The church of Landewednack consists of nave, north aisle, and a south transept, which has a low side-window at the angle formed by its eastern wall and the wall of the nave. The font, dating from about 1404, is mounted on four modern pillars of polished serpentine. The bowl bears an inscription including the name of the rector at that period, "I.H.C. D. Ric. Bolham me fecit."
And now we come to Lizard Town. No one ever planned Lizard Town, any more than its houses were designed. They were merely built, and the "town," which is a simple collection of cottages and a hotel or two of sorts, is much smaller than many villages. Its population, including Landewednack, is only 683. Lizard Town simply grew at haphazard, on the extremity of the level, heather-clad waste of the Lizard promontory, and with so little directing hand or purposeful mind that its component houses form hardly any recognisable lines of streets, running in any definite directions. They may be fitly likened to a flock of sheep huddled together, facing all ways, to escape a tempest raging from all quarters at once. The population appears to a casual observer to consist wholly of families of Jose and Roberts, all inter-related, like the Cadgwith people, who are all either Janes or Stevenses. And they are nearly all workers in serpentine, whose little workrooms and shops are all of one peculiar pattern, with a small show-window closed at night by a hinged shutter. In every one of these shanties a lathe is at work shaping the rough serpentine rock down, and then turning it into one or other of the many ornamental articles exposed for sale in the windows: paper-weights, candlesticks, pen-trays, models of the Eddystone lighthouse and of Cornish crosses, and so forth; beautifully polished. "Serpentine" gets its name from the coloured streaks and patches it displays.
The "Lizard district" is the name given to all that boldly projecting peninsula south of the Helford River: the district that is properly "Meneage," the "stony district," but "Lizard" is only rightly applied to the actual headland. It has nothing to do with the reptile lizards, but is equal to the Welsh "Llidiart," indicating a rocky height. There is a Weston-under-Lizard in Staffordshire. The peninsula forms the most southerly projection of England, and the Lizard Point by day or the Lizard Light by night is the first glimpse homeward-bound voyagers obtain of old England from the decks of the great steamships passing up Channel. It is a wild, but scarcely picturesque land, consisting of a high, but level, plateau of heaths and moors. Goonhilly Downs, in its centre, in spite of their name, are not hilly, nor are they what we generally understand to be downs, but just gently undulating, or even flat, stretches of uncultivated and uncultivable land that by some are styled "dreary." But the justness or otherwise of that expression entirely depends upon the circumstances of the moment. Given bad weather, Goonhilly Downs and the whole Lizard peninsula are, indeed, dreary to the traveller, for shelter along the exposed roads, for the most part treeless, lonely, and quite innocent of hedges, is unobtainable for many miles; but in fine weather the purple heather, the occasional wooded hollows and the innumerable grey boulders scattered in these wilds, make a pleasant holiday jaunt. From a cycling point of view, the roads are perfection, and although dreariness is again the word when a cyclist strives along them in the teeth of a gale, to be blown mile after mile on a cycle with the wind is exhilarating. There are few villages here. Inland from Lizard Town you see the church-tower of Grade peering across the flats, but it is a village only of "farm-places." Grade church takes its name from St. Grada, Crida, or Credanus, a more or less mythical companion of St. Petroc, but it has been re-dedicated to Holy Cross.