The Rise and Fall of Crugmeer
and Its Rebirth

Donald R. Rawe and D. Good, R. Richason, G. Lee-McKay

The following article was written in the early 1970s by Donald Riley Rawe, one of Cornwall's most celebrated writers of its culture during the late 20^th century. Donald was noted in the “Gorseth Kernow” as a “Byrth Noweth”, or “New Bard” of Cornwall at Perranzabuloe in 1970, and was well known as the Editor of the “Cornish Review” for many years. Among his many publications and articles were “Cornish Church Poems”, “Padstow's Obby Oss and May Day Festivities”, and many, many more during a lifetime of examining the essence of Cornish culture. His research was well worthy of academic recognition, and should Cornwall ever have its own, truly independent University of Cornwall, it could do no worse than issue an honorary Doctorate in his memory. In that spirit we present, with only minor editorial commentary, one of Douglas Rawe's best articles from the “Cornish Review” about the village of Crugmeer, threatened in the 21^st century by intrusive developers. Although over 30 years old, Douglas R. Rawe has his riposte for those alive now who enjoy Crugmeer and its magnificent landscape while being ignorant of its heritage). D. Good, Professor Emeritus – Geography, B. Richason, Professor Emeritus – Geography, G. Lee-McKay – Ph.D. Geography and Archaeology

Well off main roads, out on a hump of bleak North Cornish headland, is a hamlet of neither majesty nor obvious charm: farm buildings blotched with golden lichen; seven inhabited houses and two unoccupied, one of them now used as a grain store; two more abandoned and in a state of collapse, their rafters sticking out like spars of a ship in distress. Evidence of other cottages, now lost, reveals itself in low walls overgrown by mooorgrass and bramble. Crugmeer, a mile and a half from Padstow, has certainly seen better days.

Yet the air of decay is superficial and misleading, for in several senses the place is reviving. There are actually two farms here, small but efficient, known as Great Crugmeer and Little Crugmeer. A closer look shows that the inhabited houses and cottages of Crugmeer are trim and attractively colour-washed. One of these houses a chemist, his wife and aged relatives; he has a flourishing business nine miles away at Wadebridge. A recently converted stone dwelling has a lounge extension with flat roof giving a panoramic view to the north and east: Stepper and Pentire (Pentyre) points, the Camel estuary and the uplands beyond. This is the abode of a retired couple, one of man who have selected Cornwall and of the increasing few who favour a secluded inland position.

Only one farm worker now lives here, the last of generations of his family who have worked this land. His employer, Ernest Geach, of Great Crugmeer Farm, comes of a long line of Cornish tenant farmers. The old and the new sections of this tiny community exist side-by-side with neither hostility nor amiability: a state of mutually veiled suspicion, their conversations limited to passing the time of day and occasional complaints about locked gates on the one hand or loose dogs on the other. Until some sixty years ago Crugmeer was a busy hamlet of farmers, labourers, wives and children. Now the old pattern has gone and a new one, giving life and meaning has not yet emerged.

To trace the rise and fall of Crugmeer we should go back to the beginning, which as far as is known was in the later Neolithic and early Bronze Ages. A high shoulder of land against the south-east of the hamlet marks an immense burial chamber, giving the place its still unchanged name: Crig = barrow; meor = great: the Great Barrow. Two of the fields of Great Crugmeer Farm are called Dinas and Little Dinas; a dinas being a camp or fortified hill. Below Little Crugmeer is the two hundred feet deep gorge of Tregudda, through which the tide trumpets twice daily (Tre = homestead; Gadon = battles: The Place of the Battles). Here from pre-Celtic times copper has been mined, from adits driven deep into the cliff-face. Immediately north of Tregudda is Gunver Head (Goon = downs, or pasture, veor = great: the Great Pasture). Here, over what until recent times was known as Guddra or Crugmere Common, a mild dispute exists between the parish council and the squire over grazing rights.

During the Bronze and Iron Ages (700 B.C. To 200 A.D.) the whole of the peninsula on which Crugmeer stands, from Tregirls Cove, on the east to Tregudda on the west, was an encampment. Hundreds of flints and sherds, even complete urns, have been found here. The fortifications ran across the neck of the headland, and within them the tribal community retired with their flocks and herds each night.

The pattern of fortified headlands extends all around the coast of Cornwall, from Tintagel to Land's End and up to Rame. They were the safest dwelling places for a people who were not afraid of the sea, and who indeed used it as their means of communication and trade. During the 1967 excavations at the Rumps on Pentire, across the Camel Estuary, the Cornwall Archaeological Society found evidence that the Veneti (the tribe occupying the impressive cliff fortress) possessed an extensive fleet of ships. It is most likely that the people occupying Stepper were a clan of the same tribe, and their craft would have been harboured in what is now Hawker's Cove.

Trevose Head, three miles to the west, was another fortified headland (Tre = homestead; foss = ditch or trench). Bedruthan, Penhale Point, Treryn Dinas, the Dodman and many other all retain clear evidence of the wall-and-ditch system of defence used by the Celts. Here and in their circular hill-top forts, such as Castle-an-Dinas, near St. Columb, and Kelly Rings, near Wadebridge, the early Britons evidently accepted exposure to wind and weather so as to obtain commanding positions over their enemies (the pre-Celtic people they superseded, and wild animals, including wolves and bears); although there is no evidence that in general the climate of Britain was kinder at that period.

Somewhere in the camp walls a great gate would be found, to be lowered and raised to allow the passage of the sheep and cattle. At the approach of winter all but a few young breeding beasts would be killed off, and at the great autumn feast (Hallowe'en) the tribe would gorge themselves. Very close at hand is Porthmissen Bay (Porth = port or landing place; mesen = acorns: the acorn port). Here a submerged oak forest has been seen at very low tides amid the shifting sands; acorns were important fodder for animals. The Stepper gate-site has been ploughed over a thousand times, and may never be rediscovered; but on the Rumps, which was inaccessible to medieval and modern farmers, the gateway has been located without difficulty, its two huge sockets in almost perfect condition under feet of turf.

During the Roman and early Christian eras (Christianity arrived here from Ireland and Wales during the fourth and fifth centuries) Crugmeer became the central point of the encampment, the main town of the headland dwellers. Though depending mainly on cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, they also gre crops, fished and mined for copper and silver. Swerving across their skyline the Great Barrow dominated everything, and in its shadow they lived and worshiped their tribal gods. But by the end of the fifth century, St. Samson, one of the first Cornish hermits, was building his tiny oratory at Lelissick (Lan = cell; lesyk = bushy: the hermitage in the woods). St. Petroc, the great missionary from Wales, a prince who had renounced his kingdom, sent him out into the world to convert the heathen. His first converts may well have been the people of Crugmeer, his nearest neighbours.

St. Petroc's monastery at Padstow, during the three centuries following the abbot's death, grew in power and importance until it commanded lands all over northern Cornwall; yet it never acquired the piece of land immediately to its north, the Stepper Point promontory on which Crugmeer stands. Why this is so is hardly clear to us; but a bleak headland with comparatively poor soil did not apparently attract the busy brothers, who were concerned with overseas trading and developing their port on the route from Ireland to Brittany, as well as with the glory of God. In 981 AD Padstow was burned by the Vikigs, and the monastery was moved inland to Bodmin; the eyes of the Priors turned in other directions, to richer inland acquisitions.

Left to itself, except for its commerce with Padstow, Crugmeer slumbered for centuries; but livelihoods continued to be made there, poor enough yet reasonable by Cornish standards. By the 16^th century it was worth mentioning on the first accurate maps of Britain. It was one of the two outlying hamlets of Padstow parish recorded by Christopher Saxton in 1579, and also appears on the maps of William Kip (1610), John Speed (1630), Jan Bane (1645), Jan Jansson (1646), Robert Marden (1695), Thomas Martyn (1749) and Thomas Kitchen (1755).

In 1615, one Thomas Vivian, of St. Columb Major in Cornwall is recorded as owning “one Acre Cornish in Cruckmeor” (A Cornish acre is four times as large as an English acre). This holding covered mainly moor and downland, rough grazing at the best of times, and was the property which became known later as Little Crugmeer Farm. The rental of Penlease Manor, dated 1659, records lands held “at Crugmeor in Padstow by Malachy Marten, aged 42, and Joan his mother, aged 60: rent iiis iiiid, a capon, a day, and vs for a heriot”. 3S, 4d a year for rent, with a cockerel and the value of a day's work added, plus 5s to pay on the tenants decease, may seem a modest enough charge even for those days. But the Martens of Crugmeer were not “nobodies”: Malachy's father, of the same Christian name, was Overseer of the Poor, and by his will of 1635 bequeathed a charity providing “40s annum for four sermons to be preached in the parish church, and to the Poor of this parish 40s per annum for ever, to be distributed amongst them as such sermon days.” (The charity is still extant, having now passed to the Padstow Charity Commissioners to administer as they determine.) The Marten family farmed Great Crugmeer down to the present day, when the daughter of the last farmer of that name married Ernest Geach.

The 19^th century parochial histories of Cornwall (William Penaluna, Joseph Polsue and Davies Gilbert) all describe Crugmeer as a flourishing hamlet, and one of the principal settlements of the parish. Several notable persons lived there, apart from the Martens. Among the Crugmeer “characters” was Phillip Tresocthick, a stone mason, whose slate headstones are a feature of Padstow churchyard. He taught algebra and Latin to local schoolboys in the evenings,often working on a tombstone as he did. This blameless man had a shrewish wife who plagued him constantly; wen the arguments waxed too high he would run out of the house shouting, for all to hear, that he was going to drown himself in the village well, though he never actually did.

Though theirs was an agricultural community, the people of Crugmeer depended as much as anyone in Cornwall on fish, their cheapest and and readiest form of protein: pilchards twenty a penny, mackerel twopence a dozen, were prices ruling as late as 1890. Meat was a dish tasted by the poop only once or twice a month, and then it was usually offal. On the days following a good catch the prevailing north-westerlies would bring the smell of Crugmeer's cooking fish into Padstow itself.

In 1824 a copper mine, one of the many which brought Cornwall fame as “the Copper Kingdom”, was opened up, working in the cliff face of Gunver Head, under the name Wheal Galway (Wheal = working, work place). Th conditions there were dangerous and the lodes, although rich, were mostly inaccessible; after five years the venture fell through. It was repeated in in 1856-57, under the spirited leadership of Captain William Tom, a manager apt to “Cry-up” his assets in highly mis-leading terms. Copper, silver and lead were mined; the people of Crugmeer watched, marvelling at the miners, the speculators, the drays bringing the ore daily through their hamlet; shook their heads and went on farming. They extended their land use across the down and out to the cliff, burning gorse and moving boulders as the did. The min failed after two more attempts, and they were left to themselves again.

But now events were moving against Crugmeer, and all small villages. Free trade brought in cheap corn from the Prairies (of North America: eds. Note), and farming suffered successive depressions in the 1860s and 1870s. Labourers and their families left, some of them for the towns, more for the America-bound schooners that sailed from Padstow, taking emigrants out and bringing grain and timber hime. In a new land they tried their luck, and few of them ever returned. By 1914 there were a mere 15 cottages in use, besides the farms; and a considerable area of grazing land near the cliffs was taken over by the R.N.A.S for use as an airfield. (Today the empty nissen shells of a RADAR station stand there, a relic of World War II; approximately 180 men were stationed at the site in World War I: eds. Note). In 1928, when Ernest Geach first came to farm Great Crugmeer, there were eleven dwellings in use. By 1945 there were only nine.

Thus Crugmeer would have soon become a true ghost village if properties had not been bought and rescued, some of them just in time, by newcomers with roots in neither Cornwall nor in farming. Feelings are understandably mixed about this result, but North Cornwall has long put aside its antipathy for “furriners” and the farmer's wives are not averse to supplementing their income by taking paying guests for the summer season. With long walks along some of the most glorious and secluded scenery on their doorstep, and the ubiquitous motor car to take them into the towns or beaches, the visitors who patronise this farmhouse accomodation are well satisfied. The only thing they appear entirely unaware of is the ancient and impressive history of the place.

Donald Rawe's closing words have come eerily true; since the 1970s, Crugmeer has been re-vitalised and re-born by the quiet investment of "furriners" who have fallen in love with the ancient landscape surrounding the hamlet. Some "second-home" owners are now seeing their grand-children enjoy a landscape that seems oblivious to time and the worst aspects of tourism. Recents attempts at "development" in Crugmeer are indicative of exactly those people Donald Rawe warned about thirty years ago, those "entirely unaware of...the ancient and impressive history of the place". A drive down the small track leading to Crugmeer, and then onto Lellisick, is to travel in the footsteps of the saints. And what St. Samson and St. Petroc understood over a thousand years ago is still relevant in the 21st century: the overwhelming sense of transition beteween land, sea and sky transcends the normal human sense.