Old Town

Crooked cottages and narrower gossip. Everybody here knew Silas Penhallow, and most had an opinion.

From Hale’s notebook

This is Porthgrey as it was before the railway: cottages leaning together as if to share a secret, lanes too narrow for anything wider than a handcart. The landlord’s grandson at The Man Overboard showed me a photograph from Lantern Night, 1953. The room is so full that every face is a blur. He says his grandfather told the same three stories about Silas Penhallow until the day he died, and never the same way twice.