380 THE CORNWALL COAST pices, and there are often outlying reefs of cruel jagged crag. Noting the deadly features of the coast, we can understand how even Bude attained its name of Haven, however bitterly ironic that name may often have sounded. But it is a grand coast and mainland confronting the wild, unresting sea, and the traditional atmosphere of the district is wholly in keeping Avith its physical features. Rumours of bygone peoples float around us — of Saxon and Celt and of earlier people still ; the legends that they fostered are repeated to us, the footsteps of old saints may be traced, together with secular records of pirate and smuggler. There are memories of glorious and gracious personages, as well as of those whose villainy at least was picturesque ; there are sad memorials of shipwreck, death, and heartbreak. There are stretches of undulating upland, with fragrant turf, gorse, bracken ; valleys almost too low for sunlight to enter, the wild and tortuous mouths of rapid streams, patches of meadow and pasture, with lonely cottages and isolated church-towns. Different from the southern coast in aspect, more desolate, less fertile, there is yet a special charm even in the desolation, a stimulating appeal in the solitude, and a marvellous purity in the bracing winds that blow, sometimes with ruth- less violence, from a thousand leagues of ocean.
