At first, she listened only from the rocks at Pendour Cove, a small inlet of land along the rugged coastline barely a stone’s throw from the village. It probably takes its name from the local Saint Senara, but I prefer Philip Marsden’s suggestion of Budoc: ancient legendary royalty who was born in a barrel crossing the sea from Brittany to Ireland.

At various times in history they have been used to represent vanity (hence appearing with combs and mirror), the dual nature of Christ (with his human/divine nature symbolized in the mermaid's ability to live in the realm of air and the realm of water), and of course given their famous beauty and scanty wardrobes, as warnings about the temptations of lust. When he told them he’d met Mathew Trewella, and that the handsome young man was now a mysterious mermaid, the people all cried with fear.Along the Atlantic Coast of Cornwall, a few miles west of St Ives, sits the small village named “Zennor. The lyrics are less dictated by the legend as Wooton’s song, but the musical arrangement has the same unearthly quality to it. The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that " faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain". As a Trewhela (my lot dropped the extra l and changed the pronunciation somewhere along the line), it’s always been a source of pride that my ancestor fell in love with a mermaid.

Here, there are stories and whispers of a villager capturing the heart of a mysterious and beautiful stranger from the sea . The captain tried to explain that Mathew looked quite happy with his life, but the people wouldn’t listen. A strange woman has ensnared his heart in his absence, and Lilac finds her already fragile mental state unravelling faster still. And with a swish from her long gleaming tail she was gone, diving down to the sea-bed and her family.We gathered nouns and adjectives, using our senses, imagining what it must have been like for Tom and Zac to live there. Five or six times this unknown lady came to Zennor church, always on a fine day, and always she sat far apart from the congregation, watching Mathy and listening to every note he sang. Some of the people in the town thought it was a mermaid who had taken Mathew Trewella, all those years ago, and the captain didn’t like how this creature looked. Whenever they sang songs in church, she had the most beautiful voice, and everyone else sang quietly so they could hear her better.

Secondly, while at first it would seem unusual to find a representation of a mermaid in a church - after all, alluring ladies who are half fish and half naked aren't normally the first thing that springs to mind when contemplating the teachings of Christ - actually mermaids have a long history in church iconography as can be seen here in this marvellous round-up of church merfolk.One Chinese folklorist describes a mermaid captured on Namtao Island as ‘Her features and limbs were in all respects human, except that her body was covered with fine hair of many beautiful colours’. Alternatively, the church may have been founded by Irish or Breton missionaries and simply dedicated to Senara. The mermaid had come to church every Sunday to hear the choir, and her own voice was so sweet that she enticed Mathey Trewella, son of the churchwarden, to come away with her; neither was seen again on dry land. The Mermaid of Zennor", is a poem by John Heath-Stubbs, who lived in Zennor for a while in the 1950s.

In many tales, if a human was to obtain this cap or skin, the mermaid would be trapped on land with them for evermore. Tucked away in a side aisle of the church is a time-battered wooden chair on which can clearly be seen the scars that five hundred and more years of constant usage have inevitably left upon its surface. Supposedly the result of ocean-weary sailors mistaking aquatic mammals such as manatees for the figure of a woman, the well-known image of a creature with the head and torso of a female but the tail of a fish from the waist downwards has become a popular feature in folklore. When Senara became pregnant, the king’s mother falsely accused her of infidelity and the king cast her into the sea.To commemorate these somewhat unusual events they had the figure she bore—when in her ocean-home—carved in holy-oak, which may still be seen’.