A stroll through Kevrinek to the cove

 Most of the focus and interaction in Book 1, The Homecoming, and 2 Chamber of the Dead takes place in, around or beneath Chy nans. I’m standing outside the front of the old house, which seems to be wearing a permanent frown, grey mullioned windows rising three floors to an extravagant overhanging roofline that casts a shadow, rather like huge eyebrows, adding to the disapproving look. Turning around, a long, straight drive splices two huge granite columns, slightly off-centre, or is that an illusion, like remnants from Stonehenge, the gap crazily narrow for no apparent reason. 

Easier to head through the house than to take the pathway to the side. God, the door hinges need oiling, although the last attempt made little impression. It’s colder inside than out, the hall sulking, the fireplace crying out for an inferno, later perhaps. Through the silent kitchen and mercifully out into a fresh breeze by the scullery door, below stretches an unkempt lawn and, to the right, a wide patio outside the grandly named Morning Room, beyond which the land slopes steeply away to a labyrinth of twisted trees and bushes, the quivering marsh out of sight but not of mind. 

The path sweeps away to our left and into an archway of oak trees, the Old Buildings now peeping from behind a bank of low bushes, the sound of rooks anxious in the crisp November afternoon air. Every time I come here, where Tegan and I played as children for countless days and nights, the reverence of the place never fails to create and air of quietness if not serenity. 

There is a subtle difference, nothing about the whole area around Kevrinek seeming entirely at peace. Having said that, the further we get from the house itself, named “The Retreat” according to our research, when the place was, apparently, used, as the name implies, as a ‘House of ease’ by the monks of Bodmin Priory, the oppressive intensity moderates. Why was the new house built, when these Old Buildings probably pre-date the ‘new’ building by no more than a hundred years? I see and hear the rituals of daily worship in my imagination, plaintive and faintly reassuring. 

Now we’ve reached the top of the valley itself. Within just a few steps, we stand in the cathedral of Kevrinek, an arched roof of trees some twenty-feet above our heads, the sky clearly visible today although, in a few months, fresh green leaves will filter through the spring sun, bathing the stream in dappled light. The stream itself tumbles, albeit with dignity, among rocks and hassocks of grass and stone, chattering gleefully in one moment, more gravely as the undergrowth covers a bend in the watercourse. I can now just hear, but cannot yet see, a restless murmur from the mighty Atlantic beyond the lower valley door of Kevrinek. 

The stream gradually gathers pace as we step through the archway into open country, to be met by strengthening breeze, the chatter of gurgling water swallowed up by what manifests as distant applause as an army of breakers scramble to the shore at Tremerryn. 

A small stone bridge spans the eager stream as it explodes, ever downwards, towards the foreshore, our path taking us to the remains of the harbour, my cottage the first of three perilously close to a vertical drop to the harbour floor. All that remains of the harbour itself, once a hive of activity in the heyday of mining, is this one section, the outer claw now mostly in ruins, only visible when the tide is especially low, but not so today. 

To the left, the smooth, virgin sand of Tremerryn stretches away in an arc to a cave-arch below a promontory, defying the fury of the Atlantic. How much longer can it hold out I wonder? This is where I go to sing, to play guitar and to rearrange my thoughts. The patchwork of low rocks, a whole eco-system of pools and caves, were a perfect creative playground when Tegan and I were home together, long magical summers stretching before us, Kevrinek, the Old Buildings and the cove surely as close to perfection as could be wished for. 

I hope you can feel the sun and a cool breeze on your faces, the salty sting of the ocean mingling with fragrance from the grass on the clifftops, the life ahead brimming with promise, the mysteries of sixteenth-century Chy Nans still sleeping, but for how long? 

Jon Penryn – mikeanthonywrites.com