HISTORY AND THE PARISH 157 



precipices. On the barrows themselves, which are either 

 isolated or in a group of two or three, grow thistle and 

 gorse. They command mile upon mile of cliff and sea. 

 In their sight the great headlands run out to sea and sink- 

 ing seem to rise again a few miles out in a sheer island, 

 so that they resemble couchant beasts with backs under 

 water but heads and haunches upreared. The cliffs are 

 cleft many times by steep-sided coves, some with broad 

 sand and shallow water among purple rocks, the outlet 

 of a rivulet; others ending precipitously so that the stream 

 suddenly plunges into the black sea among a huddle of 

 sunless boulders. Near such a stream there will be a grey 

 farm amid grey outbuildings — with a carved wooden eagle 

 from the wreckage of the cove, or a mermaid, once a 

 figure-head with fair long hair and round bosom, built 

 into the wall of a barn. Or there is a briny hamlet 

 grouped steeply on either side of the stream which gurgles 

 among the pebbles down to the feet of the bearded fisher- 

 man and the ships a-gleam. Or perhaps there is no stream 

 at all, and bramble and gorse come down dry and hot to 

 the lips of the emerald and purple pools. Deep roads 

 from the sea to the cliff-top have been worn by smuggler 

 and fisherman and miner, climbing and descending. In- 

 land shows a solitary pinnacled church tower, rosy in the 

 warm evening — a thin line of trees, long bare stems and 

 dark foliage matted — and farther still the ridges of misty 

 granite, rough as the back of a perch. 



Of all the rocky land, of the sapphire sea white with 

 quiet foam, the barrows are masters. The breaking away 

 of the rock has brought them nearer to the sea as it has 

 annihilated some and cut off the cliff-ways in mid-career. 

 They stand in the unenclosed waste and are removed from 



