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One of his pranks was to swim out to the crags at the mouth of Bude haven, and there pose as a mermaid; which he did to the prolonged bewilderment of the countryfolk. He was educated at Liskeard, Cheltenham, and Oxford; coming to Morwenstow in 1834 after having held the curacy of North Tamerton.
Across the bay Tintagel lies directly opposite, eight miles away over the sea, every crevice and gully of its riven island clearly marked in the translucent air; and beyond it the eye follows leagues and leagues of iron cliffs towering far higher than any others in the west, and point after point of noble jagged promontories, past Boscastle, set back a little out of sight, past Bude and Cambeak, and rugged Morwenstow, till it rests at last on the dim line of Hartland Point, full 40 miles away as a bird would fly.
He died in 1875, having been received into the Romish Church a few hours before his death; and the remains were laid in Plymouth Cemetery. On his tombstone is a line from his own beautiful poem, "The Quest of the Sangraal" "I would not be forgotten in this land." There is now an elaborate memorial window in Morwenstow Church, unveiled in 1904.
S. Baring-Gould himself, in his book on the Vicar of Morwenstow, has located Coppinger in the Kilkhampton district; but his novel, In the Roar of the Sea, places its hero, somewhat humanised, at St. Enodoc. The truth is, there are similar traditions in several parts of the Cornish coast, and elsewhere.
The gale, blowing up channel from the southwest, broke with such fury on that bold, unsheltered piece of coast by Morwenstow, that the wreckers, who were gathered on the shore and heights above, had more than enough to do to keep their feet. The rain came down in driving sheets, shutting off the sea from their eager eyes, so that they could see nothing of the prey they were watching for.
R.S. Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow, himself a poet of real feeling, gave expression, in rabid abuse of Milton, to the antipathy which more judicious churchmen suppress.
Whatever advantage there may be in lying in consecrated earth is now freely granted; the unknown drowned are given the benefit of the doubt, and their bodies committed to the dust in Christian fashion. In parishes like these of the Lizard, and on the north Cornwall coast at places like Morwenstow, this duty of giving Christian sepulture has been no sinecure.
"Where parsley's grown in the garden, there'll be a death before the year's out." In Devonshire it has long been held unlucky to transplant parsley, and a poor woman in the neighbourhood of Morwenstow attributed a certain stroke with which one of her children had been afflicted after whooping-cough to the unfortunate undoing of the parsley bed.
Morwenstow vicarage is curious for its chimneys, which Hawker himself designed from church-towers in his neighbourhood and at Oxford. The church and vicarage stand in loneliness; there is no central village at Morwenstow, but the residences are scattered about the swelling downs and high-banked lanes.
This, Tom was told, was the country home of Mr. Farley himself, and the house alone had cost a fortune. At the turn in the pike where you lost sight finally of the iron-works, there was a new church, a miniature in native stone of good old Stephen Hawker's church of Morwenstow. Tom gasped at the sight of it, and scowled when he saw the gilded cross on the tower. "Catholic!" he said.
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