Cornwall has many drolls (orally told stories) from the sea. As a narrow peninsula, there is no part that is particularly far from the coast. Cornish culture has deep roots in maritime trade, fishing, and shipbuilding. Sky Gods and Earth Goddesses linger, but Cornwall didn’t quite shrug off the memories of sea deities and water spirits. The most memorable being the mermaid.
Mermaid is Morvoren in Cornish, and she is often called a merry-maid.
So what can the remembered folklore tell us about the Cornish mermaids? Do the newspapers record any definitive sightings? And what evidence is there of their male counterparts, the mermen?
“Dev yv hauton morvoran
Benen a’n pen the’n colon.”
‘Half the mermaid’s human,
From head to heart she’s a woman.”
Passio Christi, 1742-3
Mermaid Origins and Symbolism
This is up for debate. What we do know is that at some point in the medieval period, Homer’s Greek sirens (a creature with the head of a woman and the body of a bird) were conflated with mermaids. Often, mermaids were depicted holding a comb and mirror, symbolising vanity, luxury, and pride. The mirror could also be interpreted as the moon, which governs the seas and tides. Sometimes, she holds a fish, symbolising the soul. The simplest interpretation is she represents water and/or the sea.
Most Cornish seafarers regarded their appearance as a herald of bad luck or bad weather. But to hear their song was a sign of death. They were shapeshifters who took whatever guise to suit their plans and would often lure men to live with them.
Their depiction in churches could be in a moralising context or to represent the duality between humanity and the divine. This symbolism could go back further, as Celtic beliefs often have the sea as a gateway to the Otherworld and the divine. JRR Tolkien utilised this myth in his tales of Middle Earth. Aman, the Undying Lands, where the White Ship sails with Bilbo and Frodo at the end of The Lord of the Rings.
Mermaid Folklore
Once again we must give thanks to William Bottrell, who wrote and publicised many of the traditional folktales of West Cornwall.
The Mermaid of Zennor
Inside Zennor’s church you will find a section of a 15th-century oak pew with a carving depicting a mermaid holding a comb and a mirror. It was supposedly carved after the appearance of Zennor’s local merry-maid.
Strangers always got the jaws of the locals wagging. This particular stranger who visited Zennor Church was an attractive woman, richly dressed, and with the most beautiful singing voice. Her visitations were infrequent. Sometimes years would lapse before she returned, but when she did, her voice and beauty captivated the locals. They would whisper, wondering how she looked so young and fair, despite the passing of the years. The curious would follow her after church as she headed towards the sea, but always lost sight of her.
The locals noticed the strange woman’s visitations became more frequent, and that her eyes often sought Matthey Trewhella, the handsome son of the churchwarden. Not that it was his good looks which pleased her; it was his singing voice. He had the voice of an angel, which packed the church every Sunday.
Matthey, upon noticing the stranger, was equally drawn to her beauty and serene singing voice. One day, after service, he did as many curious locals did, and followed her towards the coast and down the path leading to Pendour Cove.
Matthey and the strange woman were never seen again.
But the story does not end here.
Years later, a vessel cast its anchor about a mile from Pendour Cove. The crew heard a woman’s voice hailing them. Looking over the side, they find a beautiful woman, and through the rippling cerulean water, they see the lower part of her body is that of a fish.
‘I was just returning from fishing,’ the mermaid tells the crew. ‘Please can you trip your anchor? It is blocking the doorway to my home and I’m anxious for my children inside.’
The mariners, knowing it isn’t wise to get on the wrong side of a mermaid, obliged. She gave her thanks and dived back to her underwater home. The crew then ended up at the Tinners Arms in Zennor (possibly my favourite pub in Cornwall) and told the locals of their encounter with the mermaid. Upon hearing it, they concluded this mermaid living in their cove was the beautiful stranger who Matthey followed, and she had taken him to her underwater abode.
It is said if you wander the coast path at Pendour Cove, you can still hear the mermaid and Matthey’s song on the waves.
The Mermaid of Padstow and the Doom Bar
On the Camel estuary is a sandbank named the Doom Bar. If you are partial to a Cornish IPA, you have probably had a pint of Doom Bar, named after this piece of geography. The legend goes that it was conjured up by a vengeful mermaid.
Long ago, the Camel estuary could be navigated by large, deep-keeled ships and Padstow was a thriving port with safe, accessible waters. This would soon change.
Our antagonist is nameless, and the story is thin, so I can flex a little creative freedom in the telling of this tale.
He is a man from Padstow who brought himself a new gun. With a desire to test his new toy, he struck off towards the sea, hoping to pick off a seabird or seal perhaps. Instead, he came across a woman.
She sat upon the rocks, positioned in a way that he could only see the top half of her. Seeing she was alone, naked, and very beautiful, the man decided to approach her.
The gunman tries all his best chat-up lines, but the woman isn’t interested. He shows off his shiny, new gun. He bigs himself up, but the woman sees through his lies. He gloats that there are hundreds of women in Padstow who would wish him for a husband, but he wants her.
The woman, now at the end of her tether, tells him plainly to leave her alone and that she wouldn’t be seen dead with him.
The man’s anger flares white hot. He raises his gun and fires, and the woman falls. He scurries over the rocks to find her half submerged in the water. He then sees the lower half of her body. It is a fish’s tail, for she is a mermaid.
Her blood mixes with the seawater. A mortal wound, but she is not dead yet. She swims out and then rises from the sea one last time. With her last breath, she cursed the Port of Padstow, proclaiming the sands would rise above the waters of the harbour. The moment she slipped beneath the waves, a storm rose and lasted for days.
When the wind and waves finally calmed, the people of Padstow discovered a sandbar had appeared on the mouth of the harbour. It did not take long for it to gain its name, the Doom Bar, for its rough waves and shallow waters have wrecked many a ship and claimed many lives.
The Cury Mermaid
An old fisherman was once walking the beach at Cury, near the Lizard. Above the sound of the waves breaking on the shore at low tide, he hears a woman’s cry for help. It takes him a moment to realise it is coming from a nearby cavern. The old fisherman follows the voice and is astonished to discover the voice belongs to a mermaid.
‘I had fallen asleep,’ the mermaid explains, ‘and now the tide is too far out. Could you kindly carry me back to the shoreline?’
Now, the old fisherman knows a thing or two about mermaids (and has probably heard about what happened in Padstow). Carefully, he carries her into the water. As thanks, she gifts him her comb, which is studded with gems from the sea.
The Mermaid of Lamorna Cove
A beautiful woman was said to appear from the water, showing only her head and shoulders, to herald an approaching storm.
This mermaid sounds more like a year-round sea swimmer. Which leads me on to historic sightings and hoaxes.
Mermaid Hoaxes
A mooch through the historic Cornish papers reveals very few sightings in Cornwall. In July 1827, several mermaids were sighted on the rocks at Trenance, Mawgan Porth. A young man set off to the beach around 10pm, planning to meet his friend to go sprat fishing. Forty feet below the cliff, he heard a screeching sound coming from the cavern beneath, where large pools of water were left by the low tide. Thinking it was his mate, the man calls out. Instead, in traditional jump-scare fashion, he sees a creepy human-like figure with long hair, and legs it back home.
The following day, a group of men are at the same spot and see three of these creatures. The next day, there are now five of them. They’re described as being about five feet long. The top part of their body was human-like and dark-coloured, while their fish-like lower extremities were bluish. Their hair was exceptional: about ten feet in length. They mostly appeared to be sleeping, so the men spent an hour throwing stones at them, hoping they might move.
There are a few inches dedicated to mermaids sightings elsewhere. One such example in the Royal Cornwall Gazette from 1819 accounts for the sighting of a mermaid in Ireland. Unfortunately, the main eyewitness was a man, so we have to endure the male gaze, which, in this case, was fixed mostly on her breasts. Boobs aside, she was said to have a tail like a dolphin, and webbed fingers which she continuously ran through her hair. A crowd of 200 watched her swimming through the waters until one idiot fired a musket at her, and she disappeared beneath the waves.
Hoaxes were common enough. In 1822, the supposed body of a mermaid found off the Cape of Good Hope was exhibited in London. However, it was a fake, made from the tail of a fish and the head and trunk of a monkey. A man in Durham was criminally charged for making a ‘mermaid’ out of cotton rags and a turnip and charging people 1p to view it.
Some were not hoaxes but mistakes. Skeletal remains of marine mammals have often been mistaken for mermaid remains. One was once displayed at Portsmouth in 1827 and was actually a Dugong.
Mistakes can be made. It reminds me that back in 2010, a news reporter excitedly revealed a polar bear had washed ashore at Bude. Shortly after, they had revised the story. It was not a polar bear, but a cow that had been bleached white by the sea.
As well as nefarious hoaxes, there are a few which are practical jokes. A young reverend Robert Hawker tricked the inhabitants of Bude into thinking he was a mermaid.
Sir Humphrey Davy and a case of mistaken identity
In 1829, the esteemed Sir Humphrey Davy (the Cornish chemist who invented a safety lamp for miners because naked flames and flammable atmospheres don’t mix) applied some scientific reasoning that mermaids anatomically don’t make any sense.
Wisdom and order are found in all the works of God, and the parts of animals are always in harmony with each other, and always adapted to certain ends consistent with the analogy of nature; and a human head, hands, and breast, are wholly inconsistent with the fish’s tail. The human head is adapted for an upright posture, an animal with a fish’s tail could not swim; and a creature with lungs must be on the surface several times in a day, and the sea is an inconvenient breathing-place; and the hands are instruments of manufacture, and the depths of the ocean are little fitted for fabricating that mirror which our old prints gave to the mermaid. Such an animal, if created, could not long exist.
Sir Humphrey Davy
There is a curious story about Sir Humphrey which crops up in the paper nearly a century after his death (meaning it’s highly dubious, but it fits nicely with this article subject). Once, when visiting Scotland on an unusually hot day, Sir Humphrey stripped off and went for a swim with the sun glistening off his long locks. By chance, he later met a woman who told him of her encounter with a mermaid up in Scotland. It just so happens that she had actually caught sight of Sir Humphrey, skinny-dipping to cool off!
Where are all the Mermen?
Like female dwarfs and the Ent-wives, the whereabouts of mermen seem to be a bit of a mystery. The only male creature from Cornish folklore with an affinity with the sea is the bucca. But his origins and numerous folktales are for another time.
Notes
- Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, Second Series – William Bottrell
- West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser 09 January 1829
- The Cornish Telegraph 19 November 1914
- Cornishman 16 October 1902
- Morning Post, 7 July 1827