The Mermaid of Zennor

Product Information

And so the mermaid was carved into the bench at the church of Zennor, and all the parents told their children to be careful about mysterious women with long, beautiful hair. Mathew is stealing god’s show and St Senara’s was becoming more concert hall than earnest, Protestant house of worship.

Despite the geographical and historical distance, they all share certain characteristics, namely their beautiful appearance which often leads to romances with humans. If fish could talk, maybe they’d have old stories about monsters that seduce their sons out of the water – monsters even more terrifying for infiltrating their sacred, protected space. On Halloween, people carve faces into pumpkins, and on Thanksgiving or at Christmas, people carve turkeys, they cut up turkeys, and eat them.

and the watch, looking overboard, saw a mermaid with green eyes and tawny-gold hair swimming beside them. Location: Paid parking at the museum, or (if there is space), free parking along the very narrow village road. In the next moment, a cloud of fog arrived, and when it disappeared, Mathew and the mysterious woman were nowhere to be seen. Any visitor to Zennor will note that a rather steep cliff separates the nearby coastal path from the shoreline, which no mere mortal could traverse with ease.

As a Trewhela (my lot dropped the extra l and changed the pronunciation somewhere along the line), it’s always been a source of pride that my ancestor fell in love with a mermaid. Hence if the villagers of Zennor had instructed a woodworker to carve them a mermaid to commemorate the tale, it is highly likely a mermaid in the classic pose with mirror and comb would have resulted anyway. As with all old folk tales, the story differs slightly each time it is told, but the basic framework of the legend is always the same. As soon as you pass the threshold into this landscape it feels like you have been transported back in time.The small village of Zennor huddles around the medieval churc hbetween the West Cornwall moors and North Cornish coast not far from St Ives. Locals say the carving was made around 400 years ago in memory of a man named Matthew Trewhella, who, so the story goes, ran off to sea with a mermai. The lyrics are less dictated by the legend as Wooton’s song, but the musical arrangement has the same unearthly quality to it. Not many people in this day and age have enjoyed extensive reading of Botrell’s original work, it having been somewhat lost to the obscurity of time. Alternatively, the church may have been founded by Irish or Breton missionaries and simply dedicated to Senara.