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The
History...
DOLLY PENTREATH was
reputedly one of the last people to speak the Cornish Language as
her native tongue and is a ancestor of the vessel owner and family.
She died some 200 years ago.
In recent years, this ancient Celtic language has undergone an enthusiastic
revival.
Dolly was from the parish of Paul, next to Mousehole, pronounced
"Mowzel",
was married to a fisherman, and had an unenviable reputation.
She sold fish, smoked her pipe, drank flagons of beer with the best
and spoke proper old Cornish with a real twenty-two carat
stamp upon it.
This was the real old lingo; hot, sweet and strong, so that those
who heard her never forgot.
Dolly Pentreath was a fine woman, with a voice you could hear as
far away as Newlyn. It rattled round the rafters like brazen
trumpets blown by tempests. She had the heart of a lion, and
it was said that when a press-gang landed in search of men for the
navy, Dolly took up a hatchet and fought them back to their boats,
and so cursed them in old Cornish that the crew never ventured back
again.
There still exists the very room in the Keigwin Arms in which Dolly
was wont to take her pint and her pipe at her ease, and the window
out of which she would thrust her hard old face and shout to the
fishermen when they came to their landing-place.
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The old lady was keen on her bargains, and would trudge into
Penzance with her wicker basket on her back, and profit from the
gullible, according to the rules of the wily.
This is her legend,
to which it may be added that she had the reputation of being a
witch.
Dolly lived to one hundred and two, and then departed, carrying
with her in her queer old brain the most complete vocabulary of
the Cornish language on Earth.
She died poor in 1777 and was buried in the parish churchyard of
Paul, where people came in shoals to see her monument and read the
inscription.
The monument is set in the churchyard wall and was erected in 1860
by Louis Lucien Bonaparte, a descendant of the great Napoleon.
He was helped by the then vicar of Paul, Rev. J. Garret. Cut
in stone is a transcription of the 5th Commandment, "Honour thy
father and thy mother" in old Cornish.
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