to most of their natural beauty and settled into genteel retirement after a post-medieval era of bustling maritime activity. Others, including the weather-beaten Hayle and Camel estuaries on Cornwall’s north coast, seem more like distant cousins to their softer-edged south coast clan. The Helford, on the other hand, is the quiet member of the family whose story is less acknowledged and far less understood. It is the shy and enigmatic beauty overshadowed by its more celebrated kin, modest in size and one that has modestly kept its secrets.

The main body of the river lies, roughly speaking, on an east–west axis, with its broad mouth between Rosemullion Head and Nare Point opening out into the English Channel. During ‘spring’ tides, when the range between low and high water is at its greatest, around 30 million tonnes of water passes between these points over a six-hour-and-twelve-minute-period. Smaller ‘neap’ tides are more leisurely affairs, but they still provide the marine life of the river with fresh nutrients twice daily. In either case, a little under half of the volume also travels through a slender channel known as ‘the narrows’, which is to be found immediately downstream of the ancient ferry crossing between Helford and Helford Passage. The deepest point of the river is also at this point, a prehistoric channel scoured clean by the fast-moving currents of both ebb and flood. Even at the lowest astronomical tide the depth of ‘the pool’ is around 50ft, and the topographical contrasts of the river bed give rise to visible currents and eddies. The sea appears confused.

The narrows could also be said to mark the transition between the marine and the estuarine, although the relatively meagre inflow of freshwater ensures that the latter is not especially pronounced. Seaward, to the east, is effectively a large bay whose width varies between 600yd from Toll Point to The Gew, and 1½ miles between Rosemullion Head and Nare Point. Here the composition of the seabed fluctuates considerably between sand, shingle, rock and coralline maerl. It boasts some of the richest marine life anywhere around the British coast, including extensive beds of eelgrass (Zostera marina). This, a member of the ocean’s only flowering plant family, is itself a habitat for numerous fish and invertebrates, not least the beautiful long-snouted seahorse (Hippocampus ramulosus). It is precious indeed.

Upstream to the west is a more secluded, sheltered realm whose defining feature is the ancient woodland that cushions it from the outside world. There are few places on Earth where large tracts of oak trees run down to the sea, but here is one of them. They are the Helford’s aegis. In places their limbs not only touch the water but are sometimes submerged by it, leaving seaweed draped over ends of twigs as the tide recedes. It is a haunting sight in the faint, watery light of early morning.

These upper reaches are both permanent and temporary home to numerous species of wading bird: redshank, turnstone, and little egret among them. Here too are herons, ‘the seven kings of Merthen’ as C.C. Vyvyan once described them.1 Indeed, the diversity of avian inhabitants along the course of the Helford is one of its defining characteristics: gulls, guillemots and cormorants hold dominion over the cliffs at its mouth, while oystercatchers and kingfishers lay claim to the creeks and feeder streams. All are regular visitors to the other’s territory where birds of field and woodland compete with those of the sea for the attention of the listener. In the hour either side of dawn the sorrowful sound of curlew echoing between the dark wooded banks gives way to the brutal call of herring gull from above and murderous rasp of the little egret along the shoreline. To landward, the parting sounds of tawny owls are replaced by the ubiquitous dawn chorus and occasional croaks of ravens.

The shoreline of the river extends for more than 27 miles at high water, this distance including the various branches that fork out into the surrounding countryside. Each is fed by a small stream. Each has a distinctive character. Gillan Creek is the largest to be found along the southern shore, and it is also that closest to the open sea. Sometimes referred to as Carne Creek, few could possibly contest that it is one of the most glorious stretches of water in the British Isles, bordered as it is by a mix of rich woodland, centuries-old settlements and ancient fields. Over the course of little over a mile it undergoes a transformation from towering cliffs and hidden coves to a sylvan shelter from the worst of storms. The church of St Anthony, complete with its numerous architectural treasures, is its most celebrated landmark.

Travelling from east to west, the next branch along the south bank is that around which the houses of Helford village are clustered. In truth, it is more of a deep cove than a creek, and being barely halfway between open sea and tidal limit means that it has little in common with the river’s other offshoots. But it is beautiful nonetheless. Meanwhile, less than a mile further upstream is the Helford’s most famous branch: Frenchman’s Creek. It was having spent a night anchored at its entrance aboard her yacht Ygdrasil in 1932 that Daphne du Maurier was inspired to write the novel of the same name. Indeed, her description of a visitor exploring it for the first time has defied the years since its publication. It surely will for a century or more to come:

Being a stranger, the yachtsman looks back over his shoulder to the safe yacht in the roadstead, and to the broad waters of the river, and he pauses, resting on his paddles, aware suddenly of the deep silence of the creek, of its narrow twisting channel, and he feels – for no reason known to him – that he is an interloper, a trespasser in time. He ventures a little way along the left bank of the creek, the sound of the blades upon the water seeming over-loud and echoing oddly amongst the trees on the farther bank, and as he creeps forward the creek narrows, the trees crowd yet more thickly to the water’s edge, and he feels a spell upon him, fascinating, strange, a thing of queer excitement not fully understood.2

Yet further upstream, and still less disturbed, is Vallum Tremayne creek. Like Frenchman’s, it runs almost directly north to south and lacks the twists and bends of most others. Excluding the nameless little pills puncturing the woods along the river’s upper reaches, Vallum Tremayne is by far the smallest division. It is also the Helford’s most enigmatic arm, the name suggestive of either past defensive qualities or it having once been the site of a mill.3 Either explanation is at odds with the serenity to be found today, but that is something also true of the Helford in its entirety.

Barely the cry of an oystercatcher further upstream is Mawgan Creek. Aside from Gillan, it is the largest along the southern shore, and also that within which a sense of past human endeavour is most palpable. It is difficult to define whether it is the surrounding medieval fields, the pretty old bridges, or simply the tolling of the church bell above its upper reaches that induces this sensation, but the present surely falls behind as one navigates its channel southwards.

The final offshoot before the tidal limit is reached at Gweek is Ponsontuel Creek, the Helford’s forgotten jewel. Aside from Vallum Tremayne, whose diminutive size and shallows deter most passers-by, Ponsontuel is the least frequented by waterborne traffic. Although its reclusive natural inhabitants would no doubt beg to differ, it is a great shame it is so often overlooked as its ambience is unique. To suggest that the surrounding woodland and steep banks induce an almost claustrophobic sensation would be an unflattering exaggeration, but there is certainly a sense of being enfolded and far from the modern world. It would no doubt have seemed even more isolated prior to 1922 when the ornamental Gweek Drive was opened as a public road above its western flank. And yet as its name almost certainly means ‘bridge across the conduit’ there is the implication of human tenure since time immemorial. Perhaps the little clapper bridge hidden from view in the woods holds the secret to its typonomic origin.

If the creeks along the south bank are greater in number, those along the north are greater in size. Heading back towards the river mouth, the first to be encountered, Polwheveral, is more than 1½ miles in length and even boasts its own subsidiary, Polpenwith. The name of the former probably means ‘the lively waters’.4 As with their counterparts to the south, these two tidal watercourses are less the haunt of people and more of wading birds skimming the water and probing the mud for nourishment. However, unlike its tree-cushioned counterparts to the south, Polwheveral feels open and spacious even if still hidden from the outside world – a paradox given that it was once a place of industry and enterprise during the early post-medieval period.

Lastly, Port Navas creek is today the gentrified branch of the Helford, although it has only taken on such an appearance in living memory. Many of the river’s waterside houses are now to be found along its course, and the old quays from which granite was once shipped across the world are these days associated with pleasure rather than commerce. Helford creek is similarly enclosed by dwellings, but instead they almost all pre-date the twentieth century and were built by those who worked the sea. They are humble, and all the greater for it. As with Polwheveral, Port Navas creek meanders inland and divides into smaller offshoots with informal names such as Trenarth and Penpoll.

However, the Helford River as an entity is not merely defined by its waters and shoreline. Without the surrounding landscape by which it is enclosed it would not be the remarkable place it is. Here are to be found the communities that have contributed to its extraordinary story for more than a hundred generations. The estuary’s enduring visual appeal is due to both astonishing natural beauty and the labours of people who once called it home.

Settlements of any appreciable size are non-existent within the river’s catchment. Instead, the local population is relatively dispersed throughout a small number of villages and larger number of rural hamlets. The most ‘populous’ of those by the water is Gweek, today home to fewer than 700 permanent residents. Here are to be found the river’s only remaining quays and wharves from which modest commercial activity is obvious, albeit only a fraction of that which would have been conducted during its zenith.

Port Navas, once an even smaller hamlet known as ‘Cove’, grew considerably during the early twentieth century, but still only boasts a population around 100 strong. Helford Passage saw similar development following the Second World War, but is less peopled still save for the summer months. Also on the north bank is the tiny fishing village of Durgan, a place whose diminutive charm is only matched by the possible origin of its name – Dowrgeun is held by some to mean ‘home of the sea dogs’. Indeed, fortunate souls may still catch a glimpse of an otter here on a calm winter’s day when the leisure boats of the warmer months have forsaken their moorings. Alternatively, the more dispassionate might suggest it is the Cornish Dowr Ganow: the ‘mouth of the river’.

Of course, the most conspicuous settlement by the water’s edge is Helford itself. Indeed, it is that which is visible to approaching sailors before any other, and yet it is also sheltered from all but the most vicious of winter storms. It is unquestionably one of the prettiest villages in these islands, and still leaves those who happen across it as beguiled as the yachting correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in 1905:

It is when you are cruising that you can enjoy Helford, when for days you can let your craft swing on the tide just above the bar. Helford, the little village, is simplicity itself. It drowses there in the warm sun, the air fragrant with roses, honeysuckle, and sweet-smelling creepers that hold the little white cottage walls in a clinging embrace. Fern, wild flax, and pine grow on the hillsides, and the river banks above are wonderfully carpeted with a scrub oak.5

However, beauty was not always the river’s most defining characteristic. It had its dark side, too, even if it was a place of natural wonder. Nor was Helford village the peaceful and largely affluent community it became during the latter half of the twentieth century. Although a few still bravely harvest the sea, fishing once sustained almost all else. The people of Helford endured arduous and insecure short lives, each venture out into open water a risk that had to be taken if mouths were to be fed.

Aside from these waterside settlements (and those around the mouth of Gillan Creek), the vast majority who reside within the river’s catchment area are to be found in the larger villages a short distance inland. With fewer than 2,000 residents apiece, Mawnan Smith and Constantine to the north are still by far the most significant. Despite being bordered by the sea on two sides, the former has always been predominantly an agricultural parish. In contrast, the latter grew in size not so much through the plough but more through pick and shovel, becoming a post-medieval hub of mining and granite quarrying.

The centres of population to the south are, like Mawnan, essentially built upon farming and its attendant crafts. These, from east to west, are St Anthony-in-Meneage, Manaccan, St Martin-in-Meneage and Mawgan-in-Meneage. All these villages have resident populations of fewer than 500, although their respective parishes also take in a great many smaller hamlets. The only others with any influence upon the river on account of their being the sources of feeder streams are St Keverne to the south and Wendron to the north. But the main body of the river is softer in geological terms, and thus visually, than the farthest places in which some of its tributaries rise.

Indeed, the Helford feels very different from the rest of Cornwall. It is within it, but not wholly of it. Its wooded creeks and safe anchorages are only 10 miles from the rugged cliffs of Lizard and Kynance Cove, but might as well be a 1,000. Fewer inhabited places by the sea are less alike than hamlets such as Durgan and the towns of the north coast. Nor could its immediate surroundings ever be said to even remotely resemble the uplands of Bodmin Moor or West Penwith. Moreover, the largest nearby centres of population, Falmouth to the north and Helston to the west, have no appreciable impact upon it, and the former is only visible from the headlands at the mouth. It is not ‘on the road to anywhere’, and for that reason has largely survived the ravages of twentieth- and twenty-first-century ‘progress’.

But the river has its contrasts, too. Gazing across the gulf from north to south it is as if the wooded banks around Ponsence and Bosahan Coves exist within a different era to the more active shore between Helford Passage and Toll Point. The fields above seem more rustic and less affected by the passing of time even though their counterparts across the water are equally ancient. And while the north is the home of world-famous ornamental gardens visited by many thousands each year, the south is far less frequented. The paths are narrower, there are fewer footprints on the sand, and the woodlands are less disturbed by human voices.

Its promontories are also diverse in character. At Toll Point the backdrop is essentially agricultural, while Rosemullion Head is covered by the gorse from which it derives its name: rhos is Cornish for ‘headland’, and melyn means ‘yellow’. And although bracken-capped Dennis Head boasts magnificent views of Falmouth Bay and beyond, nearby Nare Point slips gently into the sea as a plateau. But where the river divides at Groyne Point 3½ miles inland the landscape is wholly dominated by trees. Here, as the naturalist Oliver Rackham once observed, ‘smooth wooded hillsides, subtly mottled with the different greens or browns of individual oak trees, sweep down to high water mark’.6

Those unfamiliar with the river are advised to view it from Mawnan Glebe, just as the antiquarian William Borlase did while sketching the view in 1736. Such a vista, from the cliffs at the mouth to calm waters in the protective embrace of woods and fields inland, helps the unacquainted understand the sense of place. After all, when viewed obliquely from elsewhere on the east coast of the Lizard Peninsula the Helford cannot even be discerned, let alone appreciated. Indeed, it is possible to gaze across to Goonhilly Downs from parts of Constantine and Mawnan parishes without observing the slightest trace of the water that lies between.

Many have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to summarise its charm – a challenging task given that there are so many features, both natural and man-made, which contribute to the whole. However, there is perhaps one often overlooked description that comes closest to being the perfect précis. Writing shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the author and artist A.G. Folliott-Stokes described the river in the manner of someone who had stumbled across a Cornish Arcadia. It is succinct, yet difficult to surpass:

There is a peculiar charm about its wooded shores, its many secluded creeks, that wind far into the heart of the hills, its deep, clear water, and its delightful landing-places, where gnarled oak-stems are reflected in the smooth surface of the stream, and kingfishers dart like living jewels at one’s approach. It is five miles from the entrance between Dennis and Rosemullion Heads to Gweek, which is as far as boats can go; and there are as many more miles of winding subsidiary creeks. And everywhere there is the charm of forest, of still water, of enfolding hills, and incomparable vistas. That evening the water was like a mirror; smoke rose straight and blue from an occasional cottage, the shores were echoing with the songs of thrushes and blackbirds, a heavy-looking cormorant flew up the river at a train’s pace, and a heron stood motionless on one leg close to a spit of land crowned with some palm-shaped pines. It was a scene of great beauty.7

A similar picture could be painted in words more than a century later. It is to be hoped that with the determination of generations to come it will retain all of the natural wonder that inspired not only Folliott-Stokes, but Daphne du Maurier, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and others. The Helford has seen enough change and upheaval over the past 6,000 years and ought to be spared any more. This is its story.

1

RISE

Gilbert White was not the only ‘parson naturalist’ of the Georgian age. The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne may be the most celebrated work of such a figure, but the musings of countless others are today confined to dusty journals in libraries and private collections throughout Britain. One such lesser-known religious polymath was the Rev. John Rogers, Rector of Mawnan for almost thirty years from 1807.

An industrious character even by nineteenth-century standards, this epitome of the country gentleman intellectual was, amongst other things, an accomplished linguist and staunch advocate of safer working practices in Cornish mines. Educated at Eton and finally at Oxford, he had even penned On the Origins and Regulations of Queen Anne’s Bounty relating to the incomes of more impoverished members of the clergy. However, of all things, geology and botany were his principal interests, as his contributions to Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall attest.

One of these papers, entitled ‘Notice of Wood and Peat found below high water-mark at Mainporth in Cornwall’, concerns a remarkable discovery at a beach at the northern boundary of his parish. Published in 1832, it was most likely founded upon observations made on 15 February of that same year – had he chosen to walk the mile or so from the vicarage just a day before or after, the brine-soaked timbers he encountered would likely have remained unseen below the waves:

The oak is part of a stump, standing about a foot above the level of the sand, apparently in the place where it grew. It is just one hundred yards below high water-mark. On further examination I found the root of an oak laid bare, thirty yards below the stump: and at a spade’s depth below the surface of the sand. Immediately adjoining the roots of oak is the peat; I could trace the root extending about seven feet horizontally. The peat was evidently formed in marshy ground, and contains, I think, the leaves and roots of the iris pseudacorus-the common yellow flag which grows in the adjoining marsh.1

That such lost woodlands composed of oak, alder, and hazel should be under the sea begged the obvious question: why? To this conundrum he provided three possible explanations: that there had been subsidence of the soil; that the trees had once been protected from the water by an embankment; and, lastly, that the actual sea level had once been far lower. Rogers doubted the first for simple geological reasons and was even less positive about the second. As for the third, he at least resisted the obvious ecclesiastical temptation to cite Noah and the Book of Genesis.

This submerged forest still survives, uncovered very occasionally when both spring tides and suitable sand-shifting sea conditions combine. And yet its continued presence hundreds of years after the publication of his essay is unsurprising; it had, after all, already withstood the elements for around six millennia by 1832. Another couple of centuries are neither here nor there to such relics, not that John Rogers had any reasonable idea of their extraordinary age at the time. However, when a Mr F.S. Roberts reported to the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall sixty years later, the sheer antiquity of the preserved woodland had become more established. Visiting after a sequence of easterly gales had stripped the beach clean of its sand, he observed that a ‘springy and spongey’ mass lay beneath the surface and that it contained ‘a number of trees lying in various directions and positions; some of them from twelve to twenty feet in length’. Taking the invaluable opportunity to dig, he also uncovered a jawbone that a German palaeontologist later pronounced, almost certainly incorrectly, to be of the prehistoric ‘horse’ Prodremotherium elongatum.2

Maenporth, just to the north of the Helford, is not the only place in the area where submerged forests have been discovered. Construction of a pier at Market Strand in Falmouth during 1871 uncovered what would once have been young oak, beech and birch trees.3 And within the river itself, traces of ‘fossilised’ woodlands have been recorded in Gillan Creek.4 These venerable remains offer us a glimpse into a lost time, the ability to touch a once-living organism from an age more than four millennia before recorded history in the British Isles began. The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt was still more than 1,500 years away from construction when these natural wonders flourished by the water’s edge. The great cities of Europe were an even more distant spot on time’s horizon. They are amongst the oldest in situ large organic remains in the country.

Although they are natural objects of wonderment in and of themselves, we must contemplate whether human eyes ever laid sight upon them while in leaf rather than as dark, salt-sodden, fallen hulks. Did men, women and children walk between them, through the dense undergrowth that would once have lain beneath their canopy? More importantly, just how far back in time does mankind’s relationship with the Helford actually go? Unfortunately, to even begin to answer such questions it is necessary to rely as much on the theoretical as the evidential.

Like the Rev. Rogers, John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, was a man of many talents. Although much of his working life revolved around matters of finance, his passion was undoubtedly for the natural world. Indeed, in 1881 he became president to both the Linnean Society of London and the British Association – the latter now known more helpfully as the British Science Association. He was close friends with Charles Darwin, too, and was thus unsurprisingly a fierce proponent of the Theory of Natural Selection. Today, however, if his name should be mentioned in academic circles it is more likely to be associated with his enthusiasm for archaeology than all else.

Victorian naturalists had a tendency to give their works overly long titles, and Lubbock was no exception to the rule. Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, published in 1865, remains one of the most influential books on prehistory ever written, and its longevity bears testament to his perspicacious mind. We still use the terms he proposed within it, the Neolithic and Palaeolithic, to describe the earlier and later stone ages. Notwithstanding that a third, the Mesolithic ‘middle’, would subsequently come between them as a point of reference, archaeology certainly owes a great deal to John Lubbock’s original terminology.

The Palaeolithic – derived from the Greek words palaeo and lithos meaning ‘old’ and ‘stone’ – is a period of human time almost too vast to fully comprehend. Although it covers around 3 million years, very little is known of it. It does not sing loudly, but whispers from the corner of the room. It is the era in which human beings evolved in both body and mind, characterised by the use of stone, wood and bone tools and their relative increase in complexity over time. Given its enormity it has been necessary to divide the Palaeolithic into Lower, Middle and Upper divisions, each of these being divided once again based upon geography and variations in stone working imperceptible to the casual observer.

For reasons of typological convenience, the Lower Palaeolithic is generally held to have concluded around 300,000 years ago. When it might have commenced, on the other hand, will forever remain moveable depending upon what extraordinary remains might be found in the future. Here we find, amongst others, the Oldowan, which represents the earliest evidence of stone tool creation, and the Acheulean, in which the development of distinctive oval hand axes took place. These are the eras of Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus, some of our most distant hominin ancestors. It is also within the Lower Palaeolithic that the oldest surviving bone fragments of our own species, Homo Sapiens, have been found.

However, the hominid activity during the oldest part of the ‘Old Stone Age’ was not something confined to the African continent. Much as the tide had uncovered ancient remains at Maenporth for the Rev. Rogers to survey in 1828, so did it for archaeologists on the Norfolk coast in 2013.5 When a freshly exposed sediment layer at Happisburgh was studied, it was found to contain the footprints of both adults and children who had walked together across what had then been the upper reaches of an estuary. They had made the journey around 800,000 years ago. But just as the sea had revealed these precious relics of early human activity it cruelly took them away. Within two weeks the inexorable action of the tides had destroyed the soft sediment, although not before they had been examined in detail. There were around fifty prints in total, all walking in a southerly direction, and made by beings perhaps only a little over 5ft in height. Anthropologists speculated that they might have belonged to a family searching for shellfish at low tide. Maybe they had ventured out from an island camp upon which they would have been safe from predators. Alas, as with many Palaeolithic discoveries, nothing is remotely certain.

Many other remnants of that far-off age have been found in the British Isles, and specifically from the more climatically benign phases of the Cromerian interglacial period. Flint artefacts unearthed at Pakefield in Suffolk may well be in the region of 700,000 years old that, together with the Happisburgh footprints, suggests that what is today East Anglia was a relatively busy place during the Pleistocene.6

Regrettably, no such traces of human life from that distant time have ever been discovered in Cornwall, let alone around the Helford. It is unlikely they ever will be. It seems evident that very early human activity in the British Isles was heavily weighted towards the east of present-day England. This is unsurprising. Rather than a gradual process of colonisation, the ‘Old Stone Age’ was a series of temporary incursions into what would one day become the British Isles as the climate waxed and waned. The low-lying plains now beneath the North Sea and eastern English Channel were once a Palaeolithic thoroughfare.

These ancient immigrants undertook the journey solely in pursuit of survival. It is therefore unsurprising that the majority of our nation’s Palaeolithic finds have been made in the east and south-east; a relatively flat landscape where the hunter-gatherer would maximise their chances of survival. Trawlers in the North Sea often haul in prehistoric ‘catches’ of bones from mammoth, bison, elk and even rhinoceros. These were happy hunting grounds indeed, and it is to be expected that archaeological finds are concentrated on the fringes that have remained above the waves.

However, it would be foolish to entirely discount the possibility of human habitation as far west as the present-day Helford river area in Palaeolithic times, and especially during the ‘upper’ period between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. It is entirely reasonable to suggest that sites occupied by pioneers upon a coastal plain now lie unseen beneath sea and sediment. A child collecting pebbles on a Cornish beach may yet one day rewrite the story of the south-west peninsula with a solitary piece of curious worked flint; Palaeolithic tools are notoriously difficult to identify as they often lack the definitive lines and fine working of later Stone Age crafting. Most importantly, there would have been several windows of opportunity for early humans to reach the area of land that constitutes present-day Cornwall, and not least during the warm interglacial period known as the Ipswichian which reached its peak around 125,000 years ago. This was the time when hippopotamuses were supposed to have bathed in the waters of the Thames and other British rivers, so perhaps the concept of the occasional adventurous prehistoric soul on the Lizard Peninsula should not be considered too fanciful.

If we are to believe that the west of Cornwall was too far from the overland bridge from continental Europe, the same must have been true of North and West Wales. And yet in both places relics have been found that prove otherwise. The Red Lady of Paviland – actually the skeleton of a young man – found in a cave on the Gower Peninsula in 1823 lived around 33,000 years ago.7 More remarkable still were the remains of a young Neanderthal boy discovered at Bontnewydd in North Wales during 1981, and subsequently found to be around 230,000 years old.8 Their forebears clearly conquered geological barriers no less challenging than those to reach Cornwall. And yet these scraps of circumstantial evidence are but an aside when one takes into account that the south-west of England possesses two revered Palaeolithic sites of its own: Gough’s Cave at Cheddar in Somerset, and Kents Cavern near Torquay in Devon. Are we to dismiss the possibility that the ancestors of whoever fashioned the tools found at the latter were able to migrate a mere 70 miles further west over a period of 1,000 years or more? It is inconceivable that they did not. To do so would require that we overlook the fact that not one of the three glacial maximums to affect the British Isles in the past half a million years – the Anglian, Wolstonian, and Devensian respectively – resulted in ice sheets covering present-day Cornwall. This is not to suggest that the environment at such times was conducive to human habitation, but simply that the thaw would have set in sooner around the south-western coastline than elsewhere.

For now, though, we must content ourselves with the knowledge that the feet that trod the ground and crossed the early streams of the Helford River area between 500,000 and 12,000 years ago were less those of people, and more of deer and auroch. The wolf and bear were kings of the ancient landscape here, not man. On the basis of known finds and their relative frequency across the British Isles, it is patently more reasonable to conclude that the west of Cornwall was merely ‘quieter’ in Palaeolithic terms rather than being wholly devoid of human voices. After all, some flint artefacts bearing the hallmarks of being fashioned in that far-off time have indeed been pulled from the ground in the past few centuries: a Greensand chert hand axe was found on the Lizard Peninsula during the nineteenth century, while flint fragments and flakes discovered just south of the Helford near St Keverne are also of probable Palaeolithic origin.9 Other lithics are said to be hidden from public view in private collections.

Of all stone tools of truly exceptional age known to have come to light within the realm of the Helford, the most notable is a simple hand axe from Trewardreva, Constantine. This precious implement, pale in colour and of perfect size and form for an adult palm, is more 200,000 years old and the most ancient artefact in the Royal Cornwall Museum. If only its creator could see it now. Surely only the most sceptical and sober historian would thus refuse to entertain the idea that the area was at least fleetingly visited by early man, Homo sapiens or otherwise, during the Old Stone Age. Regrettably, sobriety is very much required for those optimistic of definitive chance finds in future. Archaeological study is predicated upon context and, lamentably, the stratigraphic elements of surrounding rock and soil for possible Palaeolithic Cornish artefacts found to date are disputable. Without such compelling evidence we must accept the prospect that they came to rest in their respective locations during more recent times. We simply cannot draw firm conclusions that pass the rigorous tests required, no matter how much we might wish to. But it should not prevent us from hoping.

Unfortunately, while these deep Palaeoliths are potentially of immense significance in a wider geographical sense, they are of little relevance to the story of the river. This is not due to doubts over archaeological provenance, but for a far more fundamental reason: when they were fashioned by human hands the Helford did not yet exist. Its story – our story – was still thousands of years away from its opening lines.

For a man of science to have a crater on the moon named after him is an honour indeed, but the Swiss geologist Jean-Andre Deluc was more than worthy on several counts – not least his having been made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1773, to which he often contributed papers for its publication, Philosophical Transactions.

Deluc lived to the ripe old age of 90, an almost unheard of achievement for someone born during the 1700s, and appears to have spent the vast majority of it in rude health given his propensity for extended tours around Europe. One of the last of these sojourns included Devon and Cornwall where, by 1 August 1806, he had reached the Helford River. His host during his stay, the Rev. Richard Polwhele, appears to have been rather fond of the then 79-year-old, describing him as a ‘florid healthful old man – always cheerful – enthusiastically attached to the object of his pursuit’.10 Deluc had once described himself as ‘tracing the history of the Earth itself, from its own monuments’, and considered what he saw before him without fear of contravening the received wisdom of the time. He had put his mind to many great matters during his life, and had even acted as reader to Queen Charlotte for more than forty years, but the complexities of rock and stone were his principal concern. The earth beneath his feet was a riddle he sought to solve.

In Geological Travels: Travels in England, Vol. III, Deluc recalled his couple of days in the company of Polwhele, describing the journey he took along the southern bank of the river as one ‘continually ascending and descending’. Crossing ‘combes which terminated at the gulph’, he was particularly struck by the heavy clay soils found in the area, but most of all by the inappreciable quantities of freshwater that trickled into the creeks:

At Gweek I saw a promontory terminating a ridge of hills, from one side of which the Hel arrives, and from the other a brook that joins it; but these when united form only a small stream, though flowing in a very wide space. We were told by people on the spot that at the spring tides the water rises up to this point; that when it ebbs, it leaves uncovered a space of seven miles in length, extending on the outer side of the gulph, and consisting entirely of mud, through which the little river preserves its course; and that this ground is still continuing to be raised by the sediments of the river and of the tides. Thus it cannot certainly have been by the actions of these waters that an arm of the sea has here been formed between hills.11

He was correct, or at least up to a point. Then as now, the relatively modest volume of water entering the creeks seems barely adequate to cut a valley as wide as the Helford. But, in mitigation, Deluc neither had the benefit of discoveries in climatology made in recent years, nor full understanding of the vast expanse of time over which they had been flowing without abeyance. He was, however, astute enough to appreciate that the river is precisely where it is on account of a remarkable sequence of geological events.

That which lies beneath the estuary and its surrounding landscape is a melange of rock types that vary with extraordinary regularity, no matter where one begins and whichever direction one then chooses to proceed. Without these variations, and the sequence of events that bore them, it could never have been formed. The geology directly below the main body of the Helford is entirely sedimentary or metasedimentary in origin, largely being siltstones, sandstones and mudstones of the ‘Portscatho Formation’ – a slender band that also underlies the Carrick Roads and River Fal. These unassuming slates, sometimes referred to as Greywacke, are far more ancient than the granite for which Cornwall is so famous. Nearly 400 million years old, they were formed by the compression of earthy detritus deposited by ancient watercourses.12 Subsequently becoming part of an abyssal plain at the bottom of a primeval ocean, these rocks existed when what would one day become the south-west of England was still south of the equator. They may appear mundane, but almost every pebble to be found upon the river’s beaches has been on a truly momentous journey.

This slow, inexorable process of sedimentation continued through the late Devonian Period and into the Carboniferous; a time before the emergence of the dinosaurs when only the most primitive of vertebrates had colonised the land. However, this relatively stable geological period came to an abrupt end around 290 million years ago with a colossal mountain-building event that would ultimately result in the creation of the supercontinent Pangea. The effects on what is now the British Isles were profound. Although the Variscan Orogeny owes its name to an ancient term for a part of Saxony in modern-day Germany, few places derive as much of their actual form from this seismic event as Devon and Cornwall. Its relics are Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor, Land’s End, and all other granite outcrops of the south-west peninsula. These are the observable summits of the vast Cornubian Batholith, which sits beneath these exposed tips like an iceberg hidden below the waterline. And yet there are disparities even within the granite mass itself: at Land’s End the rock is almost exclusively coarse-grained, while that underlying St Austell varies between coarse, fine, and rarer medium-grained types.

Closer to the Helford’s shores, the primary consequence of the Variscan Orogeny was the formation of minor faults: the Carrick Thrust along its northern edge cutting through Polwheveral and Port Navas Creeks; the Veryan Thrust below the southern shore dividing the main river from Gillan Creek; and the more distant Lizard Thrust slicing through much of the Helford’s lower catchment. All are inextricably linked to the disproportionate number of tiny earthquakes that affect the area. Most are barely noticeable, but on occasions they are manifestly obvious if not at all threatening. Almost all those recorded since the beginning of the twentieth century have been centred close to Polwheveral and Polpenwith Creeks. A few have occurred beneath the lands south of the river, with one near Mawgan-in-Meneage in April 1898 resembling ‘the roll of some heavy conveyance, with a distinctly felt vibration within a radius of several miles’.13 They are the faint echoes of what occurred all those millions of years ago; the Variscan Orogeny still murmurs from time to time.

The almost circular Carnmenellis granite outcrop to the north was fundamental to the genesis of the infant Helford. Its observable legacy can be clearly seen where the strata of the sedimentary rocks along the shoreline have been lifted to rest at unnatural angles. Through these tilted beds of siltstones and coarse-grained sandstones are ancient fissures filled with once molten rock whose names could easily have been penned by a fantasy novelist – Elvan and Lamprophyre Dykes occur in several places throughout the Helford River basin. The former include the Greenstone favoured by Neolithic axe makers and medieval stonemasons alike, while the latter is a darker and more austere rock than its title might have one believe. Most importantly, it was this same granite intrusion that delivered later human inhabitants the mineral wealth upon which settlements were founded and prospered.

To the north of the river, in the parishes of Constantine and Mawnan, it is possible to sense the change from gentler metamorphic geology to the harder granitic type over a short distance. In some places one might observe the change along the length of a single field. The soil closer to the shore tends to possess a higher clay content, but the ground quickly becomes darker, coarser, and more free draining the further north one moves towards the Carnmenellis outcrop. Unsurprisingly, these localised variations influenced the vernacular architecture until the advent of brick and block, and for some length of time afterwards in places. For thousands of years the walls of houses were built exactly from what they stood upon, and it is no surprise to discover that most of the oldest buildings in parishes such as Mawnan and Manaccan are made of cob, slate killas, or a combination of both. Meanwhile, the pre-twentieth century buildings of Constantine are largely dominated by granite from the same local quarries that once directly, or indirectly, employed most of its inhabitants. These ‘upland’ cottages are robust in stature and hard-edged, yet still pleasing to the eye where original features have been retained. Those of ‘lowland’ cob are undeniably prettier – each as unique as the hands that moulded them – and were usually built immediately alongside the very finest source of clay in the parish. Most that survived demolition or decay have since been roofed with slate in the past century, but a few are blessed with the thatch they were intended to support. As Sabine Baring-Gould once opined, cob is ‘the warmest, snuggest, driest material of which a house can be built; a material, which when used as a garden wall, ripens peaches, grapes, apricots on its warm surface. It sucks in the sun’s rays as a sponge, and gives out the heat all night. Stand by a cob wall after a bright day, when white frost is forming on the grass, and you feel a warm exhalation streaming from the dry clay’.14

Although cob-built cottages are common on both sides of the river, their prevalence declines rapidly at the point at which the underlying slates give way to harder rocks. While this change is pronounced to the north, the lands to the south are a more complicated affair. Although the main body of the river lies atop Devonian siltstones, Gillan Creek cuts through what is known as the Meneage Breccia formation. This eclectic combination of rock types sees the sedimentary reinforced by the metamorphic; mudstones combine with greenstone and the quartzite formed during the Ordovician Period around 450 million years ago. But the area within which the Helford’s southern tributaries rise is more remarkable still. ‘A geologist approaching the solution of the question of the Lizard Rocks’, wrote one nineteenth-century observer, ‘ought to be armed with every possible knowledge in department of his science, in other words, an impossibility is asked of a single man.’15 Two hundred years later they remain a source of wonderment.

Along a line between the fishing village of Porthallow in the east and Polurrian Cove in the west runs a boundary fault below which can be found a miscellany of serpentine, gneiss, gabbro, and hornblende schist. All are born of Earth’s ancient furnaces, and together they represent an entirely distinct realm from not only the Helford, but Cornwall and the rest of England. This ‘Ophiolite Complex’ is, in layman’s terms, part of the Earth’s ancient oceanic crust and upper mantle that was forced upwards and laid flat upon its surface. Indeed, on the beach at Coverack, some 6 miles to the south of Helford, it is possible to walk across the actual boundary between crust and mantle; a frontier that goes by the almost unpronounceable name of the ‘Mohorovičić discontinuity’.

The wonders of the Lizard Complex never cease. Mullion Island is the product of lava cooling on the ocean floor more than 350 million years ago, while at Polurrian there are rocks folded by violent tectonic forces unleashed when continents collided. And below Lizard Point itself are to be found Man of War gneisses that, at perhaps 500 million years old, are the most ancient rocks in the south-west of the British Isles.16 Unsurprisingly, this diversity in geology leads to attendant variations in soil and the flora that takes root within it. Magnesium-rich serpentines and gabbro abound with types of slow-growing calcicoles more often associated with chalk grasslands: bloody cranesbill, dropwort, fleabane and black bog rush among them. But the presence of the Hottentot-fig, on the other hand, is evidence that the rock below is most certainly not serpentine and far more likely to be schist or gneiss.17

These geological variations created the blueprint for the Helford River, but it required the climate to fashion it. Flanked by hard and unforgiving rocks to the north and south, the sedimentary band that underlies the estuary was gradually worn down by rainwater gathering into little streams, sometimes torrents, over millions of years. Water is unforgiving in its pursuit of eroding the weakest first, always taking the path of least resistance. In this sense Andre De Luc was wrong, but he can be wholly forgiven on account that knowledge of glaciation events would not become fully known until more than half a century after his death.

Some 50 million years after a slow decline in global temperatures had commenced, the Earth entered the Pleistocene Epoch and a series of ice ages. These periods of rapid climate change are the primary cause of the water-eroded valleys of the Helford and almost every other river in Europe. And while the ice sheets never reached this particular part of the British Isles during the most recent freezes, there is evidence of their effect to be found close to the water’s edge in many places.

When the celebrated geologist Sir Henry de la Beche studied the area around the Helford River in the late 1830s, he made note of the ‘head’ deposits and ‘raised beaches’ to be found near both Rosemullion Head and Nare Point:

… hills of hard rocks rise behind them, showing that not only a considerable decomposition of such rocks have taken place since these beaches were elevated above the present level of the sea, but also that there has been a great movement of the decomposed surfaces of the hills downwards, covering up all inequalities that presented themselves and rendering the surface more smooth than would otherwise happen.18

What De la Beche had observed was a bed of angular shattered slates formed through incessant freeze-thaw action during the bitterest periods of recent ice ages. Upon these can often be seen loess, a slender layer of fine wind-blown material from when the climate was particularly cold, dry, and the raw prevailing winds blew from the north. Conversely, the raised beaches owe their existence to the warmer interglacial periods when the sea level was higher than today. It is true that the present-day Helford is merely a modest resurrection of a long-disappeared river of greater length and depth, but it would never have been seen by human eyes.