Legends of the Sea & Shore

The coast and the deep water hold their own company — mermaids and selkies, drowned bells and sunken lands, the ghost ships and warning lights of the wrecking coasts. These are the stories of communities that lived by a sea that gave and took in equal measure, and of the shoreline as a threshold between worlds.

Sacred SitesZennorCornwallA granite village on the wild north Cornish coast, famous for the carved mermaid on a 600-year-old bench-end in its church — left to commemorate the mermaid who heard Matthew Trewhella sing, lured him down to her underwater home, and kept him there. Ships still sometimes hear his voice singing under the sea off Pendour Cove.

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