The temple of Tanat

Part three: In search of the fire sanctuary

There are hidden places still. Roads run down to singletrack ribbons and the names grow stranger: Manaccan, Lanarth, Kuggar, Predannack Wollas. The tourists get afeared in the high-hedged mazy lanes and tend to stay on the major arteries, whilst the locals duck off into the branching labyrinth on business of their own. The sheltered soft south of the Helford is riven with creeks and forested with low oaks, beech, holly, sycamore and estate-escaped bamboo. In the spring, garlicky green ransoms abound, but in high summer it is a tumble of orchids warring with bindweed, brambles spanning over flaccid primroses and foxgloves spiring after dotted pools of light. Small coves are lapped by the tide of brackish estuaries and the sea is dotted with sails, blood red for the luggers, dragonfly membranes for the racers, crackling white dacron for the day sailors. It is an idyll to become lost in.

The Lizard was suggested as the location of the pellar cult by poet Peter Redgrove, and the idea that something survived here does indeed compel on a warm summer’s day. Following Doreen Valiente’s lead, we are in search of Lantinney, ‘the enclosure of the fire,’ and a potential cultic site of Tanat. I doubt that she, or Cecil Williamson for that matter, made it out this far. Few do. Etymology had done the work for them – lan, enclosure, and tan, fire – names sprinkled across the hills of England. We are still close enough to midsummer to see the incautious remains of a scorched circle, but at the very least to get the lay of the land.

The coast path from the Helford goes past a series of quiet swimming spots, tempting us to spend the day here, dipping and then lolling on the rocks. But we persist. Over the course of the next half hour the undergrowth gets progressively denser, fed by the wood’s wet springs. A gimlet-eyed robin watches us from his ivy castle as we finally clear the trees and up onto farmland where the kissing gates give way to granite barred cattle stiles. Handsome burdocks crowd about our knees, and we gain first sight of Lantinney, there at the end of the spine of land between the dazzle of the Helford to our left and Gillan Creek to our right.

As we reach Lantinney, a thin terrace of brickwork smiles out from a disordered mound that vanishes into uneven ground and brambles. We are presented with a final maze and plunge into above head high blackthorn and then brambles, bracken and honeysuckle, cat’s ear and campion. It is a disorienting green world, heavy with bees penduluming under the weight of yellow pollen baskets. No-one is lighting fires up here. The furze has already turned its flamey flowers to soft black seed purses and the blackberries are a long way from puckering up for the drunken autumn flies.

What the cartographers now call Dennis Head – Dennis from dinas meaning castle – is become a fortress of the wild. A green keep. We cannot say that a Tanat cult winds its way up from St Anthony-in-Meneage, tucked in the elbow of the creek, to hail the Sun with cries of Tan! Tan! But we at least have made it here.

Lantinney does indeed come from lann, which is the prefix for a Celtic Christian enclosure. That structure is long gone, though an earthwork ditch does separate off Little Dinas, the overgrown spur. Headlands have been fortified settlements here from the earliest times, so the Christian site is doubtless laid on a pagan foundation.

The headland was refortified by the Royalists in the Civil War, explaining perhaps the brickwork we saw and the four prowed castle of some old maps. Since then the stone will have been scavenged and the thorns taken root, the spiral ferns exhaled their spores.

Though tan is fire in Cornish, the two words joined here are in fact Lan and Anthony, the saint of the church in the valley below. Valiente and Williamson fell for a false friend, much as the previous Phoenician enthusiasts had, seeing traces of Levantine contact in the language and landmarks that simply weren’t there.

St Anthony is the saint of lost objects, and his church was built of imported Normandy granite by a grateful shipwrecked crew in the eleventh century on the site of a much earlier wooden chapel. The farmhouse next to it is named Lantinning, demonstrating yet again that the site is dedicated to Anthony, not Tan. Our lost thing, the cult of Tanat, is one St Anthony seems less inclined to restore to us.

As for Meneage, that tells the real story; it means Monk’s Land. Rather than the site of a Phoenician survival, we are in the abandoned land of Celtic Christians who built their cells and formed their monastic communities in the Age of the Saints. Dressed in hooded cape and tunic, with a savage tonsure (the head shaved from ear to ear and left long behind), these Christians emerged as the Roman Empire fell, and formed a web between the fringes of Wales, Ireland and Cornwall.

When the Christians took over a pagan site they would fast, eating only after sunset the meagre repast of an egg, a morsel of bread and a gulp of milk until forty days had passed. Thus they prepared their spiritual force to consecrate the place and drive out the indwelling deity. It is impossible to tell how much we might have lost in the process; but much has crept back.

Before the monks came, the bosky woods of the Helford harboured Druidic nemeta, but the coppicing for charcoal means that we cannot now identify those holy groves. Yet the sense of the sacred still prevails in the land, even as the saints have grown unknown. None can tell you the stories of even Columbanus, Ia, Just or Petroc, let alone the rest; that is excepting a few older churchgoers in their namesake towns. The monks have fled, but the land continues to speak in a tongue more familiar to those who worship at grove, well and stone. The Meneage remains a place of retreat and renewal, but what survives of the Tanat cult is for now the two of us, standing on a forgotten headland gazing out to sea.

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Postscript

We are not done searching for Tanat, and for that we will return to the imaginal of Cecil Williamson and his fellow travellers, in later articles in this series.