The North Devon Coast E-Book

Charles G. Harper

• Herausgeber: Publisher s11838
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The North Devon Coast written by Charles G. Harper who  was an English author and illustrator. This book was published in 1908. And now republish in ebook format. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book.

Leseprobe

The North Devon Coast

By

Charles G. Harper

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER II. LYNMOUTH

CHAPTER III. LYNTON—THE WICHEHALSE FAMILY, IN FICTION AND IN FACT

CHAPTER IV. THE COAST, TO COUNTISBURY AND GLENTHORNE

CHAPTER V. THE NORTH WALK—THE VALLEY OF ROCKS—LEE “ABBEY”—WOODA BAY—HEDDON’S MOUTH—TRENTISHOE—THE HANGMAN HILLS

CHAPTER VI. COMBEMARTIN, AND ITS OLD SILVER MINES—THE CHURCH—-WATERMOUTH CASTLE—HELE

CHAPTER VII. “’COMBE” IN HISTORY—MODERN ’COMBE—THE OLD CHURCH

CHAPTER VIII. LUNDY—HISTORY OF THE ISLAND—WRECK OF THE MONTAGU—LUNDY OFFERED AT AUCTION—DESCRIPTION

CHAPTER IX. CHAMBERCOMBE AND ITS “HAUNTED HOUSE”—BERRYNARBOR

CHAPTER X. LEE—MORTE POINT—MORTHOE AND THE TRACY LEGEND—WOOLACOMBE—GEORGEHAM—CROYDE—SAUNTON SANDS—BRAUNTON, BRAUNTON BURROWS, AND LIGHTHOUSE

CHAPTER XI. PILTON—BARNSTAPLE BRIDGE—OLD COUNTRY WAYS—BARUM—HISTORY AND COMMERCIAL IMPORTANCE—OLD HOUSES—“SEVEN BRETHREN BANK”—FREMINGTON—INSTOW AND THE LOVELY TORRIDGE

CHAPTER XII. KINGSLEY AND “WESTWARD HO!”—BIDEFORD BRIDGE—THE GRENVILLES—SIR RICHARD GRENVILLE AND THE REVENGE—THE ARMADA GUNS—BIDEFORD CHURCH—THE POSTMAN POET

CHAPTER XIII. THE KINGSLEY STATUE—NORTHAM—“BLOODY CORNER”—APPLEDORE—WESTWARD HO! AND THE PEBBLE RIDGE

CHAPTER XIV. ABBOTSHAM—“WOOLSERY”—BUCK’S MILL

CHAPTER XV. CLOVELLY—“UP ALONG” AND “DOWN ALONG”—THE “NEW INN”—APPRECIATIVE AMERICANS—THE QUAY POOL—THE HERRING FISHERY

CHAPTER XVI. MOUTH MILL AND BLACK CHURCH ROCK—THE COAST TO HARTLAND—HARTLAND POINT—HARTLAND ABBEY—HARTLAND QUAY

E. D. Percival

[Ilfracombe.

LYNMOUTH, FROM THE BEACH.

“Let us, in God’s name, adventure one voyage more, always with this caution, that you be pleased to tolerate my vulgar phrase, and to pardon me if, in keeping the plain highway, I use a plain low phrase; and in rough, rugged and barren places, rude, rustic, and homely terms.”—Thomas Westcote, 1620.

The North Devon Coast 

CHAPTER I.INTRODUCTORY

No one can, with advantage, explore the rugged coast of North Devon by progressing direct from the point where it begins and so continuing, without once harking back. The scenery is exceptionally bold and fine, and the tracing of the actual coast-line by consequence a matter of no little difficulty. Only the pedestrian can see this coast as a whole, and even he needs to be blessed with powers of endurance beyond the ordinary, if he would miss none of those rugged steeps, those rocky coves and “mouths” and leafy combes that for the most part make up the tale of the North Devon littoral. It is true that there are sands in places, but they are principally sands like those yielding wastes of Braunton Burrows, whereon you even wish yourself back again upon the hazardous, stone-strewn hillsides sloping down to the sea that make such painful walking in the region of Heddon’s Mouth; and there you wish yourself on the sands again. It is so difficult as to be almost impossible, to have at once the boldest scenery and the easiest means of progression. At any rate, the two are found to be utterly incompatible on the North Devon coast, and it consequently behoves those who would thoroughly see this line of country to take their exploration in small doses. As for the cyclist, he can do no more upon his wheel than (so to speak) bore try-holes into the scenery, and merely sample it at those rare points where practicable roads and tracks approach the shore. The ideal method is a combined cycling and walking expedition; establishing headquarters at convenient centres, becoming acquainted with the districts within easy reach of them, and then moving on to new.

The only possible or thinkable place where to begin this exploration of these seventy-eight miles is Lynmouth, situated six miles from Glenthorne, where the coast-line of Somerset is left behind. The one reasonable criticism of this plan is that, arrived at Lynmouth, you have the culmination of all the beauties of this beautiful district, and that every other place (except Clovelly) is apt to suffer by comparison.

Hardy explorers from the neighbourhood of London (of whom I count myself one) will find their appreciation of this coast greatly enhanced by traversing the whole distance to it by cycle. You come by this means through a varied country; from the level lands of Middlesex and Berkshire, through the chalk districts of Wilts; and so, gradually entering the delightful West, to the steep hills and rugged rustic speech of Somerset. It is a better way than being conveyed by train, and being deposited at last—you do not quite know how—at Lynton station.

Of course, the ideal way to arrive at Lynmouth is by motor-car, and there, as you come down the salmon-coloured road from Minehead and Porlock, the garage of the Tors Hotel faces you, the very first outpost of the place, expectantly with open doors. But, good roads, or indeed any kind of roads, only rarely approaching the coast of North Devon, it is merely at the coast-towns and villages, and not in a continual panorama, that the motorist will here come in touch with the sea.

To give a detailed exposition of the route by which I came, per cycle, to Lynmouth might be of interest, but it would no doubt be a little beside the mark in these pages. Only let the approach across Exmoor be described.

I come to Lynmouth in the proper spirit for such scenery: not hurriedly, but determined to take things luxuriously, for to see Lynmouth in a fleeting, dusty manner is to do oneself and the place alike an injustice. But the best of intentions are apt to be set at nought by circumstances, and circumstances make sport with all explorers. Thus leaving Dulverton at noon of a blazing July day, and making for Exmoor, there is at once a long, long ascent above the valley of the infant Exe to be walked, at a time when but a few steps involve even the most lathy of tourists in perspiration. And then, at a fork of the roads in a lonely situation, where guidance is more than usually necessary, a hoary signpost, lichened with the weather of generations and totally illegible, mocks the stranger. It is, of course, inevitable in such a situation as this that, of the two roads, the one which looks the likeliest should be the wrong one; and the likely road in this instance leads presently into a farmyard—and nowhere else. This is where you perspire most copiously, and think things unutterable. Then come the treeless, furze-covered and bracken-grown expanses of Winsford common and surrounding wide-spreading heaths, where the Exmoor breed of ponies roam at large; and you think you are on Exmoor. To all intents, you are, but, technically, Exmoor is yet a long way ahead.

It is blazing hot in these parts in summer, and yet, if you be an explorer worthy the name, you must needs turn aside, left and right; first to see Torr Steps, a long, primitive bridge of Celtic origin, crossing the river Barle, generally spoken of by the country-folk as “Tarr” steps, just as they would call a hornet a “harnet,” as evidenced in the old rustic song beginning,

“A harnet zet in a holler tree,

A proper spiteful twoad was he”;

for it must be recollected that, although on the way to the North Devon coast, and near it, we are yet in Zummerzet. Secondly, an invincible curiosity to see what the village of Exford is like takes you off to the right. Cycling, you descend that long steep hill in a flash, but on the way back, in the close heat, arrive at the conclusion that Exford was not worth the mile and a half walk uphill again.

And so to Simonsbath, a tiny village in the middle of the moor and in a deep hollow where the river Barle prattles by. Unlike the moor above and all around, Simonsbath is deeply wooded. Simon himself is a half-mythical personage, one Simund, or Sigismund, of Anglo-Saxon times, according to some accounts a species of Robin Hood outlaw, and to others the owner of the manor in those days. “Bath” does not necessarily indicate bathing, and in this case it merely means a pool.

The traveller coming to Simonsbath in July finds himself in an atmosphere of “Baa,” and presently discovers hundreds of Earl Fortescue’s sheep being sheared. Then rising out of Simonsbath by a weariful, sun-scorched road, come the rounded treeless hills and the heathery hollows, where Exe Head lies on the left hand, with Chapman Barrows and the source of the river Lyn near by, in a wilderness, where the purple hills look solemnly down upon bogs, prehistoric tumuli, and hut-circles. Here, in the words of Westcote, writing in 1620, “we will, with an easy pace, ascend the mount of Hore-oke-ridge, not far from whence we shall find the spring of the rivulet Lynne.” Hoar Oak Stone, on this ridge, is a prominent landmark.

Presently, at Brendon Two Gates (where there is but one gate), we pass out of Exmoor and Somerset and into Devon, at something under six miles from Lynmouth. Alongside the unfenced road across the wild common, as far as Brendon Rectory, the sheep lie in hundreds. Then suddenly the road drops down into the deep gorge of Farley Water, and comes, with many a twist, to Bridge Ball, a picturesque hamlet with a water-mill. One more little rise, and then the road descends all the way to Lynmouth, through the splendidly romantic scenery of the Lyn valley and Watersmeet, where the streams of East and West Lyn unite.

Circumstances have by this time made the traveller, who promised himself a luxurious and leisurely journey, a hot, dusty and wearied pilgrim. To such, the sudden change from miles of sun-burnt heights is irresistibly inviting. To sit beneath the shade of those overhanging alders, those graceful hazels, oaks, and silver birches, reclining on some mossy shelf of rock, and watch the Lyn awhile, foaming here in white cataracts over the boulders in its path, or smoothly gliding over the deep pools, whose tint is touched to a brown-sherry hue by the peat held in solution, is a delight. It is a delightful spot, to which the tall foxgloves, standing pink in the half-light under the mossy stems of the trees, lend a suggestion of fairyland.

WATERSMEET.

The road winds away down the valley, its every turn revealing increasingly grand hillsides, clothed with dwarf woods, and here and there a grey crag: very like the Cheddar Gorge, with an unaccustomed mantle of greenery. Descending this fairest of introductions to the North Devon coast, past the confluence at Watersmeet, where slender trees incline their trunks together by the waterfall, like horses amiably nuzzling, one comes by degrees within the “region of influence”—as they phrase it in the world of international politics—of the holiday-maker at Lynmouth, who is commonly so lapped in luxury there, and rendered so indolent by the soft airs of Devon, that Watersmeet forms the utmost bounds to which he will penetrate in this direction, when on foot. And when those who undertake so much do at length arrive here, they want refreshment, which they appear to obtain down below the road, beside the stream, at a rustic cottage styling itself “Myrtleberry,” claiming, according to a modest notice on the rustic stone wall bordering the road, to have supplied in one year 8,000 teas and 1,700 luncheons. There thus appears to be an opening for a philosophic discussion of “Scenery as an Influence upon Appetite.” The place is so far below the road that, the observer is amused to see, tradesmen’s supplies are carried to it in a box conveyed by aerial wires.

And so at length into Lynmouth, seated at the point where the rushing Lyn tumbles, slips, and slides at last into the sea. One misses something in approaching the place, nor does one ever find it there. It is something that can readily be spared, being indeed nothing less than the usual squalid fringe that seems so inevitable an introduction to towns and villages, no matter how large or small. There are no introductory gasworks in the approaches to Lynmouth; no dustbins, advertisement-hoardings, or flagrant, dirty domestic details that usually herald civilisation. The customary accumulated refuse is astonishingly absent: mysteriously etherialised and abolished; but how is it done? In what manner do the local authorities magic it away? Do they pronounce some incantation, and then, with a mystic pass or two, abolish it?

CHAPTER II.LYNMOUTH

Lynmouth would have pleased Dr. Johnson, who held the opinion that the most beautiful landscape was capable of improvement by the addition of a good inn in the foreground. We have grown in these days beyond mere inns, which are places the more luxurious persons admire from the outside, for their picturesque qualities—and pass on. Dr. Johnson’s ideal has been transcended here, and hotels, in the foreground, in the middle distance, above, below, and on the sky-line, should serve to render it, from this standpoint, the most picturesque place in this country. One odd result of this complexion of affairs is that when a Lynmouth hotel proprietor issues booklets of tariffs, including photographic views of the place, he finds that all his choice pictures contain representations of other people’s hotels. This is sorrow’s crown of sorrow, the acme of agony, the ne plus ultra of disgust. Resting on the commanding terrace of the Tors Hotel, seated amidst its wooded grounds like some Highland shooting-box, I can see perhaps eight others; and down in the village a house that is not either a hotel, an inn, or a boarding-house, or that does not let apartments, is a shop. And I don’t think there is a shop that does not sell picture-postcards! There are some few very fine villas, situated in their own grounds, on the hillsides, but whenever any one of these comes into the market, it also becomes a hotel.

And yet, with it all, there is a holy calm at Lynmouth. Save for the murmur of the Lyn, the breaking of the waves upon the pebbly shore, or the occasional bell of the crier, nothing disturbs the quiet. As there are no advertisement-hoardings, so also there are no town or other bands, minstrels, piano-organs, or public entertainers. Rows of automatic penny-in-the-slot machines are conspicuously not here. There is not a railway station. Nor is there anything in the likeness of a conventional sea-front. The Age of Advertisement is, in short, discouraged, and I am not sure that the ruling powers of the place have not something in the way of stripes and dungeon-cells awaiting would-be public entertainers.

But, lest it might be supposed that the advantages of Lynmouth end with these negative qualities, let something now be said of its own positive charms. It is daintiness itself, to begin with, and so small and neat, yet so rugged and unexpected, that it is sometimes difficult to believe in the bona fides of its picturesqueness, which looks almost as if it had been created to order. Yet the evidence of old prints proves, if proof were wanting, that Lynmouth—what there was then of it—was as romantic a hundred years ago as it is to-day. Indeed, an inspection of old prints leads one to believe that, though there are more houses now, the enclosing hills are more abundantly and softly wooded than then. And, with the exception of the Rhenish tower built on the stone pier, everything has been added legitimately, without any idea of being picturesque.

That quaint tower, a deliberate copy of one on the Drachenfels, owes its being to General Rawdon, who resided here from about 1840, and, finding his æsthetic taste outraged by a naked iron water-tank erected on posts, built this pleasing feature to harmonise with the scenery. An iron basket, still remaining, was provided to serve for a beacon, and now that Lynmouth is lighted by an installation of electric glow-lamps, a light is shown from it every night.

But let us halt awhile to learn something of the rise of Lynmouth, as a seaside resort. At the close of the eighteenth century, the place was a little hamlet, dependent partly on a precarious fishing industry, and partly on the spinning of woollen yarn. But presently, fishing and spinning were at once and together in a bad way, and Mr. William Litson, the largest employer of the spinners, found himself and his people out of work. It chanced at this time that the new-born delight in picturesque scenery, that had already set the literary men of the age scribbling, had brought some few travellers even into the wilds of North Devon. They fell into raptures over Lynton and Lynmouth: raptures rather dashed by the discovery that there was no sufficient accommodation for them. Litson, pondering upon these things, and with wits sharpened by threatened adversity, took opportunity by the hand, and in 1800, opening what is now the “Globe” inn as a hotel of sorts, and furnishing the cottages on either side for the reception of visitors, became the pioneer of what is now the great hotel-keeping interest of the two towns. Litson prospered in an amazing degree. Early among his patrons were Robert Coutts, famous in those days as a banker, and the Marchioness of Bute; and the stream of visitors grew so rapidly that by 1807 he was able to open the original “Valley of Rocks” hotel, up at Lynton. The adjoining “Castle” hotel soon followed.

About the time when Lynmouth and Lynton were thus first rising into favour, the poet Southey came this way, and wrote a description that has ever since been most abundantly quoted. But it is impossible not to quote it again, even though the comparison with places in Portugal is uncalled for, absurd, and entirely beside the mark.

Thus, Southey: “My walk to Ilfracombe led me through Lynmouth, the finest spot, except Cintra and Arrabida, which I have ever seen. Two rivers join at Lynmouth; each of these flows down a combe, rolling over huge stones, like a long waterfall. Immediately at their junction they enter the sea, and the rivers and the sea make but one uproar. Of these combes, the one is richly wooded, the other runs between two high, bare, stony hills, wooded at the base. From the Summerhouse Hill between the two is a prospect most magnificent—on either hand combes and the river; before, the beautiful little village, which, I am assured by one who is familiar with Switzerland, resembles a Swiss village.”

LYNMOUTH AND THE TORS, FROM THE BEACH.

And so with a host of others, to whom the hills “beetle,” the rocks “frown savagely,” the sea “roars like a devouring monster.” And all the while, you know, they don’t do anything of the kind. Instead, the hills slant away beautifully up skyward, the rocks, draped with ivy and moss and studded with ferns, look benignant, and the sea and the Lyn together still the senses with their combined drowsy murmur, as you sit looking alternately down upon the harbour or up at the wooded heights from that finest of vantage points, the “Tors” terrace, after dinner, when the lights in the village and those of the hillside villas twinkle in the twilight, like jewels. The poetry of the scene appeals to all, except perhaps Miss Marie Corelli, who, in the “Mighty Atom,” does not appear to approve of it. This, of course, is very discouraging, but the inhabitants are endeavouring to bear up; apparently with a considerable measure of success.

“How soothing the sound of rushing water,” observed a charming young lady, impressed with the scene. I agreed, but could not help remarking that there were exceptions. “My dear young lady,” said I, noticing the incredulous lift of her eyebrow’s, “you do not know the feelings of a householder whose water-pipes have burst in a rapid thaw. Rushing water, as it pours out of the bath-room, down the front stairs, does not soothe him.”

The voice of the Lyn has, however, suggested less prosaic thoughts, and has set many a minor poet, and many minimus poets, scribbling in the hotel “visitors’” books. Nay, no less a person than the Reverend William Henry Havergal, staying at the Lyndale Hotel, in September 1849, waking in the night and listening to that voice, harmonised it in the following chant which he inscribed in the book then kept at that establishment:—

It is a beautiful anthem-like fragment, “like the sound of a great ‘Amen,’” and brings thoughts of cathedral choirs and deep-toned organs. Havergal, of course, as a writer of devotional music, had a mind by long use attuned to finding such a motive; but I am not sure that another composer, with a bent towards secular music of a sprightly, light-opera kind, might not, lying wakeful here, find a suggestion for his own art in these untutored sharps and trebles.

The Lyn in its final series of falls in the semi-private grounds of Glen Lyn, at the rear of the Lyndale Hotel, sounds a deeper note, and comes splashing down with a roar by fern-clad rocky walls and between a scatter of great boulders. A rustic bridge looks down upon the foaming water, flecked with sunlight coming in patches of gold through the overarching foliage.

No description of Lynmouth that has ever been penned gives even a remote idea of what the place is really like. I care nothing for Southey and his comparison with Cintra and Arrabida, for I have not been to those places, and don’t want to go: resembling, I suspect, in that disability, and in the disinclination to remedy it, most other visitors, to whom that parallel has no meaning. Lynmouth is really comparable with no other place. It is essentially individual and like nothing but itself; or, at any rate, like nothing else in nature. What it does really resemble is some romantic theatrical set scene, preferably in comic opera: the extraordinary picturesqueness of it seeming too impossible to be a part of real life. There is the quaint tower at the end of the tiny stone jetty, there are the bold, scrub-covered hills, with rocks jutting out from them, as they rarely do except in the imagination of a scene-painter, and here are the grouped little houses and cottages, mostly with the roses, the jessamine, and the clematis that are indispensable to rural cottages—on the stage. Even the very fishermen seem unreal. I don’t believe—or at least find some difficulty in believing—that they, really and truly, are fishermen, and almost imagine they must be paid to lounge out from the wings on to the stage—I mean the sea-front—in order to give an air of verisimilitude. They ask you, occasionally, it is true, if you want a boat, but with the air of playing a part that does not particularly interest them, and every moment you expect them to break into song, after the manner of the chorus in comic-opera, expressive of the delights of a life on the ocean wave, and the joys of sea-fishing.

Or, to adopt the conventions of melodrama, as formerly practised at the Adelphi, and still at Drury Lane; here you expect almost to see the villain smoking his inevitable villainous cigarette (an infallible stage symbol of viciousness), and, possibly in evening dress, that ultimate stage symbol of depravity, shooting his cuffs by the bridge that spans the Lyn; and on summer evenings the lighted hotels down in the huddled little street look for all the world like stage-hotels—abodes of splendour and gilded vice, whence presently there should issue some splendid creature of infamy, to plot with another villain, already waiting in his trysting-place, the destruction of hero and heroine. But, lest I be misunderstood, I hasten to add that all these expectations are vain things, and that villains really require a much faster place than Lynmouth.

I have spoken already about the “fishermen” of Lynmouth, but, truth to tell, that is but a conventional term, for sea-fishing here is not the industry it is on most coasts, and the jerseyed persons who loll about the harbour are more used to taking out and landing steamboat excursionists, or accompanying amateur fishermen with lines on pleasant days, than to enduring the rigours the trawler knows. Rock Whiting, Bass, and Grey Mullet give the chief sport in the sea, and in the Lyn are salmon, salmon-peel, and trout, as you may readily believe by examining the trophies of sport with rod and line treasured by Mr. Cecil Bevan, of the Lyn Valley Hotel.

LYNDALE BRIDGE.

There was formerly, indeed, a herring fishery at Lynmouth. Westcote speaks of it as existing in the time of Queen Elizabeth. “God,” says he, “hath plentifully stored with herrings, the king of fishes, which shunning their ancient places of repair in Ireland, come hither abundantly in shoals, offering themselves, as I may say, to the fishers’ nets, who soon resorted hither with divers merchants, and so for five or six years continued, to the great benefit and good of the country, until the parson vexed the poor fishermen for extraordinary unusual tithes, and then, as the inhabitants report, the fish suddenly clean left the coast.” They were not friends of the Establishment. But after a while some returned, and from 1787 to 1797 there was such an extraordinary abundance that the greater part of the catch could not be disposed of, and vast quantities were put upon the land for manure. Then they totally deserted the channel for a number of years; a fact at that time regarded by many as a Divine judgment for thus wasting the food sent. On Christmas Day 1811 a remarkable shoal appeared and choked the harbour, and in 1823 another shoal paid a visit; but since then, the herrings have given Lynmouth a wide berth.

LYNMOUTH, FROM THE TORS HOTEL.