St Senara’s Church.
Zennor. Cornwall.
The Mermaid of Zennor
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The
delightful church of St Senara, situated in the lovely seaside village of Zennor, cowers in a hollow under the granite mass of Zennor Hill. Although
the earliest records we have of the present beautiful building date from
1150, it is a certainty that a church of some sorts has stood on this site
since at least the 6th century, when the Irish and Breton missionaries came
to Cornwall with the intention of converting the natives to their religion.
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.
On the
chair’s side there is a curious carving of a mermaid, a symbol which had
several interpretations for medieval worshippers.
Before the Christian era,
mermaids were one of the
symbols
Aphrodite,
goddess of the sea and love. In one hand she held a quince (love apple) and
in the other a comb. Later the quince was changed to a mirror, symbol of
vanity and heartlessness. She was seen by medieval Christians as a symbol of
lust and a warning against the sins of the flesh. But she also had another
more inspirational interpretation amongst seafaring communities where she
was also used to illustrate the two natures of Christ. As she was both human
and fish like, so Christ could be both human and divine, a message that
would have struck a chord with the inhabitants of this isolated region whose
lives were both dependent upon and intertwined with the sea.
However, later ages were to imbue this little chair with a fanciful legend that has an eerie supernatural quality about it. Many years ago, so the story goes, the people of Zennor were curious about a mysterious, though finely-dressed lady who each Sunday attended the evening service at their church. She would sit at the back of the church and loved to listen to the choir. She was especially fond of the singing of a boy named Matthew Trewhella and it wasn’t long before she had fallen in love with him. The woman, it transpired was a mermaid who had been lured from the sea by the sweet sound of Matthew Trewhella’s voice, and one Sunday she could contain her feelings no longer. Casting a spell over him, she lured him from the church, led him along the tiny stream that still babbles through the centre of the village today, and finally took him with her back into the sea. Matthew Trewhella was never seen again, but one Sunday morning, many years later, some sailors on a ship anchored in a nearby cove claimed that they were surprised by a mermaid who rose from the water, and asked the captain to raise his anchor, as it was barring the entrance to her home. They recognised her instantly as the enigmatic woman who had visited the Church, and thus the tale spread of how Matthew Trewhella had been taken from them by this lovely creature of the sea to become her lover. Local’s claimed that on warm summer evenings they could often hear the voices of the two lovers carried on the sea breezes, as they sang in perfect harmony together.