On our way from here to Lostwithiel, which my brother thought might have been a suitable name for the place where we went astray last night, we passed along Braddock or Broad-oak Moor, where in 1643, during the Civil War, a battle was fought, in which Sir Ralph Hopton defeated the Parliamentary Army and captured more than a thousand prisoners.  Poetry seemed to be rather at a discount in Cornwall, but we copied the following lines relating to this preliminary battle: 

  When gallant Grenville stoutly stood
  And stopped the gap up with his blood,
  When Hopton led his Cornish band
  Where the sly conqueror durst not stand. 
  We knew the Queen was nigh at hand.

We must confess we did not understand this; it could not have been Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” so we walked on to the Fairy Cross without seeing either the Queen or the Fairy, although we were fortunate to find what might be described as a Fairy Glen and to reach the old Castle of Restormel, which had thus been heralded: 

To the Loiterer, the Tourist, or the Antiquary:  the ivy-covered ruins of Restormel Castle will amply repay a visit, inasmuch as the remains of its former grandeur must, by the very nature of things, induce feelings of the highest and most dignified kind; they must force contemplative thought, and compel respect for the works of our forefathers and reverence for the work of the Creator’s hand through centuries of time.

[Illustration:  RESTORMEL CASTLE.]

It was therefore with some such thoughts as these that we walked along the lonely road leading up to the old castle, and rambled amongst the venerable ruins.  The last of the summer visitors had long since departed, and the only sound we could hear was that made by the wind, as it whistled and moaned among the ivy-covered ruins, and in the trees which partly surrounded them, reminding us that the harvest was past and the summer was ended, while indications of approaching winter were not wanting.

The castle was circular in form, and we walked round the outside of it on the border of the moat which had formerly been filled with water, but now was quite dry and covered with luxuriant grass.  It was 60 feet wide and 30 feet deep, being formerly crossed by a drawbridge, not now required.  The ruins have thus been described by a modern poet: 

  And now I reach the moat’s broad marge,
  And at each pace more fair and large
  The antique pile grows on my sight,
  Though sullen Time’s resistless might,
  Stronger than storms or bolts of heaven,
  Through wall and buttress rents have riven;
  And wider gaps had there been seen
  But for the ivy’s buckler green,
  With stems like stalwart arms sustained;
  Here else had little now remained
  But heaps of stones, or mounds o’ergrown
  With nettles, or with hemlock sown. 
  Under the mouldering gate I pass,
  And, as upon the thick rank grass
  With muffled sound my footsteps falls,
  Waking no echo from the walls,
  I feel as one who chanced to tread
  The solemn precincts of the dead.