The Mermaid of Zennor

Product Information

tale of the Mermaid of Zennor may have been circulating for untold years before it was recorded by Mr William Bottrell. He received many awards for his poetry during the course of his life, including the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry (1967), and was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1955. It has been illustrated by the celebrated illustrator (and author in his own right) Michael Foreman. After many years, the mysterious woman became interested in a young man named Mathey Trewella, [i] "the best singer in the parish. In Cornish tradition, Mermaids could change their shapes at will to walk on land, and were often said to entice mortal men to come and live with them.

The famed "mermaid chair" was the same bench on which the mermaid had sat and sung, opposite Trewella in the singing loft. It’s one of Cornwall’s most famous legends – the tale of a mermaid enticing a handsome Cornish lad to live with her beneath the ocean forever and ever. Tucked away in a side aisle of the church is a time-battered wooden chair on which can clearly be seen the scars that five hundred and more years of constant usage have inevitably left upon its surface. It’s said that if you stand looking out to sea at Zennor on a warm summer’s evening you may well hear the sound of Matthew and Morvehen’s singing emanate from beneath the waves. If you want to do something really frightening, like skydiving or asking someone to marry you, you will need to work up the courage first.On Halloween, people carve faces into pumpkins, and on Thanksgiving or at Christmas, people carve turkeys, they cut up turkeys, and eat them. After the service she was the first to leave the church, and those who went out after her thought it strange how rapidly she had disappeared, as they could not see her anywhere outside. The small village of Zennor huddles around the medieval churc hbetween the West Cornwall moors and North Cornish coast not far from St Ives.

One Chinese folklorist describes a mermaid captured on Namtao Island as ‘Her features and limbs were in all respects human, except that her body was covered with fine hair of many beautiful colours’. He has won the Kate Greenaway Medal, the Smarties Book Prize, the Kurt Maschler Award and the Children's Book Award. Watkins’ poem has a much sadder and darker tone than Causley’s cheerfully magical book, reflecting how the same story can have a hundred different meanings depending on the telling.

The Mermaid of Zennor", is a poem by John Heath-Stubbs, who lived in Zennor for a while in the 1950s. In years gone by Padstow was an important port as it was a natural safe haven on an otherwise rocky coast.

Another view is that the bench was carved because of the story being passed down by word of mouth through the generations, long before Bottrell took up his pen and recorded it. According to a slightly different version of the tale, Morveren was drawn to the church by Mathew's beautiful voice and would dress as a human and listen at the back of the church. Levan, a few miles short of Land’s End, but spent much of his life abroad in Australia and Canada, where he worked as an English teacher. Many have said that it’s like sitting down to drink a coffee with me, although I’ll have a tea, I think! According to the tale she was forced into a barrel as punishment which was then nailed shut and cast into the ocean.Despite such illustrious chroniclers of the tale, we have our own version of the story below, which is also on sale in the church as a postcard. To my mind, one of the most evocative, understated observations in Waterlog concerns churches like Mathew Trewhella’s. Craig Weatherhill wrote the Mermaid of Zennor into his novel Seat of Storms (Tabb House, 1997), giving her the name Azenor, as the previous tellings never name her.

When Senara became pregnant, the king’s mother falsely accused her of infidelity and the king cast her into the sea. Whenever they sang songs in church, she had the most beautiful voice, and everyone else sang quietly so they could hear her better. They then go on to create guides to Zennor, retelling the story from the mermaid’s perspective and finishing by creating their own merfolk characters to include in a legend-style story that could be set in Cornwall or elsewhere. When Zennor folks learnt that a mermaid dwelt near Pen-dower, and what she had told the captain, they concluded—it was, this sea-lady who had visited their church, and enticed Trewella to her abode. It has a lovely path that goes around the coast, so you can walk on the cliffs and see the sea and feel the wind in your face.So it was a bit strange, because usually your first date happens a bit earlier, and usually your first date doesn’t last a whole week. 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. In the north wall is the Burma Star window, dedicated to armed forces who served in Burma during WWII.