Jessie Mothersole
The Isles of Scilly
Their Story Their Folk & Their Flowers
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066219086
Table of Contents
V DESCRIPTIVE AND ARCHÆOLOGICAL
VI THE ISLAND-FOLK: THEIR WAYS AND CUSTOMS
XIII ST. MARTIN’S AND ITS NEIGHBOURS
BOOKS REFERRED TO OR QUOTED FROM IN THE FOREGOING PAGES
I
INTRODUCTORY
A “COLOUR-BOOK” on Scilly needs no apology, so far as the subject is concerned, for there is no corner of Great Britain which more demands or deserves a tribute to its colour than do these little islands, scattered about in the Atlantic twenty-eight miles from the Land’s End.
For they are all colour; they gleam and glow with it; they shimmer like jewels “set in the silver sea.” No smoke from city, factory, or railway contaminates their pure air, or dims the brilliancy of their sunshine. They are virgin-isles, still unspoiled and inviolate in this prosaic age, when beauty and charm are apt to flee before the path of progress.
And though their compass is but small, the same cannot be said of their attraction, which seems to be almost in inverse proportion to their size. Scilly exerts a spell over her lovers which brings them back and back, again and yet again, across that stretch of the “vasty deep” which separates her from Cornwall. In this case it might almost better be called the “nasty deep,” for very nasty this particular stretch can be, as all Scillonians know!
Nor do the islands lack variety. There are downs covered with the golden glory of the gorse, with the pink of the sea-thrift, with the purple of the heather; there are hills clothed with bracken breast-high in summer, and changing from green-gold to red-gold as the year advances; there are barren rocks on which the sea-birds love to gather; there are lovely beaches of white sand, strewn with many-coloured shells and seaweed; there are clusters of palm-trees growing with Oriental luxuriance, next to fields and pastures where the sheep and cattle feed; there are bare and dreary-looking moors, “the sad sea-sounding wastes of Lyonnesse”; there are stretches of loose sand, some planted with long grass to keep the wind from lifting it, some with a mantle of mesembryanthemum, which here grows wild like a weed;—and all of them seen against a background of that wonderful and ever-changing sea, which is sometimes the pale blue of the turquoise, sometimes the deepest ultramarine, sometimes again shimmering silver or radiant gold. And then in spring there are the famous flower-fields. Let us visit the islands on an April day, and see for ourselves this harvest of gold and silver. For once we will be day-trippers in fancy though we would scorn to be in fact.
Here in Scilly we find land and sea flooded with spring sunshine, while on the “adjacent island” which we have just left every one is lamenting the cold and the rain. The flower-harvest is nearly over, yet still there are wide fields of dazzling white and yellow, and many hundreds of boxes will yet leave the quay for the mainland. The sweet-smelling Ornatus narcissus is now at its best, and its perfume fills the air. Arum-blossoms, thousands of them in a single field, stand stiffly waiting to be cut, while in the more exposed places late daffodils linger, nodding their yellow heads in the breeze that comes in from the sea. Everywhere there are flowers, flowers, flowers—such a wealth of flowers as one never saw before; and every one is either picking flowers, tying flowers, packing flowers, selling flowers, buying flowers, or talking of flowers. Even the tiny children can tell you the difference between a “ ‘natus” and a “Pheasant Eye”; and will talk wisely in a way to awe the less enlightened visitor of “Cynosures,” “Sir Watkins,” and “Peerless Primroses.”
It is barely thirty years since these sweet flower-fields first began to cover the islands. The “oldest inhabitant,” a great-grandmother of ninety-six (she died in 1913), would call to mind the kelp-making industry which occupied the people in her young days. “Eh,” she would say, “it was not a nice employ; things are better as they are.” And we can easily believe that she was right; for instead of the fragrance of the flowers the air was then filled with the thick and acrid smoke of the burning seaweed; and it was but a poor living at the best that could be made out of it.
There is now hardly a boatman in the islands who does not add to his income by having a patch of ground planted with the “lilies,” as they call them, and sending his boxes of blooms to market during the season.
But flower-growing is not the only industry of the islands. If you ask your boatman to name others as they affect himself, he will probably answer naïvely, “Fishing and visitors”; and he may also add that sometimes he is employed as a “potter.” Although the dictionary allows no other meaning to this word than “a maker of earthen vessels,” let not your imagination be betrayed into picturing a lump of wet clay and a flying wheel! It is crab and lobster pots that are in question, and quantities of these crustaceans are caught round the islands and sold to French merchants.
THE OLDEST INHABITANT
[Pg 16] [Pg 17]
Then there is the mackerel fishery, which is at its height in May and June, when St. Mary’s Pool is full of the picturesque, brown-sailed fishing-boats from Mount’s Bay.
The other “industry” mentioned by the boatmen, that is to say “visitors,” is carried