Page:Cornwall (Salmon).djvu/145

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GUNNISLAKE—GURNARD'S HEAD

migrated to Brittany; and in this country he founded and became Abbot of Landevenech. The church, standing among the sand-dunes in one of Cornwall's most lonely districts, is a campanile church (there are at least half a dozen such in the duchy); its detached belfry is on a solid slope of rock to the W. It is difficult to understand why such isolated and wild situations should have been chosen for churches; we can best account for it by regarding these churches as the successors of hermitages and cells whose early occupants specially sought such spots. Three fine cinerary urns of the Bronze Age were found here in 1878. In the graveyard of this little fifteenth century building, often dashed by the spray of the sea in stormy weather, lie many of those who have been wrecked on the pitiless coast. Among many such wrecks, that of the sloop Primrose in 1807, when only a boy escaped, may particularly be remembered.

Gurnard's Head (7 m. N. of Penzance) is a fine headland, much resorted to by tourists, but not in reality more beautiful than many a spot along this coast. The air here is very delightful, combining as it does the fragrances of turf and fern and bush with the bracing freshness of the Atlantic. As at the Logan-stone headland in the S., there is a Dinas or entrenchment here, and, singularly enough, the little hamlet is in both cases called Treryn (or Treen). Similarity of position may doubtless account for similarity of name; and there seems to have been a line of

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