Today is my first official bus ride to a tourist destination--St Michaels Mount, an hour or so to the west in Marazion (mar uh ZIE un) on the Cornwall coast.We are barely a few miles from Mullion when a seven-year-old girl behind me spots a seagull and screeches with delight. "Look!"
"I see it," says Grandma beside her. "Is that the same seagull you were singing to? Maybe it's looking for you." I instantly like this woman who encourages a child to commune with critters and to imagine possibilities that we adults often forget.
A few minutes later they stand up to take the stop just past Porthleven, about 6 miles out of Mullion, and pause to talk with me. The little girl is blonde, in shorts and tank top and a pink cotton hat that folds down in the back. We all smile at each other, they both wish me a happy holiday, and they wave goodbye to me from the side of the road as the bus pulls away. This brief but friendly interchange is just one of many that I've experienced here in the countryside. People greet me on the street, call me "love" and "darling," and label everything as "brilliant," "absolutely brilliant," or "magnificent." Very different from the diffidence of London and Bath.
Three preschool girls are now singing at back of the bus, a farm song that goes "The dog on the farm goes woof woof woof, woof woof woof, woof woof woof, the dog on the farm goes woof woof woof alllll daaaay lonnnng." On through cows, cats, chickens, geese, etc. Then one of the girls pipes up, "The people on the bus go up and down, up and down, up and down, the people on the bus go up and down allll daaay lonnng." Boy, does she have that right. The road we’re on is anything but smooth. The singers soon move on to Itsy Bitsy Spider, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and an "I love you...you love me" sung to the tune of Knick Knack Paddywhack, Give a Dog a Bone. Plays with my head, that one does.
The bus travels steadily along hedgerow lanes; I can't see much because the hedgerows are so high, but I can smell freshly mown hay, cow fields, and the sea.
Marazion is an ancient market town--I think the name even means "market." I witness an astonishing feat of bus navigation down its narrow lanes. A very wide propane fuel lorry is parked facing us on the left-hand side of the road, half on the sidewalk and half in the lane, leaving no space on the road for our wide-bodied bus. Our undaunted driver slows to about 10mph then heads right onto the right-hand sidewalk, where we jounce along an inch from the buildings and door jambs. I could have reached out the window and drawn a line right along the plaster as we went.
Such sidewalk driving is common here, both for buses and cars that must constantly pass each other on roads that were either built to be single lane or that become single lane because of parked vehicles. Passing on streets lined with hedgerows--just about any road linking towns around here--commonly knocks a bus's side mirror out of whack and the driver later pulls over to adjust it. Today’s chauffeur made it through Marazion without a scratch or bump.
St Michaels Mount is its own tiny island just off the coast--or at least it’s an island most of the day. As I disembark from the bus, the tide is out, the stone causeway to the site is open, and the air stinks of rotting tidepool and sharp salt.
I reach the head of the causeway at the beach and ferry workers call out from behind me, "The causeway is closed, you must boat across."
I look ahead. Many folks are already halfway across and sloshing through mere ankle-deep water. Beside me, others are streaming onto the causeway like a line of migrating refugees, stripping off shoes and sandals and hiking up trousers. I do the same with my skirt-culottes and gleefully wade onto a causeway that was built in 1425. Its lovely reddish-orange stones are soft-edged, uneven, and less slick than I expected.The tide is coming in quickly, however, and soon I am calf deep in water that shifts from cool to warm to icy cold then back to warm around my legs.
A black crab, 3 inches across, scuttles sideways under the clear water and nearly over my toes. I drop a shoe into the tide while juggling camera, shoes, and skirt, but it is easily retrieved and undamaged. The far end of the causeway is still dry by the time I cross, but I'll need to take the ferry back.
The gardens on the Mount climb the hillsides to reach the house, which stands about 200 feet above the sea. Most of the plants were brought in during the 1800s--no surprise given the thrall the Victorians had for toting gardens and plants home from all points abroad. Tons of garden soil were shipped here to expand the walled garden that the 12th- and 13th-century monks had created when the castle was still a monastery.
The day is warm, almost balmy. The Cornwall climate supports a surprising variety of plants, many that hark from Mexico, Europe, the West Indies. Cactus, agave, aloe, succulents, Monterey pine, even a red bottle brush like I knew in San Diego grow among the more traditional peonies, roses, lavender ("Too young yet to have any fragrance," proclaims one middle-aged, round-bellied gent in shorts, shirt sleeves, and golf cap--he's right), iris, wild gladiolus, valerian, and more.
Stone steps and grassy paths lead me up terraces that wrap the base of the island and the castle. Everywhere is a view of coastline below and the castle rising as if it grew from the stone itself.
The scent of flowers runs over the air in pockets; I want to chase each one down, but the moment I seek its source plant, the fragrance has gone elsewhere. It’s easier to stay in one spot and whiff the flowers as the winds change.
I eat lunch under a tree at the front lawn--a ploughman's picnic that I've brought. Sea breezes, cool shade, people walking by in pairs and with youngsters. Most accents are British, with a few German and Japanese thrown in.
The castle is still a residence--the owners need to cross to and from the mainland and go up and down the flights of stone steps just like the rest of us who tour the place at our leisure.
The building and grounds represent an odd combination of monastery and fort and castle and private home. I walk a stack of steps worn smooth and shallow by pilgrims visiting the holy mount that had been, according to legend, blessed by a sighting of the Archangel Michael.
I watch a video explaining the legend of a giant whose heart was turned to stone and embedded in the cobbled road to the castle; read a framed print recording a monk’s winter and summer routine (rising at 2:30am--egads); survey the remains of fortifications and cannon at the top of the hill; mull over antique furnishings and portraits inside the home; and wander a small chapel that houses memorials to dozens of St Aubyns--the family line that has held the Mount in an unbroken line for generations. A plaque embedded into the stone floor in front of the altar commemorates a centuries-old casket of bones that workers found years ago and reburied in its exact location.
Part of the castle is under scaffolding and renovation today (including the chapel roof, which was dropping dust and mortar bits into my hair in the nave below), and in my usual nosy way during a walkthrough of an estate, I got an inside peek at something others were passing by. This time, it was a dim, usually-locked cupboard full of dusty journals and ledgers of land records and newspapers dating to the late 1800s, miscellaneous broken pots and bits of woodwork, piles of other papers, and a few rolled documents poking end-up from crates on the floor. A layer of dust covered everything, the kind of dust that I associate with movies in which the heroine finds a map to long-lost treasure or a family mystery better left unresurrected.
Alas, nothing so interesting is under way: when I ask a woman who is leaning halfway into the space and poking up toward the ceiling of it, "What's in here?" she pulls out and looks at the contents as if she hadn't noticed them before. "Don't know. I'm just inventorying the structure for design changes."
"You're one of the construction workers?"
"Yes. We have to be careful during renovation."
So much for discovering possible skeletons in the St Aubyns family closet. I'll have to leave them up to my imagination and the mystery of the body consecrated beneath the chapel.
