And each place has its own legend: at Rafiel the Gold lured Pirates, and the Turnip-Field; at Polwint the Giant Excise Man; at Borhaze the Smugglers of Trezent Rock; at St.Borse the wreck of "The Golden Galleon" in the year 1563, with its wonderful treasure; and at St.Maitsin Cove the famous Witch of St.Maitsin Church Town who turned men's bones into water and filled St.Maitsin Church with snakes.

Back from one summer holiday, treasuring these stories together with our collections of shells and seaweed and dried flowers, we came, and so the tales settled in Polchester streets and crept into the heart of the Polchester cobbles and haunted the Polchester corners by the fire, and even invaded with their romantic, peering, mischievous faces the solemn aisles of the Cathedral itself.
The sea was at the heart of all of them, and whenever a sea-breeze blew down the street carrying with it wisps of straw from the field, or dandelion seeds, or smell of sea-pinks, we children lifted our noses and sniffed and sniffed and saw the waves curl in across the shore, or breakers burst upon the rock, and whispered to one another of the Smugglers of Trezent or the Gold-laced Pirates of Rafiel.
But I think that none of us adored the sea as Jeremy did.

From that first moment when, as a small baby, he had been held up in Rafiel Cove to see the tops of the waves catch the morning light as they rolled over to shore, he had adored it.

He had never felt any fear of it; he had been able to swim since he could remember, and he simply lived for those days at the end of July when they would all, in a frantic hurry and confusion, take the train for Rafiel and arrive at Cow Farm in the evening, with the roar of the sea coming across the quiet fields to mingle with the lowing of the cows and the bleating of the sheep.

He had in his bedroom a wonderful collection of dusty and sticky sea-shells, and these he would turn over and over, letting them run through his fingers as a miner counts his gold.
Let him catch the faintest glimpse of a shadow of a sailor in the street and he was after it, and he had once, when he was only four or five, been caught by the terrified Jampot, only just in time, walking away confidently down the market-place, his hand in the huge grasp of a villainous looking mariner.