island. The main road running south to Rose Head from Rosemarket cuts
the peninsula into two unequal portions, the eastern and by far the
larger of which consists of a flat tableland two or three hundred feet
above the sea covered with a bushy heath, which flourishes in the
magnesian soil and which when in bloom is of such a clear rosy pink,
with nothing to break the level monochrome except scattered drifts of
cotton grass, pools of silver water and a few stunted pines, that
ignorant observers have often supposed that the colour gave its name to
the whole peninsula. The ancient town of Rosemarket, which serves as the
only channel of communication with the rest of Cornwall, lies in the
extreme north-west of the peninsula between a wide creek of the Roseford
river and the Rose Pool, an irregular heart-shaped water about four
miles in circumference which on the west is only separated from the
Atlantic by a bar of fine shingle fifty yards across.

The parish of Nancepean, of which Mark's grandfather the Reverend
Charles Elphinstone Trehawke had been vicar for nearly thirty years, ran
southward from the Rose Pool between the main road and the sea for three
miles. It was a country of green valleys unfolding to the ocean, and of
small farms fertile enough when they were sheltered from the prevailing
wind; but on the southern confines of the parish the soil became
shallow and stony, the arable fields degenerated into a rough open
pasturage full of gorse and foxgloves and gradually widening patches of
heather, until finally the level monochrome of the Rhos absorbed the
last vestiges of cultivation, and the parish came to an end.

The actual village of Nancepean, set in a hollow about a quarter of a
mile from the sea, consisted of a smithy, a grocer's shop, a parish hall
and some two dozen white cottages with steep thatched roofs lying in
their own gardens on either side of the unfrequented road that branched