Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/130

124 THE CORNWALL COAST whom we find at Gunwalloe on the western side of the headland, was the founder. This seems unUkely, unless it can be shown that Winwaloe and Winnow or Winoc were the same person. The church is interesting in itself, and beauti- fully placed, giving traces of many periods of architecture, from Norman to Perpendicular. The font, which happily was preserved by former coats of whitewash, is Early EngKsh ; it bears the inscription " Ric. Bolham me fecit." The lofty south doorway is a very good specimen of Norman ; the pulpit, which is modern, is of serpentine, and there are serpentine tombstones in the graveyard. Like St. Keverne, this is a burial-ground of the wrecked. It has also been the sepulchre of persons dying from the plague, of which there was a severe visitation in 1645. It is said that, about a century later, the soil where its victims had been buried was dug to receive shipwrecked seamen, and that, in con- sequence, the plague reappeared. The bells have Latin mottoes and some curious bell-marks. The blending of granite with darker local stone in the tower has a rather singular effect; it makes the walls look like a chequer-board. Landewed- nack claims to be the last place where a sermon was preached in the Cornish tongue, in 1678 ; as was natural, the old language lingered longest in isolated districts of the Lizard and Land's End. It may be guessed that some of his younger hearers would not have understood the preacher, for the language had already greatly decayed. It was never a particularly rich dialect of the Celtic, and left no remains worthy to perpetuate its existence. Norden, who wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century, stated that "of late