Above the village of St Agnes rises a big round hill, purple with heather, which people now call St Agnes Beacon. Long ago, they said, it belonged to the giant Bolster.
Bolster was enormous. He could stand with one foot on the Beacon and the other on Carn Brea, and those two hills are six miles apart as the crow flies. He thought nothing of striding from one to the other. Once, halfway across, he grew thirsty and stooped to drink from the well at Chapel Porth, the little cove below the Beacon. He leaned on a stone in the valley while he drank, and the marks of his fingers were pressed into it.
Bolster had a wife, and he was a hard husband to her. Whenever he was cross with her, he made her pick up stones from the fields at the foot of the hill and carry them up to the top in her apron. She toiled up and down until the heaps of stones lay all over the summit.
Then the giant fell in love, and not with his wife. He fell in love with Agnes, the saint the village is named after, who was said to be very beautiful and very good. Bolster gave her no peace. He followed her everywhere, telling her how much he loved her, and his sighs and groans blew about the hills like storms. Agnes told him again and again that he was behaving badly, for he already had a wife. She begged him to leave her alone. It made no difference at all.
So Agnes made a plan. One day she seemed to give in. She told Bolster she believed he loved her, but that she wanted one small proof more. At Chapel Porth, at the end of the valley, there was a hole in the cliff. If Bolster would fill that hole with his own blood, she would not be cold to him any longer.
That seemed easy to Bolster. He was so huge he could fill a dozen holes like that and never miss the blood. So he stretched his great arm across the hole, cut a vein, and let the blood pour in. It roared and foamed as it fell to the bottom. He waited for the hole to fill. It took longer than he expected, but surely it couldn't be long now, so he bled on.
Hour after hour the blood ran, and still the hole was not full. At last the giant grew faint. He hadn't the strength to get up, or to stop the bleeding, and so, in the end, the great Bolster died.
Agnes had known all along what he didn't: the hole was open at the bottom to the sea. Every drop that ran in ran straight out again and turned the waves red. So the saint was free of her unwanted lover, Bolster's wife was free of her bullying husband, and the whole country round was rid of a tyrant. And if you go down to Chapel Porth, people said, you can still see the red stain on the rocks where the giant's blood ran down.
