The Pengersick Castle that you find to-day, built by the coast between Parran Uthnoe and Porthleven near Helston, is a mere upstart building, little, if any of it, more than four centuries old. This story is about the older castle built on the same site nobody knows how long ago.
It was a grim fortress inhabited by grim and eerie folk, about whom many wild and creepy tales are told. The old Pengersicks were a strange family who trafficked with the powers of evil. One went to far eastern climes and learned the black arts of sorcery, and brought back with him as his bride an “outlandish Saracen” woman of surprising beauty.
Nobody knew actually where she came from, but she arrived unexpectedly at the castle, one winter day, with her Lord and two eastern attendants, all mounted on priceless Arab horses. They spoke in an unknown tongue and disappeared behind the frowning gates, seldom to be seen abroad again.
Some say that this strange party arrived before the castle was built, and that it was this saturnine Lord of Pengersick who, by supernatural aid, erected the first grim fortress; but all agree that the beautiful Eastern lady possessed the most wonderful voice that had ever been heard.
No living creature could resist its appeal. Men and women, birds, animals, even fishes, stopped spellbound to listen when she sang. And she and she only could control her evil husband.
When engaged in his blackest sorceries, brewing strange potions that sent their exotic aromas throughout the country for miles around, or when, in the middle of a storm, he sat upon the battlements of his castle conjuring the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of Pengersick could always be quieted by the sound of his Lady’s voice singing her strange Eastern songs to the strain of her harp.
She seemed a sad, beautiful Lady, this Saracen woman. Sometimes at night, or at summer dawn, she sat by her lattice window overlooking the sea, and played and sang to herself the plaintive melodies of her own land. Then, as the fisherfolk would aver, they sat motionless at the sound of her sweet voice. Even the fishes would come to the surface to listen; birds hovered over the castle, and mermaids from the Lizard caverns would float across the bay, enchanted by the appealing tones.
For many years these strange happenings went on at Pengersick castle; the fair lady’s harp sent its sweet music through the air, the forbidding Lord continued his incantations, until one wild and stormy night—the darkest ever known in those parts—the countryside was startled by an eerie gleam in the sky. Presently angry flames burst forth, and the frightened people, hurrying from all sides to discover what this huge conflagration might be, found that Pengersick Castle was ablaze.
Nothing they could do would still the flames, the massive pile burnt itself out, and the next morning only the fire-scarred walls remained. The whole of the inside—furniture, books, pictures—everything was destroyed; and what was more curious, from that day onward neither the Lord of Pengersick nor his Lady was ever seen again. They had vanished just as mysteriously as they had arrived.
Years later a rich merchant—some said he had been a pirate—built upon the site of the ruins a new castle. That is the one you see to-day, a mellow old building looking peacefully out to sea. You may visit it either from Helston or Penzance, it lies about midway between the two.
Near at hand is famous Prussia Cove where, in the 18th century, a smuggler armed his house and opened fire upon the Revenue men with small cannon. To the west is Mounts Bay with the more famous St. Michael’s Mount, and to the east low undulating cliffs stretch in a graceful curve, until they rise to the rugged headlands dividing the sheltered coves of the Lizard Peninsula.
This coast is the very end of England, enjoying a climate mild even in the depth of winter. Spring comes here fully six weeks before it reaches London, the Midlands and the North; summer lingers almost until Christmas time, and, like the Strange Lady of Pengersick, the sea and the hills of this part of the Duchy exercise a charm that none can resist.
