“When the river calls the sea, Fishing there will be; When the sea calls the river, ’Ware foul weather.”
Bosula stood at the apex of the angle, guarded on all sides, but when the wind set southerly and strong the boom of the breakers on the Twelve Apostles reef came echoing up the valley in deep, tremendous organ peals. So clear did they sound that one would imagine the sea had broken inland and that inundation was imminent.
The founder of the family was a tin-streamer from Crowan, who, noting that the old men had got their claws into every inch of payable dirt in the parish, loaded his implements on a donkey and went westward looking for a stream of his own. In due course he and his ass meandered down Keigwin Valley and pitched camp in the elbow. On the fourth day Penhale the First, soil-stained and unkempt, approached the lord of the manor and proposed washing the stream on tribute. He held out no hopes, but was willing to give it a try, being out of work. The lord of the manor knew nothing of tin or tinners, regarded the tatterdemalion with casual contempt and let him draw up almost what terms he liked. In fifteen years Penhale had taken a small fortune out of the valley, bought surrounding land and built a house on the site of his original camp. From thenceforth the Penhales were farmers, and each in his turn added something, a field, a bit of moorland, a room to the house.
When John Penhale took possession the estate held three hundred acres of arable land, to say nothing of stretches of adjoining bog and heather, useful for grazing cattle. The buildings formed a square, with the yard in the center, the house on the north and the stream enclosing the whole on three sides, so that the place was serenaded with eternal music, the song of running water, tinkling among bowlders, purling over shallows, splashing over falls.
Penhale, the tinner, built a two-storied house of four rooms, but his successor had seven children, and an Elizabethan, attuning himself to a prolific age, thirteen. The first of these added a couple of rooms, the second four. Since building forwards encroached on the yard and building backwards would bring them into the stream they, perforce, extended sideways and westwards. In John Penhale’s time the house was five rooms long and one thick, with the front door stranded at the east end and the thatch coming down so low the upper windows had the appearance of old men’s eyes peering out under arched and shaggy brows. There was little distinctive about the house save the chimneys, which were inordinately high, and the doorway which was carved. Penhale the First, who knew something of smelting and had ideas about draught, had set the standard in chimney pots, but the Elizabethan was responsible for the doorway. He pulled a half-drowned sailor out of the cove one dawn, brought him home, fed and clothed him. The castaway, a foreigner of some sort, being unable to express gratitude in words, picked up a hammer and stone chisel and decorated his rescuer’s doorway—until then three plain slabs of granite. He carved the date on the lintel and a pattern of interwoven snakes on the uprights, culminating in two comic little heads, one on either side of the door, intended by the artist as portraits of his host and hostess, but which they, unflattered, and doubtless prompted by the pattern below, had passed down to posterity as Adam and Eve.