In Cornwall there is a famous story about a mermaid who steals a choirboy straight from the pew.
Six miles down the coast path from St Ives is Zennor, a small village above the sea where D. H. Lawrence lived for two years to escape the fury of World War I. It probably takes its name from the local Saint Senara, but I prefer Philip Marsden’s suggestion of Budoc: ancient legendary royalty who was born in a barrel crossing the sea from Brittany to Ireland. Zennor needn’t have much to do with Ireland except as an imagined presence out over the Celtic sea. If you could imagine pitching a barrel into the waves and somehow hold a straight line, you might just wash up in Cork or Skibbereen without being flushed into the Atlantic. Budoc was a real person (whose name means ‘saved from the waters’) and historians have suggested his mother (and barrel) might have stopped off in Cornwall before reaching Ireland, where the infant eventually became a monk.
It’s a neat foil to the story of Zennor’s mermaid – very much not a marine survival story. In the simplest version, recollected on a small laminate in the village church, Mathew Trewella was the parish’s greatest singer. Such was his gift that admirers would fill the pews of St Senara’s just to hear him sing. Mathew (or Mathey) was too interested in his music to take much interest, until one frequent attendee began to sing along with him. Mathew paid attention. The rest of Zennor knew her as “that one woman who’s been coming for years but never looks any older” (red flag no. 1) but Mathew (we imagine) had been far too absorbed in hymns to notice her. She always sat in the same pew, now famous for its mermaid carving (retrospectively, red flag no. 2). Suffice to say, Mathew became otherwise absorbed and one day didn’t arrive for choir practise on time. She was (of course) a mermaid; now he sleeps with the fishes.
Two ways of telling the same story: a church postcard (left) and a photo from St Senara's at night (right). It is unsettling to me that after five centuries the mermaid's belly button and tail are still clearly defined, but it was clearly necessary to erase her face.
According to the church laminate, Mathew and the mermaid chose to happily cohabit about a mile down the road in Pendour Cove. Happy ending or no, it remains a cautionary tale in an area with a troubled Christian history. At a glance, it’s clearly a myth of Catholic worship as an act of self-absorption. Mathew is stealing god’s show and St Senara’s was becoming more concert hall than earnest, Protestant house of worship. Be less like Mathew. Perhaps that’s why when the Reformation swept through Cornwall thousands died in rebellion but protestants allowed the mermaid bench to remain in Zennor untouched.
But the story also represents a decidedly pagan intrusion on Christian space of any denomination. In a land of piskies and druids, a mermaid represents a definitively Cornish monster, taking one back for old times’ sake. Taken as a story of cultural independence, there’s even space to see the hero in Mathew’s mermaid. She wouldn't be the only rare being linking Zennor back to a Cornish past; when John Davey died in the parish in 1891 he took the last living memory of the ancient Cornish language with him, taught by his father.
More than anything, however, the Mermaid of Zennor is a cautionary tale about the sea. Hop on a boat from St Ives round to Zennor and within fifteen minutes you’ll pass two wrecks visible from the surface. The Cornish coast is easily the most wrecked coast in all of the UK: an average of 24 for every mile of coast. That level of tragedy is bound to manifest itself on the cultural consciousness of a region. So a seductive mermaid probably makes a more palatable story than the cold “Graveyard of Ships” it has always been – but not by much. Growing up in Cornwall, my Dad remembers every assembly at school seemingly came with a warning about the sea and rivers like Hayle. He doesn’t remember much talk about the Mermaid of Zennor, maybe because there were real schoolchildren from his school who’d drowned in living memory.
To countenance the deaths not only of sailors and fisherman, but schoolchildren requires a powerful myth; perhaps in a more secular time we’ve lost the full disquiet of a mermaid trespassing in a church. To my mind, one of the most evocative, understated observations in Waterlog concerns churches like Mathew Trewhella’s.
‘Where English churches imitate the sacred groves of the forest, early Cornish churches, with their ribbed and curved roof timbers, imitate boats or even the skeletons of fish.’
St Senara’s does feel like an upturned fishing boat. It’s even more unsettling, then, that a creature of the sea could reach up into a holy ark itself and pluck out the most gifted there for a watery death.
For me, the most puzzling part of the story today is the mermaid’s interest in us. Most drownings are stories of humans – for whatever reason: curiosity, pride, despair – seeking out the water, but in Zennor the mermaid must have climbed up sheer cliffs to the church gate. Today exactly the opposite is true; seals don’t exactly sing like choirboys, but they certainly attract more admirers than Mathew ever did. Trips to “Seal Island” (the Carrack Islands, really just a craggy outcrop of boulders breaking the surface a mile or two east of Zennor) chug out of St Ives any dry day of the school break.
Earlier this summer I set out on a run (which quickly became a sweaty walk) from St Ives to Zennor. Opposite the Carracks I met a researcher from the Cornwall Seal Group Research Trust. She was ensconced between some rocks with pet dog and clipboard, scoping out the seals preening on the rocks. As well as posing for photos, seals need to “haul out” to rest, especially when they’re breeding. The researcher was supposed to be surveying the number of seals on the rocks over the course of the day, but she’d become distracted by one mum seal on the far left of the islands. She told me the mum had been visibly nodding off to sleep since she’d arrived that morning, but every time she got close to drifting off another pack of tourists would arrive. There’d been a steady stream of boats pulling up since 8am, clearly in cahoots so as to avoid cluttering the picture of remoteness with more than one ship.
Today, the idea of sea creatures climbing onto land to do us harm is a tragic inversion of the incursions we make into the sea. Under human observation seals exhibit dramatically raised stress, indicated by heart and breathing rates shooting up. On a daily basis this seriously affects life expectancy and ability to give birth. Elsewhere on the south coast, a single site saw 10 “stampedes” (when spooked seals charge off a resting place, often trampling pups and never to return) in just over an hour. Just like the mermaid reached into a safe human space, seal rock sits a literal stone’s throw from the ‘Lands End and Cape Bank’ Marine Protected Area (MPA). It’s a pretty neat encapsulation of why MPAs are a flawed concept, often subject to less than perfect execution. For one, tourism is generally unrestricted in protected areas (even if the harm is demonstrable and scientifically measured), but the idea that because Seal Rock is fifty yards outside a protected area those seals and their decline won’t affect the ecosystem next door is nonsensical.
Or at least it might be, if the MPA was being meaningfully protected in the first place. Instead it’s a fitting testimony to the thorough unprotectedness of MPAs across the country. Designated in 2010, it saw over 400 hours of fishing in 2018 and 360 tonnes of carbon is churned up by deepsea trawling on the small patch every year. This might not seem like much in the context of over 40 billion tons of global carbon annually, but bear in mind this is already one of the success stories when it comes to meeting the target of 30% protection for inshore waters by 2030 – a promise Michael Gove doubled down on in 2018. Bottom trawling doesn’t just release carbon, too. In 2013 the Cornish IFCA passed a byelaw against trawling in the area specifically to protect reefs we had always known were there.
There are two reasons this MPA is not “protected”, which illustrate the hollowness of Gove’s promises overall. Firstly, the government runs MPAs on a ‘feature-based approach’, whereby regulators need to provide proof, both of an environment (‘feature’) which is worth protecting and that it has already been degraded. If, for example, a reef has survived commercial fishing so far, that would not constitute reason to protect that area in the future. The absurdity of this is that conservationists therefore have to petition to protect sites which are already inside supposedly protected areas.
The second, more glaring issue, is that the government shows little to no intention of enforcing these byelaws – but plenty of intention to claim points on the success of the UK’s “world-leading” marine conservation programme. Ostensibly 40% of the UK’s inshore waters are already protected. In other words, we’ve already smashed our conservation targets. Inconveniently, the health of our oceans continues to decline despite this glowing success.
If fish could talk, maybe they’d have old stories about monsters that seduce their sons out of the water – monsters even more terrifying for infiltrating their sacred, protected space. But for us the story of the Mermaid of Zennor doesn’t hold water anymore. If it does persist it won’t be a story of Catholic hubris or of pagan pushback against Christianity. It won’t even be a cautionary story of water-safety in a land of drownings and wreckage. If the story survives it can only be one of violent climate revenge and – at present – it's more of a fantasy than it has ever been.
