Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/192

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186
THE CORNWALL COAST

Much foolish restoration has done irreparable damage, but the church is still beautiful in design and detail; unhappily the screen was badly mutilated, and many bench-ends destroyed. When Blight wrote his admirable book on the churches of West Cornwall the Miserere seats could be raised; later, they were very stupidly fixed down. On the floor of the tower lies the ancient tomb of "Clarice La Femme Cheffrei De Bolleit," with an inscription in Norman-French characters of the thirteenth century, begging visitors to pray for her soul, and promising a ten days' pardon to those who do so; there can be no harm in our testing the efficacy of this offer. The tower that rises above this remarkably interesting grave is 90 feet in height, and as the church itself stands high it forms a fine landmark. Outside there is a shaftless cross of Celtic appearance, but not supposed to be Celtic in origin, though it certainly may have been adapted from a Celtic original. There is another old cross outside the churchyard gate, which may perhaps at one time have been included within the sacred pale, as traces of burial have been found. But churchyards were not often diminished in this manner, and the graves must probably be otherwise accounted for. In the church is an altar-cloth, now rarely used, worked by two maiden ladies more than two centuries since.

St. Buryan is familiar to all visitors to the Land's End, as the cars usually make it a halting-place. Even more famous, and perhaps more attractive to the conventional sight-seer, is the Logan Stone of Treryn, or Treen; but what makes this spot truly worth seeing is not the mass of poised rock, which certainly stirs