About two miles inland is Stratton, the scene of the victory of Sir Bevil Grenville over the Roundheads, a victory which was within an ace of being a defeat. The Earl of Stamford had marched into Cornwall, with forces of about seven thousand men, and camped at Stratton, where he was attacked by Sir Bevil with half the number and defeated. Grenville came of a famous Cornish family which numbered among its members Sir Richard, who with his little ship the _Revenge_, tackled the great Spanish galleons and managed to damage many of them before he fell mortally wounded as is recorded in Tennyson's much-quoted poem!
Further north still, the very last place of note on the Cornish coast, is Morwenstow, visited by hundreds of people because of its association with its one-time vicar, the Rev. Robert Stephen Hawker, a muscular Christian of a peculiarly pungent personality. His generosity and kindliness toward his fellow-men was unstinting, but he was withal full to the brim of eccentricity. He married while still a youth of twenty at the University, his godmother, who was twenty-one years his senior, and they lived happily together until her death in extreme old age. Hawker believed in ghosts and was exceedingly superstitious; there are many curious stories still current as to his doings, and the life of him by the notable novelist Baring-Gould is well worth reading.
Fowey is perhaps the best known by name of all the Cornish towns. This is due in some measure to its being the home of Sir A. Quiller-Couch, who has made it familiar to thousands in his stories of _Troy Town_ and _The Delectable Duchy_. But people who go to Fowey should be prepared to find it unlike anything anywhere else. Fowey Harbour is a long narrow slit penetrating into the land and closed in on each side by very steep hills which drop down sharply to the water. On the west lies Fowey town close to the mouth of the harbour, built on the hillside. It consists of one long narrow street, so constricted that only here and there, where the houses fall back a little, has it been found possible to drop in a few feet of pavement, otherwise foot-passengers take their chance with the traffic. There are houses on each side. Those on the seaward side are built right on to the water so that many of them have ladders hanging from their backyards by which the men can climb down into their boats. Passing casually along the main street and glancing into an open doorway one sometimes sees the passage falling downwards like an open shaft, the lower end a rectangle of blue dancing water!