Fondness for ferns
Lamorna and St Loy, Cornwall
We have a soap dish with a fern pattern on it. But that’s as far as it goes.
Oh, and a little dish beside the kettle which, under the pile of used teabags, also has a fern pattern on it. But that really is it.
Ah … well … except there is the duvet cover and pillowcases on the bed which also have a fern pattern on them.
Oh no. Can it be? Are we becoming pteridomaniacs?
Pteridomania, from the Latin for ‘mad as a box of pterodactyls’1, was how author Charles Kingsley described the Victorian obsession with ferns. Appearing on rugs and tea sets, it was their equivalent of ‘Keep calm and carry on’. Well over a hundred years on, the fern fad still exists – it’s even there on the custard creams I dunk in my tea after dumping the bag on the fern dish – just not to a life-threatening extent.
The stretch of coast between Lamorna and St Loy is rugged and littered with huge boulders. At St Loy’s Cove, where a thick strandline of rotting seaweed gave off a scent that was by turns ‘ooh, seaside’ and ‘urghh, eggy’, you need the balance of an Olympic gymnast to make it across the rocks with anything approaching grace on what is laughingly called a beach.
It's no surprise, then, that this is a shipwreck coast. Tater Du Lighthouse, visible but not accessible down a steep staircase, was belatedly built in 1965 after a long history of disasters off this shore. Sixteen years later, perhaps the most infamous occurred when the Penlee lifeboat went to the aid of the Union Star and everyone on board both vessels died. A beautiful new granite memorial now stands on the cliffs just west of the lighthouse with 16 albatrosses carved into it – one for each of the lives lost.
Earlier on the walk, shortly after climbing and squeezing our way up the ‘path’ out of Lamorna Cove – not for nothing is there a warning sign that the next half a mile (possibly an underestimate) is ‘strenuous, uneven and close to cliff edges’ – we came to a granite cross that we assumed was a tribute to lost souls from another maritime tragedy. But the inscription, ‘D.W.W. MAR 13 1873’, remembers a botanist rather than a, errr, boatanist.
D.W.W. was David Wordsworth Watson and March 13, 1873, was the day he became an unfortunate victim of pteridomania. For years, people had been visiting the western fringes of the British Isles to gather ferns to take home and display in glass cases. Watson, a Cambridge University undergraduate from Canterbury, was reaching out for a rare specimen that had taken his fancy at Carn Barges, a little farther along the coast from where the cross now stands, when he fell to his death. He was not the only one for whom the fascination with ferns was fatal, but he does at least seem to have been indulging a keen interest in botany rather than simply following fashion.
In his account of the tragedy, Michael Tangye remembers his young children leaving wildflowers on the cross. Today, there are only coins from around the world, no doubt left with good intentions but turning the memorial’s base an ugly bright orange.
While Watson and others were the human victims of pteridomania, the ferns suffered too, with collectors stripping out many rare types. Our unskilled eyes saw only a patch of common polypody among the bracken and ivy that has now taken hold on the cliffs. Perhaps it’s for the best that pteridomania today extends no further than soap dishes and pillowcases.
Basking sharks seen on this walk: 0
Total basking sharks seen to date: 0
Obviously not. It’s ‘fern madness’.
I have a love/hate relationship with ferns. I love the sight of them, but I take it personally that, having survived millions of years and outlasted the dinosaurs, they apparently can't manage a year in my garden.