Beyond these three we need not go. The coast-towns have been already visited, and as for smaller ones inland, such as Liskeard, Camelford, Redruth, Cambourne, Callington and Helston, they cannot hope to compete.
Truro is just the picture of what one imagines a market-town to be. On market-days its open spaces are filled with country carts and the quaint little covered-in omnibuses, like those used by the peasantry of France on their immensely long straight roads. There is a buzz and clamour of talk outside the doors of the old Red Lion Inn, or, as it now seems to be the fashion to say--hotel. This is the house in which Samuel Foote, actor and dramatist, was born in 1720; his father was at one time Mayor of Truro. The house is worth seeing on its own account, for it has a massive carved oak staircase--alas, thickly overlaid with varnish, and some moulded ceilings unusual in an inn.
Truro is well watered, as it stands between two small rivers which join in the creek by which steamboats go down to Falmouth through pretty wooded scenery. The town itself is quite tolerably flat for a Cornish town, but long hills run up out of it on all sides. The oldest part of the cathedral is that which was the parish church, incorporated into the new building. About the cathedral there have been many opinions, but a modern cathedral can hardly escape severe criticism considering that it has to compete with all the dignity and reverence of those which have stood hundreds of years! The white stone shows up well, and though the town is more or less in a basin the tall spires are seen from the surrounding hills to advantage. There are good shops in Truro and much that is of interest, including the very fine collection in the Museum of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, now housed in a worthy building. Here anyone who has wandered in the hills and over the barren moors and seen the relics of hoary antiquity so freely scattered, can look with seeing eye on the more valuable specimens which have been found and are now cared for and preserved where they will not be stolen or lost.
Even in Domesday Book Truro is mentioned, and at that time there were two towns, Great and Little Truro, standing under the shadow of a fortress held by the Earls of Cornwall, now vanished, though its site is known and pointed out near the station. The town's charter was granted in 1130 and renewed in 1589, so it is not much matter for wonder the inhabitants look upon it as the first city in Cornwall, and, in olden times, so bore themselves that they earned for their city the nickname of "Proud Truro."