The castle was not a very large one, and we were more impressed by the loneliness of its situation than by the ruin itself, for there was a long approach to it without a cottage or a friendly native in sight, nor did we see any one in the lonely road of quite a mile along which we passed afterwards to the town of Lostwithiel.  But this road was quite pleasant, following the tree-covered course of the River Fowey, and lined with ferns and the usual flower-bearing plants all the way to that town.

[Illustration:  LOSTWITHIEL ANCIENT BRIDGE AND LANDING PLACE.]

Here we rejoined the Liskcard highway, which crossed the river by an ancient bridge said to date from the fourteenth century.  At this point the river had long ago been artificially widened so as to form a basin and landing-place for the small boats which then passed to and fro between Fowey and Lostwithiel.

The derivation of the last place-name was somewhat doubtful, but the general interpretation seemed to be that its original form was Lis-guythiel, meaning the “Palace in the Wood,” which might be correct, since great trees still shut in the range of old buildings representing the remains of the old Palace or Duchy House.  The buildings, which were by no means lofty, were devoted to purposes of an unimportant character, but they had a decidedly dungeon-like appearance, and my brother, who claimed to be an authority on Shakespeare because he had once committed to memory two passages from the great bard’s writings, assured me that if these old walls were gifted with speech, like the ghost that appeared to Hamlet, they “could a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up our souls; freeze our young blood; make our eyes, like stars, start from their spheres; our knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine”; but fortunately “this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood,” and so we hurried away up the town.

Lostwithiel, one of the Stannary towns, was at one time the only coinage town in Cornwall, and traces of the old Mint and Stannary Court could yet be seen.  The town had formerly the honour of being represented in Parliament by the famous writer, statesman, and poet, Joseph Addison.

[Illustration:  LOSTWITHIEL CHURCH, SOUTH PORCH AND CROSS]

The church was dedicated to St. Bartholomew, and was described as “a perfect example of the Decorated period” and the “glory of Cornwall.”  It possessed a lantern spire “of a kind unexampled elsewhere in the West of England”; but as our standard was high, since we had seen so many churches, we failed to appreciate these features, and, generally speaking, there were no very fine churches in Cornwall compared with those in other counties.  This church, however, had passed through some lively scenes in the Civil War, when the Royalist army was driving that of the Parliament towards the sea-coast, where it was