Doom Bar - in Literature

In Literature

" is doubtless a myth, but it is a fact that a wailing cry is sometimes heard on the Doombar after a fearful gale and loss of life on that fateful bar, like a woman bewailing the dead."

Enys Tregarthan's notes on the Doom Bar legend

According to local folklore, the Doom Bar was created by the Mermaid of Padstow as a dying curse after being shot. In 1906, Enys Tregarthen wrote that a Padstow local, Tristram Bird, bought a new gun and wanted to shoot something worthy of it. He went hunting seals at Hawker's Cove but found a young woman sitting on a rock brushing her hair. Entranced by her beauty, he offered to marry her and when she refused he shot her in retaliation, only realising afterwards that she was a mermaid. As she died she cursed the harbour with a "bar of doom", from Hawker's Cove to Trebetherick Bay. A terrible gale blew up that night and when it finally subsided there was the sandbar, "covered with wrecks of ships and bodies of drowned men".

The ballad, The Mermaid of Padstow, tells a similar story of a local named Tom Yeo, who shot the mermaid mistaking her for a seal. John Betjeman, who was well-acquainted with the area, wrote in 1969 that the mermaid met a local man and fell in love with him. When she could no longer bear living without him, she tried to lure him beneath the waves but he escaped by shooting her. In her rage she threw a handful of sand towards Padstow, around which the sandbank grew. In other versions of the tale, the mermaid sings from the rocks and a youth shoots at her with a crossbow, or a greedy man shoots her with a longbow.

The mermaid legend extends beyond the creation of the Doom Bar. In 1939 Samuel Williamson declared there are mermaids comparable to Sirens who lie in the shallow waters and draw in ships to be wrecked. In addition, "the distressful cry of a woman bewailing her dead" is said to be heard after a storm where lives are lost on the sandbar.

Rosamund Watson's "Ballad of Pentyre Town" uses the sandbank for imagery to elicit feelings of melancholy when talking of giving up everything for love. A Victorian poem by Alice E. Gillington, "The Doom-Bar", relates the story of a girl who gave an engraved ring to the man she loved before he sailed away across the Doom Bar, breaking her heart. Four years later, when the tide was lower than usual, her friends persuaded her to walk out on the sand where she found the ring inside a scallop. Realising he must have tossed it aside on the night he left, she resolved not to remain heart-broken, but to sail out to sea herself.

A play, The Doom Bar, about smuggling and wrecking was written in the early 1900s by Arthur Hansen Bush. Although there was no interest in London it was well received in America, and was scheduled to tour in Chicago and New York. A series of mishaps, blamed on the legendary wrecker Cruel Coppinger, culminating in a fire at Baltimore, caused the play to be considered cursed by America's actors' unions and its members were banned from appearing in it.