Local history
The cottage was built as a village school, and for most of a century the room you now sleep in was a classroom. This coast has a second history too, older and less respectable, and the two are closer together than they look — the schoolmaster and the coastguard were often the only two men in the parish paid to notice things.
1861 — 1926
A Victorian village school was one room and one master. Infants at the front on a bench, the older ones behind, everyone reciting at once, and a stove that only warmed whoever sat nearest it. Children walked in from the farms along the cliff, and in winter a good many of them did not come at all.
Slates, not paper — you wrote, the master looked, you wiped it off and wrote again. There is something to be said for a lesson that leaves no evidence.
The building stopped being a school between the wars and has been somebody's home ever since. The proportions are still the schoolroom's, though: the high windows were set above a child's eye line on purpose, so that nobody could see out.
Chalk, the Schoolmaster
The other trade
Beacon, the Coast Watch — the cliff path, on a night that suited everybody but him
Cornwall ran on smuggling for the better part of two hundred years. Not romantically: brandy, tea, salt and tobacco, landed in coves exactly like this one because the duty on them was ruinous and the coastline is all cove. Half the parish had a hand in it and the other half knew better than to ask.
Against that stood the Preventive Service, and later the Coastguard — men who walked a fixed beat along the cliff each night, alone, in whatever the weather was doing. The lantern was not for seeing by. It was so that anyone below could see that somebody was up there.
Wrecking is the darker story and the one that is mostly legend: there is very little evidence anyone here lured a ship onto rocks. Stripping one that had already come ashore, though, was near enough universal, and it went on within living memory of the children in that classroom.
The same path, now
The beat the coastguard walked is the South West Coast Path, and it runs past the top of the garden. The choughs came back to Cornwall in 2001 after half a century away, and there are usually a few working the turf between here and Black Head. The sheep are unbothered by any of it.
About the characters
Chalk and Beacon are iconkind — a small cast of characters built as a system rather than drawn one at a time. Every one of them shares the same body and the same eye line, and what makes them different is a calling: a costume, a badge, a thing they are holding. There is a schoolmaster because this was a school. There is a coast watch because of the fog. The rest of them are elsewhere.