High on Bodmin Moor, far from any house, lies a sheet of dark water called Dozmary Pool. Richard Carew, who described Cornwall in 1602, put its strangeness into rhyme:
Dosmery poole amid the moores,On top stands of a hill,More then a mile about, no streamesIt empt, nor any fill.Richard Carew, <i>The Survey of Cornwall</i> (1602)
People said the pool had no bottom, and that a thorn bush thrown into it had come up in Falmouth harbour. They said too that a wicked man was bound to stand beside it until he had emptied it.
His name was Tregeagle. As Robert Hunt heard it, he was rich beyond most men of his day: an unjust magistrate who let innocent men suffer to hide his own crimes, and a greedy landlord who trapped his tenants in his schemes. People whispered that he had murdered his own sister, and that his wife and children died of his cruelty. Dying, he gave the churchmen money to fight off the devils waiting for his soul. Their prayers held the devils back, and he was buried with great honour in St Breock church.
But he was not left to rest. After his death, two families went to law over wide lands around Bodmin. Tregeagle had been steward to one of them, and had destroyed old deeds, forged new ones, and sold land and kept the money. At the assizes, just as the judge was about to sum up, the defendant announced one more witness. A chill fell on the court, and Tregeagle himself was led into the witness box. His evidence laid the whole fraud bare, and the honest man won his case.
Then nobody could send the dead man back. Dark spirits waited for him, but something holy kept them off. The churchmen and lawyers agreed to give him a task without end: while he laboured, the devil could not touch him, but a moment's rest would be fatal. One lawyer remembered the bottomless pool on the moor. One churchman added that he must empty it with a limpet shell with a hole in it.
So, year after year, in storm and shine, Tregeagle bent over the black water with his broken shell, and the water never fell. At last the devil raised a storm so wild that lightning coiled round the rocks of Roughtor and the earth itself shook. Tregeagle fled. Three times he ran round the pool with the demons at his heels, then leapt clean across it, for devils cannot cross water, and ran shrieking over the moor to Roche Rock. There he forced his head through the east window of the hermit's chapel, safe inside holy walls while his body lay out in the storm.
His shrieks at Roche were unbearable, so the monks sent him to the shore near Padstow, to make bundles of sand and bind them with ropes of sand. Every tide undid his work, and his cries drove the people out of the town. St Petroc chained him with links each forged with a prayer and led him south, to carry sacks of sand across the mouth of the Loe to Porthleven. One day a demon tripped him, his sack burst, and the sand he spilled became Loe Bar, which choked the harbour of Helston for ever. At last, with bell, book and candle, the priests sent him to Land's End, to sweep the sand from Porthcurno round the headland into Nanjizal Cove, a task that will never be done.
He is labouring there still, people said. In calm weather you may hear his wailing along the coast, and when a storm is coming, his roaring warns of it first.
