The Scilly Isles are very lovely, perhaps the loveliest part of this lovely county. The climate is mild and equable, the constant breeze prevents too great a heat, while the rigours of winter, thanks to the warm sea-water, are unknown. Seabirds breed on the great rocks, the earth is of a marvellous fertility, and beyond, far below the horizon, the next land is that of another island--Newfoundland!
The sea has encroached within late years on the eastern shores of Mount's Bay, but the harbourage is good, and a fine fleet of fishing-vessels sails from here. There are echoes of unpleasantness with regard to Sunday fishing on the part of strangers. As the Newlyn man put it: "Sunday fishing is wicked, and what's more it spoils our market."
At the head of the bay is Gulval, near which lies the Ding Dong Mine, famous as the oldest in Cornwall, so old indeed that it has long since (1880) retired into private life. About seventy years since, a number of Roman and Alexandrian coins of the third and fourth centuries were found near this mine. It is quite possible that the Romans themselves worked Ding Dong and Ting Tang, and other of the old mines. A stone inscribed with the names of Constantine and his son is still preserved at St. Hilary: "Imperatore Cæsare Flavio Valerio Constantino Pio Cæsare nobilissimo divi Constantii Pii Augusti Filio." As Constantine the Great was Cæsar in 306 and became Augustus in 307, this inscription fixes the date of the stone as belonging to the first of those years. When draining a piece of land between Penzance and Marazion, the workmen came upon about a thousand Roman coins of that date; indeed, under stones or buried in urns various large hoards of brass, copper, and lead money have been discovered by old tinworks, and every now and then fine gold and silver coins of Trajan, Nero, and the later emperors.
St. Michael's Mount, which is principally composed of granite, is 190 ft. high and about a mile round. It is said that the members of the St. Aubyn family, to whom it now belongs--having been sold to them by the Bassets--are not considered able to look after themselves in the water until they have swum completely round the Mount.[4]
However imposing the great rock looked when the waves from which it emerged wore the summer green of beech-leaves, it could not have had so great a dignity as now. Fortified from an early date, it soon fell into the hands of the Church, and was presently garrisoned by monks. But so fine a stronghold could not be held sacred to spiritual warfare, and in 1191 a party of soldiers disguised themselves as pilgrims and, so obtaining admission to the fortress, turned on their unarmed hosts and expelled them. From that date the place took part in any little war that might be convulsing the rest of the country, and even started--as in 1548--little wars and rebellions of its own. Henry VIII., who had a most fatherly care for his coast defences, erected batteries here; and during the Civil Wars it belonged in turn to whichever party had the upper hand. Its history, indeed, is a continual change of owners, of fierce sieges, stratagems, plunderings, and hairbreadth escapes. Now it is an old grey rock, which after many vicissitudes has fallen asleep in the sun. The only very ancient part still in existence is the piece of Saxon walling pierced by the principal doorway, and the wonder is, not that there is so little, but that one stone should have been left upon another.